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Updated: May 14, 2025
That a mild British amateur of water-colour drawing should have taken part in a massacre of men, shot painfully with cheap revolvers, was an example of "the possible improbable," and much more of a tax on belief than the transformation of Dr. Jekyll.
"You see, 'the Bull's' madness doesn't last for long. He got a bit fed up with you, Lovelace, so he made himself imagine your football was bad. He can always make himself think what he likes." "Yes; but it is rather a nuisance," Mansell remarked, "when you realise it is always House men who have to do the Jekyll and Hyde business." "Good Lord! Mansell, you are becoming literary," laughed Gordon.
Many Masters of the Rolls have sate here, and have taken part, with great ability and authority, in our deliberations. To go no further back than the accession of the House of Hanover, Jekyll was a member of this House, and Strange, and Kenyon, and Pepper Arden, and Sir William Grant, and Sir John Copley, and Sir Charles Pepys, and finally Sir John Romilly.
No man in that age had so healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive evil. In The Master of Ballantrae he did prove with a pen of steel, that the Devil is a gentleman but is none the less the Devil. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry James.
"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there before my eyes pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death there stood Henry Jekyll! What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper.
He seldom went beyond his own garden-gate but lived, as he says, "like a weevil in a biscuit." Yet he never worked harder or accomplished more. He wrote in bed and out of bed, sick or well, poems, plays, short stories, and verses. He finished "Treasure Island," the book that gained him his first popularity, and wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which made him famous at home and abroad.
It is the believableness of Stevenson's atmospheres that prepare the reader for any marvels enacted in them. Gross, present-day, matter-of-fact London makes Dr. Jekyll and his worser half of flesh-and-blood credence.
The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
Who of them all is as essentially representative of nineteenth-century life? When Kipling is forgotten, will Robert Louis Stevenson be remembered for his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his Kidnapped and his David Balfour? Not so. He will be remembered for his essays, for his letters, for his philosophy of life, for himself. He will be the well beloved, as he has been the well beloved.
The dual life has been depicted in powerful colors by poets and writers of fiction; as, for instance, by Hawthorne in his "Scarlet Letter," by Robert Louis Stevenson in his "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I suppose if there be such a thing as hell on earth, the double life is another name for it. Yet I know of no writer of fiction whose plummet has sounded the depths of this hell.
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