The Art of Writing and Other Essays
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Art of Writing and Other Essays
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 dancing in the air, that, consciously
or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so
little recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which
we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect, not,
as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is
the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which attains the
highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively;
or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour.
Even the derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) natural
order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the means of such
designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most
pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most
perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical,
an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the
foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be
read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality
is poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on the
other hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with
pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted
to mention Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will.
It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless
'criticism of life'; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate
and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance and
of good sense; and the two oranges, even if one of them be rotten,
kept dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though
in verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning
beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think
that here was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from
that, it is but a new illustration of the principle involved. For
if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is
because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the
laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be
rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French,
depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or,
like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of
repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the
law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it may
have no inherent beauty; all that we have a right to ask of any
prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, and
that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard.
Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility to
write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for
in prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the
difficulties first created before they can be solved. Hence,
again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the true versifier:
such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo, whom I place beside
them as versifier merely, not as poet. These not only knit and
knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and
strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse
with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a
rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of
counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now
contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and
the verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on,
the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will
reach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that
can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the
development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in
hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with
a great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of
conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of
triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed only
two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from
melody to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the juggler,
behold him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the
spectators, juggling with three oranges instead of two. Thus it
is: added difficulty, added beauty; and the pattern, with every
fresh element, becoming more interesting in itself.
Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition;
something is lost as well as something gained; and there remains
plainly traceable, in comparing the best prose with the best verse,
a certain broad distinction of method in the web. Tight as the
versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still
leaves the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat loose. In
prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, nicely balanced, and fits
into itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear
remarks and is singly gratified by this return and balance; while
in verse it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparable
passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the superior
of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his more
delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his inferior. But
let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was
ambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the
Second Part of Henry IV., a fine flourish of eloquence in
Shakespeare's second manner, and set it side by side with
Falstaff's praise of sherris, act iv. scene iii.; or let us compare
the beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando;
compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech to
Adam, with what passage it shall please you to select--the Seven
Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of nobility as
Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive,
if you have an ear for that class of music, a certain superior
degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of the
parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbing
pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take from those who
have little, the little that they have; the merits of prose are
inferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an
independent.
3. Rhythm of the Phrase.--Some way back, I used a word which still
awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but
what is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points,
literature, being a representative art, must look for analogies to
painting and the like; but in what is technical and executive,
being a temporal art, it must seek for them in music. Each phrase
of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be
so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and
unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is
the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the secret of
the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those phrases, such
as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless and yet
to please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I owe
it all to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however,
particularly interesting in the present connection. We have been
accustomed to describe the heroic line as five iambic feet, and to
be filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious
schoolboy, we have heard our own description put in practice.
'All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,' {2}
goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our
definition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr.
Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the
heroic line consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase,
contains four pauses:
'All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.'
Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, in
this case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a
trochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with
no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly
scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this fresh richness of
intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but
still kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thing
it now appears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the
verse is made at the same time to read in fives and to read in
fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find verses
in six groups, because there is not room for six in the ten
syllables; and we do not find verses of two, because one of the
main distinctions of verse from prose resides in the comparative
shortness of the group; but it is even common to find verses of
three. Five is the one forbidden number; because five is the
number of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two patterns would
coincide, and that opposition which is the life of verse would
instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect of
polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common and
make so brave an architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is
a group of Nature's making. If but some Roman would return from
Hades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the
voice these thundering verses should be uttered--'Aut Lacedoe-
monium Tarentum,' for a case in point--I feel as if I should enter
at last into the full enjoyment of the best of human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by the
mere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a
question of elegance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so;
and I am certain that for choice no two of them should scan the
same. The singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so
far as analysis can carry us, part, indeed, to the clever
repetition of L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scansion in
the groups. The groups which, like the bar in music, break up the
verse for utterance, fall uniambically; and in declaiming a so-
called iambic verse, it may so happen that we never utter one
iambic foot. And yet to this neglect of the original beat there is
a limit.
'Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,' {3}
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it
scarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly
suggests no other measure to the ear. But begin
'Mother Athens, eye of Greece,'
or merely 'Mother Athens,' and the game is up, for the trochaic
beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is
an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten,
they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought;
but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this
variety is lost, and we fall back on sameness. Thus, both as to
the arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity
in scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose:
to keep alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously
followed; to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and
to balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader, that
neither shall be unperceived and neither signally prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we
write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the
prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly
uttered than the group in verse; so that not only is there a
greater interval of continuous sound between the pauses, but, for
that very reason, word is linked more readily to word by a more
summary enunciation. Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of
the group, and successive phrases, like successive groups, must
differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse
is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest
no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much
so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything,
but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very well pass
and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but
one following another will produce an instant impression of
poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines delivered
with the measured utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich in
variety. By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, as to a
more distant vision, these niceties of difference are lost. A
whole verse is uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied
by a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer,
in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is
condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger
scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted
metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has
to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into
his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a
quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the
inherently rhythmical strain of the English language, that the bad
writer--and must I take for example that admired friend of my
boyhood, Captain Reid?--the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his
earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any one
may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production
of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad?
And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever made
good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise
than trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can
go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity
of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the
movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak side,
and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A peculiar density
and mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, is one of the
chief good qualities of verse; but this our accidental versifier,
still following after the swift gait and large gestures of prose,
does not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since he remains
unconscious that he is making verse at all, it can never occur to
him to extract those effects of counterpoint and opposition which I
have referred to as the final grace and justification of verse,
and, I may add, of blank verse in particular.
4. Contents of the Phrase.--Here is a great deal of talk about
rhythm--and naturally; for in our canorous language rhythm is
always at the door. But it must not be forgotten that in some
languages this element is almost, if not quite, extinct, and that
in our own it is probably decaying. The even speech of many
educated Americans sounds the note of danger. I should see it go
with something as bitter as despair, but I should not be desperate.
As in verse no element, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in prose
also, other sorts of beauty will arise and take the place and play
the part of those that we outlive. The beauty of the expected beat
in verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more lawless
melody, patent as they are to English hearing, are already silent
in the ears of our next neighbours; for in France the oratorical
accent and the pattern of the web have almost or altogether
succeeded to their places; and the French prose writer would be
astounded at the labours of his brother across the Channel, and how
a good quarter of his toil, above all invita Minerva, is to avoid
writing verse. So wonderfully far apart have races wandered in
spirit, and so hard it is to understand the literature next door!