od wills
Can work--God's puppets best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first."

It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but
allowed him.

CHAPTER XVI--STEVENSON'S GLOOM

The problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut-
and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original
dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which
was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is
taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature
of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian
and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has
to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social
animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and
nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who,
from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.

His text and his sermon--which may be shortly summed in the following
sentence--be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure
to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self-
satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant
kindliness of thought and service possible. He was not in harmony with
the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated
this in his life, as few men have done. He regarded it as the highest
duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus
became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have
claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint,
as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein
of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life. Suffering
constantly, he still was always kindly. He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has
said, this philosophy by every resource open to him. In practical life,
all who knew him declared that he was brightness, naive fancy, and
sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing
into his fiction a pronounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of
gloom. Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed
thus in essence. Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write
well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge.
Always