(San Francisco Chronicle, 17 December 1894, p. 1)

 

Stevenson was by temperament aligned with the French in their emphasis on form and style in the short story. This is nicely illustrated, albeit in a small way, in an interview he gave to a San Francisco reporter in 1887, when he observed that the only writer who was doing anything at all as artistically exciting as Henry James was Guy de Maupassant. Although the remark paid tribute to the new direction James’s fiction had taken in the 1880s, it was also a compliment to the facility and originality of Maupassant, who began his career at the beginning of the decade and whose work Stevenson was clearly following. He was always attuned to what the French were doing, and his ability to draw from them ideas, both formal and thematic, was a constant reminder of the catholicity of his reading and his taste. If the nineteenth-century police novel of Emile Gaboriau provided a model for the New Arabian Nights stories, the fifteenth-century ballades (and life) of Villon offered him a means to explore issues of poverty and wealth, art and life, in “A Lodging for the Night.”

Stevenson sought to combine the elements of the French conte and the American short story in order to construct a new form that exhibited the best features of both. It is not that either had wonderful qualities absent from the other; rather, each had elements that spoke directly to Stevenson’s artistic imagination and intellectual interests. In effect, he was determined to exploit the potentialities inherent in both. What Stevenson required was a form that would maintain the detachment and objectivity of the French with the moral implicativeness, even discursiveness, of the Americans. In a sense he was attempting something that had not been done previously; he was trying to meld together two distinct and in some ways contradictory modes. For the French, the form was primary: the narrative is the embedded chain of incidents that controls and unifies the story from beginning to end. The narration is made as objective as possible in order to forestall the author’s intrusion into the story, and the manner is polished in all its details—economy of expression, concision of incidents, and exclusion of all extraneous or irrelevant data. What the French conte provides is a story admirable in construction and powerful in effect, in short, a magnificent artifice. For Stevenson, the appeal of that kind of art was considerable, for the writer is challenged by the material, concerned with presentation, and committed almost exclusively to problems of technical mastery.

With the American model, on the other hand, the moral issues in the story were of primary consideration. This was certainly the case in Washington Irving’s stories, just as it was obvious in Hawthorne’s. Indeed, if the Americans were guilty of anything in their short fiction, it was of making too much of the issues, of making the story nothing more than a vehicle for the moral. While this may not be the most interesting way to read Irving, and certainly not Hawthorne, it is nonetheless an approach that readers and reviewers invariably adopted. In the case of Hawthorne, the focus on sin and punishment made it convenient to read his short stories as moral exempla, aided by the summary conclusions often provided by the author. Although it is undeniable that the structural design of Hawthorne’s fiction often concealed its complexity, rather like James’s figure in the carpet, it is equally true that a reading of the exterior story frequently reduced it to a simple moral apothegm. Hawthorne, in effect, became the analyst of conscience. His subject and approach invariably focused attention on theme and deflected it from technique. Even Poe, whom everyone agreed was indifferent to moral issues, still paid them attention in tales like “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Stevenson was at one and the same time the most deliberately artistic of new writers and the one most preoccupied with moral issues. The questions he confronted in his short stories were never without moral implications, whether it was equity and justice in “A Lodging for the Night” or prejudice and greed in “The Beach of Falesá.” Indeed, even his adoptions of particular forms of the short story, such as the folktale “The Bottle Imp” or the parable “Will o’ the Mill,” exhibit the incorporation of moral issues within the form of the story itself. Stevenson (like Henry James) found himself with two fundamental inclinations: the one toward technical artistry, which he saw in the French, and the other toward moral analysis, which he found in Hawthorne. The problem was to amalgamate the two, creating a fiction that was both technically brilliant and thematically complex. Instead of highlighting one or the other, as the French and Americans did, Stevenson fashioned a short story that was moral in its impulse and artistic in its execution; he created, in effect, the “moral art story,” or the art story with a moral.

Perhaps no other writer exhibits a greater dichotomy between play and purpose in fiction than Stevenson: fiction as play, and fiction as purpose; art as pleasure and art as instruction. Stevenson is the quintessential embodiment of the Horatian ideal—the function of art is to delight and instruct. The problem, of course, is that for most artists the one or the other takes prominence. In the nineteenth-century novel it appeared, for a time, as if the two purposes were united: in Dickens there was pleasure, even fun, and there was instruction, or, more properly, social outrage. Yet it is clear that as the great Victorians developed their art, they emphasized the one at the expense of the other: we think of Eliot as a great moralist; of Dickens as two people, the entertainer of Pickwick Papers and the justiciary of Bleak House; of Thackeray as a social satirist in the guise of a puppeteer.