HKB
the other party: a walking doll will find suitors. The question must stand over until some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous passes.
One character must never be passed over in an estimate of Stevenson's work. The hero of his longest work is not David Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but 'a very pretty gentleman,' is transfigured at times by traits that he catches, as narrator of the story, from its author himself. But Alan Breek Stewart is a greater creation, and a fine instance of that wider morality that can seize by sympathy the soul of a wild Highland clansman. 'Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner of murder (for 'them that havenae dipped their hands in any little difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them that have'), a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-some as a turkey-cock, and as vain and sensitive as a child, Alan Breek is one of the most lovable characters in all literature; and his penetration--a great part of which he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle 'through a throng lowland country with the black soldiers at his tail'--blossoms into the most delightful reflections upon men and things.
The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable. To combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to alternate telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and suggestion, to breathe into the entire conception a profound wisdom, construct it with absolute unity, and express it in perfect style,--this thing has never yet been done. A great part of Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest outlet in his essays. In these, whatever their occasion, he shows himself the clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of the phrases and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the vision of most writers and thinkers. He has an unerring instinct for realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace. In his lately published Amateur Emigrant he describes one of his fellow-passengers to America:
'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide.'
This sense of the realities of the world,--laughter, happiness, the simple emotions of childhood, and others,--makes Stevenson an admirable critic of those social pretences that ape the native qualities of the heart. The criticism on organised philanthropy contained in the essay on Beggars is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically, but is it untrue?