Stevenson himself establishes the fact that he found short-story writing easier than the writing of novels. “It is the length that kills,” he confessed. But length offered difficulties in the longer stories because Stevenson, besides lacking the physical endurance for continuous imaginative effort, had the experimental and inventive mind rather than the synthetic or the analytical. It was easier for him to see the whole of a short story. It could be compressed: it had not to be sustained. And in the writing of a short story his confidence never slackened. He was then not sailing in uncharted seas. It is for this reason, in the first place, that Stevenson’s short stories are better as works of art than his long ones. A little idea, a flash, it may be, of inspiration; and Stevenson had his story complete, ready for that scrupulous handling and manipulation which the actual composition always involved. He did not greatly deal in anecdote; his psychological studies are inclined to be hollow; but he was perfectly effective in his not very powerful vein of fantasy, could tell a fairy tale with distinction, succeeded once without question in picturesque drama, and, when he fell to anecdote, as in The Treasure of Franchard, Providence and the Guitar, and The Beach of Falesá, he was pleasantly triumphant. Moreover, in two of his “bogle” stories, the one inserted in Catriona, and the other famous to all the world as Thrawn Janet, he seems to me to have risen clearly above anecdote with matter which might have been left as unsatisfactory as it remains in The Body-Snatcher.
In one of his reviews Stevenson speaks of “that compression which is the mark of a really sovereign style.” Compression is no more the mark of a sovereign style, of course, than it is of a suit of clothes. Compression brings with it obscurity, and is a mark of self-consciousness. What Stevenson meant was possibly a justification of apophthegm and figure. He rather enjoyed what somebody once called “minting the arresting phrase.” There is, at any rate, a palpable connection between our two quotations. But it is certain that precision, austerity, or, if I may use the word, chastity, of expression is a sign of good style; and compression, where it takes the form of heightening and intensification of effect, is the mark of a good short story. It is the mark of Stevenson’s best stories. It is the mark of Thrawn Janet, of The Pavilion on the Links, of The Bottle Imp. Sometimes, after promising well, Stevenson abandons himself, it is true, to his natural Scottish aptitude, and literally “talks out” such tales as Markheim and A Lodging for the Night; but, quite as often, his judgment beats his inclination, and the result is a classic short story in a language not too brilliantly equipped with examples of the craft.
For the short story is above all a matter of justesse, by which word I mean to suggest delicate propriety of expression to idea. Mr. Henry James can tell a short story, because Mr. Henry James writes, as it were, with a very fine pen. Stevenson was not comparable as an artist with Mr. Henry James; but he wrote in a less rarified atmosphere; and it is still practically an unsettled question whether a distinguished artist (one who perfectly expresses a fine conception), such as Turgenev or Mr. Henry James, is the superior or the inferior of the writer with more tumultuous sympathies whose sense of form is less than his sense of life. So that when Stevenson wrote The Pavilion on the Links, or The Bottle Imp, or Thrawn Janet, or Markheim, he was writing particular stories of which only the last, one supposes, could ever have occurred to Mr. James as a subject for a short story at all. Conversely, one sees Stevenson blundering into the bluntnesses and certainly the ultimate failure of Olalla, with the knowledge that his delicacy of style was more marked than the poignancy of his perception; and the psychological explorations of Olalla are jejune stumblings compared with the finished delicacy of “Washington Square.” One does not think, in reading, of Mr. James; but one may perhaps be permitted to illustrate a point by a reference to his work, which has no precise significance as a parallel. That fact, I hope, will excuse a momentary comparison for the purpose of showing that Will o’ the Mill, for all its stylistic accomplishment, is a barren piece of moralising. Where Stevenson essayed profundity, as all writers are drawn to essay profundity, whether it is from natural profoundness or from the instinct of imitation, he was badly hampered by his inexperience as an inductive philosopher. Both Will o’ the Mill and Markheim are, as it were, appendages to that doleful failure Prince Otto. They were experiments for Stevenson in a particular genre for which talent and his mental training had lent him no aptitude. It was on other work that he more successfully took his stand as a writer of short stories. His success—considering that we are now examining his position among the masters of our literature—can only be attested where his work stands supreme or, at any rate, is clearly distinguished, in its own class. It cannot be doubted for one moment that Stevenson wrote some exceedingly fine short stories, fit to be compared, in their own line, with any that have been written in English. What follows must be read in the light of this claim. In their own way, I regard The Suicide Club, The Pavilion on the Links, Providence and the Guitar, Thrawn Janet, The Treasure of Franchard, The Beach of Falesá, and The Bottle Imp as first-class short stories. In a distinct second class I should place The Rajah’s Diamond, some of The Dynamiter stories, The Merry Men, Will o’ the Mill, Markheim, Olalla, The Isle of Voices, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The least successful short stories seem to me to be The Story of a Lie, A Lodging for the Night, The Sire de Malétroit’s Door, The Misadventures of John Nicholson, and The Body-Snatcher. I am aware that one at least of the stories which I have placed in this third division—The Sire de Malétroit’s Door—has given great pleasure to many readers, and has even been not without its direct influence upon Stevenson’s imitators, while another—A Lodging for the Night—is greatly admired, and has been very highly praised; so that it seems hardly necessary to say that the classification is roughly made, and that it is only here attempted for reasons of convenience. The stories will hereafter be grouped according to subject or treatment, and will be examined individually. Those in the first division are, I think, completely successful in their own conventions; those in the second division are either incompletely successful or successful in conventions which seem to me inferior in artistic value; those in the third division are, as far as I can see, unsuccessful either because they fail to impose their conventions upon the reader or because they fail to convince the reader that Stevenson had mastered the craft of short-story writing. But, upon the whole, I believe Stevenson’s short stories to represent more successfully than any other part of his output the variety and the brilliance of his talent. It is for this reason that I shall endeavour in some detail to justify the divisions indicated above, and to emphasise the fact that such tentative distinctions, even if they prove inaccurate in the case of some one or two stories, may yet have some value as providing a basis for agreement or disagreement.
II
For that reason I shall add that the stories in the third division seem to me to fail for these reasons. The Story of a Lie is obviously prentice work. It is presumably based upon some experience of his own in France; but the action, once transferred from the Continent, is filled with sentimentality. Although written, apparently, much later than The Story of a Lie, The Misadventures of John Nicholson is a protracted anecdote which does not awaken very much interest by its attempt to blend humorous exaggeration with bizarre incidents. The Body-Snatcher is one which Stevenson had to supply in order to satisfy a journal with which he had made a contract. It is meant to shock us, but it loses power before the climax, which thereupon fails to shock. The idea is horrible, and affords scope for much dreadful detail: Stevenson, however, perhaps through ill-health, was unsuccessful with it, and possibly the ugliness of the whole thing is at fault. For The Sire de Malétroit’s Door I must confess to the greatest distaste. It seems to me to have neither historical nor human convincingness; and the phrase at the end of the story, “her falling body” very significantly conveys the pin-cushion substance of the demoiselle whose indiscretion gives rise to the sickly and cloying tale. The last story in this division is one that enjoys great reputation, first because it deals with Villon, second because there is an outburst of Villon’s against the red hair of a murdered man, and last because there is an elaborately written but entirely inconclusive duologue between Villon and his host. The story seems to me to be without point or form.
I believe that popular admiration for A Lodging for the Night is largely founded upon tradition or imitation, like the popular admiration for Shakespeare, without the basis of fact upon which the popular admiration for Shakespeare rests. It is well known that popular appreciation of great things is shallow, and that it rises from a common attempt to emulate the enthusiasm of the apostles of Art. Unfortunately, popular appreciation is more easily aroused by artifice than by art. Accordingly, those who have been taught to cite “Put out the light, and then—Put out the light” as a profundity are ready to cite with equal conviction the saying of Villon in this story that the murdered man had no right to have red hair. It is one of those dreadful æsthetic blunders that quickly pass into unquestionable dogma. If no protest is made, if those who detect an imposture remain supine, the false continues to masquerade as the magnificent; and common opinions are so impervious to proclaimed fact that it is at length impossible to cope with them, save by some such wearisome exposition as this. It should be remembered that common appreciation of art is not guided by principles but by intuitions and imitations. The decay of a thing once widely popular is slow; and it is due, not to any native perception of mistake, but to the sluggard realisation that the old enthusiasm is less ardently canvassed than it was. A Lodging for the Night has enjoyed great repute, because Stevenson “found” Villon at a time when other young men were finding Villon; and now that Villon is quite settled among the young men, Stevenson’s essay on Villon and his story about Villon have reached the larger public that is always some years after the fleeting fashion. The result is that, by imitation of those who ought to have known better, and even by its muddled acceptance of a bad play about Villon (called “If I were King”), the public has been led to esteem A Lodging for the Night as something more than the piece of laboured artifice that it always was.
In the second class I believe that The Rajah’s Diamond, The Dynamiter, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are very efficient pieces of craftsmanship, strong enough in invention to delight that typical person called by Mr. H. G. Wells the “weary giant,” engrossing reading to the accompaniment of cigars and whisky-and-soda, but not, in the way of art, quite what we require from works of creative imagination. The Merry Men, with one striking piece of characterisation, has vigour, but poor form and several superfluities of invention. The Isle of Voices is a pleasant enough fairy tale, but clearly inferior to its companion piece The Bottle Imp. The other three tales, Will o’ the Mill, Markheim, and Olalla are all psychological studies of a kind that is nowadays called arid. That is to say, they have greater elaborateness of treatment than their intrinsic importance quite justifies. Will o’ the Mill is written with great softness and delicacy, in a sort of slow and lulling drone very sweet to the ear; Markheim has great virtuosity, is faint and exquisite in manner, feeble in perception, and is sometimes, I believe, false in psychology. Its plan and its manner would only be finally true if its understanding pierced more sharply and finely to the heart of truth. It lacks penetration. Olalla is, in many ways, fine, in some, beautiful. It is, however, as Stevenson came to be aware, false. It is false, not because it is insincere, but because Stevenson’s knowledge had not the temper and the needle-like capacity to go ever deeper into the subtleties upon which he was engaged. I suspect that he dared not trust his imagination, that his imagination had more ingenuity than courage or strength. The story does not produce æsthetic emotion: it is as though the author had made a fine net to trap a moonbeam, as though, when he thought to have come at the heart of the matter, it had escaped him. He was perhaps not wise enough in the mysteries of the human soul. Sensitiveness, and the desire to create a passionate beauty, were not fit substitutes for that patient and courageous, that fearless imagination which alone could have given truth to so simple and so unseizable a problem. More, in his handling of the conclusion of his tale, Stevenson’s emotion fell to a lower plane, and his talent played him quite false. He became too intent upon his rendering of the idea; his literary sense took command when his knowledge failed. That is the weakness of all these three stories.
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.