fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in
achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.

Yes; there was growth--undoubted growth. The questioning and severely
moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism--the tendency to
casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection--which had so
coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of _The Master of Ballantrae_,
and made him a great essayist, was passing in the satisfaction of assured
insight into life itself. The art would gradually have been transformed
also. The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of
the great facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur,
pathos, and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented.

CHAPTER XVIII--EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS

Stevenson's earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the
parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical--to treatment of the world as
an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain
dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted
moralities--"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named
them--that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on
by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his
genealogy on both sides of the house. The strong Celtic strain is now
amply attested by many researches. Such phantasies as _The House of
Eld_, _The Touchstone_, _The Poor Thing_, and _The Song of the Morrow_,
published along with some fables at the end of an edition of _Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde_, by Longman's, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as
forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element, as
though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over all real
things and the secret of the world and life was in its glamour: the
shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines indeterminate, though
a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which
he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol--no
phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides
suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient--blind to
certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or
the literature of phantasy, more properly.

This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with the gift of
impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or tenden