desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is
not to be changed or remedied by any penitence.'


A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the
lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim.


' "Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All
sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like
starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of
famine, and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond
the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence
is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother
with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less
visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself." '


The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like
these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick
appreciation of, character. The variety of the characters that he
has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the
purposes of his stories, are many. Yet with all this, the number
of lifelike portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his
works is very small indeed. In the golden glow of romance,
character is always subject to be idealised; it is the effect of
character seen at particular angles and in special lights, natural
or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt to
analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it
certain principles, and works from those. It has often been said