Chapter VI

But if Stevenson does not care to philosophize over Nature--herein parting company with Thoreau as well as Hardy--he can moralize on occasion, and with infinite relish too.

"Something of the Shorter Catechist," as his friend Henley so acutely said. There is the Moralist in his essays, in some of the short stories--_Jekyll and Hyde_ is a morality in disguise, and unblushingly so is _A Christmas Sermon_.

Some of his admirers have deplored this tendency in Stevenson; have shaken their heads gloomily over his Scottish ancestry, and spoken as apologetically about the moralizing as if it had been kleptomania.

Well, there it is as glaring and apparent as Borrow's big green gamp or De Quincey's insularity. "What business has a Vagabond to moralize?" asks the reader. Yet there is a touch of the Moralist in every Vagabond (especially the English-speaking Vagabond), and its presence in Stevenson gives an additional piquancy to his work. The _Lay Morals_ and the _Christmas Sermon_ may not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a fresher note, a larger utterance in the _Fables_. And even if you do not care for Stevenson's "Hamlet" and "Shorter Catechist" moods, is it wise, even from the artistic point of view, to wish away that side of his temperament? Was it the absence of the "Shorter Catechist" in Edgar Allan Poe that sent him drifting impotently across the world, brilliant, unstable, aspiring, grovelling; a man of many fine qualities and extraordinary intensity of imagination, but tragically weak where he ought to have been strong? And was it the "Shorter Catechist" in Stevenson that gave him that grip-hold of life's possibilities, imbued him with his unfailing courage, and gave him as Artist a strenuous devotion to an ideal that accompanied him to the end? Or was it so lamentable a defect as certain critics allege? I wonder.