Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/13

11 spirited tale there were unmarketable elements; which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told." I will ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to bear in mind this "mercantile delight," this abandonment of the theme because of its "unmarketable elements." To these points we will return later on. Meanwhile, the extract I have so lamely recited has, I hope, served its purpose in enabling you to realize beyond all question that Stevenson had in him a large measure of dramatic talent—what I have called the ingredients, the makings, of a dramatist.

Now let me revive in your memory another of Stevenson's essays which throws a curious light upon his mental attitude towards the theatre. I refer to that delightful essay in "Memories and Portraits" called "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured." It describes, as many of you will remember, his juvenile delight in those sheets of toy-theatre characters which, even when he wrote, had "become, for the most part, a memory" and are now, I believe, almost extinct. "I have at different times," he says, "possessed Aladdin, The Red Rover, The Blind Boy, The Old Oak Chest, The Wood Demon, Jack Sheppard, The Miller and his Men, The Smuggler, The Forest of Bondy, Robin Hood, and Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica; and I have assisted others in the illumination of The Maid of the Inn and The Battle of Waterloo." Then he tells how, in a window in Leith Walk, all the year round, "there stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a 'forest set,' a 'combat,' and a few 'robbers carousing ' in the slides; and below and about, tenfold dearer to me! the plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the cloth-yard arrow; I would spell the name: was it Macaire"—one of the subjects, you see, which he afterwards chose for stage treatment —