morality.

Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the
memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the
round-house on board the brig COVENANT; the duel between the two
brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the
candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the
Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood, - all these,
although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art,
yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to
the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there
awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry of the parrot -
'Pieces of eight' - the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate
Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of
inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind
catechist in KIDNAPPED, and of the disguise of a blind leper in THE
BLACK ARROW, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of
romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of ADMIRAL
GUINEA, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps
the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's
scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the
burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he
was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being
silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'

The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is
never to be found in their plot, which is generally built
carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic
situation or conception. The main situation in THE WRECKER is a
splendid product of romantic aspiration, but the structure of the