The Art of Writing and Other Essays
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Art of Writing and Other Essays
But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled with
rage, tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by each of
these the story will be transformed to something else. The
newspapers that told of the return of our representatives from
Berlin, even if they had not differed as to the facts, would have
sufficiently differed by their spirits; so that the one description
would have been a second ovation, and the other a prolonged insult.
The subject makes but a trifling part of any piece of literature,
and the view of the writer is itself a fact more important because
less disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which a
subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work,
becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody;
for there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts; not
only modifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far larger
proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of the
writer's mind or momentary humour forms not only the leading
feature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only thing he can
communicate to others. In all works of art, widely speaking, it is
first of all the author's attitude that is narrated, though in the
attitude there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life.
An author who has begged the question and reposes in some narrow
faith cannot, if he would, express the whole or even many of the
sides of this various existence; for, his own life being maim, some
of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and
unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, the
triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian
religion; and hence we find equal although unsimilar limitation in
works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste
for high society. So that the first duty of any man who is to
write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set
himself up for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see that
his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everything
but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see the
good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not
wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should
recognise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop,
and that tool is sympathy. {13}
The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. There are a
thousand different humours in the mind, and about each of them,
when it is uppermost, some literature tends to be deposited. Is
this to be allowed? Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps
in more than rigourists would fancy. It were to be desired that
all literary work, and chiefly works of art, issued from sound,
human, healthy, and potent impulses, whether grave or laughing,
humorous, romantic, or religious.
Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially
insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many
tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a
masterpiece although we gird against its blemishes. We are not,
above all, to look for faults, but merits. There is no book
perfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight,
improve, or encourage the reader. On the one hand, the Hebrew
psalms are the only religious poetry on earth; yet they contain
sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood. On the other hand,
Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am only
quoting that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when I accuse
him of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote was
purely creative, he could give us works like Carmosine or Fantasio,
in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been
found again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote Madame
Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism;
and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of
appalling morality. But the truth is, when books are conceived
under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine times
heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being are
seized with such an ample grasp, that, even should the main design
be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be
expressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an ill
thing poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And so this can
be no encouragement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, who
must take their business conscientiously or be ashamed to practise
it.
Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself
and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do
a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be
sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to
travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a
sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with
truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man
but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be
profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one
could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently
uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh
as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify
the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into
his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the
world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is
immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture
of the world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be
partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of another,
cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth,
sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct, you can never hope to
do exactly right. All you can do is to make as sure as possible;
and for that there is but one rule. Nothing should be done in a
hurry that can be done slowly. It is no use to write a book and
put it by for nine or even ninety years; for in the writing you
will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must precede any
beginning; and if you meditate a work of art, you should first long
roll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like the
flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end
to end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you
should first have thought upon the question under all conditions,
in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. It
is this nearness of examination necessary for any true and kind
writing, that makes the practice of the art a prolonged and noble
education for the writer.
There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in the
meantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or
pleasing impressions is a service to the public. It is even a
service to be thankfully proud of having rendered. The slightest
novels are a blessing to those in distress, not chloroform itself a
greater. Our fine old sea-captain's life was justified when
Carlyle soothed his mind with The King's Own or Newton Forster. To
please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct
while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without
the other. Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in
even a vapid book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any
force is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies.
Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every entre-
filet, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of
some portion of the public, and to colour, however transiently,
their thoughts. When any subject falls to be discussed, some
scribbler on a paper has the invaluable opportunity of beginning
its discussion in a dignified and human spirit; and if there were
enough who did so in our public press, neither the public nor the
Parliament would find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts.
The writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on something
pleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were it
only to a single reader. He will be unfortunate, indeed, if he
suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to stumble on something
that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and for a dull
person to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended it,
makes a marking epoch in his education.
Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well. And
so, if I were minded to welcome any great accession to our trade,
it should not be from any reason of a higher wage, but because it
was a trade which was useful in a very great and in a very high
degree; which every honest tradesman could make more serviceable to
mankind in his single strength; which was difficult to do well and
possible to do better every year; which called for scrupulous
thought on the part of all who practised it, and hence became a
perpetual education to their nobler natures; and which, pay it as
you please, in the large majority of the best cases will still be
underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth
century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear more
timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.
BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME {14}
The Editor {15} has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent,
truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some
reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find himself
engaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps
worse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother
whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the
man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when word
has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be
kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes
weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person
who entrapped me.
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are
works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he
must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a
lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they
rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from
ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and
they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for
ourselves, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consuming
ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must
be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so
serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is
answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a
magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious
characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends
have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or
Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading,
I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable
hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved,
more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite
passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great
effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for
long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense,
so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend
outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the
Vicomte de Bragelonne. I know not a more human soul, nor, in his
way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a
pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of
Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the Pilgrim's Progress, a book
that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.
But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound
and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we
drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It
is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the
effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has
been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may
stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later
on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily
outlived: the Essais of Montaigne. That temperate and genial
picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of
to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism
and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have their 'linen
decencies' and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they
have any gift of reading) perceive that these have not been
fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason; and (again if
they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing that this
old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a
dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their
contemporaries.
The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New
Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew.
I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a
certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not
droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would
then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously
supposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon
this subject it is perhaps better to be silent.
I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of singular
service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew
into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and,
having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a
strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it
is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.
I will be very frank--I believe it is so with all good books
except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so
wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more
apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries
out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round
that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the
contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what
is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New
truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only
wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant
conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and
the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first
at least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and
few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of
time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to
inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there
dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked
like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find
there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its
loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two
qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes
him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my
gratitude to Herbert Spencer.
Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it
first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of
man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than
Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking
open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in
that crowning offence of Werther, and in his own character a mere
pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of
superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the
rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to
his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller,
what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its
office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of
fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of
man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and
persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this
effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular
epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make
us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity
of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognise
their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often
inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a
poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his
works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious
passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman.
It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these
pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found
them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things
that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of
the great Roman Empire.
This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the
noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are
there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life
of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can
read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the
feelings--those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man.
Its address lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home;
when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man
himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into
brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you
thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced
by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain
innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, 'the
silence that is in the lonely hills,' something of the cold thrill
of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what
is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need
not--Mill did not--agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the
spell is cast. Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only
a new error--the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit
communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb
beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is
best in themselves, that they communicate.
I should never forgive myself if I forgot The Egoist. It is art,
if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all
the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a
place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a
book to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture
of human faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our
neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which
we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind.
And The Egoist is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a
satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that
obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with that
invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your
own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with
lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend
of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in an agony.
'This is too bad of you,' he cried. 'Willoughby is me!' 'No, my
dear fellow,' said the author; 'he is all of us.'
I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read
it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I think
Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much
that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten
Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of Obligations'
was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of
aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Tales
of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper
attitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret found,
and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all is
more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to
the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a
word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I
have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood.
It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free
grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understand
that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs
absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them
passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or
hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has
the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him.
They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of
virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change
his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his
deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a
lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold
another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who
can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy
consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems
insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he
tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift,
and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims
upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he
will never be a reader.
And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid
down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after
all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can
read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find
his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable,
and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this
early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying
down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is
demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful,
and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when
his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be
weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be
assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot
intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate,
falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not
written.
A NOTE ON REALISM {16}
Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who
does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is
still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will.
Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour,
are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor
simulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we
have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the
elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the
preservation of a uniform character from end to end--these, which
taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree
within the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to put
in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be
organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be
purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design;
and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so
grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are
questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx
that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable
riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great
change of the past century has been effected by the admission of
detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length,
by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic
followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it
signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the
conditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France)
fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is,
perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement of
alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from
these extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked,
narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the
poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this
baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story--
once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable --begin to
be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details
developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability,
childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a
railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola
spends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavour
and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be
allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but
what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the
extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into
mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M.
Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible
sounds.