Tusitala,—“Teller of Tales,”—was the name which the South Sea Islanders gave to Stevenson; and he liked it well. Beginning as an essayist, he
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 turned more and more, as his life went on, to the art of prose fiction as that in which he most desired to excel. It was in this field, indeed, that he made his greatest advance. His later essays do not surpass his earlier ones as much as his later stories excel his first attempts.
Here I conceive my reader objecting: Did not Treasure Island strike twelve early in the day? Is it not the best book of its kind in English?
Yes, my fellow Stevensonian, it is all that you say, and more,—of its kind it has no superior, so far as I know, in any language. But the man who wrote it wrote also books of a better kind,—deeper, broader, more significant, and in writing these he showed, in spite of some relapses, a steadily growing power which promised to place him in the very highest rank of English novelists.
The Master of Ballantrae, maugre its defects of construction, has the inevitable atmosphere of fate, and the unforgettable figures of the two brothers, born rivals. The second part of David Balfour is not only a better romance, but also a better piece of character drawing, than the first part. St. Ives,
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 which was left unfinished, may have been little more than a regular “sword-and-cloak” story, more choicely written, perhaps, than is usual among the followers of “old Dumas.” But Stevenson’s other unfinished book, Weir of Hermiston, is the torso of a mighty and memorable work of art. It has the lines and the texture of something great.
Why, then, was it not finished? Ask Death.
Lorna Doone was written at forty-four years: The Scarlet Letter at forty-six: The Egoist at fifty-one: Tess of the D’Urbervilles at fifty-one. Stevenson died at forty-four. But considerations of what he might have done, (and disputes about the insoluble question,) should not hinder us from appraising his actual work as a teller of tales which do not lose their interest nor their charm.
He had a theory of the art of narration which he stated from time to time with considerable definiteness and inconsiderable variations. It is not obligatory to believe that his stories were written on this theory. It is more likely that he did the work first as he wanted to do it, and then, like a true Scot, reasoned out an explanation of why he had
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 done it in just that way. But even so, his theory remains good as a comment on the things that he liked best in his own stories. Let us take it briefly.
His first point is that fiction does not, and can not, compete with real life. Life has a vastly more varied interest because it is more complex. Fiction must not try to reproduce this complexity literally, for that is manifestly impossible. What the novelist has to do is to turn deliberately the other way, and seek to hold you by simplifying and clarifying the material Which life presents. He wins not by trying to tell you everything, but by telling you that which means most in the revelation of character and in the unfolding of the story. Of necessity he can deal only with a part of life, and that chiefly on the dramatic side, the dream side; for a life in which the ordinary, indispensable details of mere existence are omitted is, after all, more or less dream-like. Therefore, the story-teller must renounce the notion of making his story a literal transcript of even a single day of actual life, and concentrate his attention upon those things which seem to him the most real in life,—the things that count.
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Now a man who takes this view of fiction, if he excels at all, will be sure to do so in the short story, a form in which the art of omission is at a high premium. Here, it seems to me, Stevenson is a master unsurpassed. Will o’ the Mill is a perfect idyl; Markheim, a psychological tale in Hawthorne’s manner; Olalla, a love-story of tragic beauty; and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in spite of its obvious moving-picture artifice, a parable of intense power.
Stevenson said to Graham Balfour: “There are three ways of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons to express and realize it. I’ll give you an example—The Merry Men. There I began with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I gradually developed the feeling with which that coast affected me.” This, probably, is somewhat the way in which Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables; yet I do not think that is one of his best romances, any more than I think The Merry Men one of Stevenson’s best short stories. It is not memorable
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 as a tale. Only the bits of description live. The Treasure of Franchard, light and airy as it is, has more of that kind of reality which Stevenson sought. Therefore it seems as if his third “way of writing a story” were not the best suited to his genius.
The second way,—that in which the plot links and unfolds the characters,—is the path on which he shows at his best. Here the gentleman adventurer was at ease from the moment he set forth on it. In Treasure Island he raised the dime novel to the level of a classic.
It has been charged against Stevenson’s stories that there are no women in them. To this charge one might enter what the lawyers call a plea of “confession and avoidance.” Even were it true, it would not necessarily be fatal. It may well be doubted whether that primitive factor which psychologists call “sex-interest” plays quite such a predominant, perpetual, and all-absorbing part in real life as that which neurotic writers assign to it in their books. But such a technical, (and it must be confessed, somewhat perilous,) defense is not needed. There are plenty of women in Stevenson’s books,—quit............