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The Art of Writing
by Robert Louis Stevenson
April, 1996 [Etext #492]
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The Art of Writing
Contents
-
I. On Some Technical Elements Of Style In Literature
-
II. The Morality Of The Profession Of Letters
-
III. Books Which Have Influenced Me
-
IV. A Note On Realism
-
V. My First Book: 'TREASURE ISLAND'
-
VI. The Genesis Of 'the Master Of Ballantrae'
-
VII. Preface To 'the Master Of Ballantrae'
Chapter I -
ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF
STYLE IN LITERATURE <reference>(1)</reference>
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, and convey a
definite conventional import.
Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a
good writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the apt choice and contrast of the
words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for the
purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings
and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make
of them a drum to rouse the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubt the most
sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally present in all writers. The effect of words in
Shakespeare, their singular justice, significance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, from the
effect of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to take an example nearer home, the words in
Carlyle seem electrified into an energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved;
whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound,
yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements in a general effect. But the first class
of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to
Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it
certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies
not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but infants to the three
second; and yet each, in a particular point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole. What
is that point?
2. THE WEB. -
Literature,
although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the
affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those
arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very
clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self- sufficient,
and merely presentative. Each class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both
may claim a common ground of existence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the
motive and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of
sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical figures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. That is
the plane on which these sisters meet; it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should
at times forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligence to virile tasks, and performing
unconsciously that necessary function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperative that
the pattern shall be made.
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive
their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may
be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is
not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his
meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first
come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
In every properly constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that
(however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive
phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the
common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first
suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between
the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of
sound; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously
prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for
the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to
gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious
neatness.
The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding
him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer.
His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all,
to the demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument,
the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved unequal to his design.
And, on the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the
phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate the
argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The genius of prose rejects the
CHEVILLE no less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the CHEVILLE, I should perhaps
explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a
balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness,
charm, or emphasis of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to plait about, takes up at
once two or more elements or two or more views of the subject in hand; combines, implicates,
and contrasts them; and while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary
knot, he will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted
the work of two sentences in the space of one. In the change from the successive shallow
statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative,
there is implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see,
recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulating view of life, and a far keener
sense of the generation and affinity of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not
so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties overcome, this
double purpose attained, these two oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that,
consciously or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the
necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much admire. That style is therefore the most
perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble
of the chronicler; but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication
unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour. Even the
derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind; and it
is by the means of such designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most
pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant
and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed
continue to be read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly
represented, but still it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we continue to
peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to
mention Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a
very colourless and toothless 'criticism of life'; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and
dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance and of good sense; and the two
oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to
this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though in verse also the implication of
the logical texture is a crowning beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think
that here was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a new illustration
of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is
because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is
the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the
French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it
may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on
what principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it may have no
inherent beauty; all that we have a right to ask of any prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern
for the writer, and that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard. Hence it comes
that it is much easier for men of equal facility to write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably
interesting prose; for in prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the difficulties first
created before they can be solved. Hence, again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the true
versifier: such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as versifier
merely, not as poet. These not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the
dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety
and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to
that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now
combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a
little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution
on the same ringing syllable. The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show
us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an
obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. The writer of
verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. He
follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the
same nature as that from melody to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the juggler, behold
him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the spectators, juggling with three oranges
instead of two. Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty; and the pattern, with every fresh
element, becoming more interesting in itself.
Yet it must not be thought that
verse is simply an addition; something is lost as well as something gained; and there remains
plainly traceable, in comparing the best prose with the best verse, a certain broad distinction of
method in the web. Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still
leaves the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a
pivot, nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear
remarks and is singly gratified by this return and balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the
measure. To find comparable passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the superior of
the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely
his inferior. But let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was ambidexter;
let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the Second Part of HENRY IV., a fine flourish of
eloquence in Shakespeare's second manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise of
sherris, act iv. scene iii.; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind
and Orlando; compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech to Adam, with what
passage it shall please you to select - the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of
nobility as Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive, if you have an ear for
that class of music, a certain superior degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of
the parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbing pendulum. We must not, in
things temporal, take from those who have little, the little that they have; the merits of prose are
inferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an independent.
3. RHYTHM OF THE PHRASE. -
Some way back, I used a
word which still awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but what is a
comely phrase? In all ideal and material points, literature, being a representative art, must look
for analogies to painting and the like; but in what is technical and executive, being a temporal
art, it must seek for them in music. Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in
music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented,
as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down
laws. Even in our accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the secret of the beauty
of a verse; how much less, then, of those phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law
but to be lawless and yet to please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I owe it all
to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting in the present
connection. We have been accustomed to describe the heroic line as five iambic feet, and to be
filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious schoolboy, we have heard our
own description put in practice.
'All night | the dread | less an | gel
un | pursued,' (2)
goes the schoolboy;
but though we close our ears, we cling to our definition, in spite of its proved and naked
insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the heroic line
consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four pauses:
'All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.'
Four
groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, in this case, an iamb; the second, an
amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with
no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive,
now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but still
kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like
some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives and to read in
fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find verses in six
groups, because there is not room for six in the ten syllables; and we do not find verses of two,
because one of the main distinctions of verse from prose resides in the comparative shortness of
the group; but it is even common to find verses of three. Five is the one forbidden number;
because five is the number of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two patterns would coincide,
and that opposition which is the life of verse would instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the
effect of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common and make so brave an
architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is a group of Nature's making. If but some Roman
would return from Hades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the voice these
thundering verses should be uttered - 'AUT LACEDOE-MONIUM TARENTUM,' for a case in
point - I feel as if I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by the mere count of
syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a question of elegance, I doubt if any one of
them requires to be so; and I am certain that for choice no two of them should scan the same.
The singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so far as analysis can carry us, part,
indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scansion in the groups.
The groups which, like the bar in music, break up the verse for utterance, fall uniambically; and
in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it may so happen that we never utter one iambic foot.
And yet to this neglect of the original beat there is a limit.
'Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,' (3)
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it scarcely can be said to
indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly suggests no other measure to the ear. But begin
'Mother Athens, eye of Greece,'
or merely 'Mother Athens,' and the game is up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. The
eccentric scansion of the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been
forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the
original mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall back on sameness. Thus,
both as to the arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see
the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition of two schemes
simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to balance
them with such judicial nicety before the reader, that neither shall be unperceived and neither
signally prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we
write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is greatly longer and is
much more nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse; so that not only is there a greater
interval of continuous sound between the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more
readily to word by a more summary enunciation. Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of the
group, and successive phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm.
The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest
no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must
not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very
well pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but one following another
will produce an instant impression of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines
delivered with the measured utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich in variety. By the more
summary enunciation proper to prose, as to a more distant vision, these niceties of difference
are lost. A whole verse is uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied by a succession of
groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less
harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and
must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third
orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his
pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh
difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical strain of the English language, that the bad writer
- and must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood, Captain Reid? - the
inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as
any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And
here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no
man ever made good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial
when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond such answers. The weak side of
verse is the regularity of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the
movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak side, and this alone, that our careless
writer falls. A peculiar density and mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, is one of
the chief good qualities of verse; but this our accidental versifier, still following after the swift
gait and large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since he remains
unconscious that he is making verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract those effects of
counterpoint and opposition which I have referred to as the final grace and justification of verse,
and, I may add, of blank verse in particular.
4. CONTENTS
OF THE PHRASE. -
Here is a great deal of talk about rhythm - and naturally;
for in our canorous language rhythm is always at the door. But it must not be forgotten that in
some languages this element is almost, if not quite, extinct, and that in our own it is probably
decaying. The even speech of many educated Americans sounds the note of danger. I should
see it go with something as bitter as despair, but I should not be desperate. As in verse no
element, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in prose also, other sorts of beauty will arise and take
the place and play the part of those that we outlive. The beauty of the expected beat in verse,
the beauty in prose of its larger and more lawless melody, patent as they are to English hearing,
are already silent in the ears of our next neighbours; for in France the oratorical accent and the
pattern of the web have almost or altogether succeeded to their places; and the French prose
writer would be astounded at the labours of his brother across the Channel, and how a good
quarter of his toil, above all INVITA MINERVA, is to avoid writing verse. So wonderfully far
apart have races wandered in spirit, and so hard it is to understand the literature next door!
Yet French prose is distinctly better than English; and French verse, above all
while Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase
or a verse in French is easily distinguishable as comely or uncomely. There is then another
element of comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of the phrase. Each
phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound
suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these
concordances is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all young
writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None
the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind
who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly
upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant
demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the
adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps,
denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass
into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will find
another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two senses: a sort of
internal ear, quick to perceive 'unheard melodies'; and the eye, which directs the pen and
deciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that
there are assonances and alliterations; that where an author is running the open A, deceived by
the eye and our strange English spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the flat A; and that
where he is running a particular consonant, he will not improbably rejoice to write it down even
when it is mute or bears a different value.
Here, then, we have a fresh pattern - a
pattern, to speak grossly, of letters - which makes the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer,
and the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very delicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps
most excellent and winning (I say perhaps); but at times again the elements of this literal melody
stand more boldly forward and usurp the ear. It becomes, therefore, somewhat a matter of
conscience to select examples; and as I cannot very well ask the reader to help me, I shall do the
next best by giving him the reason or the history of each selection. The two first, one in prose,
one in verse, I chose without previous analysis, simply as engaging passages that had long
re-echoed in my ear.
'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the
race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.'
(4) Down to 'virtue,' the current S and R are both announced and
repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note that almost inseparable group PVF is given
entire. (5) The next phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in itself,
both S and R still audible, and B given as the last fulfilment of PVF. In the next four phrases,
from 'that never' down to 'run for,' the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight repetition of the
F and V, the whole matter turns, almost too obtrusively, on S and R; first S coming to the front,
and then R. In the concluding phrase all these favourite letters, and even the flat A, a timid
preference for which is just perceptible, are discarded at a blow and in a bundle; and to make
the break more obvious, every word ends with a dental, and all but one with T, for which we
have been cautiously prepared since the beginning. The singular dignity of the first clause, and
this hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair
to own that S and R are used a little coarsely.
'In Xanady did
Kubla Khan (KANDL)
A stately pleasure dome decree,
(KDLSR)
Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR)
Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR)
Down to a sunless sea.' (6) (NDLS)
Here I have put the analysis of the
main group alongside the lines; and the more it is looked at, the more interesting it will seem.
But there are further niceties. In lines two and four, the current S is most delicately varied with
Z. In line three, the current flat A is twice varied with the open A, already suggested in line
two, and both times ('where' and 'sacred') in conjunction with the current R. In the same line F
and V (a harmony in themselves, even when shorn of their comrade P) are admirably contrasted.
And in line four there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was announced in line two. I stop
from weariness, for more might yet be said.
My next example was recently
quoted from Shakespeare as an example of the poet's colour sense. Now, I do not think
literature has anything to do with colour, or poets anyway the better of such a sense; and I
instantly attacked this passage, since 'purple' was the word that had so pleased the writer of the
article, to see if there might not be some literary reason for its use. It will be seen that I
succeeded amply; and I am bound to say I think the passage exceptional in Shakespeare -
exceptional, indeed, in literature; but it was not I who chose it.
'The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe BURNT oN the water: the POOP was BeateN
gold, PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that * per The wiNds were love-sick with them.' (7)
It may be asked why I have put the
F of 'perfumed' in capitals; and I reply, because this change from P to F is the completion of that
from B to P, already so adroitly carried out. Indeed, the whole passage is a monument of curious
ingenuity; and it seems scarce worth while to indicate the subsidiary S, L, and W. In the same
article, a second passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once again as an example of his colour
sense:
'A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops I' the
bottom of a cowslip.' (8)
It is very
curious, very artificial, and not worth while to analyse at length: I leave it to the reader. But
before I turn my back on Shakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, for my own pleasure,
and for a very model of every technical art:
But in the wind and
tempest of her frown,
W. P. V. (9) F. (st)
(ow)
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan,
W.P. F. (st) (ow) L.
Puffing at
all, winnows the light away;
W. P. F. L.
And
what hath mass and matter by itself
W. F. L. M. A.
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.' (10)
V. L. M.
From these delicate and choice writers
I turned with some curiosity to a player of the big drum - Macaulay. I had in hand the
two-volume edition, and I opened at the beginning of the second volume. Here was what I read:
'The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the
degree of the maladministration which has produced them. It is therefore not strange that the
government of Scotland, having been during many years greatly more corrupt than the
government of England, should have fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement against the
last king of the house of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland destructive. The
English complained not of the law, but of the violation of the law.'
This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a
body; but as I read on, and turned the page, and still found PVF with his attendant liquids, I
confess my mind misgave me utterly. This could be no trick of Macaulay's; it must be the nature
of the English tongue. In a kind of despair, I turned half-way through the volume; and coming
upon his lordship dealing with General Cannon, and fresh from Claverhouse and Killiecrankie,
here, with elucidative spelling, was my reward:
'Meanwhile the
disorders of Kannon's Kamp went on inKreasing. He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what
Kourse it would be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had met, a preliminary
Kuestion was raised. The army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The recent vKktory
had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great chieFs who had brought siKs or
SeVen hundred Fighting men into the Field did not think it Fair that they should be outVoted by
gentlemen From Ireland, and From the Low Kountries, who bore indeed King James's
Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without
regiments and Kaptains without Kompanies.'
A moment of FV in
all this world of K's! It was not the English language, then, that was an instrument of one string,
but Macaulay that was an incomparable dauber.
It was probably from this
barbaric love of repeating the same sound, rather than from any design of clearness, that he
acquired his irritating habit of repeating words; I say the one rather than the other, because such
a trick of the ear is deeper-seated and more original in man than any logical consideration. Few
writers, indeed, are probably conscious of the length to which they push this melody of letters.
One, writing very diligently, and only concerned about the meaning of his words and the rhythm
of his phrases, was struck into amazement by the eager triumph with which he cancelled one
expression to substitute another. Neither changed the sense; both being mono-syllables, neither
could affect the scansion; and it was only by looking back on what he had already written that
the mystery was solved: the second word contained an open A, and for nearly half a page he
had been riding that vowel to the death.
In practice, I should add, the ear is not
always so exacting; and ordinary writers, in ordinary moments, content themselves with
avoiding what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare occasion, buttressing a phrase, or linking
two together, with a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle of alliteration. To understand
how constant is this preoccupation of good writers, even where its results are least obtrusive, it
is only necessary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, the rattle
of incongruous consonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not to
be articulated by the powers of man.
CONCLUSION. -
We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the
prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without
ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of
combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and
metre - harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime
elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their
argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods - but this particularly
binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and
communicative words. We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how
many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and
why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of
according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant
and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in
man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and
perfect pages rarer.
Chapter II -
THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS <reference>(11)</reference>
THE profession of letters has
been lately debated in the public prints; and it has been debated, to put the matter mildly, from a
point of view that was calculated to surprise high-minded men, and bring a general contempt on
books and reading. Some time ago, in particular, a lively, pleasant, popular writer (12) devoted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, to a very encouraging view
of the profession. We may be glad that his experience is so cheering, and we may hope that all
others, who deserve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded; but I do not think we need be at all
glad to have this question, so important to the public and ourselves, debated solely on the
ground of money. The salary in any business under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first,
question. That you should continue to exist is a matter for your own consideration; but that your
business should be first honest, and second useful, are points in which honour and morality are
concerned. If the writer to whom I refer succeeds in persuading a number of young persons to
adopt this way of life with an eye set singly on the livelihood, we must expect them in their
works to follow profit only, and we must expect in consequence, if he will pardon me the
epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty literature. Of that writer himself I am not speaking:
he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of entertainment, and he has achieved
an amiable popularity which he has adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did
not when he first embraced it, regard his profession from this purely mercenary side. He went
into it, I shall venture to say, if not with any noble design, at least in the ardour of a first love;
and he enjoyed its practice long before he paused to calculate the wage. The other day an author
was complimented on a piece of work, good in itself and exceptionally good for him, and
replied, in terms unworthy of a commercial traveller that as the book was not briskly selling he
did not give a copper farthing for its merit. It must not be supposed that the person to whom this
answer was addressed received it as a profession of faith; he knew, on the other hand, that it
was only a whiff of irritation; just as we know, when a respectable writer talks of literature as a
way of life, like shoemaking, but not so useful, that he is only debating one aspect of a question,
and is still clearly conscious of a dozen others more important in themselves and more central to
the matter in hand. But while those who treat literature in this penny-wise and virtue-foolish
spirit are themselves truly in possession of a better light, it does not follow that the treatment is
decent or improving, whether for themselves or others. To treat all subjects in the highest, the
most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer. If
he be well paid, as I am glad to hear he is, this duty becomes the more urgent, the neglect of it
the more disgraceful. And perhaps there is no subject on which a man should speak so gravely
as that industry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his
tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of
dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject alone even to
force the note might lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising
generation of writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it would be better if the stream
were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest English books were closed, than that esurient book-
makers should continue and debase a brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, a famous
race. Better that our serene temples were deserted than filled with trafficking and juggling
priests.
There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life: the first is
inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the industry selected. Literature, like
any other art, is singularly interesting to the artist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among the
arts, it is useful to mankind. These are the sufficient justifications for any young man or woman
who adopts it as the business of his life. I shall not say much about the wages. A writer can live
by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the
work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night.
Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you
know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little
poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the
business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot,
or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most
and best for mankind. Now Nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother. A lad,
for some liking to the jingle of words, betakes himself to letters for his life; by-and-by, when he
learns more gravity, he finds that he has chosen better than he knew; that if he earns little, he is
earning it amply; that if he receives a small wage, he is in a position to do considerable services;
that it is in his power, in some small measure, to protect the oppressed and to defend the truth.
So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may arise from a small degree of human
reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing, that it
should combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and
useful, like good preaching.
This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with
the four great elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin,
Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser
aspect. But while we cannot follow these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very
vigorous, very original, or very wise, I still contend that, in the humblest sort of literary work,
we have it in our power either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to please;
we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine days' curiosity of our
contemporaries; or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to
deal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is the dialect of life, comes home so
easily and powerfully to the minds of men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these
branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name of Public
Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly
modifies the total of the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, taken together, form the
efficient educational medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some little
while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average
of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the
Parisian CHRONIQUEAR, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for
ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the
consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply
some pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the
rare utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in broad
sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have
spoken of the American and the French, not because they are so much baser, but so much more
readable, than the English; their evil is done more effectively, in America for the masses, in
French for the few that care to read; but with us as with them, the duties of literature are daily
neglected, truth daily perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the
treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an important officer; yet judge of the good he might
do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the
reverse sides of politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for the interest
of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as over a good joke and
pardonable stratagem. Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things that we
profess to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this piece of education will
be crowned with any great success, so long as some of us practise and the rest openly approve
of public falsehood.
There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters
on the business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. In every
department of literature, though so low as hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of
importance to the education and comfort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that the faithful
trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man who tries it. Our judgments are based upon
two things: first, upon the original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of
testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us, in divers manners,
from without. For the most part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of
past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the medium of books or
papers, and even he who cannot read learning from the same source at second-hand and by the
report of him who can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good and
evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who write. Those who write have to see that
each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall
not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered to
imagine that all rights are concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his own
parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend; he must
be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell him
the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, steering himself,
cheering or reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a
fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should know it; for it is in this world
as it is, and not in a world made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win his way to
shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false; and it can never be safe
to suppress what is true. The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody was
wanting, for one man's meat is another man's poison, and I have known a person who was
cheered by the perusal of CANDIDE. Every fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set
together; and none that comes directly in a writer's path but has some nice relations,
unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subject under hand. Yet there are
certain classes of fact eternally more necessary than others, and it is with these that literature
must first bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature once more easily leading us; for
the necessary, because the efficacious, facts are those which are most interesting to the natural
mind of man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in morality, and those,
on the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and a part of science, are alone vital in
importance, seizing by their interest, or useful to communicate. So far as the writer merely
narrates, he should principally tell of these. He should tell of the kind and wholesome and
beautiful elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the present, to
move us with instances: he should tell of wise and good people in the past, to excite us by
example; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may
neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of
contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs
of thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported)
on their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more
might it do so if the writers chose! There is not a life in all the records of the past but, properly
studied, might lend a hint and a help to some contemporary. There is not a juncture in to-day's
affairs but some useful word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has an office, and, with
clear eyes and honest language, may unveil injustices and point the way to progress. And for a
last word: in all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be
vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose the first; for vividly to convey a wrong
impression is only to make failure conspicuous.
But a fact may be viewed on
many sides; it may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by
each of these the story will be transformed to something else. The newspapers that told of the
return of our representatives from Berlin, even if they had not differed as to the facts, would
have sufficiently differed by their spirits; so that the one description would have been a second
ovation, and the other a prolonged insult. The subject makes but a trifling part of any piece of
literature, and the view of the writer is itself a fact more important because less disputable than
the others. Now this spirit in which a subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work,
becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for there it not only colours
but itself chooses the facts; not only modifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far
larger proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of the writer's mind or
momentary humour forms not only the leading feature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only
thing he can communicate to others. In all works of art, widely speaking, it is first of all the
author's attitude that is narrated, though in the attitude there be implied a whole experience and a
theory of life. An author who has begged the question and reposes in some narrow faith cannot,
if he would, express the whole or even many of the sides of this various existence; for, his own
life being maim, some of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and
unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the inhumanity
in works of merely sectarian religion; and hence we find equal although unsimilar limitation in
works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste for high society. So that the first
duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up
for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable,
and bright. Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see the good in
all things; where he has even a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be
wholly silent; and he should recognise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop,
and that tool is sympathy. (13)
The second duty, far
harder to define, is moral. There are a thousand different humours in the mind, and about each
of them, when it is uppermost, some literature tends to be deposited. Is this to be allowed? Not
certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in more than rigourists would fancy. It were to be
desired that all literary work, and chiefly works of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and
potent impulses, whether grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or religious.
Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane; some, mostly religious,
partially inhuman; and very many tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a
masterpiece although we gird against its blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults, but
merits. There is no book perfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight, improve,
or encourage the reader. On the one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only religious poetry on
earth; yet they contain sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood. On the other hand, Alfred
de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am only quoting that generous and frivolous
giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote
was purely creative, he could give us works like CARMOSINE or FANTASIO, in which the
last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been found again to touch and please us. When
Flaubert wrote MADAME BOVARY, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid
realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But
the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine
times heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being are seized with such an ample
grasp, that, even should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to
be expressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an ill thing poorly done is an ill
thing top and bottom. And so this can be no encouragement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed
scribes, who must take their business conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it.
Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself and his own views and
preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral:
it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment;
that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty
with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth
and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any
one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance
and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify
the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place
and proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art.
Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the world and
life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the work of one proving dank and
depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth, sourly
ascetic. In literature as in conduct, you can never hope to do exactly right. All you can do is to
make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry
that can be done slowly. It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even ninety years;
for in the writing you will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must precede any beginning;
and if you meditate a work of art, you should first long roll the subject under the tongue to make
sure you like the flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to end; or if
you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you should first have thought upon the question
under all conditions, in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. It is this
nearness of examination necessary for any true and kind writing, that makes the practice of the
art a prolonged and noble education for the writer.
There is plenty to do, plenty
to say, or to say over again, in the meantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or
pleasing impressions is a service to the public. It is even a service to be thankfully proud of
having rendered. The slightest novels are a blessing to those in distress, not chloroform itself a
greater. Our fine old sea-captain's life was justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with THE
KING'S OWN or NEWTON FORSTER. To please is to serve; and so far from its being
difficult to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other.
Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and to read a novel that
was conceived with any force is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies.
Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every ENTRE-FILET, is destined to
pass, however swiftly, through the minds of some portion of the public, and to colour, however
transiently, their thoughts. When any subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has
the invaluable opportunity of beginning its discussion in a dignified and human spirit; and if
there were enough who did so in our public press, neither the public nor the Parliament would
find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. The writer has the chance to stumble, by the
way, on something pleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were it only to a
single reader. He will be unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to
stumble on something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and for a dull person to
have read anything and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a marking epoch in his education.
Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well. And so, if I were
minded to welcome any great accession to our trade, it should not be from any reason of a higher
wage, but because it was a trade which was useful in a very great and in a very high degree;
which every honest tradesman could make more serviceable to mankind in his single strength;
which was difficult to do well and possible to do better every year; which called for scrupulous
thought on the part of all who practised it, and hence became a perpetual education to their
nobler natures; and which, pay it as you please, in the large majority of the best cases will still be
underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth century, there is nothing that an
honest man should fear more timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.
Chapter III -
BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME <reference>(14)</reference>
THE Editor (15) has somewhat insidiously
laid a trap for his correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so
deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find
himself engaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a
chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all
lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has
been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and
say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the
person who entrapped me.
The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards
unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from
ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of
experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change - that monstrous,
consuming EGO of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably
true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course
of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a
magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has
served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet
or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to
see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever
more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away.
Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of
my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so
overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is
D'Artagnan - the elderly D'Artagnan of the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE. I know not a more
human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a
pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.
But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the
influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet
know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and
distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell early
into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and
perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the ESSAIS of Montaigne.
That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day;
they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain;
they will have their 'linen decencies' and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have
any gift of reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground
of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing that this old
gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life,
than they or their contemporaries.
The next book, in order of time, to influence
me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it
would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it
freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be
able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly
refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be silent.
I
come next to Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, a book of singular service, a book which
tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and
ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong
foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who
have the gift of reading. I will be very frank - I believe it is so with all good books except,
perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that
gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either
he cries 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.
Chapter IV -
A NOTE ON REALISM <reference>(16)</reference>
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 more naked, 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 work-manship 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.
Chapter V -
MY FIRST BOOK: 'TREASURE ISLAND' <reference>(17)</reference>
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 at all, it calls on me in the familiar 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, sympathy, help, and now a 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.
Chapter VI -
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 up at all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my
unformed fancies.
And while I was groping for the fable and the character
required, behold I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge hot,
pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was there ever a more complete
justification of the rule of Horace? Here, thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on the
solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of a
story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry and Strathardle, conceived in
Highland rain, in the blend of the smell of heather and bog- plants, and with a mind full of the
Athole correspondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long ago, so far away it
was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.
My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being all
obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me except in books; I had never known any
living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to all
seeing) equally accidental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get into India
and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness; and I believe this first suggested to me the idea
of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It was at first intended that he should be Scottish, and I
was then filled with fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my own Alan Breck.
Presently, however, it began to occur to me it would be like my Master to curry favour with the
Prince's Irishmen; and that an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself in
India with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided he should be, and
then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon.
No man (in Lord Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep with my Master:
in the original idea of this story conceived in Scotland, this companion had been besides
intended to be worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant) he was to visit
Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very bad Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century,
how was I to evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch besieged me, offering his services; he gave me
excellent references; he proved that he was highly fitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own
evil heart, suggested it was easy to disguise his ancient livery wit a little lace and a few frogs and
buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there
came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and had spent long
nights walking and talking with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as
a youth of an extraordinary moral simplicity - almost vacancy; plastic to any influence, the
creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of
fortune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in place of
entering into competition with the Master, would afford a slight though a distinct relief. I know
not if I have done him well, though his moral dissertations always highly entertained me: but I
own I have been surprised to find that he reminded some critics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . .
Chapter VII -
PREFACE TO 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE' <reference>(19)</reference>
ALTHOUGH an old, consistent exile, the editor of the
following pages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a native; and there are
few things more strange, more painful, or more salutary, than such revisitations. Outside, in
foreign spots, he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he had expected; in his
own city, the relation is reversed, and he stands amazed to be so little recollected. Elsewhere he
is refreshed to see attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scouts the long streets,
with a pang at heart, for the faces and friends that are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted with
the presence of what is new, there tormented by the absence of what is old. Elsewhere he is
content to be his present self; there he is smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and
for what he once hoped to be.
He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from
the station, on his last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of his friend Mr.
Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay. A hearty welcome, a face not altogether
changed, a few words that sounded of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in
passing of the snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis on the dining-room wall,
brought him to his bed-room with a somewhat lightened cheer, and when he and Mr. Thomson
sat down a few minutes later, cheek by jowl, and pledged the past in a preliminary bumper, he
was already almost consoled, he had already almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable
errors, that he should ever have left his native city, or ever returned to it.
'I have something quite in your way,'
said Mr. Thomson. 'I wished
to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own youth that comes back along
with you; in a very tattered and withered state, to be sure, but - well! - all that's left of it.'
'A great deal better than nothing,'
said the editor. 'But what is this which is quite in my way?'
'I was
coming to that,'
said Mr. Thomson: 'Fate has put it in my power to honour
your arrival with something really original by way of dessert. A mystery.'
'A mystery?'
I repeated.
'Yes,'
said his friend, 'a mystery. It may prove to be nothing, and it may prove to be a great
deal. But in the meanwhile it is truly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundred
years; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; and it ought to be melodramatic, for
(according to the superscription) it is concerned with death.'
'I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising annunciation,'
the other
remarked. 'But what is It?'
'You remember my
predecessor's, old Peter M'Brair's business?'
'I remember him
acutely; he could not look at me without a pang of reprobation, and he could not feel the pang
without betraying it. He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest was not
returned.'
'Ah well, we go beyond him,'
said Mr.
Thomson. 'I daresay old Peter knew as little about this as I do. You see, I succeeded
to a prodigious accumulation of old law-papers and old tin boxes, some of them of Peter's
hoarding, some of his father's, John, first of the dynasty, a great man in his day. Among other
collections were all the papers of the Durrisdeers.'
'The
Durrisdeers!'
cried I. 'My dear fellow, these may be of the greatest interest.
One of them was out in the '45; one had some strange passages with the devil - you will find a
note of it in Law's MEMORIALS, I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy, I know not
what, much later, about a hundred years ago - '
'More than a
hundred years ago,'
said Mr. Thomson. 'In 1783.'
'How do you know that? I mean some death.'
'Yes,
the lamentable deaths of my lord Durrisdeer and his brother, the Master of Ballantrae (attainted
in the troubles),'
said Mr. Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting. 'Is that it?'
'To say truth,'
said I,
'I have only seen some dim reference to the things in memoirs; and heard some traditions
dimmer still, through my uncle (whom I think you knew). My uncle lived when he was a boy in
the neighbourhood of St. Bride's; he has often told me of the avenue closed up and grown over
with grass, the great gates never opened, the last lord and his old maid sister who lived in the
back parts of the house, a quiet, plain, poor, hum-drum couple it would seem - but pathetic too,
as the last of that stirring and brave house - and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from some
deformed traditions.'
'Yes,'
said Mr. Thomson. Henry Graeme Durie, the last lord, died in 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss
Katherine Durie, in '27; so much I know; and by what I have been going over the last few days,
they were what you say, decent, quiet people and not rich. To say truth, it was a letter of my
lord's that put me on the search for the packet we are going to open this evening. Some papers
could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M'Brair suggesting they might be among those sealed
up by a Mr. Mackellar. M'Brair answered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar's
own hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrative character; and besides, said he, "I
am bound not to open them before the year 1889." You may fancy if these words struck me: I
instituted a hunt through all the M'Brair repositories; and at last hit upon that packet which (if
you have had enough wine) I propose to show you at once.'
In the
smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet, fastened with many seals and
enclosed in a single sheet of strong paper thus endorsed:-
Papers relating to the
lives and lamentable deaths of the late Lord Durisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly
called Master of Ballantrae, attainted in the troubles: entrusted into the hands of John M'Brair in
the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W.S.; this 20th day of September Anno Domini 1789; by him to
be kept secret until the revolution of one hundred years complete, or until the 20th day of
September 1889: the same compiled and written by me,
EPHRAIM MACKELLAR,
FOR NEAR FORTY YEARS LAND STEWARD
ON THE ESTATES OF HIS LORDSHIP.
As Mr. Thomson is a
married man, I will not say what hour had struck when we laid down the last of the following
pages; but I will give a few words of what ensued.
'Here,'
said Mr. Thomson, 'is a novel ready to your hand: all you have to do is to work up the
scenery, develop the characters, and improve the style.'
'My
dear fellow,'
said I, 'they are just the three things that I would rather die than
set my hand to. It shall be published as it stands.'
'But it's so
bald,'
objected Mr. Thomson.
'I believe there is nothing so
noble as baldness,'
replied I, 'and I am sure there is nothing so interesting. I
would have all literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.'
'Well, well,'
said Mr. Thomson, 'we shall see.'
Footnotes:
(1)
First published in the Contemporary Review, April 1885
(2) Milton.
(3) Milton.
(4) Milton.
(5) As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English examples, take, by way of comparison,
this Latin verse, of which it forms a chief adornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all
too Roman freedom of the sense: 'Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata vagatur.'
(6) Coleridge.
(7) Antony and
Cleopatra.
(8) Cymbeline.
(9) The V is in 'of.'
(10) Troilus and Cressida.
(11) First published
in the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, April 1881.
(12) Mr. James Payn.
(13) A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set before all
young writers in the width of literary sympathy displayed by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to
welcome merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in
criticism, the attitude we should all seek to preserve; not only in that, but in every branch of
literary work.
(14) First published in the BRITISH WEEKLY, May 13,
1887.
(15) Of the BRITISH WEEKLY.
(16)
First published in the MAGAZINE OF ART in 1883.
(17) First
published in the IDLER, August 1894.
(18) NE PAS CONFONDRE.
Not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with
amazement from the book-lists) the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy prices; but
its predecessor, a bulky historical romance without a spark of merit, and now deleted from the
world.
(19) 1889.
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The End of the Project Gutenberg etext The Art of Writing