Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/207

 are judged ethically as well as artistically. Yet Stevenson was singularly deficient in capacity for catching characteristic traits of physiognomy. He rarely, if ever, pictures men by his pen. He cannot give a character by a trick of gesture as Dickens could, and did.

Still more was this philosophy of his predominant and pervading in his critical studies. Whether he was judging Burns or Villon, old admirals or young men, a lover, a soldier, or a poet, the appeal was to an ideal of character which Stevenson had formed for himself straight from the facts of life, or perhaps one should say straight from the facts of Scottish life. Although he may have thrown over the older creeds, they formed at least the frame to his picture of life. He was Scot of the Scots in his judgment of things, and we might almost forgive Calvinism for the misery it has caused in the world if only because it formed, as it were, the sash to the window from which Stevenson looked out into the world.

It is this Calvinistic framework, hard but clear, which imparted such effectiveness to the booklet by which he most impressed the world. Dr. Jekyll became a classic from the day it was published. It stands beside The Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels as one of the three great allegories in English. The