The mental comment with which I had laid it down had set up a yeasty ferment and a bubble in my brain; till at last, with a start, I asked myself how long was it since I had been satisfied with such a pitiful majority on the side of evil? Why, a certain number of years ago it would have been no majority at all—none, at least, worth speaking of. What a change must have been taking place in me unsuspected all this time, that I could tamely accept, as I had just done, this pitiful compromise (I can call it nothing else) with the base law of probabilities! What a totally different person I must have now become, from the hero who sallied out to deal with a horde of painted Indians, armed only with his virtue and his unerring smoothbore! Well, there was some little comfort in the fact that the fault was not entirely my own, nor even that of the irresistible years.
Frankly, in the days I look back to, this same Treasure Island would not have gone down at all. It was not that we were in the least exacting. We did not ask for style; the evolution of character possessed no interest whatever for us; and all scenery and description we sternly skipped. One thing we did insist on having, and that was good long odds against the hero; and in those fortunate days we generally got them. Just at present, however, a sort of moral cowardice seems to have set in among writers of this noblest class of fiction; a truckling to likelihood, and a dirty regard for statistics. Needless to say, this state of things is bringing about its inevitable consequence. Already one hears rumours that the boy of the period, instead of cutting down impalpable bandits or blowing up imaginary mines and magazines, is moodily devoting himself to golf. The picture is a pitiful one. Heaven hath blessed him, this urchin, with a healthy appetite for pirates, a neat hand at the tomahawk, and a simple passion for being marooned; instead of which, he now plods about the country
playing
