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

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