narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate
vehicles of his morality. He has left no work - unless the two
short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions - in which
romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole,
nothing that can be put beside THE SCARLET LETTER or THE MARBLE
FAUN for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his
essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective wisdom,
are ranked by some critics above his stories.

A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is
no question in art of police regulations or conformity to
established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide.
Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all
acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of a
man in all times and places. He is not bound to display allegiance
to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is
bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can
no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be
broken by the fall of china - the morality without which life would
be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each
other, the feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of
society. For the appreciation of morality in this wider sense high
gifts of imagination are necessary. Shakespeare could never have
drawn Macbeth, and thereby made apparent the awfulness of murder,
without some sympathy for the murderer - the sympathy of
intelligence. These gifts of imagination and sympathy belong to
Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances there are
gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon life,
from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously
that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion