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