The Art of Writing

The Art of Writing and Other
Essays
by Robert Louis
Stevenson

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Title: The Art of Writing and Other Essays
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: April, 1996 [EBook #492] [This file was first posted on
February 21, 1996]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ART
OF WRITING ***

Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING

Contents: On some technical elements of style in literature The
morality of the profession of letters Books which have influenced me A
note on realism My first book: 'Treasure Island' The genesis of 'the
master of Ballantrae' Preface to 'the master of Ballantrae'

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
{1}

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the
springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie

wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty,
fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their
emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In
a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers
an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than
from any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the
reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of
art seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those
conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the
serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to
their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we
conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance at
least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of
beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the
mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will always
grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated but never can
wholly be explained; nay, on the principle laid down in Hudibras, that
'Still the less they understand, The more they admire the
sleight-of-hand,'
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the
ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known
character, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most
distasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall and looking
on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to
pieces.
1. Choice of Words.--The art of literature stands apart from among its
sisters, because the material in which the literary artist works is the
dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and
immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to
understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister
arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's
clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and
quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this
one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with

blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is
condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for since
these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our daily
affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which
other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch,
no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank
wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and
paragraph must move in a logical progression,