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

and indelible character; and when I am asked to talk of my first

book, no question in the world but what is meant is my first novel.

Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It

seems vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my

earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary

series of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a

good friend to the paper-makers. Reams upon reams must have gone

to the making of ‘Rathillet,’ ‘The Pentland Rising,’ {18} ‘The

King’s Pardon’ (otherwise ‘Park Whitehead’), ‘Edward Daven,’ ‘A

Country Dance,’ and ‘A Vendetta in the West’; and it is consolatory

to remember that these reams are now all ashes, and have been

received again into the soil. I have named but a few of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they

were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of years.

‘Rathillet’ was attempted before fifteen, ‘The Vendetta’ at twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was

thirty-one. By that time, I had written little books and little

essays and short stories; and had got patted on the back and paid

for them—though not enough to live upon. I had quite a

reputation, I was the successful man; I passed my days in toil, the

futility of which would sometimes make my cheek to burn—that I

should spend a man’s energy upon this business, and yet could not

earn a livelihood: and still there shone ahead of me an unattained

ideal: although I had attempted the thing with vigour not less

than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. All—all

my pretty ones—had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably

like a schoolboy’s watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of

many years’ standing who should never have made a run. Anybody can

write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper

and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad

novel. It is the length that kills.

The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend

days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to

blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rights;

instinct—the instinct of self-preservation—forbids that any man

(cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory)

should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a

period to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hope

to feed upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein

must be running, he must be in one of those hours when the words

come and the phrases balance of themselves—EVEN TO BEGIN. And

having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the book

shall be accomplished! For so long a time, the slant is to

continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time

you must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a

time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always

vigorous! I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every

three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat—not

possibly of literature—but at least of physical and moral

endurance and the courage of Ajax.

In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at

Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and by

the side of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains

inspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my wife and I projected a

joint volume of logic stories, for which she wrote ‘The Shadow on

the Bed,’ and I turned out ‘Thrawn Janet,’ and a first draft of

‘The Merry Men.’ I love my native air, but it does not love me;

and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister,

and a migration by Strathairdle and Glenshee to the Castleton of

Braemar.

There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native air

was more unkind than man’s ingratitude, and I must consent to pass

a good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriously

known as the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. And now admire the

finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late Miss

McGregor’s Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of

‘something craggy to break his mind upon.’ He had no thought of

literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting

suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of

water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture

gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be

showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so

to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a

generous emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these

occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I

thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond

expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and

with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my

performance ‘Treasure Island.’ I am told there are people who do

not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the

shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the

prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and

down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries,

perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here

is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see

or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but

must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the

infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’

the future character of the book began to appear there visibly

among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons

peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and

fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a

flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me

and was writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so,

and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of

success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys; no

need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a

touchstone. Women were excluded. I was unable to handle a brig

(which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could make

shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame. And then I

had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of

entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader

very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of

all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave

him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and

his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of

the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I

think, a common way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed,

the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred

words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our

friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know—but can

we put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and

imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in

hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his

nature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at

least be fairly sure of.

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the

rain drumming on the window, I began The Sea Cook, for that was the

original title. I have begun (and finished) a number of other

books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with

more complacency. It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters

are proverbially sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt

the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton

is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles

and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or

make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from

Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. These useful

writers had fulfilled the poet’s saying: departing, they had left

behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints which

perhaps another—and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington

Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe

plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the

Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of

prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones,

his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and

a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters—all were

there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no

guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed

the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day

by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning’s work to the

family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me

like my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in

my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance

and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that

every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt

perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and

commercial travellers before the era of steam. He never finished

one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in

Treasure Island he recognised something kindred to his own

imagination; it was HIS kind of picturesque; and he not only heard

with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to

collaborate. When the time came for Billy Bones’s chest to be

ransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing,

on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents,

which I exactly followed; and the name of ‘Flint’s old ship’—the

Walrus—was given at his particular request. And now who should

come dropping in, ex machina, but Dr. Japp, like the disguised

prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in

the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a

talisman, but a publisher—had, in fact, been charged by my old

friend, Mr. Henderson, to unearth new writers for Young Folks.

Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the

extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of

The Sea Cook; at the same time, we would by no means stop our

readings; and accordingly the tale was begun again at the

beginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of Dr. Japp.

From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical faculty;

for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his

portmanteau.

Here, then, was everything to keep me up,