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(3.) It is very certain, as the book stands, that the reader must experience some shock of disappointment when, after 200 pages of the most heroical endeavoring, David fails in the end to save James Stewart of the Glens. Were the book concerned wholly with James Stewart’s fate, the cheat would be intolerable: and as a great deal more than half of Catriona points and trembles towards his fate like a magnetic needle, the cheat is pretty bad if we take Catriona alone. But once more, if we are dealing with The Memoirs of David Balfour–if we bear steadily in mind that David Balfour is our concern–not James Stewart–the disappointment is far more easily forgiven. Then, and then only, we get the right perspective of David’s attempt, and recognize how inevitable was the issue when this stripling engaged to turn back the great forces of history.

It is more than a lustre, as the Dedication reminds us, since David Balfour, at the end of the last chapter of Kidnapped, was left to kick his heels in the British Linen Company’s office. Five years have a knack of making people five years older; and the wordy, politic intrigue of Catriona is at least five years older than the rough-and-tumble intrigue of Kidnapped; of the fashion of the Vicomte de Bragelonne rather than of the Three Musketeers. But this is as it should be; for older and astuter heads are now mixed up in the case, and Preston-grange is a graduate in a very much higher school of diplomacy than was Ebenezer Balfour. And if no word was said in Kidnapped of the love of women, we know now that this matter was held over until the time came for it to take its due place in David Balfour’s experience. Everyone knew that Mr. Stevenson would draw a woman beautifully as soon as he was minded. Catriona and her situation have their foreshadowing in The Pavilion on the Links. But for all that she is a surprise. She begins to be a surprise–a beautiful surprise–when in Chapter X. she kisses David’s hand “with a higher passion than the common kind of clay has any sense of;” and she is a beautiful surprise to the end of the book. The loves of these two make a moving story–old, yet not old: and I pity the heart that is not tender for Catriona when she and David take their last walk together in Leyden, and “the knocking of her little shoes upon the way sounded extraordinarily pretty and sad.”

* * * * *

Nov. 3, 1894. “The Ebb Tide.”

A certain Oxford lecturer, whose audience demurred to some trivial mistranslation from the Greek, remarked: “I perceive, gentlemen, that you have been taking a mean advantage of me. You have been looking it out in the Lexicon.”

The pleasant art of reasoning about literature on internal evidence suffers constant discouragement from the presence and activity of those little people who insist upon “looking it out in the Lexicon.” Their brutal methods will upset in two minutes the nice calculations of months. Your logic, your taste, your palpitating sense of style, your exquisite ear for rhythm and cadence–what do these avail against the man who goes straight to Stationers’ Hall or the Parish Register?

“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.