The name is absent

Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 119
was also the true son of his mother’s house—the Balfours,
scholars and theologians. In “The Manse” he described
with relish his maternal grandfather, the Reverend Lewis
Balfour, and traced some of his own qualities back to that
severe man of learning, speculating, in his whimsical way, on
the possibility that there had been chance and unrecognized
meetings between the Reverend Lewis Balfour and the grand-
father of Thomas Stevenson, neither dreaming that their
blood would mingle in a common descendant, part adven-
turer and part philosopher. But so it was to be, with the
result that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote tales of adventure
shot through with such philosophy as had not before been
found in tales of adventure. Stevenson had the curiosity
of a boy about foreign lands and strange seas and hidden
treasure, but he had the curiosity of a man and a philoso-
pher about that most curious of all mundane things, the
workings of the human mind, and the working out of human
destinies.

Whether as essayist or novelist, he had a mystic’s fascina-
tion in speculating on the strange ways in which a man and
his ancestors combine to promote destiny. In that same
essay “The Manse,” and again in the essay “Pastoral,” he
is seeking in his various forebears for the explanation of his
own contradictory moods and whims, finding one quality in
one ancestor, another in another, and so on through a long
line, studying the family tree, at the top of which sits,
munching nuts, the first of them all, labeled “probably arbo-
real.” It was a mystic, absorbingly interested in man’s mul-
tiple personalities, and in his own subconscious self, who
wrote those terrible stories of crime and psychics, “Mark-
heim” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

It has been said that “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde” “showed Stevenson as Poe with the addition of

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