well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has
happened in the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll,' 'The Master of
Ballantrae,' 'The Child's Garden of Verses,' and 'Across the Plains' had
been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by
succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once,
he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But
the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral
as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as
that of James Watt.

The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that
romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more
important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the
other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of
all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap of
scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing before a stunted
orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact that no one
has been through it but an elderly female cook. But everything exists
in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is
the shrine and theatre of some strange chance between a girl and a
ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception that
ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our adventures. To
think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. And this is
the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make one
story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for
the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It
is quite inappropriate to judge 'The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans
called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr