The Art of Writing, Robert Louis Stevenson [e reader .txt] 📗
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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
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