HKB
writes is removed by the width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill.
If he ever fell into one of these--which may perhaps be doubted--it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 'I remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.' And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde.