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