120 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
a moral sense.” That was the Scotch Presbyterian in him.
He always referred to ethics as his “veiled mistress,” and at
one time drafted a book on ethics, which he never finished.
With all his art, and with all his belief in the sufficiency of
pleasure as the object of art, there was in him a strong feel-
ing that art must present life in its true moral values, a view
which has puzzled some of the “art for art’s sake” people.
But, after all, the more serious note in Stevenson’s writ-
ings grows quite as much out of scientific curiosity as out of
ethics. In essays like “The Manse” and “Pastoral” he is
interested in what might be called distributed personality,
the derivatives from many ancestors that meet in one de-
scendant. In stories like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and
“Markheim” he is interested in alternating personalities and
the subconscious self. So, as I see it, the juster statement is
that Stevenson stands midway between Poe and Haw-
thorne. In Poe the psychic interest is purely scientific; in
Hawthorne it is primarily moral, with merely enough science
to explain morality; while in Stevenson it is, of equal parts,
scientific and moral.
So, perhaps, we have discovered one means whereby
Stevenson lifts a dime-novel theme into the region of great
literature—the injection of metaphysics into stories of pi-
rates, treasure-hunters, and beach-combers. In the typical
blood-and-thunder story these are merely men of desperate
strength and ferocity. Moralists of Thackeray’s kind might
infiltrate a little goodness to point the recurrent lesson that
there is some good in the worst men. Neither method is
Stevenson’s. He does not hesitate to make his men irre-
trievably bad, but he does not make them mere lay-figures of
wickedness. He shows their minds working, and, of course,
the moment he shows that he has humanized them. He
frequently mingles with their desperate and dark deeds, not
goodness, but a childlike simplicity, which renders them