He was a kind of bard who spoke in prose rather than verse, with all the bard’s swiftness of narration and sudden bursts of lyric beauty. He was a great short-story writer.” Stevenson’s influence on the short story was pervasive. He became part of the consciousness of the modernist sensibility, and the poles of his short-story art can be seen in two later masters of the form—Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene.

The Complete Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson is for a new generation of readers, still open to experience and enthusiastic about the possibilities of magical art. In “Providence and the Guitar,” Stevenson’s brilliant riff on the theme of art and life, Léon Berthelini is a second-rate performer with an inflated sense of self-importance and a dated style. Nonetheless he is a genuine artist: he delights and instructs a younger couple who are having a marital conflict over the artistic life but are struggling resolutely to hold on to each other. Léon’s wife advises the younger woman that a good man may be hard to find, and it is worth keeping the father of your child, even if he is not a very good painter. Painting, after all, is not everything. Léon, with his guitar, performs the noblest service of art—the affirmation of life. And Stevenson, the supreme performance artist, silently nodding in the direction of the reader, confirms both the reality and importance of the entire enterprise.

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Few developments in contemporary fiction since the Second World War match the extraordinary rise in the status of the short story. Many of the most acclaimed writers in England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States are primarily short-story writers, who are recognized and acclaimed for their work in a genre that has historically been considered a second sister to the novel. But it would be a mistake to imply that the short story suddenly emerged from nowhere, or that nobody had paid it much attention before. On the contrary, it has an extensive and impressive history. We need only recover the origins of the form in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to recognize that the impulse that gave rise to its development was not fundamentally different from that which makes it such a viable form today. The short story evolved in tandem with the modern novel. They had in common a single objective: to reduce the size of the book and concentrate the art of the fiction. There is no question that a certain fatigue had set in with the reading public, as well as with the writers themselves. It is hardly coincidental that the two most successful fiction writers of the last two decades of the nineteenth century were Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. The latter declared an end to the triple-decker novel, and the former considered it a feat of strength to complete one. For the Victorians, of course, at least the High Victorians, the tripledecker represented an achievement emblematic of high seriousness and moral integrity. To fill up three complete volumes with complicated stories that reflected the variety and multiplicity of ordinary lives was almost a vocation. Although it is a commonplace that the Victorian serial anticipated the contemporary soap opera in its kaleidoscope of characters, involuted plot, melodrama, and sentiment, it is equally true that the major Victorians were serious writers whose subjects were not conditioned solely by the marketplace. They were also driven by their compulsion to dramatize their profound if not obsessive themes.

What was the situation of the novel in the last quarter of the nineteenth century? Dickens and Thackeray were dead. Eliot had completed her important work. Trollope was writing his last novels. The only major novelist who was still productive was George Meredith, and Meredith, as everybody knows, was caviar for the general, a writer whom other writers could admire but whose work was destined to fail a larger audience. This was the situation when Robert Louis Stevenson began his career. If Harold Bloom’s idea of generational rebellion is viable, then any serious writer coming of age with Stevenson might exhibit an antagonism to those monuments of powerful and daunting intellect, monuments of assurance if not indeed arrogance that were sold in three thick volumes to an elite audience for thirty shillings. In any event, nobody growing up in the 1860s and 1870s could fail to be awed by them. Certainly Stevenson was awed, perhaps even intimidated, although it is equally clear that he recognized exactly what they represented: a vision of the world that could only be contained within a formal text akin to the Victorian epic. It is hardly surprising that he considered Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables the consummation of fiction on this scale, or in this manner.