The Art of Writing

by Robert Louis Stevenson
CONTENTS

I. ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
II. THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS

III. BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME
IV. A NOTE ON REALISM

V. MY FIRST BOOK: 'TREASURE ISLAND'
VI. THE GENESIS OF 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE'

VII. PREFACE TO 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE'
CHAPTER I - ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

(1)
THERE is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown

the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and
occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface

that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and
to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked

by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar
way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers

an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our
analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And

perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those
disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so

perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those
conscious and conscious" target="_blank" title="a.无意识的；不觉察的">unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy

of the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power
to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of

the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient
harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely

irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty,
for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the

mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will
always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be

stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the
principle laid down in HUDIBRAS, that

'Still the less they understand,
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,'

many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in
the ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that

well-known character, the general reader, that I am here
embarked upon a most distasteful business: taking down the

picture from the wall and looking on the back; and, like the
inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.

1. CHOICE OF WORDS. - The art of literature stands apart
from among its sisters, because the material in which the

literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the
one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the

public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but
hence, on the other, a singularlimitation. The sister arts

enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the
modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in

mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a

pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of
just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary

architect is condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor
is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are the

acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here
possible none of those suppressions by which other arts

obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic
touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in

painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word,
phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical

progression, and convey a definiteconventional import.
Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good

writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the
apt choice and contrast of the words employed. It is,

indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudelyconceived
for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of

application touch them to the finest meanings and
distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily

shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse
the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubt

the most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally
present in all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare,

their singular justice, significance, and poetic charm, is
different, indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or

Fielding. Or, to take an example nearer home, the words in
Carlyle seem electrified into an energy of lineament, like

the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words in
Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious enough

in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished
elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers

have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in
which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero

is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne:
it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in

the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of
intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but

infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular
point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole.

What is that point?
2. THE WEB. - Literature, although it stands apart by reason

of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the
affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we

may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like
sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as

used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like
architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-

sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of
this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim

a common ground of existence, and it may be said with
sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art

whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of
colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical

figures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. That is
the plane on which these sisters meet; it is by this that

they are arts; and if it be well they should at times forget
their childishorigin, addressing their intelligence to

virile tasks, and performing conscious" target="_blank" title="a.无意识的；不觉察的">unconsciously that necessary
function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still

imperative that the pattern shall be made.
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their

pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and
pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the

business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but
that is not what we call literature; and the true business of

the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning,
involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by

successivephrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and
then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear

itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should
be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately)

we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the
successivephrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an

element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure
of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an

antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each
phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the

implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be
a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often

disappoints the ear than a sentencesolemnly and sonorously
prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the

balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be
infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise,

and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were,
the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious