seur_. "The
fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty.... _Any brave man may
make out_ a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being,
beneficent to those about him. And if he fail, why should I hear him
weeping?" Why, indeed? Think of Mr. Carlyle! "Did I groan loud, or did I
groan low, Wackford?" said Mr. Squeers. Mr. Carlyle groaned loud,
sometimes with fair reason. Stevenson did not groan at all. If he
posed, if his silence was a pose, it was heroic. But his intellectual
high spirits were almost invincible. If he had a pen in his hand, the
_follet_ of Moliere rode it. Mr. Thomas Emmett, that famous Yorkshire
cricketer, has spoken words of gold: "I was always happy as long as I
was bowling." Stevenson, I think, was almost always happy when he was
writing, when the instrument of his art was in his fingers.

Consider the deliberate and self-conscious glumness; the willful making
the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the
novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and
have a name as _Psychologues! Ohe, les Psychologues_! Does anyone
suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and
gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called,"
as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the
prose of horror," he said. "It is when you are not able to write
'Macbeth' that you write 'Therese Raquin' ... In any case, and under any
fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the
little man produces----" We know what he produces, and though his books
may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and
his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty,
mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui.

None the less, I believe that the little men of woe are happy; are
enjoying themselves, while they are writing, while they are doing their
best to make the public comfortably miserable. If these authors were as
candid as Stevenson they would admit that they enjoy their "merry days
of desolation," and that the world is not such a bad place for them,
after all. But perhaps before this truth can be accepted and confessed
by these eminent practitioners in pessimism, a gleam of humour must
arise on their darkness--and that is past praying for. There is a burden
of a Scots song which, perhaps, may have sung itself in the ear of
Louis, when life was