Yet just as Hawthorne cannot be dismissed because of the moral message often attached to his stories, neither can Stevenson. His are no more moralistic, in the pejorative sense, than Hawthorne’s, perhaps even less so. And this is because he was in certain fundamental ways a more self-conscious artist than Hawthorne, as well as a more broadly intellectual one than Poe.

As for the French, it is virtually a commonplace that Stevenson’s connection with French literature and culture was as deeply rooted as his attachment to the country itself. From his laudatory remarks on Victor Hugo at the beginning of his career to his dedication of Across the Plains to Paul Bourget near the end, Stevenson retained an unshaken admiration for French writers. He even incorporated them in his own fiction. In The Rajah’s Diamond, for example, he calls attention to Emile Gaboriau, the novelist whose stories of the Paris underworld established the roman policier, and whose detective, Lecoq, was a model for Prince Florizel in the New Arabian Nights stories. The French provided Stevenson with an abundance of material for his work. Among his earliest essays were those on Charles of Orléans and François Villon, just as his best-known travel book charts his journey through the mountainous Cévennes in southern France (Travels with a Donkey). Of course, the old and deep ties between France and Scotland were central to Stevenson’s cultural experience and formed the substance of his longer historical novels. But aspects of those ties surfaced as well in the shorter stories that were set in France, either in their entirety or only in part: The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond, “A Lodging for the Night,” “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door,” “Providence and the Guitar,” and “The Treasure of Franchard.” Certainly the intellectual and aesthetic quality and even the daily texture of French life quickened Stevenson’s imagination. But as a student of art it was the writing that drew his closest attention.

The French conte was the only alternative to the American short story, the only other model available to a writer determined to craft a form that had no modern equivalent in England. For the French short story, as opposed to its American cousin, “revindicated … the supreme value of form in composition and of that unity of effect which is twin to structural completeness” (Una A. Taylor, “The Short Story in France,” Edinburgh Review, July 1913, p. 137). Taylor’s description of the French short story, and in particular the short fiction of Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier, reads like a primer for Stevenson’s art: “Gautier sought his end in concentration, Mérimée in elimination of detail.… In the hands of both … the art of the French conte remained for the most part definitely objective” (137, 141). Of his familiarity with Gautier, Stevenson himself told a San Francisco newspaper in June 1887: “My special distaste is the use of any foreign word.… The great instance of the folly of reading to get new words was Gautier.”

Stevenson found in the French conte the elements that were essential to the construction of the modern short story in English: the economical use of language, an economy that invariably encouraged a highly conscious concern for diction and phrasing; the linkage of incidents in a logical, ineluctable chain so that the ending, as Stevenson said in a famous letter to Sidney Colvin, is always implicit in the beginning; the habit of telling the story from outside the events, through either a third-person narrator or a first-person narrator who is virtually an objective observer, even when he is intimately involved in the story; and, not least, the compression of incidents and details into a focused and self-contained unit. Stevenson’s search for compression and economy was clearly recognized by his contemporaries, although they often disapproved of the end result. One review of Jekyll and Hyde took the story to task for its failure to develop what was seen as a brilliantly original conception: “Perhaps, however, a larger audience will be found, in these days of hurried reading, for the condensed narrative presented by Mr. Stevenson than for a more elaborate story” (New York Tribune, 24 January 1886, p. 6). Stevenson himself was very clear about this aim in his art:

When I am making a point I try to do it in the smallest possible space. I do not think a reader should be expected to plod through pages of print to find out what I mean. The great difficulty I have is in compressing my matter. I can always tell when an author does not write over and over again. The most rapid and fluent writer cannot arrange the mass of material that goes to make up a book without having it out of order here and there. Order is the basis, the charm and the end of literature. Literature is an art that takes place in time. Therefore the main point is to be certain that you have everything in proper order. That you can never get in the first shot. That is my experience.