Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by DavidPrice,
ESSAYS IN THE
ART OF WRITING
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1905
CONTENTS
| PAGE |
On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature | |
The Morality of the Profession of Letters | |
Books which have Influenced Me | |
A Note on Realism | |
My First Book: ‘Treasure Island’ | |
The Genesis of ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ | |
Preface To ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ |
p. 3ON SOMETECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE [3]
There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shownthe springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts andoccupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface thatwe perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to prybelow is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by thecoarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way,psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers anabhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysisthan from any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps inæsthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures whichseem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps only in theproportion of our ignorance; and those conscious and unconsciousartifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist to employwere yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs,indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive,and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance atleast is largely irremediable. We shall never learn theaffinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too farback in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, inconsequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method,which can be stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, onthe principle laid down in Hudibras, that
‘Stillthe less they understand,
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,’
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution inthe ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn thatwell-kn