... 'Neath thy spell the world grows fair;
Our hearts revive, our inmost souls are stirred,
And all our English race awaits thy latest word.'
—Sir L. Morris'
Birthday Ode to the late Lord Tennyson.
Beginning his literary career as a writer of such quaint books of travel as An Inland Voyage and Through the Cevennes with a Donkey, such charming essays as Roads, Ordered South, El Dorado, and many others, Mr Stevenson was not long in entering the arena as a story-teller. His first printed stories were A Lodging for the Night, which appeared in Temple Bar in October 1877; The Sire de Maletroit's Door, in the same magazine in January 1878; and Will o' the Mill, in Cornhill, also in January 1878.
In Cornhill, in 1876 had appeared the series of essays republished as Virginibus Puerisque, and in 1877 and 1878 those afterwards collected under the title Familiar Studies of Men and Books. There also began, now and then, to be short stories from his pen in Cornhill, Macmillan, Longmans, Mr H. Norman's Christmas Annual, The Court and Society Review, and other magazines. These, as they added originality and a certain weirdness of plot to his already recognised beauty of style, still further attracted that cultured public which had at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As already stated, it was Will o' the Mill, a charmingly written story of still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had pronounced a masterpiece of style. Markheim was a graphic, but very unpleasant, story of a murder; Olalla, a horrible, but powerfully written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of Italian scenery to relieve the gloomy picture.
Thrawn Janet which, with most of the tales in The Merry Men, was written at Pitlochry, appeared in Cornhill in 1880. Mr Stevenson himself considered it one of his best stories, and thought it an excellent piece of dialect writing. It is weird and impressive in the extreme, and no one who has read it is likely to forget the minister of Balweary in the vale of Dull, and his terrible experiences in the matter of a housekeeper; the 'het lowin' wind' and the coppery sky of that day on which he met the black man coming down by Dull water, and knew that he had spoken with the enemy of souls himself; or the awful storm, in which Satan finally came for all that was left of Thrawn Janet. Into this story of a few pages are condensed a power of forcible expression and a weirdness of theme which have not been surpassed in any of the larger books.
The Merry Men is a story of wreck and wickedness on a desolate West Highland island where the rocks called 'the Merry Men,' as the tides boil and foam among them, make, as it were, an undercurrent of mad laughter that forms a fitting accompaniment to the hideous passions of greed and murder and the dead level of human misery that are the prevailing atmosphere of the tale. It is one of the best of the stories forming the volume, to which it gives its name, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887.
In another collection of short tales Mr Stevenson also deals with the seamy side of life, and The New Arabian Nights published in 1882, and which contains the reprint of such stories as The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, The Sire de Maletroit's Door, and The Pavilion on the Links, is quite as gruesome and by no means less interesting than The Merry Men.