are from this cause mainly complete
failures, alike from the point of view of nature and of art, and the
Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been
a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to
losing his virtue. The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all
Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,--a farce,
felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the
more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human
being too icily perfect whom he had met.

On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true, and final,
that I cannot refrain from here quoting them:

"From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince Otto loses the regard,
affection, and esteem of his wife. He goes eavesdropping among the
peasantry, and has to sit silent while his wife's honour is coarsely
impugned. After that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to
rehabilitate his hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails.
. . . I cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown
away on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject. The
music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for this
genteel comedy Princess. A touch of Offenbach would seem more
appropriate. Then even in comedy the hero must not be the butt." And
it must reluctantly be confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess
that to which there is a tendency in almost all the rest--it is to
make up for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style
and mere external technical art.

CHAPTER XXII--PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM

Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson,
who, like a youth, was all for _Heiterkeit_, cheerfulness, taking and
giving of pleasure, for relief, change, variety, new impressions, new
sensations, should, at the time he did, have conceived and written a
story like _The Master of Ballantrae_--all in a grave, grey, sombre tone,
not aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is
conceived to aim at--the giving of pleasure: he himself decisively said
that it "lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence."
A very strange utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the
essays that the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate
pleasure, to cheer and to elevate and improve,