“My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.”

Such is the goddess that beckons on.  The creed implicit in such work deems that life is stirring and worth while, and that it is a weakness to repine and waste time, to be too subjective when so much on earth is objectively alluring.  This is only a part of Stevenson, of course, but it was that phase of him vastly liked of the public and doubtless doing most to give him vogue.

But in later work like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” we get quite another thing:  the skilled story-maker is still giving us thrilling fiction, to be sure, but here it is the Scotchman of acute conscience, writing a spiritual allegory with the healthy instinct which insists that the lesson shall be dramatized.  So, too, in a late fiction like “Ebb Tide,” apparently as picaresque and harum-scarum as “Treasure Island,” it is nevertheless the moralist who is at work beneath the brilliantly picturesque surface of the narrative, contrasting types subtly, showing the gradings in moral disintegration.  In the past-mastership of the finest Scotch novels, “Kidnapped” and its sequel “David Balfour,” “The Master of Ballantrae” and the beautiful torso, “Weir of Hermiston,” we get the psychologic romance, which means a shift of interest;—­character comes first, story is secondary to it.  Here is the maturest Stevenson, the fiction most expressive of his genius, and naturally the inspiration is native, he looks back, as he so often did in his poetry, to the distant gray little island which was Motherland to him, home of his youth and of his kindred, the earth where he was fain to lie when his time came.  Stevenson, to the end, could always return to sheer story, as in “St. Ives,” but in doing so, is a little below his best:  that kind did not call on his complete powers:  in such fiction deep did not answer unto deep.

In 1883, when “Treasure Island” appeared, the public was gasping for the oxygen that a story with outdoor movement and action could supply:  there was enough and to spare of invertebrate subtleties, strained metaphysics and coarse naturalistic studies.  A sublimated dime novel like “Treasure Island” came at the psychologic moment; the year before “The New Arabian Nights” had offered the same sort of pabulum, but had been practically overlooked.  Readers were only too glad to turn from people with a past to people of the past, or to people of the present whose ways were ways of pleasantness.  Stevenson substituted a lively, normal interest in life for plotlessness and a surfeit of the flesh.  The public rose to the bait as the trout to a particularly inviting fly.  Once more reverting to the good old appeal of Scott—­incident, action and derring-do—­he added the attraction of his personal touch, and what was so gallantly preferred was greedily grasped.

Although, as has been said, Stevenson passed from the primitive romance of the Shilling Shocker to the romance of character, his interest in character study was keen from the first:  the most plot-cunning and external of his yarns have that illuminative exposure of human beings—­in flashes at least—­which mark him off from the bluff, robust manner of a Dumas and lend an attraction far greater than that of mere tangle of events.  This gets fullest expression in the Scotch romances.