V
If what has been said above has any applicability to this matter, we have reduced to five the number of Stevenson’s short stories to which we can give the name of art. In mentioning that number, I have ventured to eliminate The Suicide Club, which contains several episodes, excluding The Young Man with the Cream Tarts whose particular character does not seem to me to warrant the use of the term “art.” That leaves us with Thrawn Janet, The Beach of Falesá, The Bottle Imp, Providence and the Guitar, and The Treasure of Franchard. One of these is a “bogle” story, one is a realistic story of adventure in the South Seas, one is a fairy tale, and the others are light comedies, touched with fancy which transfigures without falsifying the underlying artistic sincerity of their conception. We have eliminated, for what may in some cases appear to be insufficient reasons, some twenty odd stories (counting the various episodes of The Rajah’s Diamond and The Dynamiter as stories). Of the whole number of stories, two (or, with the little tale in Catriona, three) are concerned with “bogles,” namely Thrawn Janet and The Body-Snatcher. Two others are also concerned with the supernatural: they are The Bottle Imp and The Isle of Voices. Three are psychological—Will o’ the Mill, Markheim, and Olalla. Four are light comedies—The Story of a Lie, John Nicholson, The Treasure of Franchard, Providence and the Guitar. Two are picturesque or romantic tales of incident—The Pavilion on the Links and The Merry Men. One is a realistic tale of incident—The Beach of Falesá. The rest belong to a class of fantastic mystery or criminal tale which is not, apart from the attractiveness of its mayonnaise, intrinsically of great value. It is from the five tales named at the beginning of this section that we shall perhaps draw our best material for the appraisement of Stevenson’s chief success as a short-story writer.
Thrawn Janet, then, is an extraordinarily successful tale of the devil’s entry into the body of an old woman, imagined with great power, and told with enormous spirit. The Beach of Falesá is the narrative, by a trader, of his arrival at a South Sea island, his marriage to a native girl, and his overthrow of a treacherous rival. The character of the man who tells the story—Wiltshire—is well-sustained, the character of Uma, the native wife, is amazingly suggested, considering how little we see her and considering that we receive her, as it were, through the trader’s report alone. For the rest, the story has vividness of local colouring, and a good deal of feeling. The Bottle Imp, the fairy tale, is told without fault in a manner of great simplicity. It relates to the successive purchases and sales, the sales always, by the conditions of purchase, being made at a figure lower than that of the purchase, of a magic bottle as potent as Aladdin’s lamp; and to the certainty of Hell which is involved in the continued possession of the bottle until the lessee’s death. The story was written for the Samoan natives, and, as far as I am able to judge, it bears in a remarkable degree the impress of native ways of thought. It has, that is to say, the naïveté and gravity of the folk-tale. Providence and the Guitar is a gay story of the misadventures of some travelling musicians who receive poor welcome from those whom they seek to entertain, but who reconcile at length the claims of art and duty as they find them opposed in the lives of certain disunited hosts. The Treasure of Franchard is the simple tale of an eccentric philosopher, his more stolid wife, and of a little boy whose wisdom leads him to check, by means which are proved legitimate only by their adequacy, the philosopher’s diversion from the path of happiness. The theft by the waif of certain treasure which the philosopher has discovered, to the risk of his immortal soul and the danger of his present happiness; and the appropriate restoration of that treasure when it will be of vital service—upon so slight an invention does the story progress.
The point to be observed in all these stories is that they possess unquestionable unity. Only one of them, The Beach of Falesá, is in any true sense a narrative. The others are examples of situation imposed upon character. In each there is an absolute relation between the conception or inspiration and Stevenson’s treatment. Each will bear the pressure which may legitimately be exerted by the seeking imagination. In Providence and the Guitar alone is there the least air of accident; and for this reason Providence and the Guitar, which has this slight air of possible manipulation, is less good than the others. The Beach of Falesá, although a narrative, and although its perfection of form is thus affected (since, with our consciousness of narrative, is interrupted the singleness of our æsthetic emotion) has a strict consistency of action. Whether this consistency is native, or whether it is aided by the imagined personality of the narrator, which may thus impose an artificial unity upon the tale, I am unable to determine. The other three stories, The Bottle Imp, Thrawn Janet, and The Treasure of Franchard, granting to each story its own convention, seem to me to be perfect examples of their craft.