summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
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Title: The Art of Writing and Other Essays

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<p>
<a name="startoftext"></a>
Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Contents:<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;On some technical elements of style in literature<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The morality of the profession of letters<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Books which have influenced me<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A note on realism<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;My first book: &lsquo;Treasure Island&rsquo;<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The genesis of &lsquo;the master of Ballantrae&rsquo;<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Preface to &lsquo;the master of Ballantrae&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs
and mechanism of any art.&nbsp; All our arts and occupations lie wholly
on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty,
fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their
emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.&nbsp;
In a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers
an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than
from any poverty native to the mind.&nbsp; And perhaps in aesthetics
the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity
of art seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and
those conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of
the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace
them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer
than we conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature.&nbsp; This
ignorance at least is largely irremediable.&nbsp; We shall never learn
the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far
back in the mysterious history of man.&nbsp; The amateur, in consequence,
will always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated
but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the principle laid down in
<i>Hudibras</i>, that<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Still the less they understand,<br>
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<br>
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the ardour
of their pleasure.&nbsp; I must therefore warn that well-known character,
the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most distasteful
business: taking down the picture from the wall and looking on the back;
and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.<br>
<br>
<i>1.&nbsp; Choice of Words</i>. - The art of literature stands apart
from among its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist
works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness
and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared
to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation.&nbsp;
The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like
the modeller&rsquo;s clay; literature alone is condemned to work in
mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.&nbsp; You have seen these
blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third
a window or a vase.&nbsp; It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size
and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace
of his art.&nbsp; Nor is this all; for since these blocks, or words,
are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible
none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity,
and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable
shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every
word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression,
and convey a definite conventional import.<br>
<br>
Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer, or
the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the apt choice and contrast
of the words employed.&nbsp; It is, indeed, a strange art to take these
blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market or the bar, and
by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and distinctions,
restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue,
or make of them a drum to rouse the passions.&nbsp; But though this
form of merit is without doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is
far from being equally present in all writers.&nbsp; The effect of words
in Shakespeare, their singular justice, significance, and poetic charm,
is different, indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or Fielding.&nbsp;
Or, to take an example nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified
into an energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved;
whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious
enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements
in a general effect.&nbsp; But the first class of writers have no monopoly
of literary merit.&nbsp; There is a sense in which Addison is superior
to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which
Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in the choice of words;
it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force
of intellect, of poetry, or of humour.&nbsp; The three first are but
infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular point of
literary art, excels his superior in the whole.&nbsp; What is that point?<br>
<br>
<i>2.&nbsp; The Web</i>. - Literature, although it stands apart by reason
of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of
men, is yet an art like other arts.&nbsp; Of these we may distinguish
two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which
are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative;
and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient,
and merely presentative.&nbsp; Each class, in right of this distinction,
obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground of existence,
and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive and end of
any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours,
of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical figures, or imitative
lines; but still a pattern.&nbsp; That is the plane on which these sisters
meet; it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should
at times forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligence
to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessary function
of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperative that the pattern
shall be made.<br>
<br>
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern
of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.&nbsp; Communication
may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with
substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the
true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning,
involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases,
shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended
meaning, solve and clear itself.&nbsp; In every properly constructed
sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however
delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the
successive phrases.&nbsp; The pleasure may be heightened by an element
of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis,
or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested
and then deftly evaded.&nbsp; Each phrase, besides, is to be comely
in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence
there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often
disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared,
and hastily and weakly finished.&nbsp; Nor should the balance be too
striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to
interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be
ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect
of an ingenious neatness.<br>
<br>
The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding
him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or
sacrificed.&nbsp; So with the writer.&nbsp; His pattern, which is to
please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first
of all, to the demands of logic.&nbsp; Whatever be the obscurities,
whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness of the fabric
must not suffer, or the artist has been proved unequal to his design.&nbsp;
And, on the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot must
be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what is
wanted to forward and illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is
to swindle in the game.&nbsp; The genius of prose rejects the <i>cheville</i>no
less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the <i>cheville</i>, I
should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or
very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.&nbsp;
Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness,
charm, or emphasis of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness
of the first.<br>
<br>
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to plait
about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more views of
the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts them; and while,
in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary knot,
he will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the meaning,
or to have transacted the work of two sentences in the space of one.&nbsp;
In the change from the successive shallow statements of the old chronicler
to the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative, there
is implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit.&nbsp; The philosophy
we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep
and stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation
and affinity of events.&nbsp; The wit we might imagine to be lost; but
it is not so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances,
these difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two
oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or
not, afford the reader his delight.&nbsp; Nay, and this wit, so little
recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much
admire.&nbsp; That style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools
say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is the disjointed
babble of the chronicler; but which attains the highest degree of elegant
and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with
the greatest gain to sense and vigour.&nbsp; Even the derangement of
the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous for the
mind; and it is by the means of such designed reversal that the elements
of a judgment may be most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a
complicated action most perspicuously bound into one.<br>
<br>
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an
elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation
of the art of literature.&nbsp; Books indeed continue to be read, for
the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly represented,
but still it will be there.&nbsp; And, on the other hand, how many do
we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is
the elegance of texture?&nbsp; I am tempted to mention Cicero; and since
Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will.&nbsp; It is a poor diet for the
mind, a very colourless and toothless &lsquo;criticism of life&rsquo;;
but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and dexterous pattern,
every stitch a model at once of elegance and of good sense; and the
two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable
grace.<br>
<br>
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though in
verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning beauty,
yet in verse it may be dispensed with.&nbsp; You would think that here
was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from that, it is
but a new illustration of the principle involved.&nbsp; For if the versifier
is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern
has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse.&nbsp; For that
is the essence of a prosody.&nbsp; Verse may be rhythmical; it may be
merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi)
regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist
in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea.&nbsp; It
does not matter on what principle the law is based, so it be a law.&nbsp;
It may be pure convention; it may have no inherent beauty; all that
we have a right to ask of any prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern
for the writer, and that what it lays down shall be neither too easy
nor too hard.&nbsp; Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of
equal facility to write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting
prose; for in prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the difficulties
first created before they can be solved.&nbsp; Hence, again, there follows
the peculiar greatness of the true versifier: such as Shakespeare, Milton,
and Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as versifier merely, not as
poet.&nbsp; These not only knit and knot the logical texture of the
style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill
up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but
they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable
to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and
now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and
the verse.&nbsp; Here the sounding line concludes; a little further
on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will
reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.&nbsp; The best that
can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development
of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes
by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease
and nature.&nbsp; The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another
difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.&nbsp; He follows
three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is
of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.&nbsp; Or
if you prefer to return to the juggler, behold him now, to the vastly
increased enthusiasm of the spectators, juggling with three oranges
instead of two.&nbsp; Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty; and
the pattern, with every fresh element, becoming more interesting in
itself.<br>
<br>
Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition; something
is lost as well as something gained; and there remains plainly traceable,
in comparing the best prose with the best verse, a certain broad distinction
of method in the web.&nbsp; Tight as the versifier may draw the knot
of logic, yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the sentence
floating somewhat loose.&nbsp; In prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot,
nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an obtrusive neatness like
a puzzle.&nbsp; The ear remarks and is singly gratified by this return
and balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the measure.&nbsp;
To find comparable passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely
the superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his
more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his inferior.&nbsp;
But let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was
ambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour&rsquo;s Prologue to the
Second Part of <i>Henry IV</i>., a fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
second manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff&rsquo;s praise
of sherris, act iv. scene iii.; or let us compare the beautiful prose
spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for example, the
first speech of all, Orlando&rsquo;s speech to Adam, with what passage
it shall please you to select - the Seven Ages from the same play, or
even such a stave of nobility as Othello&rsquo;s farewell to war; and
still you will be able to perceive, if you have an ear for that class
of music, a certain superior degree of organisation in the prose; a
compacter fitting of the parts; a balance in the swing and the return
as of a throbbing pendulum.&nbsp; We must not, in things temporal, take
from those who have little, the little that they have; the merits of
prose are inferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom,
but an independent.<br>
<br>
<i>3.&nbsp; Rhythm of the Phrase</i>. - Some way back, I used a word
which still awaits an application.&nbsp; Each phrase, I said, was to
be comely; but what is a comely phrase?&nbsp; In all ideal and material
points, literature, being a representative art, must look for analogies
to painting and the like; but in what is technical and executive, being
a temporal art, it must seek for them in music.&nbsp; Each phrase of
each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be so artfully
compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as
to gratify the sensual ear.&nbsp; And of this the ear is the sole judge.&nbsp;
It is impossible to lay down laws.&nbsp; Even in our accentual and rhythmic
language no analysis can find the secret of the beauty of a verse; how
much less, then, of those phrases, such as prose is built of, which
obey no law but to be lawless and yet to please?&nbsp; The little that
we know of verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend Professor
Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting in the present
connection.&nbsp; We have been accustomed to describe the heroic line
as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain and confusion whenever,
as by the conscientious schoolboy, we have heard our own description
put in practice.<br>
<br>
&lsquo;All night | the dre&agrave;d | less &agrave;n | gel &ugrave;n
| purs&ugrave;ed,&rsquo; <a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a><br>
<br>
goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our definition,
in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency.&nbsp; Mr. Jenkin was
not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the heroic line consists
of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four pauses:<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<br>
Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, in this
case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and
the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with no other liberty
but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs.&nbsp;
Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth
orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others.&nbsp;
What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like some
puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in
fives and to read in fours.<br>
<br>
But again, four is not necessary.&nbsp; We do not, indeed, find verses
in six groups, because there is not room for six in the ten syllables;
and we do not find verses of two, because one of the main distinctions
of verse from prose resides in the comparative shortness of the group;
but it is even common to find verses of three.&nbsp; Five is the one
forbidden number; because five is the number of the feet; and if five
were chosen, the two patterns would coincide, and that opposition which
is the life of verse would instantly be lost.&nbsp; We have here a clue
to the effect of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so
common and make so brave an architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable
is a group of Nature&rsquo;s making.&nbsp; If but some Roman would return
from Hades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the
voice these thundering verses should be uttered - &lsquo;<i>Aut</i>
<i>Lacedoe-monium Tarentum</i>,&rsquo; for a case in point - I feel
as if I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of
human verses.<br>
<br>
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by the
mere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a question
of elegance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so; and I am
certain that for choice no two of them should scan the same.&nbsp; The
singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so far as analysis
can carry us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N,
but part to this variety of scansion in the groups.&nbsp; The groups
which, like the bar in music, break up the verse for utterance, fall
uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it may so
happen that we never utter one iambic foot.&nbsp; And yet to this neglect
of the original beat there is a limit.<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,&rsquo; <a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it scarcely
can be said to indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly suggests
no other measure to the ear.&nbsp; But begin<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Mother Athens, eye of Greece,&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<br>
or merely &lsquo;Mother Athens,&rsquo; and the game is up, for the trochaic
beat has been suggested.&nbsp; The eccentric scansion of the groups
is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten,
they cease implicitly to be eccentric.&nbsp; Variety is what is sought;
but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this variety
is lost, and we fall back on sameness.&nbsp; Thus, both as to the arithmetical
measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see
the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition
of two schemes simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart,
though still coincident; and to balance them with such judicial nicety
before the reader, that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally
prevail.<br>
<br>
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate.&nbsp; Here, too, we
write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose
phrase is greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly uttered than
the group in verse; so that not only is there a greater interval of
continuous sound between the pauses, but, for that very reason, word
is linked more readily to word by a more summary enunciation.&nbsp;
Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of the group, and successive
phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm.&nbsp;
The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in
hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all.&nbsp; Prose must be rhythmical,
and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical.&nbsp;
It may be anything, but it must not be verse.&nbsp; A single heroic
line may very well pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of
the prose style; but one following another will produce an instant impression
of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment.&nbsp; The same lines delivered
with the measured utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich in variety.&nbsp;
By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, as to a more distant
vision, these niceties of difference are lost.&nbsp; A whole verse is
uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied by a succession of
groups identical in length.&nbsp; The prose writer, in fact, since he
is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually
fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint
the ear by the trot of an accepted metre.&nbsp; And this obligation
is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which
the prose writer must work into his pattern of words.&nbsp; It may be
thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty;
but such is the inherently rhythmical strain of the English language,
that the bad writer - and must I take for example that admired friend
of my boyhood, Captain Reid? - the inexperienced writer, as Dickens
in his earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any
one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production
of bad blank verse.&nbsp; And here it may be pertinently asked, Why
bad?&nbsp; And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever
made good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise
than trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose.&nbsp; But we can
go beyond such answers.&nbsp; The weak side of verse is the regularity
of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the movement
of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak side, and this alone,
that our careless writer falls.&nbsp; A peculiar density and mass, consequent
on the nearness of the pauses, is one of the chief good qualities of
verse; but this our accidental versifier, still following after the
swift gait and large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire to
imitate.&nbsp; Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he is making
verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract those effects of
counterpoint and opposition which I have referred to as the final grace
and justification of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in particular.<br>
<br>
<i>4.&nbsp; Contents of the Phrase</i>. - Here is a great deal of talk
about rhythm - and naturally; for in our canorous language rhythm is
always at the door.&nbsp; But it must not be forgotten that in some
languages this element is almost, if not quite, extinct, and that in
our own it is probably decaying.&nbsp; The even speech of many educated
Americans sounds the note of danger.&nbsp; I should see it go with something
as bitter as despair, but I should not be desperate.&nbsp; As in verse
no element, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in prose also, other
sorts of beauty will arise and take the place and play the part of those
that we outlive.&nbsp; The beauty of the expected beat in verse, the
beauty in prose of its larger and more lawless melody, patent as they
are to English hearing, are already silent in the ears of our next neighbours;
for in France the oratorical accent and the pattern of the web have
almost or altogether succeeded to their places; and the French prose
writer would be astounded at the labours of his brother across the Channel,
and how a good quarter of his toil, above all <i>invita</i> <i>Minerva</i>,
is to avoid writing verse.&nbsp; So wonderfully far apart have races
wandered in spirit, and so hard it is to understand the literature next
door!<br>
<br>
Yet French prose is distinctly better than English; and French verse,
above all while Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one side.&nbsp;
What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French is easily
distinguishable as comely or uncomely.&nbsp; There is then another element
of comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of
the phrase.&nbsp; Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each
phrase in music consists of notes.&nbsp; One sound suggests, echoes,
demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these
concordances is the final art in literature.&nbsp; It used to be a piece
of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice
was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing.&nbsp; None the less for
that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest
of the blind who will not see.&nbsp; The beauty of the contents of a
phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon
assonance.&nbsp; The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant demands
to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied.&nbsp; You
may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly
pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear;
find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into
congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another.&nbsp;
And you will find another and much stranger circumstance.&nbsp; Literature
is written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive
&lsquo;unheard melodies&rsquo;; and the eye, which directs the pen and
deciphers the printed phrase.&nbsp; Well, even as there are rhymes for
the eye, so you will find that there are assonances and alliterations;
that where an author is running the open A, deceived by the eye and
our strange English spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the
flat A; and that where he is running a particular consonant, he will
not improbably rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or bears
a different value.<br>
<br>
Here, then, we have a fresh pattern - a pattern, to speak grossly, of
letters - which makes the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer,
and the fifth of the versifier.&nbsp; At times it is very delicate and
hard to perceive, and then perhaps most excellent and winning (I say
perhaps); but at times again the elements of this literal melody stand
more boldly forward and usurp the ear.&nbsp; It becomes, therefore,
somewhat a matter of conscience to select examples; and as I cannot
very well ask the reader to help me, I shall do the next best by giving
him the reason or the history of each selection.&nbsp; The two first,
one in prose, one in verse, I chose without previous analysis, simply
as engaging passages that had long re-echoed in my ear.<br>
<br>
&lsquo;I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks
out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without
dust and heat.&rsquo; <a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a>&nbsp;
Down to &lsquo;virtue,&rsquo; the current S and R are both announced
and repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note that almost inseparable
group PVF is given entire. <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a>&nbsp;
The next phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in itself, both S
and R still audible, and B given as the last fulfilment of PVF.&nbsp;
In the next four phrases, from &lsquo;that never&rsquo; down to &lsquo;run
for,&rsquo; the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight repetition
of the F and V, the whole matter turns, almost too obtrusively, on S
and R; first S coming to the front, and then R.&nbsp; In the concluding
phrase all these favourite letters, and even the flat A, a timid preference
for which is just perceptible, are discarded at a blow and in a bundle;
and to make the break more obvious, every word ends with a dental, and
all but one with T, for which we have been cautiously prepared since
the beginning.&nbsp; The singular dignity of the first clause, and this
hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the charm of this exquisite
sentence.&nbsp; But it is fair to own that S and R are used a little
coarsely.<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;In Xanady did Kubla Khan&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
&nbsp; &nbsp;  (KANDL)<br>
A stately pleasure dome decree,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; (KDLSR)<br>
Where Alph the sacred river ran,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  (KANDLSR)<br>
Through caverns measureless to man,&nbsp;  (KANLSR)<br>
Down to a sunless sea.&rsquo; <a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a>&nbsp;
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; (NDLS)<br>
<br>
<br>
Here I have put the analysis of the main group alongside the lines;
and the more it is looked at, the more interesting it will seem.&nbsp;
But there are further niceties.&nbsp; In lines two and four, the current
S is most delicately varied with Z.&nbsp; In line three, the current
flat A is twice varied with the open A, already suggested in line two,
and both times (&lsquo;where&rsquo; and &lsquo;sacred&rsquo;) in conjunction
with the current R.&nbsp; In the same line F and V (a harmony in themselves,
even when shorn of their comrade P) are admirably contrasted.&nbsp;
And in line four there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was announced
in line two.&nbsp; I stop from weariness, for more might yet be said.<br>
<br>
My next example was recently quoted from Shakespeare as an example of
the poet&rsquo;s colour sense.&nbsp; Now, I do not think literature
has anything to do with colour, or poets anyway the better of such a
sense; and I instantly attacked this passage, since &lsquo;purple&rsquo;
was the word that had so pleased the writer of the article, to see if
there might not be some literary reason for its use.&nbsp; It will be
seen that I succeeded amply; and I am bound to say I think the passage
exceptional in Shakespeare - exceptional, indeed, in literature; but
it was not I who chose it.<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe<br>
BURNT oN the water: the POOP was BeateN gold,<br>
PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fum&egrave;d that&nbsp; &nbsp;  * per<br>
The wiNds were love-sick with them.&rsquo; <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
It may be asked why I have put the F of &lsquo;perfum&egrave;d&rsquo;
in capitals; and I reply, because this change from P to F is the completion
of that from B to P, already so adroitly carried out.&nbsp; Indeed,
the whole passage is a monument of curious ingenuity; and it seems scarce
worth while to indicate the subsidiary S, L, and W.&nbsp; In the same
article, a second passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once again as
an example of his colour sense:<br>
<br>
<br>
&lsquo;A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops<br>
I&rsquo; the bottom of a cowslip.&rsquo; <a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth while to analyse
at length: I leave it to the reader.&nbsp; But before I turn my back
on Shakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, for my own pleasure,
and for a very model of every technical art:<br>
<br>
<br>
But in the wind and tempest of her frown,<br>
W. P. V.<a name="citation9"></a><a href="#footnote9">{9}</a> F. (st)
(ow)<br>
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan,<br>
W.P. F. (st) (ow) L.<br>
<br>
Puffing at all, winnows the light away;<br>
W. P. F. L.<br>
And what hath mass and matter by itself<br>
W. F. L. M. A.<br>
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.&rsquo; <a name="citation10"></a><a href="#footnote10">{10}</a><br>
V. L. M.<br>
<br>
<br>
From these delicate and choice writers I turned with some curiosity
to a player of the big drum - Macaulay.&nbsp; I had in hand the two-volume
edition, and I opened at the beginning of the second volume.&nbsp; Here
was what I read:<br>
<br>
&lsquo;The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the
degree of the maladministration which has produced them.&nbsp; It is
therefore not strange that the government of Scotland, having been during
many years greatly more corrupt than the government of England, should
have fallen with a far heavier ruin.&nbsp; The movement against the
last king of the house of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland
destructive.&nbsp; The English complained not of the law, but of the
violation of the law.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old friend PVF, floated by
the liquids in a body; but as I read on, and turned the page, and still
found PVF with his attendant liquids, I confess my mind misgave me utterly.&nbsp;
This could be no trick of Macaulay&rsquo;s; it must be the nature of
the English tongue.&nbsp; In a kind of despair, I turned half-way through
the volume; and coming upon his lordship dealing with General Cannon,
and fresh from Claverhouse and Killiecrankie, here, with elucidative
spelling, was my reward:<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon&rsquo;s Kamp went on inKreasing.&nbsp;
He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advisable
to taKe.&nbsp; But as soon as the Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion
was raised.&nbsp; The army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army.&nbsp;
The recent vKktory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors.&nbsp;
Great chie<i>f</i>s who had brought siKs or Se<i>v</i>en hundred <i>f</i>ighting
men into the <i>f</i>ield did not think it <i>f</i>air that they should
be out<i>v</i>oted by gentlemen <i>f</i>rom Ireland, and <i>f</i>rom
the Low Kountries, who bore indeed King James&rsquo;s Kommission, and
were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments
and Kaptains without Kompanies.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
A moment of FV in all this world of K&rsquo;s!&nbsp; It was not the
English language, then, that was an instrument of one string, but Macaulay
that was an incomparable dauber.<br>
<br>
It was probably from this barbaric love of repeating the same sound,
rather than from any design of clearness, that he acquired his irritating
habit of repeating words; I say the one rather than the other, because
such a trick of the ear is deeper-seated and more original in man than
any logical consideration.&nbsp; Few writers, indeed, are probably conscious
of the length to which they push this melody of letters.&nbsp; One,
writing very diligently, and only concerned about the meaning of his
words and the rhythm of his phrases, was struck into amazement by the
eager triumph with which he cancelled one expression to substitute another.&nbsp;
Neither changed the sense; both being mono-syllables, neither could
affect the scansion; and it was only by looking back on what he had
already written that the mystery was solved: the second word contained
an open A, and for nearly half a page he had been riding that vowel
to the death.<br>
<br>
In practice, I should add, the ear is not always so exacting; and ordinary
writers, in ordinary moments, content themselves with avoiding what
is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare occasion, buttressing a phrase,
or linking two together, with a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle
of alliteration.&nbsp; To understand how constant is this preoccupation
of good writers, even where its results are least obtrusive, it is only
necessary to turn to the bad.&nbsp; There, indeed, you will find cacophony
supreme, the rattle of incongruous consonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking
hiatus, and whole phrases not to be articulated by the powers of man.<br>
<br>
<i>Conclusion</i>. - We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.&nbsp;
We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases
large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them
to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task
of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern,
feet and groups, logic and metre - harmonious in diversity: common to
both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language
into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving
their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods
- but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common
to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.&nbsp;
We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage;
how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon
the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us
so complete a pleasure.&nbsp; From the arrangement of according letters,
which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of
the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure
intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.&nbsp;
We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect
pages rarer.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS <a name="citation11"></a><a href="#footnote11">{11}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The profession of letters has been lately debated in the public prints;
and it has been debated, to put the matter mildly, from a point of view
that was calculated to surprise high-minded men, and bring a general
contempt on books and reading.&nbsp; Some time ago, in particular, a
lively, pleasant, popular writer <a name="citation12"></a><a href="#footnote12">{12}</a>
devoted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, to a very encouraging
view of the profession.&nbsp; We may be glad that his experience is
so cheering, and we may hope that all others, who deserve it, shall
be as handsomely rewarded; but I do not think we need be at all glad
to have this question, so important to the public and ourselves, debated
solely on the ground of money.&nbsp; The salary in any business under
heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question.&nbsp; That you
should continue to exist is a matter for your own consideration; but
that your business should be first honest, and second useful, are points
in which honour and morality are concerned.&nbsp; If the writer to whom
I refer succeeds in persuading a number of young persons to adopt this
way of life with an eye set singly on the livelihood, we must expect
them in their works to follow profit only, and we must expect in consequence,
if he will pardon me the epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty
literature.&nbsp; Of that writer himself I am not speaking: he is diligent,
clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of entertainment, and he
has achieved an amiable popularity which he has adequately deserved.&nbsp;
But the truth is, he does not, or did not when he first embraced it,
regard his profession from this purely mercenary side.&nbsp; He went
into it, I shall venture to say, if not with any noble design, at least
in the ardour of a first love; and he enjoyed its practice long before
he paused to calculate the wage.&nbsp; The other day an author was complimented
on a piece of work, good in itself and exceptionally good for him, and
replied, in terms unworthy of a commercial traveller that as the book
was not briskly selling he did not give a copper farthing for its merit.&nbsp;
It must not be supposed that the person to whom this answer was addressed
received it as a profession of faith; he knew, on the other hand, that
it was only a whiff of irritation; just as we know, when a respectable
writer talks of literature as a way of life, like shoemaking, but not
so useful, that he is only debating one aspect of a question, and is
still clearly conscious of a dozen others more important in themselves
and more central to the matter in hand.&nbsp; But while those who treat
literature in this penny-wise and virtue-foolish spirit are themselves
truly in possession of a better light, it does not follow that the treatment
is decent or improving, whether for themselves or others.&nbsp; To treat
all subjects in the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest
spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer.&nbsp;
If he be well paid, as I am glad to hear he is, this duty becomes the
more urgent, the neglect of it the more disgraceful.&nbsp; And perhaps
there is no subject on which a man should speak so gravely as that industry,
whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life;
which is his tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy,
stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders
of labouring humanity.&nbsp; On that subject alone even to force the
note might lean to virtue&rsquo;s side.&nbsp; It is to be hoped that
a numerous and enterprising generation of writers will follow and surpass
the present one; but it would be better if the stream were stayed, and
the roll of our old, honest English books were closed, than that esurient
book-makers should continue and debase a brave tradition, and lower,
in their own eyes, a famous race.&nbsp; Better that our serene temples
were deserted than filled with trafficking and juggling priests.<br>
<br>
There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life: the first
is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the
industry selected.&nbsp; Literature, like any other art, is singularly
interesting to the artist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among
the arts, it is useful to mankind.&nbsp; These are the sufficient justifications
for any young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life.&nbsp;
I shall not say much about the wages.&nbsp; A writer can live by his
writing.&nbsp; If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously.&nbsp;
The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness
than the quality of his dinner at night.&nbsp; Whatever be your calling,
and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know,
get more by cheating.&nbsp; We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned
about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in
the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of
so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot,
or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career
in which we can do the most and best for mankind.&nbsp; Now Nature,
faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother.&nbsp; A lad, for
some liking to the jingle of words, betakes himself to letters for his
life; by-and-by, when he learns more gravity, he finds that he has chosen
better than he knew; that if he earns little, he is earning it amply;
that if he receives a small wage, he is in a position to do considerable
services; that it is in his power, in some small measure, to protect
the oppressed and to defend the truth.&nbsp; So kindly is the world
arranged, such great profit may arise from a small degree of human reliance
on oneself, and such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade
of writing, that it should combine pleasure and profit to both parties,
and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching.<br>
<br>
This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the four great
elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle,
Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be cowardly to consider
it at first in any lesser aspect.&nbsp; But while we cannot follow these
athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very original,
or very wise, I still contend that, in the humblest sort of literary
work, we have it in our power either to do great harm or great good.&nbsp;
We may seek merely to please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely
to gratify the idle nine days&rsquo; curiosity of our contemporaries;
or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct.&nbsp; In each of these
we shall have to deal with that remarkable art of words which, because
it is the dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the
minds of men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these
branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which
goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling.&nbsp; The total
of a nation&rsquo;s reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly
modifies the total of the nation&rsquo;s speech; and the speech and
reading, taken together, form the efficient educational medium of youth.&nbsp;
A good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air;
but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average
of mediocre characters.&nbsp; The copious Corinthian baseness of the
American reporter or the Parisian <i>chroniquear</i>, both so lightly
readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they touch
upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin
the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds, in an unworthy
spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull people to quote.&nbsp;
The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the rare utterances of
good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered
in broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small volumes,
lies unread upon the shelf.&nbsp; I have spoken of the American and
the French, not because they are so much baser, but so much more readable,
than the English; their evil is done more effectively, in America for
the masses, in French for the few that care to read; but with us as
with them, the duties of literature are daily neglected, truth daily
perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment.&nbsp;
The journalist is not reckoned an important officer; yet judge of the
good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance only:
that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of politics each,
on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for the interest of
its own party, we smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as over
a good joke and pardonable stratagem.&nbsp; Lying so open is scarce
lying, it is true; but one of the things that we profess to teach our
young is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this piece of education
will be crowned with any great success, so long as some of us practise
and the rest openly approve of public falsehood.<br>
<br>
There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the business
of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment.&nbsp;
In every department of literature, though so low as hardly to deserve
the name, truth to the fact is of importance to the education and comfort
of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that the faithful trying to do
so will lend some dignity to the man who tries it.&nbsp; Our judgments
are based upon two things: first, upon the original preferences of our
soul; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God,
man, and the universe which reaches us, in divers manners, from without.&nbsp;
For the most part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that
we learn of past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us
through the medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning
from the same source at second-hand and by the report of him who can.&nbsp;
Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good and
evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who write.&nbsp; Those
who write have to see that each man&rsquo;s knowledge is, as near as
they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not
suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this world for a hell;
nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are concentred in his own
caste or country, or all veracities in his own parochial creed.&nbsp;
Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend;
he must be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others.&nbsp;
It can never be wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable
state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, steering himself, cheering
or reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to his conduct;
and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best
that he should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in
a world made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win his
way to shame or glory.&nbsp; In one word, it must always be foul to
tell what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.&nbsp;
The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody was wanting,
for one man&rsquo;s meat is another man&rsquo;s poison, and I have known
a person who was cheered by the perusal of <i>Candide</i>.&nbsp; Every
fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together; and none that
comes directly in a writer&rsquo;s path but has some nice relations,
unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subject under
hand.&nbsp; Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more necessary
than others, and it is with these that literature must first bestir
itself.&nbsp; They are not hard to distinguish, nature once more easily
leading us; for the necessary, because the efficacious, facts are those
which are most interesting to the natural mind of man.&nbsp; Those which
are coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in morality, and those,
on the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and a part of science,
are alone vital in importance, seizing by their interest, or useful
to communicate.&nbsp; So far as the writer merely narrates, he should
principally tell of these.&nbsp; He should tell of the kind and wholesome
and beautiful elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly of the
evil and sorrow of the present, to move us with instances: he should
tell of wise and good people in the past, to excite us by example; and
of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults,
that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to
our neighbours.&nbsp; So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral
and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought
and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily
supported) on their way to what is true and right.&nbsp; And if, in
any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so if the writers
chose!&nbsp; There is not a life in all the records of the past but,
properly studied, might lend a hint and a help to some contemporary.&nbsp;
There is not a juncture in to-day&rsquo;s affairs but some useful word
may yet be said of it.&nbsp; Even the reporter has an office, and, with
clear eyes and honest language, may unveil injustices and point the
way to progress.&nbsp; And for a last word: in all narration there is
only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact.&nbsp; To be vivid
is a secondary quality which must presuppose the first; for vividly
to convey a wrong impression is only to make failure conspicuous.<br>
<br>
But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled with rage,
tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by each of these the
story will be transformed to something else.&nbsp; The newspapers that
told of the return of our representatives from Berlin, even if they
had not differed as to the facts, would have sufficiently differed by
their spirits; so that the one description would have been a second
ovation, and the other a prolonged insult.&nbsp; The subject makes but
a trifling part of any piece of literature, and the view of the writer
is itself a fact more important because less disputable than the others.&nbsp;
Now this spirit in which a subject is regarded, important in all kinds
of literary work, becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation,
or rhapsody; for there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts;
not only modifies but shapes the work.&nbsp; And hence, over the far
larger proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease
of the writer&rsquo;s mind or momentary humour forms not only the leading
feature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only thing he can communicate
to others.&nbsp; In all works of art, widely speaking, it is first of
all the author&rsquo;s attitude that is narrated, though in the attitude
there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life.&nbsp; An author
who has begged the question and reposes in some narrow faith cannot,
if he would, express the whole or even many of the sides of this various
existence; for, his own life being maim, some of them are not admitted
in his theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his
experience.&nbsp; Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the inhumanity
in works of merely sectarian religion; and hence we find equal although
unsimilar limitation in works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or
the despicable taste for high society.&nbsp; So that the first duty
of any man who is to write is intellectual.&nbsp; Designedly or not,
he has so far set himself up for a leader of the minds of men; and he
must see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright.&nbsp;
Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should
see the good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not
wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should recognise
from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool
is sympathy.&nbsp; <a name="citation13"></a><a href="#footnote13">{13}</a><br>
<br>
The second duty, far harder to define, is moral.&nbsp; There are a thousand
different humours in the mind, and about each of them, when it is uppermost,
some literature tends to be deposited.&nbsp; Is this to be allowed?&nbsp;
Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in more than rigourists
would fancy.&nbsp; It were to be desired that all literary work, and
chiefly works of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent
impulses, whether grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or religious.<br>
<br>
Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane;
some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many tainted with
morbidity and impotence.&nbsp; We do not loathe a masterpiece although
we gird against its blemishes.&nbsp; We are not, above all, to look
for faults, but merits.&nbsp; There is no book perfect, even in design;
but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader.&nbsp;
On the one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only religious poetry on
earth; yet they contain sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood.&nbsp;
On the other hand, Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature;
I am only quoting that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when
I accuse him of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote
was purely creative, he could give us works like <i>Carmosine</i> or<i>
Fantasio</i>, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to
have been found again to touch and please us.&nbsp; When Flaubert wrote
<i>Madame Bovary</i>, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid
realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece
of appalling morality.&nbsp; But the truth is, when books are conceived
under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated
and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being are seized with
such an ample grasp, that, even should the main design be trivial or
base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be expressed.&nbsp; Out of
the strong comes forth sweetness; but an ill thing poorly done is an
ill thing top and bottom.&nbsp; And so this can be no encouragement
to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, who must take their business
conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it.<br>
<br>
Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself and
his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far
more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of
being untrue.&nbsp; To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty
a sentiment; that will not be helpful.&nbsp; To conceal a sentiment,
if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth.&nbsp;
There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains
some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race.&nbsp;
I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am
afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.&nbsp; There is a time to
dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental;
to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a man were
to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion,
that work would be the world&rsquo;s masterpiece of morality as well
as of art.&nbsp; Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that
gives a misleading picture of the world and life.&nbsp; The trouble
is that the weakling must be partial; the work of one proving dank and
depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically
sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic.&nbsp; In literature as in conduct,
you can never hope to do exactly right.&nbsp; All you can do is to make
as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule.&nbsp; Nothing
should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly.&nbsp; It is no use
to write a book and put it by for nine or even ninety years; for in
the writing you will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must
precede any beginning; and if you meditate a work of art, you should
first long roll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like the
flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to
end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you should
first have thought upon the question under all conditions, in health
as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy.&nbsp; It is this
nearness of examination necessary for any true and kind writing, that
makes the practice of the art a prolonged and noble education for the
writer.<br>
<br>
There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in the meantime.&nbsp;
Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or pleasing impressions
is a service to the public.&nbsp; It is even a service to be thankfully
proud of having rendered.&nbsp; The slightest novels are a blessing
to those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater.&nbsp; Our fine
old sea-captain&rsquo;s life was justified when Carlyle soothed his
mind with <i>The</i> <i>King&rsquo;s Own</i> or<i> Newton Forster</i>.&nbsp;
To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct
while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the
other.&nbsp; Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in even
a vapid book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any force
is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies.<br>
<br>
Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every <i>entre-filet</i>,
is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of some portion
of the public, and to colour, however transiently, their thoughts.&nbsp;
When any subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has
the invaluable opportunity of beginning its discussion in a dignified
and human spirit; and if there were enough who did so in our public
press, neither the public nor the Parliament would find it in their
minds to drop to meaner thoughts.&nbsp; The writer has the chance to
stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, something interesting, something
encouraging, were it only to a single reader.&nbsp; He will be unfortunate,
indeed, if he suit no one.&nbsp; He has the chance, besides, to stumble
on something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and for
a dull person to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended
it, makes a marking epoch in his education.<br>
<br>
Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well.&nbsp; And
so, if I were minded to welcome any great accession to our trade, it
should not be from any reason of a higher wage, but because it was a
trade which was useful in a very great and in a very high degree; which
every honest tradesman could make more serviceable to mankind in his
single strength; which was difficult to do well and possible to do better
every year; which called for scrupulous thought on the part of all who
practised it, and hence became a perpetual education to their nobler
natures; and which, pay it as you please, in the large majority of the
best cases will still be underpaid.&nbsp; For surely, at this time of
day in the nineteenth century, there is nothing that an honest man should
fear more timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME <a name="citation14"></a><a href="#footnote14">{14}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The Editor <a name="citation15"></a><a href="#footnote15">{15}</a> has
somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the question
put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep.&nbsp; It
is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the
writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of
autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that
little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all
lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to
be.&nbsp; But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should,
if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little,
and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door
of the person who entrapped me.<br>
<br>
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
of fiction.&nbsp; They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
he must afterwards unlearn.&nbsp; They repeat, they rearrange, they
clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web
of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular
change - that monstrous, consuming <i>ego</i> of ours being, for the
nonce, struck out.&nbsp; To be so, they must be reasonably true to the
human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.&nbsp;
But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and
romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet
generous and pious characters.&nbsp; Shakespeare has served me best.&nbsp;
Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good
as Hamlet or Rosalind.&nbsp; The last character, already well beloved
in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable
hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons.&nbsp; Nothing has ever more moved,
more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed
away.&nbsp; Kent&rsquo;s brief speech over the dying Lear had a great
effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long,
so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering
in expression.&nbsp; Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare
is D&rsquo;Artagnan - the elderly D&rsquo;Artagnan of the <i>Vicomte
de Bragelonne</i>.&nbsp; I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way,
a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant
in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers.&nbsp;
Lastly, I must name the <i>Pilgrim&rsquo;s Progress</i>, a book that
breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.<br>
<br>
But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound
and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we
drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how.&nbsp;
It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the
effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare.&nbsp; A book which has
been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand
first, though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and
perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the
<i>Essais</i> of Montaigne.&nbsp; That temperate and genial picture
of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day;
they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom,
all of an antique strain; they will have their &lsquo;linen decencies&rsquo;
and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of
reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse
and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they
will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer
fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or
their contemporaries.<br>
<br>
The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament,
and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew.&nbsp; I believe
it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort
of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully
like a portion of the Bible.&nbsp; Any one would then be able to see
in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and
all modestly refrain from applying.&nbsp; But upon this subject it is
perhaps better to be silent.<br>
<br>
I come next to Whitman&rsquo;s <i>Leaves of</i> <i>Grass</i>, a book
of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for
me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion,
and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon
a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues.&nbsp; But
it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.&nbsp;
I will be very frank - I believe it is so with all good books except,
perhaps, fiction.&nbsp; The average man lives, and must live, so wholly
in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose
than to invigorate his creed.&nbsp; Either he cries out upon blasphemy
and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths
and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced
by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and
indecent himself.&nbsp; New truth is only useful to supplement the old;
rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and
often elegant conventions.&nbsp; He who cannot judge had better stick
to fiction and the daily papers.&nbsp; There he will get little harm,
and, in the first at least, some good.<br>
<br>
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence
of Herbert Spencer.&nbsp; No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better.&nbsp;
How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much
is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire.&nbsp; But
his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his
pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic
symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a <i>caput mortuum</i>
of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its
essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual
vigour makes him a bracing, writer.&nbsp; I should be much of a hound
if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.<br>
<br>
<i>Goethe&rsquo;s Life</i>, by Lewes, had a great importance for me
when it first fell into my hands - a strange instance of the partiality
of man&rsquo;s good and man&rsquo;s evil.&nbsp; I know no one whom I
less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius,
breaking open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends,
in that crowning offence of <i>Werther</i>, and in his own character
a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior
talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties
of his office.&nbsp; And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his
honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained!&nbsp;
Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform
for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly
mingled tissue of man&rsquo;s nature, and how huge faults and shining
virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character.&nbsp; History serves
us well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the
popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to
make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity
of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognise their
own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under
strange names, often interchanged.&nbsp; Martial is a poet of no good
repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately,
and find in this unseemly jester&rsquo;s serious passages the image
of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman.&nbsp; It is customary,
I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I
never heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and this
partiality is one among a thousand things that help to build up our
distorted and hysterical conception of the great Roman Empire.<br>
<br>
This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book - the <i>Meditations</i>
of Marcus Aurelius.&nbsp; The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness
of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were
practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book
a book quite by itself.&nbsp; No one can read it and not be moved.&nbsp;
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings - those very mobile,
those not very trusty parts of man.&nbsp; Its address lies further back:
its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away
with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched
a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there
is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the
love of virtue.<br>
<br>
Wordsworth should perhaps come next.&nbsp; Every one has been influenced
by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how.&nbsp; A certain
innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, &lsquo;the
silence that is in the lonely hills,&rsquo; something of the cold thrill
of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what
is best in us.&nbsp; I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need
not - Mill did not - agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the
spell is cast.&nbsp; Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is
only a new error - the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated
is a perpetual possession.&nbsp; These best teachers climb beyond teaching
to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves,
that they communicate.<br>
<br>
I should never forgive myself if I forgot <i>The Egoist</i>.&nbsp; It
is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from
all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place
by itself.&nbsp; Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book
to send the blood into men&rsquo;s faces.&nbsp; Satire, the angry picture
of human faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour;
what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious,
but his merits, to which we are too blind.&nbsp; And <i>The Egoist</i>
is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular
quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged
from first to last with that invisible beam.&nbsp; It is yourself that
is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the
day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision.&nbsp;
A young friend of Mr. Meredith&rsquo;s (as I have the story) came to
him in an agony.&nbsp; &lsquo;This is too bad of you,&rsquo; he cried.&nbsp;
&lsquo;Willoughby is me!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;No, my dear fellow,&rsquo;
said the author; &lsquo;he is all of us.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
I have read <i>The Egoist</i> five or six times myself, and I mean to
read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote - I think
Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.<br>
<br>
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that
was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and
Hazlitt, whose paper &lsquo;On the Spirit of Obligations&rsquo; was
a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms
had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford&rsquo;s <i>Tales</i>
<i>of Old Japan</i>, wherein I learned for the first time the proper
attitude of any rational man to his country&rsquo;s laws - a secret
found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands.&nbsp; That I should commemorate
all is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask.&nbsp; It will be
more to the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to
say a word or two about the improvable reader.&nbsp; The gift of reading,
as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood.&nbsp;
It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment - a free
grace, I find I must call it - by which a man rises to understand that
he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely
wrong.&nbsp; He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and
he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently,
or hold them not at all.&nbsp; Well, if he has the gift of reading,
these others will be full of meat for him.&nbsp; They will see the other
side of propositions and the other side of virtues.&nbsp; He need not
change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma,
and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it.&nbsp; A human
truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it
displays.&nbsp; It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to
us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences.&nbsp; Something that seems
quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the
test of a reader.&nbsp; If he tries to see what it means, what truth
excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read.&nbsp; If he is merely
hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author&rsquo;s folly, he had
better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.<br>
<br>
And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down
my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite.&nbsp; For, after all,
we are vessels of a very limited content.&nbsp; Not all men can read
all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed
food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves
welcome to the mind.&nbsp; A writer learns this early, and it is his
chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure
at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of
a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service;
but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any
genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which
suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one
who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate,
falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
A NOTE ON REALISM <a name="citation16"></a><a href="#footnote16">{16}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who
does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still
the one quality in which he may improve himself at will.&nbsp; Passion,
wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted
in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated.&nbsp;
But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion
of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless,
the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform
character from end to end - these, which taken together constitute technical
perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual
courage.&nbsp; What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular
fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be
purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design;
and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly
and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic
style continually rearising.&nbsp; And the sphinx that patrols the highways
of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound.<br>
<br>
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great change
of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail.&nbsp;
It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic
Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like
a duty on the novelist.&nbsp; For some time it signified and expressed
a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man&rsquo;s life; but
it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical
and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call
survival.&nbsp; With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid begin
to fall a little back from these extremities; they begin to aspire after
a more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified,
and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of
this baggage of detail.&nbsp; After Scott we beheld the starveling story
- once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable&nbsp; - begin
to be pampered upon facts.&nbsp; The introduction of these details developed
a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged,
has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey.&nbsp; A
man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical
successes.&nbsp; To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he
adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid.&nbsp;
That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests
the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed
as a principle, to degenerate into mere<i> feux-de-joie</i> of literary
tricking.&nbsp; The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling
of audible colours and visible sounds.<br>
<br>
This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us
of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics.&nbsp;
All representative art, which can be said to live, is both realistic
and ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely
of externals.&nbsp; It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity,
but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has made us turn our back upon
the larger, more various, and more romantic art of yore.&nbsp; A photographic
exactitude in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion; but even in the
ablest hands it tells us no more - I think it even tells us less - than
Moli&egrave;re, wielding his artificial medium, has told to us and to
all time of Alceste or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale.&nbsp; The historical
novel is forgotten.&nbsp; Yet truth to the conditions of man&rsquo;s
nature and the conditions of man&rsquo;s life, the truth of literary
art, is free of the ages.&nbsp; It may be told us in a carpet comedy,
in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale.&nbsp; The scene may be pitched
in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the mountains of
Beulah.&nbsp; And by an odd and luminous accident, if there is any page
of literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that
<i>Troilus and Cressida</i> which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly
anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy.<br>
<br>
This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards
not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical
method, of a work of art.&nbsp; Be as ideal or as abstract as you please,
you will be none the less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the
risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong and
honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece.<br>
<br>
A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period
of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists,
puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless,
but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human mind, a perfected
design.&nbsp; On the approach to execution all is changed.&nbsp; The
artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan.&nbsp;
He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, to
the touch of matter; he must decide, almost in a breath, the scale,
the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his whole
design.<br>
<br>
The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical preoccupation
stands them instead of some robuster principle of life.&nbsp; And with
these the execution is but play; for the stylistic problem is resolved
beforehand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully foregone.&nbsp;
Such are the verses, intricately designed, which we have learnt to admire,
with a certain smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr.
Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity or even breadth
of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of design.&nbsp;
So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin to write <i>Esmond</i>
than <i>Vanity Fair</i>, since, in the first, the style was dictated
by the nature of the plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence
of mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort.&nbsp;
But the case is exceptional.&nbsp; Usually in all works of art that
have been conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from
the author&rsquo;s mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is
one of extreme perplexity and strain.&nbsp; Artists of indifferent energy
and an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful effort
once for all; and, having formed a style, adhere to it through life.&nbsp;
But those of a higher order cannot rest content with a process which,
as they continue to employ it, must infallibly degenerate towards the
academic and the cut-and-dried.&nbsp; Every fresh work in which they
embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of the whole forces of their
mind; and the changing views which accompany the growth of their experience
are marked by still more sweeping alterations in the manner of their
art.&nbsp; So that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the
varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven.<br>
<br>
It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive moment when
execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a less degree, that the
ideal and the real do indeed, like good and evil angels, contend for
the direction of the work.&nbsp; Marble, paint, and language, the pen,
the needle, and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable
impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordination.&nbsp;
It is the work and it is a great part of the delight of any artist to
contend with these unruly tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty
expedient, to drive and coax them to effect his will.&nbsp; Given these
means, so laughably inadequate, and given the interest, the intensity,
and the multiplicity of the actual sensation whose effect he is to render
with their aid, the artist has one main and necessary resource which
he must, in every case and upon any theory, employ.&nbsp; He must, that
is, suppress much and omit more.&nbsp; He must omit what is tedious
or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and necessary.&nbsp; But
such facts as, in regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes,
he will perforce and eagerly retain.&nbsp; And it is the mark of the
very highest order of creative art to be woven exclusively of such.&nbsp;
There, any fact that is registered is contrived a double or a treble
debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its place, and a pillar in
the main design.&nbsp; Nothing would find room in such a picture that
did not serve, at once, to complete the composition, to accentuate the
scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes of distance, and to strike
the note of the selected sentiment; nothing would be allowed in such
a story that did not, at the same time, expedite the progress of the
fable, build up the characters, and strike home the moral or the philosophical
design.&nbsp; But this is unattainable.&nbsp; As a rule, so far from
building the fabric of our works exclusively with these, we are thrown
into a rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a score of them,
to be the plums of our confection.&nbsp; And hence, in order that the
canvas may be filled or the story proceed from point to point, other
details must be admitted.&nbsp; They must be admitted, alas! upon a
doubtful title; many without marriage robes.&nbsp; Thus any work of
art, as it proceeds towards completion, too often - I had almost written
always - loses in force and poignancy of main design.&nbsp; Our little
air is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our
little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence
or slipshod talk.<br>
<br>
But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those particulars which
we know we can describe; and hence those most of all which, having been
described very often, have grown to be conventionally treated in the
practice of our art.&nbsp; These we choose, as the mason chooses the
acanthus to adorn his capital, because they come naturally to the accustomed
hand.&nbsp; The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship
and schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would
long have been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made
but not perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises,
and wean us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice
of art.&nbsp; To struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions,
and give expression to facts which have not yet been adequately or not
yet elegantly expressed, is to run a little upon the danger of extreme
self-love.&nbsp; Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and
the artist may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists,
and consider any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground of
brilliant handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern landscape-painter,
who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed
can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath
of art - charm.&nbsp; A little further, and he will regard charm in
the light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of
a tedious passage as an infidelity to art.<br>
<br>
We have now the matter of this difference before us.&nbsp; The idealist,
his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill
up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched,
soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect.&nbsp; But the realist,
with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so
dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from
nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye.&nbsp; The style
that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its
necessary disabilities and dangers.&nbsp; The immediate danger of the
realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of the whole to
local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate
his readers under facts; but he comes in the last resort, and as his
energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all choice, and, with
scientific thoroughness, steadily to communicate matter which is not
worth learning.&nbsp; The danger of the idealist is, of course, to become
merely null and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion.<br>
<br>
We talk of bad and good.&nbsp; Everything, indeed, is good which is
conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour.&nbsp;
But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every
case the artist must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh
for each succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing may be generally
said, that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing
as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err
upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal.&nbsp; Upon
that theory it may be well to watch and correct our own decisions, always
holding back the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity,
and resolutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate,
dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in
design.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
MY FIRST BOOK: &lsquo;TREASURE ISLAND&rsquo; <a name="citation17"></a><a href="#footnote17">{17}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist
alone.&nbsp; But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public,
regards what else I have written with indifference, if not aversion;
if it call upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indelible
character; and when I am asked to talk of my first book, no question
in the world but what is meant is my first novel.<br>
<br>
Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel.&nbsp;
It seems vain to ask why.&nbsp; Men are born with various manias: from
my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary
series of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good
friend to the paper-makers.&nbsp; Reams upon reams must have gone to
the making of &lsquo;Rathillet,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Pentland Rising,&rsquo;
<a name="citation18"></a><a href="#footnote18">{18}</a> &lsquo;The King&rsquo;s
Pardon&rsquo; (otherwise &lsquo;Park Whitehead&rsquo;), &lsquo;Edward
Daven,&rsquo; &lsquo;A Country Dance,&rsquo; and &lsquo;A Vendetta in
the West&rsquo;; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams
are now all ashes, and have been received again into the soil.&nbsp;
I have named but a few of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as
came to a fair bulk ere they were desisted from; and even so they cover
a long vista of years.&nbsp; &lsquo;Rathillet&rsquo; was attempted before
fifteen, &lsquo;The Vendetta&rsquo; at twenty-nine, and the succession
of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one.&nbsp; By that time,
I had written little books and little essays and short stories; and
had got patted on the back and paid for them - though not enough to
live upon.&nbsp; I had quite a reputation, I was the successful man;
I passed my days in toil, the futility of which would sometimes make
my cheek to burn - that I should spend a man&rsquo;s energy upon this
business, and yet could not earn a livelihood: and still there shone
ahead of me an unattained ideal: although I had attempted the thing
with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written
a novel.&nbsp; All - all my pretty ones - had gone for a little, and
then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy&rsquo;s watch.&nbsp; I might
be compared to a cricketer of many years&rsquo; standing who should
never have made a run.&nbsp; Anybody can write a short story - a bad
one, I mean - who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every
one may hope to write even a bad novel.&nbsp; It is the length that
kills.<br>
<br>
The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days
upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot.&nbsp;
Not so the beginner.&nbsp; Human nature has certain rights; instinct
- the instinct of self-preservation - forbids that any man (cheered
and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure
the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured
in weeks.&nbsp; There must be something for hope to feed upon.&nbsp;
The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running,
he must be in one of those hours when the words come and the phrases
balance of themselves - <i>even to begin</i>.&nbsp; And having begun,
what a dread looking forward is that until the book shall be accomplished!&nbsp;
For so long a time, the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to
keep running, for so long a time you must keep at command the same quality
of style: for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always
consistent, always vigorous!&nbsp; I remember I used to look, in those
days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a
feat - not possibly of literature - but at least of physical and moral
endurance and the courage of Ajax.<br>
<br>
In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird,
above Pitlochry.&nbsp; Then I walked on the red moors and by the side
of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains inspirited,
if it did not inspire us, and my wife and I projected a joint volume
of logic stories, for which she wrote &lsquo;The Shadow on the Bed,&rsquo;
and I turned out &lsquo;Thrawn Janet,&rsquo; and a first draft of &lsquo;The
Merry Men.&rsquo;&nbsp; I love my native air, but it does not love me;
and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister, and
a migration by Strathairdle and Glenshee to the Castleton of Braemar.<br>
<br>
There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native air
was more unkind than man&rsquo;s ingratitude, and I must consent to
pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriously
known as the Late Miss McGregor&rsquo;s Cottage.&nbsp; And now admire
the finger of predestination.&nbsp; There was a schoolboy in the Late
Miss McGregor&rsquo;s Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want
of &lsquo;something craggy to break his mind upon.&rsquo;&nbsp; He had
no thought of literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his
fleeting suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box
of water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture
gallery.&nbsp; My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be
showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so
to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous
emulation, making coloured drawings.&nbsp; On one of these occasions,
I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully
coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained
harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness
of the predestined, I ticketed my performance &lsquo;Treasure Island.&rsquo;&nbsp;
I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard
to believe.&nbsp; The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses
of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly
traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds
and the ferries, perhaps the <i>Standing Stone</i> or the <i>Druidic
Circle</i> on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for
any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand
with!&nbsp; No child but must remember laying his head in the grass,
staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with
fairy armies.<br>
<br>
Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of &lsquo;Treasure Island,&rsquo;
the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among
imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out
upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting
and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.&nbsp;
The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out
a list of chapters.&nbsp; How often have I done so, and the thing gone
no further!&nbsp; But there seemed elements of success about this enterprise.&nbsp;
It was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing;
and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone.&nbsp; Women were excluded.&nbsp;
I was unable to handle a brig (which the <i>Hispaniola</i> should have
been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without
public shame.&nbsp;  And then I had an idea for John Silver from which
I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend
of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as I
do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of
temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage,
his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express
these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin.&nbsp; Such psychical
surgery is, I think, a common way of &lsquo;making character&rsquo;;
perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.&nbsp; We can put in the quaint
figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside;
but do we know him?&nbsp; Our friend, with his infinite variety and
flexibility, we know - but can we put him in?&nbsp; Upon the first,
we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong;
from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless
arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that
remain we may at least be fairly sure of.<br>
<br>
On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the
rain drumming on the window, I began <i>The Sea Cook</i>, for that was
the original title.&nbsp; I have begun (and finished) a number of other
books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more
complacency.&nbsp; It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are
proverbially sweet.&nbsp; I am now upon a painful chapter.&nbsp; No
doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe.&nbsp; No doubt the
skeleton is conveyed from Poe.&nbsp; I think little of these, they are
trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons
or make a corner in talking birds.&nbsp; The stockade, I am told, is
from <i>Masterman Ready</i>.&nbsp; It may be, I care not a jot.&nbsp;
These useful writers had fulfilled the poet&rsquo;s saying: departing,
they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints
which perhaps another - and I was the other!&nbsp; It is my debt to
Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I
believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther.&nbsp; I chanced to pick
up the <i>Tales of a Traveller</i> some years ago with a view to an
anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy
Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit,
and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters - all were
there, all were the property of Washington Irving.&nbsp; But I had no
guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the
spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day,
after lunch, as I read aloud my morning&rsquo;s work to the family.&nbsp;
It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right
eye.&nbsp; I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience.&nbsp;
My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness
of his original nature.&nbsp; His own stories, that every night of his
life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside
inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era
of steam.&nbsp; He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man
did not require to!&nbsp; But in <i>Treasure Island</i> he recognised
something kindred to his own imagination; it was <i>his</i> kind of
picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but
set himself acting to collaborate.&nbsp; When the time came for Billy
Bones&rsquo;s chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better
part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory
of its contents, which I exactly followed; and the name of &lsquo;Flint&rsquo;s
old ship&rsquo; - the <i>Walrus</i> - was given at his particular request.&nbsp;
And now who should come dropping in, <i>ex machin&acirc;</i>, but Dr.
Japp, like the disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain upon
peace and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not
a horn or a talisman, but a publisher - had, in fact, been charged by
my old friend, Mr. Henderson, to unearth new writers for <i>Young Folks</i>.&nbsp;
Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme
measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of <i>The Sea
Cook</i>; at the same time, we would by no means stop our readings;
and accordingly the tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly
re-delivered for the benefit of Dr. Japp.&nbsp; From that moment on,
I have thought highly of his critical faculty; for when he left us,
he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau.<br>
<br>
Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a
positive engagement.&nbsp; I had chosen besides a very easy style.&nbsp;
Compare it with the almost contemporary &lsquo;Merry Men&rsquo;, one
reader may prefer the one style, one the other - &rsquo;tis an affair
of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the
one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain.&nbsp;
It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage
to turn out <i>Treasure Island</i> at so many pages a day, and keep
his pipe alight.&nbsp; But alas! this was not my case.&nbsp; Fifteen
days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the
early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold.&nbsp; My
mouth was empty; there was not one word of <i>Treasure Island</i> in
my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting
me at the &lsquo;Hand and Spear&rsquo;!&nbsp; Then I corrected them,
living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in
dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and
more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for
me to do.&nbsp; I was thirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had
lost my health; I had never yet paid my way, never yet made &pound;200
a year; my father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book
that was judged a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco?&nbsp;
I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during
the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution
to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of M. de Boisgobey.&nbsp;
Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished
tale; and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second
tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a day,
I finished <i>Treasure Island</i>.&nbsp; It had to be transcribed almost
exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained alone of the faithful;
and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly mentioned what I was engaged
on) looked on me askance.&nbsp; He was at that time very eager I should
write on the characters of Theophrastus: so far out may be the judgments
of the wisest men.&nbsp; But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant
to go to for sympathy on a boy&rsquo;s story.&nbsp; He was large-minded;
&lsquo;a full man,&rsquo; if there was one; but the very name of my
enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and
solecisms of style.&nbsp; Well! he was not far wrong.<br>
<br>
<i>Treasure Island</i> - it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first
title, <i>The Sea Cook</i> - appeared duly in the story paper, where
it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not
the least attention.&nbsp; I did not care.&nbsp; I liked the tale myself,
for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my
kind of picturesque.&nbsp; I was not a little proud of John Silver,
also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.&nbsp;
What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had
finished a tale, and written &lsquo;The End&rsquo; upon my manuscript,
as I had not done since &lsquo;The Pentland Rising,&rsquo; when I was
a boy of sixteen not yet at college.&nbsp; In truth it was so by a set
of lucky accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the
tale flowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid aside
like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to
the fire.&nbsp; Purists may suggest it would have been better so.&nbsp;
I am not of that mind.&nbsp; The tale seems to have given much pleasure,
and it brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine
to a deserving family in which I took an interest.&nbsp; I need scarcely
say I mean my own.<br>
<br>
But the adventures of <i>Treasure Island</i> are not yet quite at an
end.&nbsp; I had written it up to the map.&nbsp; The map was the chief
part of my plot.&nbsp; For instance, I had called an islet &lsquo;Skeleton
Island,&rsquo; not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate
picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery
of Mr. Poe and stole Flint&rsquo;s pointer.&nbsp; And in the same way,
it was because I had made two harbours that the <i>Hispaniola</i> was
sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands.&nbsp; The time came when it
was decided to republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along
with it, to Messrs. Cassell.&nbsp; The proofs came, they were corrected,
but I heard nothing of the map.&nbsp; I wrote and asked; was told it
had never been received, and sat aghast.&nbsp; It is one thing to draw
a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write
up a story to the measurements.&nbsp; It is quite another to have to
examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained
in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit
the data.&nbsp; I did it; and the map was drawn again in my father&rsquo;s
office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and
my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing,
and elaborately <i>forged</i> the signature of Captain Flint, and the
sailing directions of Billy Bones.&nbsp; But somehow it was never <i>Treasure
Island</i> to me.<br>
<br>
I have said the map was the most of the plot.&nbsp; I might almost say
it was the whole.&nbsp; A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington
Irving, a copy of Johnson&rsquo;s <i>Buccaneers</i>, the name of the
Dead Man&rsquo;s Chest from Kingsley&rsquo;s <i>At Last</i>, some recollections
of canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite,
eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials.&nbsp; It is,
perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is
always important.&nbsp; The author must know his countryside, whether
real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass,
the place of the sun&rsquo;s rising, the behaviour of the moon, should
all be beyond cavil.&nbsp; And how troublesome the moon is!&nbsp; I
have come to grief over the moon in <i>Prince</i> <i>Otto</i>, and so
soon as that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend
to other men - I never write now without an almanack.&nbsp; With an
almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either
actually plotted on paper or already and immediately apprehended in
the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders.&nbsp;
With the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the
east, as it does in <i>The Antiquary</i>.&nbsp; With the almanack at
hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent
affair, to employ six days, from three of the Monday morning till late
in the Saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles,
and before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty
in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of <i>Rob
Roy</i>.&nbsp; And it is certainly well, though far from necessary,
to avoid such &lsquo;croppers.&rsquo;&nbsp; But it is my contention
- my superstition, if you like - that who is faithful to his map, and
consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains
positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident.&nbsp;
The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of
its own behind the words.&nbsp; Better if the country be real, and he
has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone.&nbsp; But even
with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a
map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought
upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints
for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was
in <i>Treasure Island</i>, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE GENESIS OF &lsquo;THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac.&nbsp; It was winter; the night
was very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with
the purity of forests.&nbsp; From a good way below, the river was to
be heard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered
unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense
of isolation.&nbsp; For the making of a story here were fine conditions.&nbsp;
I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished
my third or fourth perusal of <i>The Phantom Ship</i>.&nbsp; &lsquo;Come,&rsquo;
said I to my engine, &lsquo;let us make a tale, a story of many years
and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a
story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in
the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and
admiring.&rsquo;&nbsp; I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly
just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by.&nbsp;
I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited
by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared
his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains,
if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece
of my own meditated fiction.&nbsp; In the course of this vain search
there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and resuscitated
fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately
dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.<br>
<br>
On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below
zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had
seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the
Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border.&nbsp;
Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two countries,
two of the ends of the earth involved: and thus though the notion of
the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general acceptation,
or even (as I have since found) acceptability, it fitted at once with
my design of a tale of many lands; and this decided me to consider further
of its possibilities.&nbsp; The man who should thus be buried was the
first question: a good man, whose return to life would be hailed by
the reader and the other characters with gladness?&nbsp; This trenched
upon the Christian picture, and was dismissed.&nbsp; If the idea, then,
was to be of any use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius
to his friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and
make this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American
wilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series.&nbsp; I need not
tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most interesting
moment of an author&rsquo;s life; the hours that followed that night
upon the balcony, and the following nights and days, whether walking
abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of unadulterated joy.&nbsp;
My mother, who was then living with me alone, perhaps had less enjoyment;
for, in the absence of my wife, who is my usual helper in these times
of parturition, I must spur her up at all seasons to hear me relate
and try to clarify my unformed fancies.<br>
<br>
And while I was groping for the fable and the character required, behold
I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory.&nbsp; Pease
porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years
old.&nbsp; Was there ever a more complete justification of the rule
of Horace?&nbsp; Here, thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled
on the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase)
the Curtain or final Tableau of a story conceived long before on the
moors between Pitlochry and Strathardle, conceived in Highland rain,
in the blend of the smell of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind
full of the Athole correspondence and the memories of the dumlicide
Justice.&nbsp; So long ago, so far away it was, that I had first evoked
the faces and the mutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.<br>
<br>
My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being
all obligatory scenes.&nbsp; But of these India was strange to me except
in books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member
of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to all seeing) equally
accidental with myself.&nbsp; It was plain, thus far, that I should
have to get into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness;
and I believe this first suggested to me the idea of the Chevalier Burke
for a narrator.&nbsp; It was at first intended that he should be Scottish,
and I was then filled with fears that he might prove only the degraded
shadow of my own Alan Breck.&nbsp; Presently, however, it began to occur
to me it would be like my Master to curry favour with the Prince&rsquo;s
Irishmen; and that an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to
find himself in India with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally.&nbsp;
Irish, therefore, I decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden,
I was aware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon.&nbsp;
No man (in Lord Foppington&rsquo;s phrase) of a nice morality could
go very deep with my Master: in the original idea of this story conceived
in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended to be worse than
the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant) he was to visit Scotland;
if I took an Irishman, and a very bad Irishman, in the midst of the
eighteenth century, how was I to evade Barry Lyndon?&nbsp; The wretch
besieged me, offering his services; he gave me excellent references;
he proved that he was highly fitted for the work I had to do; he, or
my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to disguise his ancient livery
wit a little lace and a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray himself
should hardly recognise him.&nbsp; And then of a sudden there came to
me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and
had spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very desolate
coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraordinary
moral simplicity - almost vacancy; plastic to any influence, the creature
of his admirations: and putting such a youth in fancy into the career
of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn
as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in place of entering into competition with
the Master, would afford a slight though a distinct relief.&nbsp; I
know not if I have done him well, though his moral dissertations always
highly entertained me: but I own I have been surprised to find that
he reminded some critics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . .<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
PREFACE TO &lsquo;THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE&rsquo; <a name="citation19"></a><a href="#footnote19">{19}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following pages
revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a native; and
there are few things more strange, more painful, or more salutary, than
such revisitations.&nbsp; Outside, in foreign spots, he comes by surprise
and awakens more attention than he had expected; in his own city, the
relation is reversed, and he stands amazed to be so little recollected.&nbsp;
Elsewhere he is refreshed to see attractive faces, to remark possible
friends; there he scouts the long streets, with a pang at heart, for
the faces and friends that are no more.&nbsp; Elsewhere he is delighted
with the presence of what is new, there tormented by the absence of
what is old.&nbsp; Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there
he is smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and for what
he once hoped to be.<br>
<br>
He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on his
last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of his
friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay.&nbsp;
A hearty welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words that sounded
of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in passing of the
snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis on the dining-room
wall, brought him to his bed-room with a somewhat lightened cheer, and
when he and Mr. Thomson sat down a few minutes later, cheek by jowl,
and pledged the past in a preliminary bumper, he was already almost
consoled, he had already almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable
errors, that he should ever have left his native city, or ever returned
to it.<br>
<br>
&lsquo;I have something quite in your way,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp;
&lsquo;I wished to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow,
it is my own youth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered
and withered state, to be sure, but - well! - all that&rsquo;s left
of it.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;A great deal better than nothing,&rsquo; said the editor.&nbsp;
&lsquo;But what is this which is quite in my way?&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;I was coming to that,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson: &lsquo;Fate has
put it in my power to honour your arrival with something really original
by way of dessert.&nbsp; A mystery.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;A mystery?&rsquo; I repeated.<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said his friend, &lsquo;a mystery.&nbsp; It may prove
to be nothing, and it may prove to be a great deal.&nbsp; But in the
meanwhile it is truly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near
a hundred years; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family;
and it ought to be melodramatic, for (according to the superscription)
it is concerned with death.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising annunciation,&rsquo;
the other remarked.&nbsp; &lsquo;But what is It?&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;You remember my predecessor&rsquo;s, old Peter M&rsquo;Brair&rsquo;s
business?&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang
of reprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it.&nbsp;
He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest
was not returned.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Ah well, we go beyond him,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
daresay old Peter knew as little about this as I do.&nbsp; You see,
I succeeded to a prodigious accumulation of old law-papers and old tin
boxes, some of them of Peter&rsquo;s hoarding, some of his father&rsquo;s,
John, first of the dynasty, a great man in his day.&nbsp; Among other
collections were all the papers of the Durrisdeers.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;The Durrisdeers!&rsquo; cried I.&nbsp; &lsquo;My dear fellow,
these may be of the greatest interest.&nbsp; One of them was out in
the &lsquo;45; one had some strange passages with the devil - you will
find a note of it in Law&rsquo;s <i>Memorials</i>, I think; and there
was an unexplained tragedy, I know not what, much later, about a hundred
years ago - &lsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;More than a hundred years ago,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp;
&lsquo;In 1783.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;How do you know that?&nbsp; I mean some death.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Yes, the lamentable deaths of my lord Durrisdeer and his brother,
the Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles),&rsquo; said Mr.
Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting.&nbsp; &lsquo;Is that
it?&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;To say truth,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;I have only seen some dim
reference to the things in memoirs; and heard some traditions dimmer
still, through my uncle (whom I think you knew).&nbsp; My uncle lived
when he was a boy in the neighbourhood of St. Bride&rsquo;s; he has
often told me of the avenue closed up and grown over with grass, the
great gates never opened, the last lord and his old maid sister who
lived in the back parts of the house, a quiet, plain, poor, hum-drum
couple it would seem - but pathetic too, as the last of that stirring
and brave house - and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from some
deformed traditions.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson.&nbsp; Henry Graeme Durie, the last
lord, died in 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss Katherine Durie,
in &lsquo;27; so much I know; and by what I have been going over the
last few days, they were what you say, decent, quiet people and not
rich.&nbsp; To say truth, it was a letter of my lord&rsquo;s that put
me on the search for the packet we are going to open this evening.&nbsp;
Some papers could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M&rsquo;Brair suggesting
they might be among those sealed up by a Mr. Mackellar.&nbsp; M&rsquo;Brair
answered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar&rsquo;s
own hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrative character;
and besides, said he, &ldquo;I am bound not to open them before the
year 1889.&rdquo;&nbsp; You may fancy if these words struck me: I instituted
a hunt through all the M&rsquo;Brair repositories; and at last hit upon
that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I propose to show you
at once.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
In the smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet, fastened
with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strong paper thus
endorsed:-<br>
<br>
<br>
Papers relating to the lives and lamentable deaths of the late Lord
Durisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly called Master of Ballantrae,
attainted in the troubles: entrusted into the hands of John M&rsquo;Brair
in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W.S.; this 20th day of September Anno
Domini 1789; by him to be kept secret until the revolution of one hundred
years complete, or until the 20th day of September 1889: the same compiled
and written by me,<br>
<br>
EPHRAIM MACKELLAR,<br>
<br>
<i>For near forty years Land Steward on the<br>
estates of His Lordship.<br>
<br>
</i>As Mr. Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour had struck
when we laid down the last of the following pages; but I will give a
few words of what ensued.<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Here,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson, &lsquo;is a novel ready to your
hand: all you have to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters,
and improve the style.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;My dear fellow,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;they are just the three
things that I would rather die than set my hand to.&nbsp; It shall be
published as it stands.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;But it&rsquo;s so bald,&rsquo; objected Mr. Thomson.<br>
<br>
&lsquo;I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,&rsquo; replied
I, &lsquo;and I am sure there is nothing so interesting.&nbsp; I would
have all literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
&lsquo;Well, well,&rsquo; said Mr. Thomson, &lsquo;we shall see.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Footnotes:<br>
<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a>&nbsp; First published
in the Contemporary Review, April 1885<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a>&nbsp; Milton.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a>&nbsp; Milton.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a>&nbsp; Milton.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a> As PVF will continue
to haunt us through our English examples, take, by way of comparison,
this Latin verse, of which it forms a chief adornment, and do not hold
me answerable for the all too Roman freedom of the sense: &lsquo;Hanc
volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata vagatur.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a>&nbsp; Coleridge.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a>&nbsp; Antony and
Cleopatra.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a>&nbsp; Cymbeline.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote9"></a><a href="#citation9">{9}</a>&nbsp; The V is
in &lsquo;of.&rsquo;<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote10"></a><a href="#citation10">{10}</a>&nbsp; Troilus
and Cressida.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote11"></a><a href="#citation11">{11}</a>&nbsp; First
published in the <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, April 1881.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote12"></a><a href="#citation12">{12}</a>&nbsp; Mr. James
Payn.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote13"></a><a href="#citation13">{13}</a>&nbsp; A footnote,
at least, is due to the admirable example set before all young writers
in the width of literary sympathy displayed by Mr. Swinburne.&nbsp;
He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether
in Villon, Milton, or Pope.&nbsp; This is, in criticism, the attitude
we should all seek to preserve; not only in that, but in every branch
of literary work.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote14"></a><a href="#citation14">{14}</a>&nbsp; First
published in the <i>British Weekly</i>, May 13, 1887.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote15"></a><a href="#citation15">{15}</a>&nbsp; Of the<i>
British Weekly.<br>
<br>
</i><a name="footnote16"></a><a href="#citation16">{16}</a>&nbsp; First
published in the <i>Magazine of Art</i> in 1883.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote17"></a><a href="#citation17">{17}</a>&nbsp; First
published in the <i>Idler</i>, August 1894.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote18"></a><a href="#citation18">{18}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ne
pas confondre</i>.&nbsp; Not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint
of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with amazement from the book-lists)
the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy prices; but its predecessor,
a bulky historical romance without a spark of merit, and now deleted
from the world.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote19"></a><a href="#citation19">{19}</a>&nbsp; 1889.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ART OF WRITING ***<br>
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