immense deal of scorn, that this picturesque Bohemian pleased the clergy!—never stopping to inquire whether that fact was creditable to the clergy or discreditable to him; whether it indicated that he had been won to their view or they to his. The iconoclasts noticed that he "preached," without noticing what he was preaching; and that he wrote "Lay Morals," without noticing what virtues he commended; and that he composed prayers, without noticing the objects of his supplications or the nature of the deity that he addressed. And so, one must assume, they reached the conclusion that his vision of life was essentially conventional, his beliefs spiritually timid, and his maxims acquiescent and compromising.
Assuming that his moral ideas were purely conventional, others of the iconoclasts argue that he was a hypocrite, with obvious reference to the field of sexual morality. They produce evidence for believing that in early life, at any rate, his conduct partook more of the French artist than of the shorter catechist. Mr. Osbourne, indeed, tells us that he was involved in several tempestuous affairs with women, and that he never heard him regret the experience. Mr. Steuart, of course, made this the outstanding feature of a twovolume life. Several of the "new poems" are corroborative. Why did not Stevenson speak out frankly all that he thought and felt about these matters, as "modern" writers do?
Well, now, in the first place, modern writers don't. The most "outrageous" of them is still so far from his own ideal of self-acknowledgment that it is indecent of him to twit Stevenson with compromise in that field. Living in an environment, as he declared, of realism à l'outrance in the South Seas, he ventured in "The
