“Two thousand pounds of education
        Drops to a ten-rupee jezail,”

as Mr. Kipling sings.  The answer, of course, is that the beauty of reasoning upon internal evidence lies in the process rather than the results.  You spend a month in studying a poet, and draw some conclusion which is entirely wrong:  within a week you are set right by some fellow with a Parish Register.  Well, but meanwhile you have been reading poetry, and he has not.  Only the uninstructed judge criticism by its results alone.

If, then, after studying Messrs. Stevenson and Osbourne’s The Ebb-Tide (London:  Heinemann) I hazard a guess or two upon its authorship; and if somebody take it into his head to write out to Samoa and thereby elicit the information that my guesses are entirely wrong—­why then we shall have been performing each of us his proper function in life; and there’s an end of the matter.

Let me begin though—­after reading a number of reviews of the book—­by offering my sympathy to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne.  Very possibly he does not want it.  I guess him to be a gentleman of uncommonly cheerful heart.  I hope so, at any rate:  for it were sad to think that indignation had clouded even for a minute the gay spirit that gave us The Wrong Box—­surely the funniest book written in the last ten years.  But he has been most shamefully served.  Writing with him, Mr. Stevenson has given us The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide.  Faults may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in the development of Mr. Stevenson’s genius.  Nobody denies that they are splendid tales:  nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a singular and original pattern.  Yet no reviewer praises them on their own merits or points out their own defects.  They are judged always in relation to Mr. Stevenson’s previous work, and the reviewers concentrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr. Stevenson’s development—­that he is not continuing as the public expected him to continue.

Now there are a number of esteemed novelists about the land who earn comfortable incomes by doing just what the public expects of them.  But of Mr. Stevenson’s genius—­always something wayward—­freaks might have been predicted from the first.  A genius so consciously artistic, so quick in sympathy with other men’s writings, however diverse, was bound from the first to make many experiments.  Before the public took his career in hand and mapped it out for him, he made such an experiment with The Black Arrow; and it was forgiven easily enough.  But because he now takes Mr. Osbourne into partnership for a new set of experiments, the reviewers—­not considering that these, whatever their faults, are vast improvements on The Black Arrow—­ascribe all those faults to the new partner.