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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Essays in the Art of Writing, by Robert Louis
Stevenson
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Essays in the Art of Writing
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: October 16, 2012 [eBook #492]
[This file was first posted on February 21, 1996]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h1><span class="GutSmall">ESSAYS IN THE</span><br />
ART OF WRITING</h1>
<p style="text-align: center">BY<br />
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
<img alt=
"Decorative logo"
title=
"Decorative logo"
src="images/p0s.jpg" />
</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="GutSmall">LONDON</span><br />
<span class="GutSmall">CHATTO & WINDUS</span><br />
1905</p>
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p> </p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page3">3</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>The Morality of the Profession of Letters</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page47">47</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>Books which have Influenced Me</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page75">75</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>A Note on Realism</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page93">93</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>My First Book: ‘Treasure Island’</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>The Genesis of ‘The Master of Ballantrae’</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page135">135</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>Preface To ‘The Master of Ballantrae’</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page145">145</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2><a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 3</span>ON SOME
TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE <a
name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3"
class="citation">[3]</a></h2>
<p>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
æsthetics 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 <i>Hudibras</i>, that</p>
<blockquote><p> ‘Still
the less they understand,<br />
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>1. <i>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. 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>2. <i>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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Henry IV.</i>, 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.</p>
<p>3. <i>Rhythm of the Phrase</i>.—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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘All night | the dreàd | less
àn | gel ùn | pursùed,’ <a
name="citation21"></a><a href="#footnote21"
class="citation">[21]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘All night | the dreadless | angel |
unpursued.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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—‘<i>Aut Lacedæmonium
Tarentum</i>,’ for a case in point—I feel as if I
should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of human
verses.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of
arts,’ <a name="citation24"></a><a href="#footnote24"
class="citation">[24]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Mother Athens, eye of Greece,’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>4. <i>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. 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 <i>invita
Minerva</i>, 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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘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.’ <a
name="citation33"></a><a href="#footnote33"
class="citation">[33]</a> 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. <a name="citation34"></a><a href="#footnote34"
class="citation">[34]</a> 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.</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p>‘In Xanady did Kubla Khan</p>
</td>
<td><p>(KĂNDL)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p> A stately pleasure dome decree,</p>
</td>
<td><p>(KDLSR)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>Where Alph the sacred river ran,</p>
</td>
<td><p>(KĂNDLSR)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>Through caverns measureless to man,</p>
</td>
<td><p>(KĂNLSR)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p> Down to a sunless sea.’ <a
name="citation35"></a><a href="#footnote35"
class="citation">[35]</a></p>
</td>
<td><p>(NDLS)</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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* Fumèd
that * per<br />
The wiNds were love-sick with them.’ <a
name="citation36"></a><a href="#footnote36"
class="citation">[36]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It may be asked why I have put the F of
‘perfumèd’ 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson
drops<br />
I’ the bottom of a cowslip.’ <a
name="citation37a"></a><a href="#footnote37a"
class="citation">[37a]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>But in the wind and tempest of her frown,<br />
W. P. V.<a name="citation37b"></a><a href="#footnote37b"
class="citation">[37b]</a> F. (st) (ow)<br />
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan,<br />
W. P. F. (st) (ow) L.</p>
<p>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.’ <a
name="citation38"></a><a href="#footnote38"
class="citation">[38]</a><br />
V. L. M.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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 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’s Kommission, and
were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without
regiments and Kaptains without Kompanies.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><i>Conclusion</i>.—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.</p>
<h2><a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>THE
MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS <a
name="citation47a"></a><a href="#footnote47a"
class="citation">[47a]</a></h2>
<p>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
<a name="citation47b"></a><a href="#footnote47b"
class="citation">[47b]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <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. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Candide</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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. <a
name="citation64"></a><a href="#footnote64"
class="citation">[64]</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <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. 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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The King’s Own</i> or <i>Newton
Forster</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2><a name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 75</span>BOOKS
WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME <a name="citation75a"></a><a
href="#footnote75a" class="citation">[75a]</a></h2>
<p>The Editor <a name="citation75b"></a><a href="#footnote75b"
class="citation">[75b]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>ego</i> 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 <i>Vicomte de
Bragelonne</i>. 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 <i>Pilgrim’s
Progress</i>, a book that breathes of every beautiful and
valuable emotion.</p>
<p>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 <i>Essais</i>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I come next to Whitman’s <i>Leaves of 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. 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.</p>
<p>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 <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. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude
to Herbert Spencer.</p>
<p><i>Goethe’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’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
<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. 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.</p>
<p>This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble
book—the <i>Meditations</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I should never forgive myself if I forgot <i>The
Egoist</i>. 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
<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. 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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Tales of Old Japan</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2><a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 93</span>A NOTE
ON REALISM <a name="citation93"></a><a href="#footnote93"
class="citation">[93]</a></h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>feux-de-joie</i> of literary
tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard
babbling of audible colours and visible sounds.</p>
<p>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 Molière, 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 <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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2><a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 111</span>MY
FIRST BOOK: ‘TREASURE ISLAND’ <a
name="citation111"></a><a href="#footnote111"
class="citation">[111]</a></h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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,’ <a
name="citation112"></a><a href="#footnote112"
class="citation">[112]</a> ‘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.</p>
<p>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—<i>even to begin</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <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! No child but must remember
laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal
forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.</p>
<p>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 <i>Hispaniola</i> 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.</p>
<p>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. 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 <i>Masterman Ready</i>. 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 <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. 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 <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. 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
<i>Walrus</i>—was given at his particular request.
And now who should come dropping in, <i>ex machinâ</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>.
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. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Treasure Island</i> 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
<i>Treasure Island</i> 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 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 <i>Treasure
Island</i>. 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.</p>
<p><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. 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.</p>
<p>But the adventures of <i>Treasure Island</i> 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 <i>Hispaniola</i> 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 <i>forged</i> the
signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy
Bones. But somehow it was never <i>Treasure Island</i> to
me.</p>
<p>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
<i>Buccaneers</i>, the name of the Dead Man’s Chest from
Kingsley’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. 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 <i>Prince 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. 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 <i>The Antiquary</i>. 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>. 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 <i>Treasure Island</i>, it will be found to be a mine
of suggestion.</p>
<h2><a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 135</span>THE
GENESIS OF ‘THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE’</h2>
<p>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
<i>The Phantom Ship</i>. ‘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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. . . .</p>
<h2><a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
145</span>PREFACE TO ‘THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE’ <a
name="citation145"></a><a href="#footnote145"
class="citation">[145]</a></h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘A great deal better than nothing,’ said the
editor. ‘But what is this which is quite in my
way?’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘A mystery?’ I repeated.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more
promising annunciation,’ the other remarked.
‘But what is It?’</p>
<p>‘You remember my predecessor’s, old Peter
M‘Brair’s business?’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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
<i>Memorials</i>, I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy,
I know not what, much later, about a hundred years
ago—‘</p>
<p>‘More than a hundred years ago,’ said Mr.
Thomson. ‘In 1783.’</p>
<p>‘How do you know that? I mean some
death.’</p>
<p>‘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?’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>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,</p>
<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Ephraim
Mackellar</span>,<br />
<i>For near forty years Land Steward on the</i><br />
<i>estates of His Lordship</i>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘But it’s so bald,’ objected Mr.
Thomson.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘Well, well,’ said Mr. Thomson, ‘we shall
see.’</p>
<div class="gapmediumline"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">Printed by T. and A. <span
class="smcap">Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty<br />
at the Edinburgh University Press</p>
<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3"
class="footnote">[3]</a> First published in the
Contemporary Review, April 1885</p>
<p><a name="footnote21"></a><a href="#citation21"
class="footnote">[21]</a> Milton.</p>
<p><a name="footnote24"></a><a href="#citation24"
class="footnote">[24]</a> Milton.</p>
<p><a name="footnote33"></a><a href="#citation33"
class="footnote">[33]</a> Milton.</p>
<p><a name="footnote34"></a><a href="#citation34"
class="footnote">[34]</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:
‘Hanc volo, quæ facilis, quæ palliolata
vagatur.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote35"></a><a href="#citation35"
class="footnote">[35]</a> Coleridge.</p>
<p><a name="footnote36"></a><a href="#citation36"
class="footnote">[36]</a> Antony and Cleopatra.</p>
<p><a name="footnote37a"></a><a href="#citation37a"
class="footnote">[37a]</a> Cymbeline.</p>
<p><a name="footnote37b"></a><a href="#citation37b"
class="footnote">[37b]</a> The V is in
‘of.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote38"></a><a href="#citation38"
class="footnote">[38]</a> Troilus and Cressida.</p>
<p><a name="footnote47a"></a><a href="#citation47a"
class="footnote">[47a]</a> First published in the
<i>Fortnightly Review</i>, April 1881.</p>
<p><a name="footnote47b"></a><a href="#citation47b"
class="footnote">[47b]</a> Mr. James Payn.</p>
<p><a name="footnote64"></a><a href="#citation64"
class="footnote">[64]</a> 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.</p>
<p><a name="footnote75a"></a><a href="#citation75a"
class="footnote">[75a]</a> First published in the
<i>British Weekly</i>, May 13, 1887.</p>
<p><a name="footnote75b"></a><a href="#citation75b"
class="footnote">[75b]</a> Of the <i>British
Weekly</i>.</p>
<p><a name="footnote93"></a><a href="#citation93"
class="footnote">[93]</a> First published in the
<i>Magazine of Art</i> in 1883.</p>
<p><a name="footnote111"></a><a href="#citation111"
class="footnote">[111]</a> First published in the
<i>Idler</i>, August 1894.</p>
<p><a name="footnote112"></a><a href="#citation112"
class="footnote">[112]</a> <i>Ne pas confondre</i>.
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.</p>
<p><a name="footnote145"></a><a href="#citation145"
class="footnote">[145]</a> 1889.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING***</p>
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