skeletons and gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took
pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular
and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the
life of another.

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman
and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there
are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.
The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such
stories as "The Master of Ballantrae" and "Weir of Hermiston." But there
is another view of the matter--that in which the whole act is an abrupt
and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a
blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the
standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of "Treasure Island" and "The
Wrecker." It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he
loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring
universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as
has not been known since St. Francis called the sun brother and the well
sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that
Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones left
at the "Admiral Benbow," with the knife that Wicks drove through his own
hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain clean-cut
angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting wood with
an axe.

Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this
deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing
something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an
object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, "The Destroying Angel,"