The one thing in which Scott really excelled Stevenson was in the depiction of women. The latter has given us no Diana Vernon or Jeannie Deans. For the most part, Stevenson's romances are Paradise before the creation of Eve. The snake is there, but not the woman. This extraordinary absence of sex-interest is a notable feature, and many have been the reasons assigned for it. If he had not tried at all, we should be safe in saying that, like a small boy, he felt that girls were in the way, and he did not want them mussing up his games. There is perhaps some truth in this; for the presence of a girl might have ruined _Treasure Island_, as it ruined the _Sea Wolf_. Her fuss and feathers bring in all sorts of bothersome problems to distract a novelist, bent on having a good time with pirates, murders, and hidden treasure. Unfortunately for the complete satisfaction of this explanation, Stevenson wrote _Prince Otto_, and tried to draw a real woman. The result did not add anything to his fame, and, indeed, the whole book missed fire. He was unquestionably more successful in _David Balfour_, but, when all is said, the presence of women in a few of Stevenson's romances is not so impressive as their absence in most. It is only in that unfinished work, _Weir of Hermiston_, which gave every promise of being one of the greatest novels in English literature, that he seemed to have reached full maturity of power in dealing with the master passion. The best reason for Stevenson's reserve on matters of sex was probably his delicacy; he did not wish to represent this particular animal impulse with the same vivid reality he pictured avarice, ambition, courage, cowardice, and pride; and thus hampered by conscience, he thought it best in the main to omit it altogether. At least, this is the way he felt about it, as we may learn from the _Vailima Letters_:--
"This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in it at all." (February, 1892.)
"I am afraid my touch is a little broad in a love story; I can't mean one thing and write another. As for women, I am no more in any fear of them; I can do a sort all right; age makes me less afraid of a petticoat, but I am a little in fear of grossness. However, this David Balfour's love affair, that's all right--might be read out to a mothers' meeting--or a daughters' meeting. The difficulty in a love yarn, which dwells at all on love, is the dwelling on one string; it is manifold, I grant, but the root fact is there unchanged, and the sentiment being very intense, and already very much handled in letters, positively calls for a little pawing and gracing. With a writer of my prosaic literalness and pertinency of point of view, this all shoves toward grossness--positively even towards the far more damnable _closeness_. This has kept me off the sentiment hitherto, and now I am to try: Lord! Of course Meredith can do it, and so could Shakespeare; but with all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered; hence my perils. To do love in the same spirit as I did (for instance) D. Balfour's fatigue in the heather; my dear sir, there were grossness--ready made! And hence, how to sugar?" (May, 1892.)