But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul has no true humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit venom...
.He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for the story, and calls it in one passage of his VAILIMA LETTERS 'the ever-to-be-
execrated EBB-TIDE' (pp.178 and 184)....He repented of it like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt cleared and strengthened instead of wrecked.So, after what in one sense was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height.That is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not change the character of the EBB-TIDE as 'the ever-to-be-
execrated.'"
Mr Baildon truly says (p.49):
"The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that tendency to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is always at its worst in books over which he collaborated."
"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the DAILY NEWS on "The Average Reader" has this passage:
"We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in A
WINDOW IN THRUMS, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis Stevenson paints Attwater alone on his South Sea island, the approach of the pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent reception and fate.All these are surely specimens of brilliant writing, and they are brilliant because, in the first place, they give truth.The events described must, in the supposed circumstances, and with the given characters, have happened in the way stated.Only in none of the specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place.We have great pictures by genius of the - to the prosaic eye - invisible realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions.We behold and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these wonderful pictures disclose to our view.Had we been lookers-on, we, the average readers, could not have seen these qualities for ourselves.But they are there, and genius enables us to see them.Genius makes truth shine.
"Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we average readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is something altogether different? I think I know what it is.It is an attempt to describe with words without thoughts, an effort to make readers see something the writer has never seen himself in his mind's eye.He has no revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose, and to produce an impression uses words, words, words, makes daub, daub, daub, without any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or artistic, or definite effect.To describe, one must first of all see, and if we see anything the description of it will, as far as it is in us, come as effortless and natural as the leaves on trees, or as 'the tender greening of April meadows.' I, therefore, more than suspect that the brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not brilliancy.A pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas does not make a picture."
Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident, which may exist quite apart from what may be called moral, spiritual, or even loftily imaginative conception, at once commanding unity and commanding it.There can be no doubt of Stevenson's power in the former line - the earliest as the latest of his works are witnesses to it.THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE abounds in picture and incident and dramatic situations and touches; but it lacks true unity, and the reason simply is given by Stevenson himself - that the "ending shames, perhaps degrades, the beginning," as it is in the EBB-TIDE, with the cockney Huish, "execrable." "We have great pictures by genius of the - to the prosaic eye - invisible realities, as well as the outward form of the action." True, but the "invisible realities" form that from which true unity is derived, else their partial presence but makes the whole the more incomplete and lop-
sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from light weight beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet not too assertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails, and is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not degrading, the beginning - "and without the true sense of pleasurableness; and therefore really imperfect IN ESSENCE." Ah, it is to be feared that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his own work, than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring critics - from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott Watson.
