The Art of Writing E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 112

Beschreibung

Long essay that begins: "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."

Leseprobe

THE ART OF WRITING BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

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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  (1)

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.