heart. I hope so, at any rate: for it were sad to think that
indignation had clouded even for a minute the gay spirit that gave us
_The Wrong Box_--surely the funniest book written in the last ten
years. But he has been most shamefully served. Writing with him, Mr.
Stevenson has given us _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb-Tide_. Faults
may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in
the development of Mr. Stevenson's genius. Nobody denies that they are
splendid tales: nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a
singular and original pattern. Yet no reviewer praises them on their
own merits or points out their own defects. They are judged always in
relation to Mr. Stevenson's previous work, and the reviewers
concentrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr.
Stevenson's development--that he is not continuing as the public
expected him to continue.

Now there are a number of esteemed novelists about the land who earn
comfortable incomes by doing just what the public expects of them. But
of Mr. Stevenson's genius--always something wayward--freaks might have
been predicted from the first. A genius so consciously artistic, so
quick in sympathy with other men's writings, however diverse, was
bound from the first to make many experiments. Before the public took
his career in hand and mapped it out for him, he made such an
experiment with _The Black Arrow_; and it was forgiven easily enough.
But because he now takes Mr. Osbourne into partnership for a new set
of experiments, the reviewers--not considering that these, whatever
their faults, are vast improvements on _The Black Arrow_--ascribe all
those faults to the new partner.

But that is rough criticism. Moreover it is almost demonstrably false.
For the weakness of _The Wrecker_, such as it was, lay in the Paris