But it was not the avenue that he pursued, nor was it the avenue that was pursued after him. Stevenson realized that the Victorian novel had finally exhausted itself, that it was of a time, and a place, that had long passed. He had the remarkable ability to recognize both the achievement of the novel and its limitations. Just as he admired Walter Scott as a fellow countryman and a writer whose subject touched him personally, he also knew that Scott’s fiction had played itself out, or at least that Scott’s method was defunct. In brief, the age demanded an image of its accelerated pace; the age demanded the short story.

What was the status of the English short story when Robert Louis Stevenson first signed the initials R.L.S. at the end of “A Lodging for the Night” in the October 1877 issue of Temple Bar? For the most part it was moribund. The form was clearly not one that the English novelists had been able to master. Serial publication of fiction placed a premium on elaborate plots, and the continued dominance of the three-volume novel inhibited the development of techniques that would highlight the strengths of the short narrative. If one wanted models for shorter fiction there were only two: the Americans and the French. Stevenson was naturally attracted to both. For the Americans, Hawthorne and Poe were the dominating presences. That Poe had provided the theoretical underpinnings for the short story, or had elaborated a formal process that rationalized his own practice, was apparent to anyone. Stevenson read Poe avidly, and used him with impunity. The fascination with “doubles” (symbolized by Jekyll and Hyde) that runs as a motif through Stevenson’s fiction is well known. In a letter to Andrew Lang, for example, he readily acknowledged his familiarity with one of Poe’s masterpieces in the genre (“Yes, I knew William Wilson” [undated letter to Andrew Lang, Huntington Library, HM 2490]). The earliest reviews of Stevenson’s short fiction are rife with references to Poe, who appeared to critics as the model and inspiration for Stevenson’s tales of horror, and for that morbidity which was recognized early as a prominent strain in his fiction. Stevenson’s affinity with the American theorist must be taken as a fundamental.

But it was Hawthorne that Stevenson was most intensely drawn to. The New Englander’s stories of religious obsession and guilt, framed by the hard doctrines of Calvinism, held a special appeal for the writer whose own country was haunted by a staunch and unyielding Presbyterianism. Even tales of superstition and the supernatural found their echo in the terrifying stories of witchcraft told him by his childhood nurse, and which were among his earliest memories. Hawthorne also displayed a powerful moral strand that was absent from Poe but that struck a deeply sympathetic chord in Stevenson, who could never quite shake free of the strict faith of the orthodox. It is not surprising that from the beginning critics have commented, and not always favorably, on an abiding moral element as one of the salient characteristics of Stevenson’s fiction.

Stevenson knew Cooper and Twain too, of course, and he chided Melville for his failure to transcribe accurately the Marquesans’ speech in Typee. But the question is not how many of the American writers he knew. He read voraciously, omnivorously, and there is little he was unaware of. That Hawthorne was his intellectual model is as undeniable as that Walt Whitman was his emotional inspiration. Stevenson found in the outspoken poet a zest for freedom that was the antithesis of the crimped and dour Scots mentality. In Whitman, as in Thoreau, he found an idea, perhaps even an ideal, that was associated with America, an idea as persuasive as it was seductive to a young man growing up beneath the overhang of Edinburgh Castle, in the damp and darkness of a northern city.

If there is any single thing Stevenson might have learned from Hawthorne, it is unquestionably the use of light, a visual image that dominates Stevenson’s fiction from his first published story through the final brilliance of The Beach of Falesá. But America did not represent “light” in fiction as opposed to the “dark” of Scotland. Rather, Whitman and Thoreau represented the elevation, indeed the exaltation, of the individual, and the idea of freedom that was so strong an element in Stevenson’s personality. Yet the antithesis to that idea of freedom was just as deeply rooted in a man who read the stern Scottish religious writers with a certain degree of relish. Hence the overt “moralizing,” the use of the word sermon to title his writings (Lay Sermons, “A Christmas Sermon”), and stories that often seem so strongly “moralistic” in their message or tone that modern readers are inclined to put them aside, or to dismiss them for that reason alone.