And yet I could only give him two places in my team.  One would be for the “Gold Bug,” the other for the “Murder in the Rue Morgue.”  I do not see how either of those could be bettered.  But I would not admit perfect excellence to any other of his stories.  These two have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand in the other.  The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one of those great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of a longer flight.  He was always like one of his own gold-miners who struck a rich pocket, but found no continuous reef.  The pocket was, alas, a very limited one, but the gold was of the best.  “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Tennessee’s Partner” are both, I think, worthy of a place among my immortals.  They are, it is true, so tinged with Dickens as to be almost parodies of the master, but they have a symmetry and satisfying completeness as short stories to which Dickens himself never attained.  The man who can read those two stories without a gulp in the throat is not a man I envy.

And Stevenson?  Surely he shall have two places also, for where is a finer sense of what the short story can do?  He wrote, in my judgment, two masterpieces in his life, and each of them is essentially a short story, though the one happened to be published as a volume.  The one is “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which, whether you take it as a vivid narrative or as a wonderfully deep and true allegory, is a supremely fine bit of work.  The other story of my choice would be “The Pavilion on the Links”—­the very model of dramatic narrative.  That story stamped itself so clearly on my brain when I read it in Cornhill that when I came across it again many years afterwards in volume form, I was able instantly to recognize two small modifications of the text—­each very much for the worse—­from the original form.  They were small things, but they seemed somehow like a chip on a perfect statue.  Surely it is only a very fine work, of art which could leave so definite an impression as that.  Of course, there are a dozen other of his stories which would put the average writer’s best work to shame, all with the strange Stevenson glamour upon them, of which I may discourse later, but only to those two would I be disposed to admit that complete excellence which would pass them into such a team as this.

And who else?  If it be not an impertinence to mention a contemporary, I should certainly have a brace from Rudyard Kipling.  His power, his compression, his dramatic sense, his way of glowing suddenly into a vivid flame, all mark him as a great master.  But which are we to choose from that long and varied collection, many of which have claims to the highest?  Speaking from memory, I should say that the stories of his which have impressed me most are “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” “The Man who Would be King,” “The Man who Was,” and “The Brushwood Boy.”  Perhaps, on the whole, it is the first two which I should choose to add to my list of masterpieces.