The Art of Writing, Robert Louis Stevenson [e reader .txt] 📗
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positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style.
Compare it with the almost contemporary ‘Merry Men’, one reader may
prefer the one style, one the other—‘tis an affair of character,
perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much
more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as
though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn
out Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe
alight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to
it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early
paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was
empty; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom; and
here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the
‘Hand and Spear’! Then I corrected them, living for the most part
alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a
good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I
can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was
thirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had
never yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father
had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged
a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I was indeed
very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the
journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the
resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels
of M. de Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one
morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like
small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again
at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished Treasure Island. It had
to be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy
remained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom
I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance.
He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters of
Theophrastus: so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men.
But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to for
sympathy on a boy’s story. He was large-minded; ‘a full man,’ if
there was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to
him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well!
he was not far wrong.
Treasure Island—it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title,
The Sea Cook—appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in
the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least
attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the
same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of
picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to
this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What
was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had
finished a tale, and written ‘The End’ upon my manuscript, as I had
not done since ‘The Pentland Rising,’ when I was a boy of sixteen
not yet at college. In truth it was so by a set of lucky
accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the tale
flowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid aside
like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to
the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so. I am
not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and
it brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine
to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need scarcely
say I mean my own.
But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite at an end.
I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my
plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not
knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque,
and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of
Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was
because I had made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her
wanderings with Israel Hands. The time came when it was decided to
republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it,
to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but I
heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never
been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at
random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up
a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to
examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions
contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a
map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my
father’s office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing
ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of
various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain
Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it
was never Treasure Island to me.
I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say
it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and
Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson’s Buccaneers, the name of the
Dead Man’s Chest from Kingsley’s At Last, some recollections of
canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite,
eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is,
perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it
is always important. The author must know his countryside, whether
real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the
compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon,
should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the moon is! I
have come to grief over the moon in Prince Otto, and so soon as
that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend
to other men—I never write now without an almanack. With an
almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house,
either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately
apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the
grossest possible blunders. With the map before him, he will
scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in The
Antiquary. With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two
horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days,
from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night,
upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the
week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day,
as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of Rob Roy. And
it is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such
‘croppers.’ But it is my contention—my superstition, if you like-
-that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from
it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and
not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root
there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the
words. Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot
of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places,
he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies
it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will
discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for
his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was
in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.
THE GENESIS OF ‘THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE’
I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was
very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the
purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be
heard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared,
scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to
lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were
fine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation,
for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom
Ship. ‘Come,’ said I to my engine, ‘let us make a tale, a story of
many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and
civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and
may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you
have been reading and admiring.’ I was here brought up with a
reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel
shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than
Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and
legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very
title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance
I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my
own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there
cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and
resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of
mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.
On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below
zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had
seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to
the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian
border. Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two
countries, two of the ends of the earth involved: and thus though
the notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of
general acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability,
it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and this
decided me to consider further of its possibilities. The man who
should thus be buried was the first question: a good man, whose
return to life would be hailed by the reader and the other
characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian
picture, and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any
use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his
friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and make
this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American
wilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series. I need not
tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most
interesting moment of an author’s life; the hours that followed
that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days,
whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of
unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone,
perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is
my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her
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