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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Art of Writing and Other Essays
+by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#22 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+Title: The Art of Writing and Other Essays
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: April, 1996  [EBook #492]
+[This file was first posted on February 21, 1996]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ART OF WRITING ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+   On some technical elements of style in literature
+   The morality of the profession of letters
+   Books which have influenced me
+   A note on realism
+   My first book:  'Treasure Island'
+   The genesis of 'the master of Ballantrae'
+   Preface to 'the master of Ballantrae'
+
+
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS {11}
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME {14}
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON REALISM {16}
+
+
+
+Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who
+does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is
+still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will.
+Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour,
+are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor
+simulated.  But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we
+have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the
+elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the
+preservation of a uniform character from end to end--these, which
+taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree
+within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.  What to put
+in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be
+organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be
+purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design;
+and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so
+grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise:  are
+questions of plastic style continually rearising.  And the sphinx
+that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable
+riddle to propound.
+
+In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great
+change of the past century has been effected by the admission of
+detail.  It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length,
+by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic
+followers, bound like a duty on the novelist.  For some time it
+signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the
+conditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France)
+fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is,
+perhaps, still too harsh to call survival.  With a movement of
+alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from
+these extremities; they begin to aspire after a 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 workmanship and schemes of composition (all
+being admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten) haunt
+and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly
+appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us from
+the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art.  To
+struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give
+expression to facts which have not yet been adequately or not yet
+elegantly expressed, is to run a little upon the danger of extreme
+self-love.  Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the
+artist may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists,
+and consider any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground
+of brilliant handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern
+landscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and
+science well displayed can take the place of what is, after all,
+the one excuse and breath of art--charm.  A little further, and he
+will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to
+prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity
+to art.
+
+We have now the matter of this difference before us.  The idealist,
+his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to
+fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly
+touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect.  But the
+realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of
+anything so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-
+pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye.
+The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings
+with it its necessary disabilities and dangers.  The immediate
+danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance
+of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit of
+completion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he comes in
+the last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all design,
+abjure all choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to
+communicate matter which is not worth learning.  The danger of the
+idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip of
+fact, particularity, or passion.
+
+We talk of bad and good.  Everything, indeed, is good which is
+conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour.  But
+though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every
+case the artist must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet
+afresh for each succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing may
+be generally said, that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth
+century, breathing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age,
+are more apt to err upon the side of realism than to sin in quest
+of the ideal.  Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct
+our own decisions, always holding back the hand from the least
+appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin
+no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily
+mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design.
+
+
+
+MY FIRST BOOK:  'TREASURE ISLAND' {17}
+
+
+
+It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist
+alone.  But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public,
+regards what else I have written with indifference, if not
+aversion; if it call upon me 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.
+
+
+
+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. . . .
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE' {19}
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ART OF WRITING ***
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
+<title>The Art of Writing and Other Essays</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">The Art of Writing and Other Essays, by Robert Louis Stevenson</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Art of Writing and Other Essays
+by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#22 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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+
+Title: The Art of Writing and Other Essays
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: April, 1996  [EBook #492]
+[This file was first posted on February 21, 1996]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Contents:<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;On some technical elements of style in literature<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The morality of the profession of letters<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Books which have influenced me<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A note on realism<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;My first book: &lsquo;Treasure Island&rsquo;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The genesis of &lsquo;the master of Ballantrae&rsquo;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Preface to &lsquo;the master of Ballantrae&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs
+and mechanism of any art.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; This
+ignorance at least is largely irremediable.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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
+<i>Hudibras</i>, that<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Still the less they understand,<br>
+The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the ardour
+of their pleasure.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<i>1.&nbsp; Choice of Words</i>. - 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.&nbsp;
+The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like
+the modeller&rsquo;s clay; literature alone is condemned to work in
+mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.&nbsp; You have seen these
+blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third
+a window or a vase.&nbsp; It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size
+and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace
+of his art.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But though this
+form of merit is without doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is
+far from being equally present in all writers.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; But the first class of writers have no monopoly
+of literary merit.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; What is that point?<br>
+<br>
+<i>2.&nbsp; The Web</i>. - 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern
+of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding
+him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or
+sacrificed.&nbsp; So with the writer.&nbsp; His pattern, which is to
+please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first
+of all, to the demands of logic.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The genius of prose rejects the <i>cheville</i>no
+less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the <i>cheville</i>, I
+should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or
+very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.&nbsp;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Nay, and this wit, so little
+recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much
+admire.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And, on the other hand, how many do
+we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is
+the elegance of texture?&nbsp; I am tempted to mention Cicero; and since
+Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will.&nbsp; It is a poor diet for the
+mind, a very colourless and toothless &lsquo;criticism of life&rsquo;;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For that
+is the essence of a prosody.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It
+does not matter on what principle the law is based, so it be a law.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another
+difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty; and
+the pattern, with every fresh element, becoming more interesting in
+itself.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot,
+nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an obtrusive neatness like
+a puzzle.&nbsp; The ear remarks and is singly gratified by this return
+and balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the measure.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+But let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was
+ambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour&rsquo;s Prologue to the
+Second Part of <i>Henry IV</i>., a fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+second manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<i>3.&nbsp; Rhythm of the Phrase</i>. - Some way back, I used a word
+which still awaits an application.&nbsp; Each phrase, I said, was to
+be comely; but what is a comely phrase?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And of this the ear is the sole judge.&nbsp;
+It is impossible to lay down laws.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;All night | the dre&agrave;d | less &agrave;n | gel &ugrave;n
+| purs&ugrave;ed,&rsquo; <a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a><br>
+<br>
+goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our definition,
+in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency.&nbsp; 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:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth
+orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others.&nbsp;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+But again, four is not necessary.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s making.&nbsp; 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 - &lsquo;<i>Aut</i>
+<i>Lacedoe-monium Tarentum</i>,&rsquo; for a case in point - I feel
+as if I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of
+human verses.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And yet to this neglect
+of the original beat there is a limit.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,&rsquo; <a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; But begin<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Mother Athens, eye of Greece,&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+or merely &lsquo;Mother Athens,&rsquo; and the game is up, for the trochaic
+beat has been suggested.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of the group, and successive
+phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm.&nbsp;
+The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in
+hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all.&nbsp; Prose must be rhythmical,
+and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical.&nbsp;
+It may be anything, but it must not be verse.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The same lines delivered
+with the measured utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich in variety.&nbsp;
+By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, as to a more distant
+vision, these niceties of difference are lost.&nbsp; A whole verse is
+uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied by a succession of
+groups identical in length.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And here it may be pertinently asked, Why
+bad?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But we can
+go beyond such answers.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<i>4.&nbsp; Contents of the Phrase</i>. - Here is a great deal of talk
+about rhythm - and naturally; for in our canorous language rhythm is
+always at the door.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The even speech of many educated
+Americans sounds the note of danger.&nbsp; I should see it go with something
+as bitter as despair, but I should not be desperate.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 <i>invita</i> <i>Minerva</i>,
+is to avoid writing verse.&nbsp; So wonderfully far apart have races
+wandered in spirit, and so hard it is to understand the literature next
+door!<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French is easily
+distinguishable as comely or uncomely.&nbsp; There is then another element
+of comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of
+the phrase.&nbsp; Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each
+phrase in music consists of notes.&nbsp; One sound suggests, echoes,
+demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these
+concordances is the final art in literature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; None the less for
+that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest
+of the blind who will not see.&nbsp; The beauty of the contents of a
+phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon
+assonance.&nbsp; The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant demands
+to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+And you will find another and much stranger circumstance.&nbsp; Literature
+is written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive
+&lsquo;unheard melodies&rsquo;; and the eye, which directs the pen and
+deciphers the printed phrase.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;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.&rsquo; <a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a>&nbsp;
+Down to &lsquo;virtue,&rsquo; 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. <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a>&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+In the next four phrases, from &lsquo;that never&rsquo; down to &lsquo;run
+for,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The singular dignity of the first clause, and this
+hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the charm of this exquisite
+sentence.&nbsp; But it is fair to own that S and R are used a little
+coarsely.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;In Xanady did Kubla Khan&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+&nbsp; &nbsp;  (KANDL)<br>
+A stately pleasure dome decree,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; (KDLSR)<br>
+Where Alph the sacred river ran,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  (KANDLSR)<br>
+Through caverns measureless to man,&nbsp;  (KANLSR)<br>
+Down to a sunless sea.&rsquo; <a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a>&nbsp;
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; (NDLS)<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+But there are further niceties.&nbsp; In lines two and four, the current
+S is most delicately varied with Z.&nbsp; In line three, the current
+flat A is twice varied with the open A, already suggested in line two,
+and both times (&lsquo;where&rsquo; and &lsquo;sacred&rsquo;) in conjunction
+with the current R.&nbsp; In the same line F and V (a harmony in themselves,
+even when shorn of their comrade P) are admirably contrasted.&nbsp;
+And in line four there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was announced
+in line two.&nbsp; I stop from weariness, for more might yet be said.<br>
+<br>
+My next example was recently quoted from Shakespeare as an example of
+the poet&rsquo;s colour sense.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;purple&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe<br>
+BURNT oN the water: the POOP was BeateN gold,<br>
+PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fum&egrave;d that&nbsp; &nbsp;  * per<br>
+The wiNds were love-sick with them.&rsquo; <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It may be asked why I have put the F of &lsquo;perfum&egrave;d&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp; Indeed,
+the whole passage is a monument of curious ingenuity; and it seems scarce
+worth while to indicate the subsidiary S, L, and W.&nbsp; In the same
+article, a second passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once again as
+an example of his colour sense:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops<br>
+I&rsquo; the bottom of a cowslip.&rsquo; <a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth while to analyse
+at length: I leave it to the reader.&nbsp; 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:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+But in the wind and tempest of her frown,<br>
+W. P. V.<a name="citation9"></a><a href="#footnote9">{9}</a> F. (st)
+(ow)<br>
+Distinction with a loud and powerful fan,<br>
+W.P. F. (st) (ow) L.<br>
+<br>
+Puffing at all, winnows the light away;<br>
+W. P. F. L.<br>
+And what hath mass and matter by itself<br>
+W. F. L. M. A.<br>
+Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.&rsquo; <a name="citation10"></a><a href="#footnote10">{10}</a><br>
+V. L. M.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+From these delicate and choice writers I turned with some curiosity
+to a player of the big drum - Macaulay.&nbsp; I had in hand the two-volume
+edition, and I opened at the beginning of the second volume.&nbsp; Here
+was what I read:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the
+degree of the maladministration which has produced them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The movement against the
+last king of the house of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland
+destructive.&nbsp; The English complained not of the law, but of the
+violation of the law.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+This could be no trick of Macaulay&rsquo;s; it must be the nature of
+the English tongue.&nbsp; 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:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon&rsquo;s Kamp went on inKreasing.&nbsp;
+He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advisable
+to taKe.&nbsp; But as soon as the Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion
+was raised.&nbsp; The army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army.&nbsp;
+The recent vKktory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors.&nbsp;
+Great chie<i>f</i>s who had brought siKs or Se<i>v</i>en hundred <i>f</i>ighting
+men into the <i>f</i>ield did not think it <i>f</i>air that they should
+be out<i>v</i>oted by gentlemen <i>f</i>rom Ireland, and <i>f</i>rom
+the Low Kountries, who bore indeed King James&rsquo;s Kommission, and
+were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments
+and Kaptains without Kompanies.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+A moment of FV in all this world of K&rsquo;s!&nbsp; It was not the
+English language, then, that was an instrument of one string, but Macaulay
+that was an incomparable dauber.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; Few writers, indeed, are probably conscious
+of the length to which they push this melody of letters.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<i>Conclusion</i>. - We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect
+pages rarer.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS <a name="citation11"></a><a href="#footnote11">{11}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; Some time ago, in particular, a
+lively, pleasant, popular writer <a name="citation12"></a><a href="#footnote12">{12}</a>
+devoted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, to a very encouraging
+view of the profession.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The salary in any business under
+heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But the truth is, he does not, or did not when he first embraced it,
+regard his profession from this purely mercenary side.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On that subject alone even to force the
+note might lean to virtue&rsquo;s side.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Better that our serene temples
+were deserted than filled with trafficking and juggling priests.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; These are the sufficient justifications
+for any young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life.&nbsp;
+I shall not say much about the wages.&nbsp; A writer can live by his
+writing.&nbsp; If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously.&nbsp;
+The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness
+than the quality of his dinner at night.&nbsp; Whatever be your calling,
+and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know,
+get more by cheating.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Now Nature,
+faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+We may seek merely to please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely
+to gratify the idle nine days&rsquo; curiosity of our contemporaries;
+or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The total
+of a nation&rsquo;s reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly
+modifies the total of the nation&rsquo;s speech; and the speech and
+reading, taken together, form the efficient educational medium of youth.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The copious Corinthian baseness of the
+American reporter or the Parisian <i>chroniquear</i>, 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good and
+evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who write.&nbsp; Those
+who write have to see that each man&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; In one word, it must always be foul to
+tell what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.&nbsp;
+The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody was wanting,
+for one man&rsquo;s meat is another man&rsquo;s poison, and I have known
+a person who was cheered by the perusal of <i>Candide</i>.&nbsp; Every
+fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together; and none that
+comes directly in a writer&rsquo;s path but has some nice relations,
+unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subject under
+hand.&nbsp; Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more necessary
+than others, and it is with these that literature must first bestir
+itself.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; So far as the writer merely narrates, he should
+principally tell of these.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And if, in
+any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so if the writers
+chose!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+There is not a juncture in to-day&rsquo;s affairs but some useful word
+may yet be said of it.&nbsp; Even the reporter has an office, and, with
+clear eyes and honest language, may unveil injustices and point the
+way to progress.&nbsp; And for a last word: in all narration there is
+only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; And hence, over the far
+larger proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease
+of the writer&rsquo;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.&nbsp; In all works of art, widely speaking, it is first of
+all the author&rsquo;s attitude that is narrated, though in the attitude
+there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; So that the first duty
+of any man who is to write is intellectual.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; <a name="citation13"></a><a href="#footnote13">{13}</a><br>
+<br>
+The second duty, far harder to define, is moral.&nbsp; There are a thousand
+different humours in the mind, and about each of them, when it is uppermost,
+some literature tends to be deposited.&nbsp; Is this to be allowed?&nbsp;
+Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in more than rigourists
+would fancy.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; We do not loathe a masterpiece although
+we gird against its blemishes.&nbsp; We are not, above all, to look
+for faults, but merits.&nbsp; There is no book perfect, even in design;
+but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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 <i>Carmosine</i> or<i>
+Fantasio</i>, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to
+have been found again to touch and please us.&nbsp; When Flaubert wrote
+<i>Madame Bovary</i>, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid
+realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece
+of appalling morality.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Out of
+the strong comes forth sweetness; but an ill thing poorly done is an
+ill thing top and bottom.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty
+a sentiment; that will not be helpful.&nbsp; To conceal a sentiment,
+if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am
+afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s masterpiece of morality as well
+as of art.&nbsp; Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that
+gives a misleading picture of the world and life.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In literature as in conduct,
+you can never hope to do exactly right.&nbsp; All you can do is to make
+as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule.&nbsp; Nothing
+should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in the meantime.&nbsp;
+Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or pleasing impressions
+is a service to the public.&nbsp; It is even a service to be thankfully
+proud of having rendered.&nbsp; The slightest novels are a blessing
+to those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater.&nbsp; Our fine
+old sea-captain&rsquo;s life was justified when Carlyle soothed his
+mind with <i>The</i> <i>King&rsquo;s Own</i> or<i> Newton Forster</i>.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every <i>entre-filet</i>,
+is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of some portion
+of the public, and to colour, however transiently, their thoughts.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The writer has the chance to
+stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, something interesting, something
+encouraging, were it only to a single reader.&nbsp; He will be unfortunate,
+indeed, if he suit no one.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME <a name="citation14"></a><a href="#footnote14">{14}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The Editor <a name="citation15"></a><a href="#footnote15">{15}</a> has
+somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the question
+put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
+of fiction.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 <i>ego</i> of ours being, for the
+nonce, struck out.&nbsp; To be so, they must be reasonably true to the
+human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Shakespeare has served me best.&nbsp;
+Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good
+as Hamlet or Rosalind.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Nothing has ever more moved,
+more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed
+away.&nbsp; Kent&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare
+is D&rsquo;Artagnan - the elderly D&rsquo;Artagnan of the <i>Vicomte
+de Bragelonne</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Lastly, I must name the <i>Pilgrim&rsquo;s Progress</i>, a book that
+breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the
+effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare.&nbsp; 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
+<i>Essais</i> of Montaigne.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;linen decencies&rsquo;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament,
+and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But upon this subject it is
+perhaps better to be silent.<br>
+<br>
+I come next to Whitman&rsquo;s <i>Leaves of</i> <i>Grass</i>, 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.&nbsp; But
+it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.&nbsp;
+I will be very frank - I believe it is so with all good books except,
+perhaps, fiction.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He who cannot judge had better stick
+to fiction and the daily papers.&nbsp; There he will get little harm,
+and, in the first at least, some good.<br>
+<br>
+Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence
+of Herbert Spencer.&nbsp; No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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 <i>caput mortuum</i>
+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.&nbsp; I should be much of a hound
+if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.<br>
+<br>
+<i>Goethe&rsquo;s Life</i>, by Lewes, had a great importance for me
+when it first fell into my hands - a strange instance of the partiality
+of man&rsquo;s good and man&rsquo;s evil.&nbsp; 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 <i>Werther</i>, 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.&nbsp; And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his
+honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained!&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s nature, and how huge faults and shining
+virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s serious passages the image
+of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book - the <i>Meditations</i>
+of Marcus Aurelius.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No one can read it and not be moved.&nbsp;
+Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings - those very mobile,
+those not very trusty parts of man.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Wordsworth should perhaps come next.&nbsp; Every one has been influenced
+by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how.&nbsp; A certain
+innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, &lsquo;the
+silence that is in the lonely hills,&rsquo; something of the cold thrill
+of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what
+is best in us.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; These best teachers climb beyond teaching
+to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves,
+that they communicate.<br>
+<br>
+I should never forgive myself if I forgot <i>The Egoist</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book
+to send the blood into men&rsquo;s faces.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And <i>The Egoist</i>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+A young friend of Mr. Meredith&rsquo;s (as I have the story) came to
+him in an agony.&nbsp; &lsquo;This is too bad of you,&rsquo; he cried.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Willoughby is me!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;No, my dear fellow,&rsquo;
+said the author; &lsquo;he is all of us.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I have read <i>The Egoist</i> 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.<br>
+<br>
+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 &lsquo;On the Spirit of Obligations&rsquo; was
+a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms
+had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford&rsquo;s <i>Tales</i>
+<i>of Old Japan</i>, wherein I learned for the first time the proper
+attitude of any rational man to his country&rsquo;s laws - a secret
+found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands.&nbsp; That I should commemorate
+all is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The gift of reading,
+as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Well, if he has the gift of reading,
+these others will be full of meat for him.&nbsp; They will see the other
+side of propositions and the other side of virtues.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A human
+truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it
+displays.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Something that seems
+quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the
+test of a reader.&nbsp; If he tries to see what it means, what truth
+excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read.&nbsp; If he is merely
+hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author&rsquo;s folly, he had
+better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.<br>
+<br>
+And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down
+my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite.&nbsp; For, after all,
+we are vessels of a very limited content.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A NOTE ON REALISM <a name="citation16"></a><a href="#footnote16">{16}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; Passion,
+wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted
+in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And the sphinx that patrols the highways
+of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound.<br>
+<br>
+In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great change
+of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; For some time it signified and expressed
+a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; After Scott we beheld the starveling story
+- once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable&nbsp; - begin
+to be pampered upon facts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A
+man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical
+successes.&nbsp; To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he
+adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid.&nbsp;
+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<i> feux-de-joie</i> of literary
+tricking.&nbsp; The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling
+of audible colours and visible sounds.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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
+Moli&egrave;re, wielding his artificial medium, has told to us and to
+all time of Alceste or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale.&nbsp; The historical
+novel is forgotten.&nbsp; Yet truth to the conditions of man&rsquo;s
+nature and the conditions of man&rsquo;s life, the truth of literary
+art, is free of the ages.&nbsp; It may be told us in a carpet comedy,
+in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale.&nbsp; The scene may be pitched
+in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the mountains of
+Beulah.&nbsp; 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
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i> which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly
+anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; On the approach to execution all is changed.&nbsp; The
+artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan.&nbsp;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical preoccupation
+stands them instead of some robuster principle of life.&nbsp; And with
+these the execution is but play; for the stylistic problem is resolved
+beforehand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully foregone.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin to write <i>Esmond</i>
+than <i>Vanity Fair</i>, 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.&nbsp;
+But the case is exceptional.&nbsp; Usually in all works of art that
+have been conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from
+the author&rsquo;s mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is
+one of extreme perplexity and strain.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; So that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the
+varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He must, that
+is, suppress much and omit more.&nbsp; He must omit what is tedious
+or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and necessary.&nbsp; But
+such facts as, in regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes,
+he will perforce and eagerly retain.&nbsp; And it is the mark of the
+very highest order of creative art to be woven exclusively of such.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But this is unattainable.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And hence, in order that the
+canvas may be filled or the story proceed from point to point, other
+details must be admitted.&nbsp; They must be admitted, alas! upon a
+doubtful title; many without marriage robes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; These we choose, as the mason chooses the
+acanthus to adorn his capital, because they come naturally to the accustomed
+hand.&nbsp; The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship
+and schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would
+long have been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made
+but not perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises,
+and wean us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice
+of art.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+We have now the matter of this difference before us.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The style
+that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its
+necessary disabilities and dangers.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The danger of the idealist is, of course, to become
+merely null and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion.<br>
+<br>
+We talk of bad and good.&nbsp; Everything, indeed, is good which is
+conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+MY FIRST BOOK: &lsquo;TREASURE ISLAND&rsquo; <a name="citation17"></a><a href="#footnote17">{17}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist
+alone.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel.&nbsp;
+It seems vain to ask why.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Reams upon reams must have gone to
+the making of &lsquo;Rathillet,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Pentland Rising,&rsquo;
+<a name="citation18"></a><a href="#footnote18">{18}</a> &lsquo;The King&rsquo;s
+Pardon&rsquo; (otherwise &lsquo;Park Whitehead&rsquo;), &lsquo;Edward
+Daven,&rsquo; &lsquo;A Country Dance,&rsquo; and &lsquo;A Vendetta in
+the West&rsquo;; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams
+are now all ashes, and have been received again into the soil.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; &lsquo;Rathillet&rsquo; was attempted before
+fifteen, &lsquo;The Vendetta&rsquo; at twenty-nine, and the succession
+of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; All - all my pretty ones - had gone for a little, and
+then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy&rsquo;s watch.&nbsp; I might
+be compared to a cricketer of many years&rsquo; standing who should
+never have made a run.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is the length that
+kills.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+Not so the beginner.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There must be something for hope to feed upon.&nbsp;
+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 - <i>even to begin</i>.&nbsp; And having begun,
+what a dread looking forward is that until the book shall be accomplished!&nbsp;
+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!&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird,
+above Pitlochry.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;The Shadow on the Bed,&rsquo;
+and I turned out &lsquo;Thrawn Janet,&rsquo; and a first draft of &lsquo;The
+Merry Men.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native air
+was more unkind than man&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Cottage.&nbsp; And now admire
+the finger of predestination.&nbsp; There was a schoolboy in the Late
+Miss McGregor&rsquo;s Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want
+of &lsquo;something craggy to break his mind upon.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;Treasure Island.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard
+to believe.&nbsp; 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 <i>Standing Stone</i> or the <i>Druidic
+Circle</i> 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!&nbsp; No child but must remember laying his head in the grass,
+staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with
+fairy armies.<br>
+<br>
+Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of &lsquo;Treasure Island,&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp;
+The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out
+a list of chapters.&nbsp; How often have I done so, and the thing gone
+no further!&nbsp; But there seemed elements of success about this enterprise.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Women were excluded.&nbsp;
+I was unable to handle a brig (which the <i>Hispaniola</i> should have
+been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without
+public shame.&nbsp;  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.&nbsp; Such psychical
+surgery is, I think, a common way of &lsquo;making character&rsquo;;
+perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.&nbsp; We can put in the quaint
+figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside;
+but do we know him?&nbsp; Our friend, with his infinite variety and
+flexibility, we know - but can we put him in?&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the
+rain drumming on the window, I began <i>The Sea Cook</i>, for that was
+the original title.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are
+proverbially sweet.&nbsp; I am now upon a painful chapter.&nbsp; No
+doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe.&nbsp; No doubt the
+skeleton is conveyed from Poe.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The stockade, I am told, is
+from <i>Masterman Ready</i>.&nbsp; It may be, I care not a jot.&nbsp;
+These useful writers had fulfilled the poet&rsquo;s saying: departing,
+they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints
+which perhaps another - and I was the other!&nbsp; It is my debt to
+Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I
+believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther.&nbsp; I chanced to pick
+up the <i>Tales of a Traveller</i> 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s work to the family.&nbsp;
+It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right
+eye.&nbsp; I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience.&nbsp;
+My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness
+of his original nature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man
+did not require to!&nbsp; But in <i>Treasure Island</i> he recognised
+something kindred to his own imagination; it was <i>his</i> kind of
+picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but
+set himself acting to collaborate.&nbsp; When the time came for Billy
+Bones&rsquo;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 &lsquo;Flint&rsquo;s
+old ship&rsquo; - the <i>Walrus</i> - was given at his particular request.&nbsp;
+And now who should come dropping in, <i>ex machin&acirc;</i>, 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 <i>Young Folks</i>.&nbsp;
+Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme
+measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of <i>The Sea
+Cook</i>; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a
+positive engagement.&nbsp; I had chosen besides a very easy style.&nbsp;
+Compare it with the almost contemporary &lsquo;Merry Men&rsquo;, one
+reader may prefer the one style, one the other - &rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage
+to turn out <i>Treasure Island</i> at so many pages a day, and keep
+his pipe alight.&nbsp; But alas! this was not my case.&nbsp; Fifteen
+days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the
+early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold.&nbsp; My
+mouth was empty; there was not one word of <i>Treasure Island</i> in
+my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting
+me at the &lsquo;Hand and Spear&rsquo;!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 &pound;200
+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?&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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 <i>Treasure Island</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant
+to go to for sympathy on a boy&rsquo;s story.&nbsp; He was large-minded;
+&lsquo;a full man,&rsquo; if there was one; but the very name of my
+enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and
+solecisms of style.&nbsp; Well! he was not far wrong.<br>
+<br>
+<i>Treasure Island</i> - it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first
+title, <i>The Sea Cook</i> - appeared duly in the story paper, where
+it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not
+the least attention.&nbsp; I did not care.&nbsp; I liked the tale myself,
+for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my
+kind of picturesque.&nbsp; I was not a little proud of John Silver,
+also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.&nbsp;
+What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had
+finished a tale, and written &lsquo;The End&rsquo; upon my manuscript,
+as I had not done since &lsquo;The Pentland Rising,&rsquo; when I was
+a boy of sixteen not yet at college.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Purists may suggest it would have been better so.&nbsp;
+I am not of that mind.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I need scarcely
+say I mean my own.<br>
+<br>
+But the adventures of <i>Treasure Island</i> are not yet quite at an
+end.&nbsp; I had written it up to the map.&nbsp; The map was the chief
+part of my plot.&nbsp; For instance, I had called an islet &lsquo;Skeleton
+Island,&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s pointer.&nbsp; And in the same way,
+it was because I had made two harbours that the <i>Hispaniola</i> was
+sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands.&nbsp; The time came when it
+was decided to republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along
+with it, to Messrs. Cassell.&nbsp; The proofs came, they were corrected,
+but I heard nothing of the map.&nbsp; I wrote and asked; was told it
+had never been received, and sat aghast.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I did it; and the map was drawn again in my father&rsquo;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 <i>forged</i> the signature of Captain Flint, and the
+sailing directions of Billy Bones.&nbsp; But somehow it was never <i>Treasure
+Island</i> to me.<br>
+<br>
+I have said the map was the most of the plot.&nbsp; I might almost say
+it was the whole.&nbsp; A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington
+Irving, a copy of Johnson&rsquo;s <i>Buccaneers</i>, the name of the
+Dead Man&rsquo;s Chest from Kingsley&rsquo;s <i>At Last</i>, some recollections
+of canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite,
+eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials.&nbsp; It is,
+perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is
+always important.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s rising, the behaviour of the moon, should
+all be beyond cavil.&nbsp; And how troublesome the moon is!&nbsp; I
+have come to grief over the moon in <i>Prince</i> <i>Otto</i>, 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+With the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the
+east, as it does in <i>The Antiquary</i>.&nbsp; 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 <i>Rob
+Roy</i>.&nbsp; And it is certainly well, though far from necessary,
+to avoid such &lsquo;croppers.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of
+its own behind the words.&nbsp; Better if the country be real, and he
+has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone.&nbsp; 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 <i>Treasure Island</i>, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE GENESIS OF &lsquo;THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
+lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac.&nbsp; It was winter; the night
+was very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with
+the purity of forests.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For the making of a story here were fine conditions.&nbsp;
+I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished
+my third or fourth perusal of <i>The Phantom Ship</i>.&nbsp; &lsquo;Come,&rsquo;
+said I to my engine, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly
+just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; This trenched
+upon the Christian picture, and was dismissed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I need not
+tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most interesting
+moment of an author&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; Pease
+porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years
+old.&nbsp; Was there ever a more complete justification of the rule
+of Horace?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being
+all obligatory scenes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Presently, however, it began to occur
+to me it would be like my Master to curry favour with the Prince&rsquo;s
+Irishmen; and that an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to
+find himself in India with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+No man (in Lord Foppington&rsquo;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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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. . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PREFACE TO &lsquo;THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE&rsquo; <a name="citation19"></a><a href="#footnote19">{19}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Elsewhere he is delighted
+with the presence of what is new, there tormented by the absence of
+what is old.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I have something quite in your way,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;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&rsquo;s left
+of it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A great deal better than nothing,&rsquo; said the editor.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;But what is this which is quite in my way?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I was coming to that,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson: &lsquo;Fate has
+put it in my power to honour your arrival with something really original
+by way of dessert.&nbsp; A mystery.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A mystery?&rsquo; I repeated.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said his friend, &lsquo;a mystery.&nbsp; It may prove
+to be nothing, and it may prove to be a great deal.&nbsp; 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.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising annunciation,&rsquo;
+the other remarked.&nbsp; &lsquo;But what is It?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You remember my predecessor&rsquo;s, old Peter M&rsquo;Brair&rsquo;s
+business?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;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.&nbsp;
+He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest
+was not returned.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ah well, we go beyond him,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+daresay old Peter knew as little about this as I do.&nbsp; You see,
+I succeeded to a prodigious accumulation of old law-papers and old tin
+boxes, some of them of Peter&rsquo;s hoarding, some of his father&rsquo;s,
+John, first of the dynasty, a great man in his day.&nbsp; Among other
+collections were all the papers of the Durrisdeers.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The Durrisdeers!&rsquo; cried I.&nbsp; &lsquo;My dear fellow,
+these may be of the greatest interest.&nbsp; One of them was out in
+the &lsquo;45; one had some strange passages with the devil - you will
+find a note of it in Law&rsquo;s <i>Memorials</i>, I think; and there
+was an unexplained tragedy, I know not what, much later, about a hundred
+years ago - &lsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;More than a hundred years ago,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;In 1783.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;How do you know that?&nbsp; I mean some death.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Yes, the lamentable deaths of my lord Durrisdeer and his brother,
+the Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles),&rsquo; said Mr.
+Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting.&nbsp; &lsquo;Is that
+it?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;To say truth,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;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).&nbsp; My uncle lived
+when he was a boy in the neighbourhood of St. Bride&rsquo;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.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp; Henry Graeme Durie, the last
+lord, died in 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss Katherine Durie,
+in &lsquo;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.&nbsp; To say truth, it was a letter of my lord&rsquo;s that put
+me on the search for the packet we are going to open this evening.&nbsp;
+Some papers could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M&rsquo;Brair suggesting
+they might be among those sealed up by a Mr. Mackellar.&nbsp; M&rsquo;Brair
+answered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar&rsquo;s
+own hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrative character;
+and besides, said he, &ldquo;I am bound not to open them before the
+year 1889.&rdquo;&nbsp; You may fancy if these words struck me: I instituted
+a hunt through all the M&rsquo;Brair repositories; and at last hit upon
+that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I propose to show you
+at once.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+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:-<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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&rsquo;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,<br>
+<br>
+EPHRAIM MACKELLAR,<br>
+<br>
+<i>For near forty years Land Steward on the<br>
+estates of His Lordship.<br>
+<br>
+</i>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.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Here,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My dear fellow,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;they are just the three
+things that I would rather die than set my hand to.&nbsp; It shall be
+published as it stands.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;But it&rsquo;s so bald,&rsquo; objected Mr. Thomson.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,&rsquo; replied
+I, &lsquo;and I am sure there is nothing so interesting.&nbsp; I would
+have all literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, well,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson, &lsquo;we shall see.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Footnotes:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a>&nbsp; First published
+in the Contemporary Review, April 1885<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a>&nbsp; Milton.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a>&nbsp; Milton.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a>&nbsp; Milton.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a> 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: &lsquo;Hanc
+volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata vagatur.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a>&nbsp; Coleridge.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a>&nbsp; Antony and
+Cleopatra.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a>&nbsp; Cymbeline.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote9"></a><a href="#citation9">{9}</a>&nbsp; The V is
+in &lsquo;of.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote10"></a><a href="#citation10">{10}</a>&nbsp; Troilus
+and Cressida.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote11"></a><a href="#citation11">{11}</a>&nbsp; First
+published in the <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, April 1881.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote12"></a><a href="#citation12">{12}</a>&nbsp; Mr. James
+Payn.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote13"></a><a href="#citation13">{13}</a>&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether
+in Villon, Milton, or Pope.&nbsp; This is, in criticism, the attitude
+we should all seek to preserve; not only in that, but in every branch
+of literary work.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote14"></a><a href="#citation14">{14}</a>&nbsp; First
+published in the <i>British Weekly</i>, May 13, 1887.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote15"></a><a href="#citation15">{15}</a>&nbsp; Of the<i>
+British Weekly.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote16"></a><a href="#citation16">{16}</a>&nbsp; First
+published in the <i>Magazine of Art</i> in 1883.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17"></a><a href="#citation17">{17}</a>&nbsp; First
+published in the <i>Idler</i>, August 1894.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote18"></a><a href="#citation18">{18}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ne
+pas confondre</i>.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote19"></a><a href="#citation19">{19}</a>&nbsp; 1889.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ART OF WRITING ***<br>
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