Moral issues, which are the heart of every Stevenson story, are always confronted in individual cases. From the start of “A Lodging for the Night,” where Francis Villon is in a tavern carousing with his friends, to the end of the story, when he is alone in the street trying to toss off the experience of the evening, he is essentially alone in the world and forced to live with that condition. Philosophy, religion, art—all of which he is an adept at—can in no way alter or ameliorate his situation. Villon must live with himself, just as he has a vision of dying by himself, swinging from the gibbet like a piece of fruit on a tree. Part of the pain of Stevenson’s depiction of the isolation of Villon, or of Cassilis or Northmour in “The Pavilion on the Links,” is the realization that it is the inalterable condition of experience.

For Stevenson, mortality is destiny, inescapable, ineluctable—a vision that unquestionably drives many readers to attribute a distinctly morbid note to many of the stories. The doctor’s speech in “The Physician and the Saratoga Trunk” spelling out his view of the flesh once the spirit has passed out of it can be read either as a cold-blooded commentary from a heartless materialist or as a plausible argument on the nature of man, an argument that must be acknowledged before one can determine how to address or answer it. The fact of death is so central to Stevenson’s imagination that to shy from it at the start is to avoid wrestling with his subject and his art. Where is permanence? Over and over, he reflects upon this question through his surrogates. The young narrator in “The Merry Men” who discovers the shoe buckle at the bottom of the sea and silently discourses on the life of the man who wore the shoe, and in effect on human history, is another illustration of the way Stevenson promotes the idea of the transitoriness of life and perhaps the futility of all human pursuits. The contrast between life and death, which is another way of looking at this question, also recurs regularly in Stevenson’s work. And it is the perception of death that makes the solitariness so bleak. It is curious, too, how little Stevenson’s fiction is concerned with issues like ambition or success in the world in terms that would be recognizable to ordinary working people. Yet there is always an acute consciousness of the fact that these are indeed the issues that drive men’s lives. The line in “Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders” about Rolles’s struggle for success in the church and the recognition that his merits will have no effect on that success is only one of the wittier illustrations.

But the absence of incidents reflective of the ordinariness of life does not mean that Stevenson was simply trying to steal boys away from their Ovid and carry them into the world of romance, as he says in the dedication to Kidnapped. Rather, he preferred to concentrate on issues he considered more fundamental, or perhaps more revelatory of the human condition. The “adventures” in The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond and the misadventures in “The Misadventures of John Nicholson” are merely the occasions for profound explorations of experience; they are certainly not the substance—let alone the meaning—of the stories. The swindling and fighting in “The Pavilion on the Links” are no more what that story is about than is the mystery surrounding the wrecked ship the subject of “The Merry Men.”

This is not always apparent, because the engine that drives a Stevenson story is plot, moving forward through time with a series of incidents that are unpredictable and suspenseful. But for Stevenson plot is (on one level) just a technical device, a means to enthrall the reader while the serious issues are being explored. The excitement of a plot is the pleasure of the reading experience. Stevenson never denigrates that pleasure and always strives to sustain it, but it is finally an arbitrary, perhaps even a capricious, device. In The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond the plots are extraordinary, straining credulity and calling attention to their own outrageousness. What is always at the center of the fiction is the idea. The core of a Stevenson story is intellect, either the intellect of a character or intellectual comprehension conveyed through the omniscient narrator. If we consider stories like The Suicide Club, The Rajah’s Diamond, “A Lodging for the Night,” “Markheim,” and “The Merry Men,” it is clear that intellectual issues are at bottom the meaning of the texts. It would indeed be surprising if one of the most widely read and scholarly of late-Victorian writers were to suddenly park all his knowledge and wisdom outside the circle of his fiction. Stevenson can be called a philosopher in fiction with far more justness than virtually any of his contemporaries, including Hardy and James. Some of his texts overtly identify themselves as philosophical, like “Will o’ the Mill,” where the protagonist watches from the perch of his rural retreat the whole panorama of men’s lives cavalcading before him. Another, like “The Treasure of Franchard,” wittily exposes the antics of a faux philosopher whose wildly extravagant vocabulary simply shows up his complete want of common sense. Others assume the manner of discourses, as the dialogue between Villon and Brisetout in “A Lodging for the Night” illustrates. Does the debate between the two about poverty and riches, circumstance and fate, honor versus degradation, constitute an inauthentic or undramatic use of fiction? Or does it rather, given its rich visual and linguistic context, powerfully illustrate the irresolvability of those issues?

Stevenson, developing his story from the character of a historical figure, cannot take Villon and make him other than what he was: a creative genius whose rough life contrasted sharply with his natural gifts and in all probability ended briefly and painfully.