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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.

But that is rough criticism. Moreover it is almost demonstrably false. For the weakness of The Wrecker, such as it was, lay in the Paris and Barbizon business and the author’s failure to make this of one piece with the main theme, with the romantic histories of the Currency Lass and the Flying Scud. But which of the two partners stands responsible for this Pais-Barbizon business? Mr. Stevenson beyond a doubt. If you shut your eyes to Mr. Stevenson’s confessed familiarity with the Paris and the Barbizon of a certain era; if you choose to deny that he wrote that chapter on Fontainebleau in Across the Plains; if you go on to deny that he wrote the opening of Chapter XXI. of The Wrecker; why then you are obliged to maintain that it was Mr. Osbourne, and not Mr. Stevenson, who wrote that famous chapter on the Roussillon Wine–which is absurd. And if, in spite of its absurdity, you stick to this also, why, then you are only demonstrating that Mr. Lloyd Osbourne is one of the greatest living writers of fiction: and your conception of him as a mere imp of mischief jogging the master’s elbow is wider of the truth than ever.

No; the vital defect of The Wrecker must be set down to Mr. Stevenson’s account. Fine story as that was, it failed to assimilate the Paris-Barbizon business. The Ebb-Tide, on the other hand, is all of one piece. It has at any rate one atmosphere, and one only. And who can demand a finer atmosphere of romance than that of the South Pacific?

The Ebb-Tide, so far as atmosphere goes, is all of one piece. And the story, too, is all of one piece–until we come to Attwater: I own Attwater beats me. As Mr. Osbourne might say, “I have no use for” that monstrous person. I wish, indeed, Mr. Osbourne had said so: for again I cannot help feeling that the offence of Attwater lies at Mr. Stevenson’s door. He strikes me as a bad dream of Mr. Stevenson’s–a General Gordon out of the Arabian Nights. Do you remember a drawing of Mr. du Maurier’s in Punch, wherein, seizing upon a locution of Miss Rhoda Broughton’s, he gave us a group of “magnificently ugly” men? I seem to see Attwater in that group.