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

narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the

poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this

baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story—

once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable —begin to

be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details

developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability,

childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a

railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola

spends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavour

and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be

allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but

what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the

extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into

mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M.

Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible

sounds.

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind

us of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the

critics. All representative art, which can be said to live, is

both realistic and ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is

a matter purely of externals. It is no especial cultus of nature

and veracity, but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has made us

turn our back upon the larger, more various, and more romantic art

of yore. A photographic exactitude in dialogue is now the

exclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands it tells us no

more—I think it even tells us less—than Moliere, wielding his

artificial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste or

Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is forgotten. Yet

truth to the conditions of man’s nature and the conditions of man’s

life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be

told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy

tale. The scene may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of

Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. And by an odd and

luminous accident, if there is any page of literature calculated to

awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that Troilus and Cressida

which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world,

grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy.

This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood,

regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the

technical method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as

you please, you will be none the less veracious; but if you be

weak, you run the risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if

you be very strong and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece.

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the

period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these

swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at

length that most faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable

product of the human mind, a perfected design. On the approach to

execution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don his

working clothes, and become the artisan. He now resolutely commits

his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he

must decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit,

and the particularity of execution of his whole design.

The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical

preoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle of

life. And with these the execution is but play; for the stylistic

problem is resolved beforehand, and all large originality of

treatment wilfully foregone. Such are the verses, intricately

designed, which we have learnt to admire, with a certain smiling

admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are

those canvases where dexterity or even breadth of plastic style

takes the place of pictorial nobility of design. So, it may be

remarked, it was easier to begin to write Esmond than Vanity Fair,

since, in the first, the style was dictated by the nature of the

plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind,

enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the

case is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have been

conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from the

author’s mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is one of

extreme perplexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy and

an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful

effort once for all; and, having formed a style, adhere to it

through life. But those of a higher order cannot rest content with

a process which, as they continue to employ it, must infallibly

degenerate towards the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh

work in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of

the whole forces of their mind; and the changing views which

accompany the growth of their experience are marked by still more

sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticism

loves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods of a

Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven.

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive moment when

execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a less degree, that the

ideal and the real do indeed, like good and evil angels, contend

for the direction of the work. Marble, paint, and language, the

pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their

ineffable impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of

insubordination. It is the work and it is a great part of the

delight of any artist to contend with these unruly tools, and now

by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to drive and coax them to

effect his will. Given these means, so laughably inadequate, and

given the interest, the intensity, and the multiplicity of the

actual sensation whose effect he is to render with their aid, the

artist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in every

case and upon any theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much

and omit more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and

suppress what is tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in

regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he will

perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of the very

highest order of creative art to be woven exclusively of such.

There, any fact that is registered is contrived a double or a

treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its place, and a

pillar in the main design. Nothing would find room in such a

picture that did not serve, at once, to complete the composition,

to accentuate the scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes of

distance, and to strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothing

would be allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time,

expedite the progress of the fable, build up the characters, and

strike home the moral or the philosophical design. But this is

unattainable. As a rule, so far from building the fabric of our

works exclusively with these, we are thrown into a rapture if we

think we can muster a dozen or a score of them, to be the plums of

our confection. And hence, in order that the canvas may be filled

or the story proceed from point to point, other details must be

admitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title; many

without marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds

towards completion, too often—I had almost written always—loses

in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped

and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our little

passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or

slipshod talk.

But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those particulars

which we know we can describe; and hence those most of all which,

having been described very often, have grown to be conventionally

treated in the practice of our art. These we choose, as the mason

chooses the acanthus to adorn his capital, because they come

naturally to the accustomed hand. The old stock incidents and

accessories, tricks of workmanship and schemes of composition (all

being admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten) haunt

and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly

appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us from

the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art. To

struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give

expression to facts which have not yet been adequately or not yet

elegantly expressed, is to run a little upon the danger of extreme

self-love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the

artist may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists,

and consider any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground

of brilliant handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern

landscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and

science well displayed can take the place of what is, after all,

the one excuse and breath of art—charm. A little further, and he

will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to

prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity

to art.

We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist,

his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to

fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly

touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the

realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of

anything so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye.

The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings

with it its necessary disabilities and dangers. The immediate

danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance

of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit of

completion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he comes in

the last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all design,

abjure all choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to

communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger of the

idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip of

fact, particularity, or passion.

We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is

conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. But

though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every

case the artist must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet

afresh for each succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing may

be generally said, that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, breathing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age,

are more apt to err upon the side of realism than to sin in quest

of the ideal. Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct

our own decisions, always holding back the hand from the least

appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin

no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily

mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design.

MY FIRST BOOK: ‘TREASURE ISLAND’ {17}

It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist

alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public,

regards what else I have written with indifference, if not

aversion; if it call upon me