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

should combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at once

agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching.

This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the four

great elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration,

with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be

cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser aspect. But while

we cannot follow these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps,

be very vigorous, very original, or very wise, I still contend

that, in the humblest sort of literary work, we have it in our

power either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to

please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the

idle nine days’ curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may essay,

however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to

deal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is the

dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the minds

of men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these

branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which

goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of

a nation’s reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies

the total of the nation’s speech; and the speech and reading, taken

together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A good

man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but

the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the

average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of

the American reporter or the Parisian chroniquear, both so lightly

readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they

touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand;

they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds,

in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull

people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the

rare utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the

cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the

antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have

spoken of the American and the French, not because they are so much

baser, but so much more readable, than the English; their evil is

done more effectively, in America for the masses, in French for the

few that care to read; but with us as with them, the duties of

literature are daily neglected, truth daily perverted and

suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment.

The journalist is not reckoned an important officer; yet judge of

the good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance

only: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of

politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for

the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no

discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem.

Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things

that we profess to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I

cannot think this piece of education will be crowned with any great

success, so long as some of us practise and the rest openly approve

of public falsehood.

There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the

business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the

treatment. In every department of literature, though so low as

hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of importance to

the education and comfort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that

the faithful trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man who

tries it. Our judgments are based upon two things: first, upon

the original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of

testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches

us, in divers manners, from without. For the most part these

divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past

times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the

medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning

from the same source at second-hand and by the report of him who

can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of

good and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who

write. Those who write have to see that each man’s knowledge is,

as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that

he shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this

world for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are

concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his

own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him,

that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him,

that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell him

the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his

theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all

facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a

fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he

should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a

world made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win his

way to shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul to tell

what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.

The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody was

wanting, for one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and I have

known a person who was cheered by the perusal of Candide. Every

fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together; and none

that comes directly in a writer’s path but has some nice relations,

unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subject

under hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more

necessary than others, and it is with these that literature must

first bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature once

more easily leading us; for the necessary, because the efficacious,

facts are those which are most interesting to the natural mind of

man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in

morality, and those, on the other hand, which are clear,

indisputable, and a part of science, are alone vital in importance,

seizing by their interest, or useful to communicate. So far as the

writer merely narrates, he should principally tell of these. He

should tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful elements of our

life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the

present, to move us with instances: he should tell of wise and

good people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these he

should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we

may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our

neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and

feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of

thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at

all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right.

And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so

if the writers chose! There is not a life in all the records of

the past but, properly studied, might lend a hint and a help to

some contemporary. There is not a juncture in to-day’s affairs but

some useful word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has an

office, and, with clear eyes and honest language, may unveil

injustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word: in

all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be

exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose

the first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make

failure conspicuous.

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