In “Pavilion” Frank Cassilis marries Clara Huddlestone and has children, to whom in fact he is relating the events of the story. But Clara is already dead when Cassilis begins his narrative, so the focus remains on the solitariness itself rather than on the love that becomes a salve for that solitariness. In truth, Stevenson’s imagination was energized more by the sense of failure his figures experience than by their prospects for love. In a real sense Cassilis and Northmour are outcasts, people on the edge of society, whose lives are separated from intimacy and connection, people who have deliberately removed themselves from the norms of domestic social responsibilities. Although joined by their common love for Clara, which motivates them to protect her father, they are not really against the Italians and are in effect fighting a false battle. As the pavilion goes up in flames—their redoubt against the world—nothing is left but the links scarred “with little patches of burnt furze” (this page). The land has gone back to itself, and all the intruders are expelled from its midst.

It is a nice question how an only child, growing up in an indulgent upper-class Edinburgh home, could have so compelling a vision of the loneliness of men and women in the world. But for whatever reasons, it is a vision that controls a substantial portion of his fiction, and creates the atmosphere and tone that dominate his greatest short stories. In a way that is nothing short of modern in its invention and execution, Stevenson made the landscape an element that heightens the loneliness endured by an individual. It came to symbolize both the condition and the consequence of experience. “The Reverend Murdoch Soulis … dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw” (this page). The fusion of character and place is so simple, yet so vivid, that it can more easily be understood in our time as a cinematic technique, a graphic and instantaneous representation of subject and form. It is a technique that readers intuitively understood but rarely analyzed. Part of its effectiveness lay in the simplicity of the language, part in the evocation of mood, part in the rhythm itself, with its building up of a sense of finality, and ultimate emptiness, by the suggestion of imminent death and the total absence of human contact. It is a method Stevenson continued through his career, so that by the 1890s he was using coral atolls in the South Seas to illustrate the same terrible loneliness that he earlier identified with the wet and dark rock fastnesses of the Scottish coastline.

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In “A Lodging for the Night” Stevenson introduces a theme that was to figure prominently in his fiction—chance, or the capriciousness of life. It is a philosophical issue that he treated wryly in The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond, with comic pathos in “The Misadventures of John Nicholson,” and with deep sobriety in “The Merry Men” and “Markheim.” It is an issue that focuses on a vision of the world, even of the universe, and of man’s place in the world. How do we live our lives? How do we plan for our work, our children, our posterity? Stevenson was an intensely driven man: the thought that he might die and leave nothing behind, that his name would have been “writ in water” and disappear unremembered into the oblivion of time, this was the spur that impelled him to write wherever he was, traveling steerage on a transatlantic boat, on a train across the United States, or on a ninety-foot sloop across the Pacific, coughing blood or running a fever, but never to be without a notebook and pen in his pocket, or a board to write upon in bed. Perhaps the desire for immortality and the refusal to go quietly, however futile that notion to a man who had absorbed Darwin into his consciousness (“Pulvis et Umbra”), compelled him to write unremittingly. For Stevenson wanted to leave behind a small, indelible mark on a stick, so that whoever came after, so long as the stick lasted, would recall and in the process revivify his name. Of course, this is nothing more than the artist’s desire for immortality, and there is certainly nothing new here. But with Stevenson it was joined to the late nineteenth century’s recognition that in the context of geologic time, the very notion of immortality was something of an anachronism.

It is clear that Stevenson does not approach this issue from the point of view of religion. Like Hawthorne, he draws on the grammar of religion for his subject and his vocabulary, but everlasting perdition, like eternal glory, is simply a trope that enables us to enter the circle where true meaning is explored and debated. Part of that debate has to do with what Stevenson (through Villon) calls “the riddle of man’s life.” For the pursuit of fame and immortality through writing is as arbitrary as any other pursuit engaged in by people high and low in life.

In “A Lodging for the Night” Stevenson draws together issues of art and immortality, poverty and wealth, and the transiency of all worldly pursuits, with the central idea of a universe ruled by chance. He begins with the first of his memorable opening paragraphs, from which I quote just the first two lines: “It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable” (this page). The opening sentence cannot be bettered for its utter simplicity and modernity. The voice is as dateless today as it was in 1878, and it is only the insertion of the year 1456 that gives the sentence (and the reader) a jolt. It has the effect of bringing alive the late medieval city, as if we were in the midst of it, able to enter its mentalité while still living in our much later time. Then Stevenson delivers one of the most powerful and evocative descriptions of a city covered in snow, whose whiteness provides a vivid contrast with the darkness of the night. And with the single word “vortices” he draws both on older theories of the universe that posited a rotational movement of cosmic matter around an axis and on nineteenth-century scientific theories that defined the term as a rapid movement of particles of matter around an axis.