But in many ways these writers were working in an ad hoc manner; they were not consciously dividing their roles and determining the consequent effects on their fiction. Hawthorne illustrated the same phenomenon. His primary role was instructive in the widest sense. He may have complained about his lack of audience, but he did not write to entertain or delight that audience. As for Poe, if his conception of his role was complex, the consequence for his art was less so. His stories had calculated effects, and whether he constructed them for that purpose or whether the effects were simply a result of their design is beside the point.

But Stevenson’s position was more subtle. For one thing, he was extremely sophisticated and articulate about the artistic process. He was writing at a period when there was extraordinary ferment in France and even Britain about the nature of art, and particularly narrative art. He was involved in the historic debate that culminated in Henry James’s “Art of Fiction” and his own “A Humble Remonstrance.” That Stevenson’s titles are so modest as to be virtually self-effacing is unfortunate, since they have encouraged critics to dismiss the arguments out of hand. Yet “A Humble Remonstrance” and “A Gossip on Romance” are far from modest inquiries into the nature of fictional art. Indeed, in “A Gossip on Romance” Stevenson anticipates Freud’s commentary on creative writers and daydreaming, where the psychoanalyst argues that literature is nothing more than the legitimate expression of fantasies. When Stevenson says that fiction is play for grown-ups, he is merely using familiar language to describe the same idea. That perception of his—that fiction is an acceptable form of play for adults—is joined to another, that fiction is one of the few avenues for truth in the world because it is the only form that people will accept as entertainment, and therefore it is the only medium the truth teller has for his message.

Stevenson thus was caught in the position of wanting to entertain his readers, in that he realized he would have no readers without entertaining them, and at the same time was determined to convey his vision with the single-minded passion of a Hawthorne. Admittedly he had an arrogant and even patronizing view of his readers. Stevenson was under no illusions as to the abilities or interests or experience of the mass reading audience. And it is an open question whether his earliest fiction was even consciously written with that (or any) audience in mind. But there is no question whatever that he was always aware of what was owed his readers, and it is not for nothing that one of the central refrains that runs through Stevenson criticism is that he was a natural or born storyteller. The aptness of such a description was never in doubt during his lifetime, and it continued in force at least through the 1920s. Indeed, shortly after the news of his death, the San Francisco Chronicle headlined one of its biographical articles “Tales of the Prince of Storytellers” (23 December 1894). Stevenson’s life had begun to assume a mythic quality; there were “tales” to be told of it that competed with—and indeed were bound and destined to compete with—the generated tales that constituted the work itself.

2

 

When we read Stevenson’s short stories, we immediately sense the solitariness and loneliness of his characters. Francis Scrymgeour and Simon Rolles in The Rajah’s Diamond are two early examples of figures who live in the midst of metropolitan centers but are nonetheless alone. Both are pursuing careers in the very center of European cities, one struggling against all odds for a secure position in an office in Edinburgh, the other driven by ambition for preferment in the church. They are intensely centered upon themselves and at the same time curiously unaware of the fact. Unlike James’s “super-subtle fry,” who know they are self-conscious and revel in that knowledge, Stevenson’s figures (like those in classical tragedy) are largely unconscious of their obsessiveness. Even in a story like “The Pavilion on the Links,” where the narrator admits to having been “a great solitary when … young” (this page), the emphasis is not on the narrator’s consciousness of his solitariness or even on his awareness of how distorting such a self-absorption might be. In The Rajah’s Diamond there is a motif of voyeurism that functions as a mirror image for the voyeur’s obsessive focus on himself, as if to gaze surreptitiously at others were the only escape from the prison of one’s mind. That there is a sexual aspect to this gazing is clear in “The Physician and the Saratoga Trunk” when the young American cannot keep his eyes from the peephole. But on a deeper level Stevenson concentrates attention on an issue that was fundamental to a strict Protestant mind: the inward-looking self trying to discover an unblemished soul. It may be that the solitary and lonely self is the condition of the Calvinist mentality, a condition that was clearly reflected by the realities of Stevenson’s Presbyterian upbringing and his Edinburgh experience. For him, the “long Scots faces” of the dour people he knew so well was a metonymy for their attitudes and their mentality.

A Stevenson story invariably has an individual at the center (either as character or narrator) and never seems to have more than one individual in it, even when there is a cast of characters who appear to fill out the pages.