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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Art of Writing and Other Essays

by Robert Louis Stevenson

(#22 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)

 

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Title: The Art of Writing and Other Essays

 

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Release Date: April, 1996 [EBook #492]

[This file was first posted on February 21, 1996]

 

Edition: 10

 

Language: English

 

Character set encoding: ASCII

 

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ART OF WRITING ***

 

Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,

email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

 

ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING

 

Contents:

On some technical elements of style in literature

The morality of the profession of letters

Books which have influenced me

A note on realism

My first book: ‘Treasure Island’

The genesis of ‘the master of Ballantrae’

Preface to ‘the master of Ballantrae’

 

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE {1}

 

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the

springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie

wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their

beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be

appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the

strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, when

pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather

from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the

mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those

disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps

only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious and

unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist

to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their

springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we

conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance

at least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn the

affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far

back in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, in

consequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method,

which can be stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the

principle laid down in Hudibras, that

 

‘Still the less they understand,

The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,’

 

many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the

ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known

character, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most

distasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall and

looking on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the

musical cart to pieces.

 

1. Choice of Words.—The art of literature stands apart from among

its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist

works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange

freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is

ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a

singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic

and ductile material, like the modeller’s clay; literature alone is

condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You

have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar,

that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of

just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is

condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for

since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our

daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions

by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no

hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as

in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word,

phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression,

and convey a definite conventional import.

 

Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer,

or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the apt choice and

contrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to

take these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market

or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest

meanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy,

wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to

rouse the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubt

the most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally present

in all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular

justice, significance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, from

the effect of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to take an example

nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified into an energy

of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the

words in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious

enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished

elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers have

no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison

is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than

Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not

in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the

matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour.

The three first are but infants to the three second; and yet each,

in a particular point of literary art, excels his superior in the

whole. What is that point?

 

2. The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the

great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men,

is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two

great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which

are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily,

imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance,

which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in

right of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may

claim a common ground of existence, and it may be said with

sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever is

to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of sounds, of

changing attitudes, geometrical figures, or imitative lines; but

still a pattern. That is the plane on which these sisters meet; it

is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should at

times forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligence

to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessary

function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperative

that the pattern shall be made.

 

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern

of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.

Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be

carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call

literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to

plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that

each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind

of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and

clear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should

be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we are

led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive

phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise,

as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with

much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and

then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in

itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the

sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for

nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and

sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should

the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be

infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and

yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch,

and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness.

 

The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in

beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instant

overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which

is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and

first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be the

obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness

of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved

unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of words

must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unless

knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate

the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The

genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the

laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some

of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed

to strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in

each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis

of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first.

 

Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to

plait about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more

views of the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts

them; and while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion

for the necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to have

greatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted the work of two

sentences in the space of one. In the change from the successive

shallow statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous

flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amount

of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see,

recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulating

view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and affinity

of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not so,

for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these

difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two

oranges kept simultaneously