III
Finally, in the first division, we have seven stories. Providence and the Guitar and The Treasure of Franchard are what we may call, if we wish to do so, sentimental stories. Both are comedies of light character, both show certain influences; but to both the manner, tender and amused, is so appropriate that we are pleased as we were meant to be pleased. Both contain good characterisation and an unstrained knowledge. Both are so entirely naïve in conception that we do not question the inspiration by which they were produced. In style and character dissimilar, but in humour of a like kind, are The Suicide Club and The Bottle Imp. These four stories are all marked with the whimsical and charming manner which made Stevenson so many friends in life. All are more or less lifted by fantasy above their common play with the humours and the pathos of daily affairs. They are founded upon Stevenson’s natural attitude—The Suicide Club, more convincingly than The Superfluous Mansion, in which story the idea appears in its native ingenuousness, is an example of Stevenson’s constant wish (a wish not unshared by others) that he might be singled out mysteriously by the agent for some strange adventure in the manner of “The White Cat.” The young man in The Superfluous Mansion, it will be remembered, was thrilled by an invitation to enter a carriage in which a solitary lady sat: his adventure thereafter was more commonplace, for Stevenson’s wish had in fact gone no further than the invitation to the carriage. So Prince Florizel embodied a desire for strange safe experience, such as all lonely children feel; and Stevenson was as much gratified as we are at the adventure of the young man with the cream tarts. My own opinion is, that it was the young man with the cream tarts who mattered; and that in the subsequent intrigues the story falls away to the level of The Rajah’s Diamond. To be accosted by a young man with cream tarts in a locality so picturesque as Leicester Square—that is romance: to go to the suicide club, and to participate in what follows, is to leave romance for picturesque stimulation of interest by bizarre incident. The young man, I think, is art: the rest might have been invented by a person without imagination, and so we might call it craft. Nevertheless, even if the events subsequent to the young man with the cream tarts take on a more commonplace air, they have yet an individuality above that of the tales in The Rajah’s Diamond, and the peculiar fantastic bravado of Stevenson’s writing maintains the quality of surprise with extreme gusto. The Bottle Imp is, to me, comparable in quality with Thrawn Janet alone; and these two stories offer the two most successful examples of Stevenson’s art as a short-story writer. Each in its way is perfect, in form and in manner. The Beach of Falesá, more anecdotal, and less fine in form than any of the other stories in this division, has excellences of character, emotion, and reality which may elsewhere be considered to be lacking. In all its details it is possibly more vital and more worth the telling than The Pavilion on the Links, which in form is superior, but which, in convention, is inferior. I know of nothing with which to compare The Beach of Falesá; and The Pavilion on the Links is perhaps not wholly outside the range of so accomplished a craftsman as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or so determined a romancer as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. That may be so, and very likely both those gentlemen admire The Pavilion on the Links very much. The fact that requires to be recorded here of this story is that it sustains its own note magnificently; and that if we grant this type of story the right to be described as art The Pavilion on the Links is the best example of the type known to us. It is continuously exciting; it is not oppressively false; and it is handled with extreme competence. Possibly one admires its craftsmanship, its consummate treatment of a theme from whose reality one withdraws one’s conviction when the story’s grip has relaxed, more than one admires its quality as a work of imagination. If that is so, one must certainly regard The Pavilion on the Links as a magnificent example of craft, but on a lower artistic plane than Stevenson’s best work.
That brings to an end our consideration of the three rough divisions formulated at the beginning of this chapter. It is possible now to group the stories into their particular kinds, and to attempt to obtain, from an examination of these, some more general estimate of Stevenson’s ability as a writer of short stories. As a preliminary to this it will be desirable to set forth what may be regarded as a principle of judgment; and then to tabulate the stories in their various kinds. Thus we shall be able to eliminate the inferior stories, and to arrive at certain, I hope reasonable, conclusions as to the place occupied by the better stories both in Stevenson’s output and in the art of the short story.