Essays in the Art of Writing

Stevenson Robert Louis

Description

Although several of Robert Louis Stevenson's major works -- Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- have been enshrined in the Western canon of popular literature, these novels represent only a fraction of a prodigious body of writing that spans virtually every genre. Stevenson was a prolific and preternaturally skilled writer, and in these essays, he offers insight, tips, and inspiration that will capture the imagination of both fans of his work and would-be writers.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781877527364
• Langue: English

Extrait

ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING
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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
 
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Essays in the Art of Writing From a 1905 edition.
ISBN 978-1-877527-36-4
© 2008 THE FLOATING PRESS.
While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.
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Contents
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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" Endnotes
On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature
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[1] There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown thesprings and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations liewholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive theirbeauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to beappalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of thestrings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, whenpushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but ratherfrom the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to themind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: thosedisclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhapsonly in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious andunconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artistto employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to theirsprings, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than weconceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignoranceat least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn theaffinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too farback in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, inconsequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method,which can be stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on theprinciple 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 theardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-knowncharacter, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a mostdistasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall andlooking on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling themusical cart to pieces.
1. Choice of Words.—The art of literature stands apart from amongits sisters, because the material in which the literary artistworks is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strangefreshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which isready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, asingular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plasticand ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone iscondemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. Youhave 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 ofjust such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect iscondemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; forsince these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of ourdaily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressionsby which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: nohieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, asin 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 andcontrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art totake these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the marketor the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finestmeanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy,wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum torouse the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubtthe most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally presentin all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singularjustice, significance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, fromthe effect of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to take an examplenearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified into an energyof lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst thewords in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmoniousenough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguishedelements in a general effect. But the first class of writers haveno monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addisonis superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better thanTacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies notin the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of thematter; 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 thewhole. What is that point?
2. The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of thegreat destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men,is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish twogreat classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, whichare 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, inright of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both mayclaim a common ground of existence, and it may be said withsufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever isto make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of sounds, ofchanging attitudes, geometrical figures, or imitative lines; butstill a pattern. That is the plane on which these sisters meet; itis by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should attimes forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligenceto virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessaryfunction of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperativethat the pattern shall be made.
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their patternof sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life becarried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we callliterature; and the true business of the literary artist is toplait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so thateach sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kindof knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve andclear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there shouldbe observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we areled to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successivephrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise,as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, withmuch greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested andthen deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely initself; and between the implication and the evolution of thesentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; fornothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly andsonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor shouldthe balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to beinfinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, andyet 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 inbeholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instantoverlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, whichis to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout andfirst of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be theobscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatnessof the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been provedunequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of wordsmust be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unlessknot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminatethe argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. Thegenius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than thelaws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to someof my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employedto strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live ineach other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasisof the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg toplait about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or moreviews of the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contraststhem; and while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasionfor the necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to havegreatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted the work of twosentences in the space of one. In the change from the successiveshallow statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminousflow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amountof both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see,recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulatingview of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and affinityof events