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

out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round

that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the

contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what

is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New

truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only

wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant

conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and

the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first

at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the

influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and

few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of

time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to

inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there

dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked

like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find

there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its

loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two

qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes

him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my

gratitude to Herbert Spencer.

Goethe’s Life, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it

first fell into my hands—a strange instance of the partiality of

man’s good and man’s evil. I know no one whom I less admire than

Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking

open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in

that crowning offence of Werther, and in his own character a mere

pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of

superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the

rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to

his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller,

what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its

office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of

fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of

man’s nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and

persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this

effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular

epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make

us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity

of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognise

their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often

inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a

poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his

works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester’s serious

passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman.

It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these

pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found

them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things

that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of

the great Roman Empire.

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book—the

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the

noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are

there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life

of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can

read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the

feelings—those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man.

Its address lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home;

when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man

himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into

brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you

thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced

by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain

innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, ‘the

silence that is in the lonely hills,’ something of the cold thrill

of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what

is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need

not—Mill did not—agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the

spell is cast. Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only

a new error—the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit

communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb

beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is

best in themselves, that they communicate.

I should never forgive myself if I forgot The Egoist. It is art,

if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all

the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a

place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a

book to send the blood into men’s faces. Satire, the angry picture

of human faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our

neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which

we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind.

And The Egoist is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a

satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that

obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with that

invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your

own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with

lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend

of Mr. Meredith’s (as I have the story) came to him in an agony.

‘This is too bad of you,’ he cried. ‘Willoughby is me!’ ‘No, my

dear fellow,’ said the author; ‘he is all of us.’

I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read

it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote—I think

Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much

that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten

Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper ‘On the Spirit of Obligations’

was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of

aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford’s Tales

of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper

attitude of any rational man to his country’s laws—a secret found,

and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all is

more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to

the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a

word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I

have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood.

It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment—a free

grace, I find I must call it—by which a man rises to understand

that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs

absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them

passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or

hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has

the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him.

They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of

virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change

his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his

deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a

lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold

another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who

can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy

consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems

insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he

tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift,

and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims

upon his author’s folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he

will never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid

down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after

all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can

read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find

his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable,

and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this

early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying

down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is

demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful,

and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when

his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be

weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be

assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot

intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate,

falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not

written.

A NOTE ON REALISM {16}

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who

does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is

still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will.

Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour,

are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor

simulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we

have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the

elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the

preservation of a uniform character from end to end—these, which

taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree

within the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to put

in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be

organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be

purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design;

and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so

grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are

questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx

that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable

riddle to propound.

In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great

change of the past century has been effected by the admission of

detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length,

by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic

followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it

signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the

conditions of man’s life; but it has recently (at least in France)

fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is,

perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement of

alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from

these extremities; they begin to aspire after a