_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 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. 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.