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

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,