easy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not handsomely; it
is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."

If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well have quoted
it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the _Pall Mall
Magazine_ article. He could hardly have quoted anything more apparently
apt to the purpose.

In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important topic.
Unselfishness is too often only the most exasperating form of
selfishness. Here is another very characteristic bit:

"You will always do wrong: you must try to get used to that, my son.
It is a small matter to make a work about, when all the world is in
the same case. I meant when I was a young man to write a great poem;
and now I am cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good
spirits. I thank you. . . . Our business in life is not to succeed,
but to continue to fail, in good spirits."

Again:

"It is the mark of good action that it appears inevitable in the
retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And
there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for
what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been
gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about."

The moral to _The House of Eld_ is incisive writ out of true
experience--phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce,
tragic:--

"Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And, like the mandrake, comes with groans."

The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously
earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of _Moral Emblems_.

"Reader, your soul upraise to see,
In yon fair cut designed by me,
The pauper by the highwayside
Vainly soliciting from pride.
Mark how the Beau with easy air
Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer
And casting a disdainful eye
Goes gaily gallivanting by.
He from the poor averts his head . . .
He will regret it when he's dead."

Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point, clearly
and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free
of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into
the freer air of life and real character, would do more