Whether he might have had a different life under different circumstances is really beside the point. He had the life he had, and he was the man he was. Hence the brilliance of the ending: Despite the long and contentious debate, the facing and challenging of complex philosophical questions, when Villon leaves and goes back out into the bitter-cold night, his first thought is for the loss of what he might have had: “ ‘A very dull old gentleman,’ he thought. ‘I wonder what his goblets may be worth’ ” (this page).

The opening sentence of “The Pavilion on the Links” (“I was a great solitary when I was young”) introduces the retrospective narrative, a characteristic mode of Stevenson’s first-person texts. This method of delivering a story invariably implies two stories, the one a story of past events told in sequential order, the other the present story, which remains untold, except for our awareness of its presentness. In other words, a typical retrospective narrative is a story about the past which feels as if it were happening at the moment, thus achieving the immediacy and suspense of present action. But, in fact, all the events have long since vanished into the world of time and memory, recalled partly as a means of reviving the experience, and partly as a way of holding on to life. For Stevenson’s retrospective narrators, the past is often the only life that has any vivacity, perhaps even reality, and the stories are told with a vigor and excitement that entrances the reader and makes him imagine himself caught in a wonderful or terrifying web of suspense. Through retrospective narration, Stevenson gives a deeper dimension to past events, keeping them alive in the memory of the survivor-narrator.

The portrait of Frank Cassilis, the narrator of “The Pavilion on the Links,” is one that Stevenson periodically produced—a figure alone in the world, virtually living in the wild, whose gypsy life is reflected in his physical surroundings. The description of the countryside surrounding the pavilion captures the mentalities of Cassilis and his equally solitary companion, Northmour: “But there stood in the northern part of the estate, in a wilderness of links and blowing sandhills, and between a plantation and the sea, a small Pavilion or Belvidere, of modern design, which was exactly suited to our wants; and in this hermitage, speaking little, reading much, and rarely associating except at meals, Northmour and I spent four tempestuous winter months” (this page). The image of a hermitage is an apt one, for in these situations Stevenson often identifies, or conflates, a disciplined, self-imposed isolation with a kind of religious asceticism. Indeed, along the sea wood not far from the pavilion, “one or two ruined cottages were dotted about the wood; and, according to Northmour, these were ecclesiastical foundations, and in their time had sheltered pious hermits” (this page). There is a certain fascination with this life: a world where nothing but the sea and the links are to be encountered, a world with books for companions. This seems the ideal world sought by Cassilis.

It is hardly accidental that so many of Stevenson’s protagonists are serious readers—Simon Rolles in The Suicide Club studies the patristic fathers, Villon in “A Lodging for the Night” is a student who quotes the Latin bible, and the Reverend Soulis in “Thrawn Janet” is immersed in theology. There is a complex association in Stevenson between the profound and disciplined study of deep books and the ascetic isolation of the (fictional) reader, a connection that leads to a kind of voyeurism, as if investigating the secrets of texts is the equivalent of surreptitiously looking into the secrets of others. It need hardly be remarked that the transference from the intense study of texts to the process of writing them is always present in Stevenson’s consciousness, if not in the protagonist’s or the narrator’s. In some fundamental way there is an ineluctable connection between the self-imposed isolation of the fictional character, with all its attendant implications for personality and destiny, and the position of the creative artist in the world. The voyeurism referred to earlier that recurs in The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond is nothing more than a fictional reality that inscribes the actual reality of the voyeurism that Stevenson practiced as a writer. It is a voyeurism that he himself viewed as a by-product of an obsessive self-absorption, a kind of narcissism that writers and artists were prone to by the very nature of their work. If Stevenson deliberately fought against this tendency in his own life, it was through the ceaseless pursuit of friends. There is no other writer who worked so hard and so steadily to sustain his friendships—each of his books had its requisite dedicatee—and whose marriage itself may even have been an escape from the prison house of the self. Stevenson lived with the fullness of friends and family in order not to succumb to the tyranny of self. Yet the pace and intensity of the work produced in those last few years in the Pacific were so profound as to virtually ensure his early death, from a sudden cerebral hemorrhage.

Stevenson’s Scottish stories always draw on the most rugged features of the beautiful and harsh landscape, features defined by sheer cliffs and craggy rocks, by cold winds and roiling seas. He creates a setting so unremittingly desolate in “Pavilion” that Frank Cassilis declares, “The place had an air of solitude that daunted even a solitary like myself” (this page). It is almost impossible to read this story without experiencing the bleakness of the country. It is not for nothing that Stevenson was consistently invoked by twentieth-century writers of handbooks on short-story technique as an exemplary master of “atmosphere” or “description”—terms that highlighted his extraordinary gift for evoking a mood from the most extreme physical settings. But it is not mood alone that conditions the narrative. For Stevenson, place is character, and the windswept links, barren of all vegetation except evergreen shrub, are an appropriate counter for the reclusive Cassilis and Northmour.

The consequences of isolation are manifest in the mental condition and the social behavior of the characters, in Minister Soulis in “Thrawn Janet,” or Gordon Darnaway in “The Merry Men.” Villon declares that “man is not a solitary animal—Cui Deus feminam tradit” (to whom God gives woman) (this page). Of course, in the mouth of Villon, who is both rogue and poet, the words have a mordancy that almost belies their meaning: Villon needs a woman in the same way he needs meat and drink. Nonetheless, the central idea of the assertion is in fact Stevenson’s answer to the damage inflicted on the self by voluntary or enforced isolation—love with the proper woman.