The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson (read book .txt) 📕

positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style.

Compare it with the almost contemporary ‘Merry Men’, one reader may

prefer the one style, one the other—‘tis an affair of character,

perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much

more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as

though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn

out Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe

alight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to

it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early

paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was

empty; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom; and

here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the

‘Hand and Spear’! Then I corrected them, living for the most part

alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a

good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I

can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was

thirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had

never yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father

had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged

a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I was indeed

very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the

journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the

resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels

of M. de Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one

morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like

small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again

at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished Treasure Island. It had

to be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy

remained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom

I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance.

He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters of

Theophrastus: so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men.

But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to for

sympathy on a boy’s story. He was large-minded; ‘a full man,’ if

there was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to

him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well!

he was not far wrong.

Treasure Island—it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title,

The Sea Cook—appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in

the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least

attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the

same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of

picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to

this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What

was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had

finished a tale, and written ‘The End’ upon my manuscript, as I had

not done since ‘The Pentland Rising,’ when I was a boy of sixteen

not yet at college. In truth it was so by a set of lucky

accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the tale

flowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid aside

like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to

the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so. I am

not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and

it brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine

to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need scarcely

say I mean my own.

But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite at an end.

I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my

plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not

knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque,

and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of

Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was

because I had made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her

wanderings with Israel Hands. The time came when it was decided to

republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it,

to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but I

heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never

been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at

random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up

a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to

examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions

contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a

map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my

father’s office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing

ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of

various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain

Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it

was never Treasure Island to me.

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say

it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and

Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson’s Buccaneers, the name of the

Dead Man’s Chest from Kingsley’s At Last, some recollections of

canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite,

eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is,

perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it

is always important. The author must know his countryside, whether

real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the

compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon,

should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the moon is! I

have come to grief over the moon in Prince Otto, and so soon as

that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend

to other men—I never write now without an almanack. With an

almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house,

either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately

apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the

grossest possible blunders. With the map before him, he will

scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in The

Antiquary. With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two

horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days,

from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night,

upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the

week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day,

as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of Rob Roy. And

it is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such

‘croppers.’ But it is my contention—my superstition, if you like-

-that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from

it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and

not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root

there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the

words. Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot

of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places,

he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies

it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will

discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for

his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was

in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

THE GENESIS OF ‘THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE’

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I

lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was

very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the

purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be

heard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared,

scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to

lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were

fine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation,

for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom

Ship. ‘Come,’ said I to my engine, ‘let us make a tale, a story of

many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and

civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and

may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you

have been reading and admiring.’ I was here brought up with a

reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel

shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than

Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and

legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very

title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance

I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my

own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there

cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and

resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of

mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below

zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had

seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to

the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian

border. Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two

countries, two of the ends of the earth involved: and thus though

the notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of

general acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability,

it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and this

decided me to consider further of its possibilities. The man who

should thus be buried was the first question: a good man, whose

return to life would be hailed by the reader and the other

characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian

picture, and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any

use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his

friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and make

this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American

wilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series. I need not

tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most

interesting moment of an author’s life; the hours that followed

that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days,

whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of

unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone,

perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is

my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her