"LAY MORALS."

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1168, 1 July 1911, Page 10

"LAY MORALS."

"Elzevir," in the -Melbourne "Argus," writes of the new Stevenson volume "Lay Morals and other Papers" (in which there is nothing new, but much that was inaccessible to poor Stevensonians who could not afford to buy the "Edinburgh" Edition). Of the four chapters of "Lay Morals," "Elzevir" writes:—

As for the famous treatise on ethics, there is nothing in the four chapters of "Lay Morals" to indicate that the author was unwise in setting it aside; as a treatise on ethics I think it would probably have satisfied .nobody. For all that, it is an. extremely interesting document. It contains an "obviously, autobiographical passage, in which some of us will find the charm wo used, to find in everything Stevenson wrote about his own youth, and it contains a page of description which reads like.the first draft of the terrible account of tho world in "Pulvis et Umbra," perhaps the most famous of all Stevenson's essays. "We inhabit a dead ember, swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a mere horrible hellfire than was ever conceived by tho theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwellingplace: and the reverberation of this hellfire ripens flower and fruit, and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn. Far off on all hands other dead embers, ether flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; tho nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive, the distance. Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride "but the truncheon of a boom, are safe and near, at homo, compared with mankind on its bullet.. Even to us who have known no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place ofresidence." Such a passage proves something mere than that Stevenson could write English prose; it proves that ho had one, at any rate, of the philosopher's gifts —he had the cosmic eye. r r.. . "=*a ,