ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING

Contents: On some technical elements of style in literature The morality of the profession of letters Books which have influenced me A note on realism My first book: 'Treasure Island' The genesis of 'the master of Ballantrae' Preface to 'the master of Ballantrae'

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE {1}

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown thesprings and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations liewholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive theirbeauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to beappalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of thestrings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, whenpushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but ratherfrom the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to themind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: thosedisclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhapsonly in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious andunconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artistto employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to theirsprings, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than weconceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignoranceat least 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, on theprinciple 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 theardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-knowncharacter, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a mostdistasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall andlooking on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling themusical cart to pieces. 

1. Choice of Words. --The art of literature stands apart from amongits sisters, because the material in which the literary artistworks is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strangefreshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which isready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, asingular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plasticand ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone iscondemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. Youhave 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 ofjust such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect iscondemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; forsince these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of ourdaily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressionsby which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: nohieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, asin painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import. 

Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the apt choice andcontrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art totake these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the marketor the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finestmeanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum torouse the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubtthe most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally presentin all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singularjustice, significance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, fromthe effect of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to take an examplenearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified into an energyof lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst thewords in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmoniousenough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguishedelements in a general effect. But the first class of writers haveno monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addisonis superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better thanTacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies notin the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of thematter; 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 thewhole. What is that point?

2. The Web. --Literature, although it stands apart by reason of thegreat destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish twogreat classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, whichare 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, inright of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both mayclaim a common ground of existence, and it may be said withsufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever isto make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of sounds, ofchanging attitudes, geometrical figures, or imitative lines; butstill a pattern. That is the plane on which these sisters meet; itis by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should attimes forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligenceto virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessaryfunction of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperativethat the pattern shall be made. 

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their patternof sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life becarried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we callliterature; and the true business of the literary artist is toplait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so thateach sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kindof knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve andclear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there shouldbe observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we areled 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, withmuch greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested andthen deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely initself; and between the implication and the evolution of thesentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; fornothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly andsonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor shouldthe balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to beinfinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, andyet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness. 

The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure inbeholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instantoverlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, whichis to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout andfirst of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be theobscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatnessof the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been provedunequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of wordsmust be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unlessknot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminatethe argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. Thegenius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than thelaws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to someof my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employedto strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live ineach other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasisof the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first. 

Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg toplait about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or moreviews of the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contraststhem; and while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasionfor the necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to havegreatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted the work of twosentences in the space of one. In the change from the successiveshallow statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminousflow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amountof both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulatingview of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and affinityof events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, thesedifficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these twooranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciouslyor not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, solittle recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy whichwe so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural isthe disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which attains thehighest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively;or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) naturalorder is luminous for the mind; and it is by the means of suchdesigned reversal that the elements of a judgment may be mostpertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action mostperspicuously bound into one. 

The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is thefoundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to beread, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this qualityis poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on theother hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse withpleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am temptedto mention Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless'criticism of life'; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricateand dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance andof good sense; and the two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace. 

Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for thoughin verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowningbeauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would thinkthat here was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far fromthat, it is but a new illustration of the principle involved. Forif the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it isbecause another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by thelaws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may berhythmical; 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 ofrepeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle thelaw is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it mayhave no inherent beauty; all that we have a right to ask of anyprosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, andthat what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard. Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility towrite fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; forin prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and thedifficulties first created before they can be solved. Hence, again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the true versifier:such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo, whom I place besidethem as versifier merely, not as poet. These not only knit andknot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity andstrength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the versewith infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, arare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that ofcounterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and nowcontrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture andthe verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both willreach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best thatcan be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us thedevelopment of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand inhand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes witha great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue ofconquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series oftriumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed onlytwo; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that frommelody to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the juggler, behold him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of thespectators, juggling with three oranges instead of two. Thus itis: added difficulty, added beauty; and the pattern, with everyfresh element, becoming more interesting in itself. 

Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition;something is lost as well as something gained; and there remainsplainly traceable, in comparing the best prose with the best verse, a certain broad distinction of method in the web. Tight as theversifier may draw the knot of logic, yet for the ear he stillleaves the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat loose. Inprose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, nicely balanced, and fitsinto itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The earremarks and is singly gratified by this return and balance; whilein verse it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparablepassages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the superiorof the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his moredelicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his inferior. Butlet us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who wasambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to theSecond Part of Henry IV. , a fine flourish of eloquence inShakespeare's second manner, and set it side by side withFalstaff's praise of sherris, act iv. Scene iii. ; or let us comparethe beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando;compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech toAdam, with what passage it shall please you to select--the SevenAges from the same play, or even such a stave of nobility asOthello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive, if you have an ear for that class of music, a certain superiordegree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of theparts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbingpendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take from those whohave little, the little that they have; the merits of prose areinferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but anindependent. 

3. Rhythm of the Phrase. --Some way back, I used a word which stillawaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; butwhat is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points, literature, being a representative art, must look for analogies topainting and the like; but in what is technical and executive, being a temporal art, it must seek for them in music. Each phraseof each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should beso artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented andunaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear isthe sole judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in ouraccentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the secret ofthe beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those phrases, suchas prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless and yetto please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I oweit all to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting in the present connection. We have beenaccustomed to describe the heroic line as five iambic feet, and tobe filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientiousschoolboy, we have heard our own description put in practice. 

'All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued, ' {2}

goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to ourdefinition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that theheroic line consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four pauses:

'All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued. '

Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, inthis case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, atrochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, withno other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantlyscanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this fresh richness ofintricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, butstill kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thingit now appears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, theverse is made at the same time to read in fives and to read infours. 

But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find versesin six groups, because there is not room for six in the tensyllables; and we do not find verses of two, because one of themain distinctions of verse from prose resides in the comparativeshortness of the group; but it is even common to find verses ofthree. Five is the one forbidden number; because five is thenumber of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two patterns wouldcoincide, and that opposition which is the life of verse wouldinstantly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect ofpolysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common andmake so brave an architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable isa group of Nature's making. If but some Roman would return fromHades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of thevoice these thundering verses should be uttered--'Aut Lacedoe-monium Tarentum, ' for a case in point--I feel as if I should enterat last into the full enjoyment of the best of human verses. 

But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by themere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as aquestion 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 thesame. The singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, sofar as analysis can carry us, part, indeed, to the cleverrepetition of L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scansion inthe groups. The groups which, like the bar in music, break up theverse for utterance, fall uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it may so happen that we never utter oneiambic foot. And yet to this neglect of the original beat there isa limit. 

'Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, ' {3}

is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though itscarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainlysuggests no other measure to the ear. But begin

'Mother Athens, eye of Greece, '

or merely 'Mother Athens, ' and the game is up, for the trochaicbeat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups isan adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought;but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of thisvariety is lost, and we fall back on sameness. Thus, both as tothe arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularityin scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose:to keep alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneouslyfollowed; to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; andto balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader, thatneither shall be unperceived and neither signally prevail. 

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, wewrite in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for theprose phrase is greatly longer and is much more nonchalantlyuttered than the group in verse; so that not only is there agreater interval of continuous sound between the pauses, but, forthat very reason, word is linked more readily to word by a moresummary enunciation. Still, the phrase is the strict analogue ofthe group, and successive phrases, like successive groups, mustdiffer openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verseis to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggestno measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as muchso as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very well passand not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; butone following another will produce an instant impression ofpoverty, flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines deliveredwith the measured utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich invariety. By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, as to amore distant vision, these niceties of difference are lost. Awhole verse is uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon weariedby a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, iscondemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a largerscale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an acceptedmetre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he hasto juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work intohis pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is aquality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is theinherently rhythmical strain of the English language, that the badwriter--and must I take for example that admired friend of myboyhood, Captain Reid?--the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in hisearlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any onemay see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the productionof bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad?And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever madegood verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwisethan trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we cango beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularityof the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than themovement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A peculiar densityand mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, is one of thechief good qualities of verse; but this our accidental versifier, still following after the swift gait and large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since he remainsunconscious that he is making verse at all, it can never occur tohim to extract those effects of counterpoint and opposition which Ihave referred to as the final grace and justification of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in particular. 

4. Contents of the Phrase. --Here is a great deal of talk aboutrhythm--and naturally; for in our canorous language rhythm isalways at the door. But it must not be forgotten that in somelanguages this element is almost, if not quite, extinct, and thatin our own it is probably decaying. The even speech of manyeducated Americans sounds the note of danger. I should see it gowith something as bitter as despair, but I should not be desperate. As in verse no element, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in prosealso, other sorts of beauty will arise and take the place and playthe part of those that we outlive. The beauty of the expected beatin verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more lawlessmelody, patent as they are to English hearing, are already silentin the ears of our next neighbours; for in France the oratoricalaccent and the pattern of the web have almost or altogethersucceeded to their places; and the French prose writer would beastounded at the labours of his brother across the Channel, and howa good quarter of his toil, above all invita Minerva, is to avoidwriting verse. So wonderfully far apart have races wandered inspirit, and so hard it is to understand the literature next door!

Yet French prose is distinctly better than English; and Frenchverse, above all while Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon oneside. What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in Frenchis easily distinguishable as comely or uncomely. There is thenanother element of comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis:the contents of the phrase. Each phrase in literature is built ofsounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One soundsuggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the artof rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoidalliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it preventeddaubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, andthe mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, dependsimplicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demandsto be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cryaloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of aletter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; findit, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it firedagain at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congeneroussounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another. And youwill find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature iswritten by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick toperceive 'unheard melodies'; and the eye, which directs the pen anddeciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as there are rhymes forthe eye, so you will find that there are assonances andalliterations; that where an author is running the open A, deceivedby the eye and our strange English spelling, he will often show atenderness for the flat A; and that where he is running aparticular consonant, he will not improbably rejoice to write itdown even when it is mute or bears a different value. 

Here, then, we have a fresh pattern--a pattern, to speak grossly, of letters--which makes the fourth preoccupation of the prosewriter, and the fifth of the versifier. At times it is verydelicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps most excellent andwinning (I say perhaps); but at times again the elements of thisliteral melody stand more boldly forward and usurp the ear. Itbecomes, therefore, somewhat a matter of conscience to selectexamples; and as I cannot very well ask the reader to help me, Ishall do the next best by giving him the reason or the history ofeach selection. The two first, one in prose, one in verse, I chosewithout previous analysis, simply as engaging passages that hadlong re-echoed in my ear. 

'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised andunbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, butslinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be runfor, not without dust and heat. ' {4} Down to 'virtue, ' the currentS and R are both announced and repeated unobtrusively, and by wayof a grace-note that almost inseparable group PVF is given entire. {5} The next phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in itself, both S and R still audible, and B given as the last fulfilment ofPVF. In the next four phrases, from 'that never' down to 'runfor, ' the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight repetition ofthe F and V, the whole matter turns, almost too obtrusively, on Sand R; first S coming to the front, and then R. In the concludingphrase all these favourite letters, and even the flat A, a timidpreference for which is just perceptible, are discarded at a blowand in a bundle; and to make the break more obvious, every wordends with a dental, and all but one with T, for which we have beencautiously prepared since the beginning. The singular dignity ofthe first clause, and this hammer-stroke of the last, go far tomake the charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair to ownthat S and R are used a little coarsely. 

'In Xanady did Kubla Khan (KANDL)A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR)Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR)Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR)Down to a sunless sea. ' {6} (NDLS)

Here I have put the analysis of the main group alongside the lines;and the more it is looked at, the more interesting it will seem. But there are further niceties. In lines two and four, the currentS is most delicately varied with Z. In line three, the currentflat A is twice varied with the open A, already suggested in linetwo, and both times ('where' and 'sacred') in conjunction with thecurrent R. In the same line F and V (a harmony in themselves, evenwhen shorn of their comrade P) are admirably contrasted. And inline four there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was announcedin line two. I stop from weariness, for more might yet be said. 

My next example was recently quoted from Shakespeare as an exampleof the poet's colour sense. Now, I do not think literature hasanything to do with colour, or poets anyway the better of such asense; and I instantly attacked this passage, since 'purple' wasthe word that had so pleased the writer of the article, to see ifthere might not be some literary reason for its use. It will beseen that I succeeded amply; and I am bound to say I think thepassage exceptional in Shakespeare--exceptional, indeed, inliterature; but it was not I who chose it. 

'The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNeBURNT oN the water: the POOP was BeateN gold, PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that * perThe wiNds were love-sick with them. ' {7}

It may be asked why I have put the F of 'perfumed' in capitals; andI reply, because this change from P to F is the completion of thatfrom B to P, already so adroitly carried out. Indeed, the wholepassage is a monument of curious ingenuity; and it seems scarceworth while to indicate the subsidiary S, L, and W. In the samearticle, a second passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once againas an example of his colour sense:

'A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson dropsI' the bottom of a cowslip. ' {8}

It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth while to analyseat length: I leave it to the reader. But before I turn my back onShakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, for my own pleasure, and for a very model of every technical art:

But in the wind and tempest of her frown, W. P. V. {9} F. (st) (ow)Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, W. P. F. (st) (ow) L. 

Puffing at all, winnows the light away;W. P. F. L. And what hath mass and matter by itselfW. F. L. M. A. Lies rich in virtue and unmingled. ' {10}V. L. M. 

From these delicate and choice writers I turned with some curiosityto a player of the big drum--Macaulay. I had in hand the two-volume edition, and I opened at the beginning of the second volume. Here was what I read:

'The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to thedegree of the maladministration which has produced them. It istherefore not strange that the government of Scotland, having beenduring many years greatly more corrupt than the government ofEngland, should have fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movementagainst the last king of the house of Stuart was in Englandconservative, in Scotland destructive. The English complained notof the law, but of the violation of the law. '

This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old friend PVF, floatedby 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 mindmisgave me utterly. This could be no trick of Macaulay's; it mustbe the nature of the English tongue. In a kind of despair, Iturned half-way through the volume; and coming upon his lordshipdealing with General Cannon, and fresh from Claverhouse andKilliecrankie, here, with elucidative spelling, was my reward:

'Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp went on inKreasing. HeKalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what Kourse it would beadvisable to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had met, apreliminary Kuestion was raised. The army was almost eKsKlusivelya Highland army. The recent vKktory had been won eKsKlusively byHighland warriors. Great chieFs who had brought siKs or SeVenhundred Fighting men into the Field did not think it Fair that theyshould be outVoted by gentlemen From Ireland, and From the LowKountries, who bore indeed King James's Kommission, and were KalledKolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments andKaptains without Kompanies. '

A moment of FV in all this world of K's! It was not the Englishlanguage, then, that was an instrument of one string, but Macaulaythat was an incomparable dauber. 

It was probably from this barbaric love of repeating the samesound, rather than from any design of clearness, that he acquiredhis irritating habit of repeating words; I say the one rather thanthe other, because such a trick of the ear is deeper-seated andmore original in man than any logical consideration. Few writers, indeed, are probably conscious of the length to which they pushthis melody of letters. One, writing very diligently, and onlyconcerned about the meaning of his words and the rhythm of hisphrases, was struck into amazement by the eager triumph with whichhe cancelled one expression to substitute another. Neither changedthe sense; both being mono-syllables, neither could affect thescansion; and it was only by looking back on what he had alreadywritten that the mystery was solved: the second word contained anopen A, and for nearly half a page he had been riding that vowel tothe death. 

In practice, I should add, the ear is not always so exacting; andordinary writers, in ordinary moments, content themselves withavoiding what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare occasion, buttressing a phrase, or linking two together, with a patch ofassonance or a momentary jingle of alliteration. To understand howconstant is this preoccupation of good writers, even where itsresults are least obtrusive, it is only necessary to turn to thebad. There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, the rattle ofincongruous consonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not to be articulated by the powers of man. 

Conclusion. --We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping hisphrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without everallowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to theversifier, 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 artfullycombining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall bemusical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into atexture of committed phrases and of rounded periods--but thisparticularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common toboth, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words. We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfectpassage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, mustbe held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, itshould afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement ofaccording letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up tothe architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is avigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty inman but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfectsentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. 

THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS {11}

The profession of letters has been lately debated in the publicprints; and it has been debated, to put the matter mildly, from apoint of view that was calculated to surprise high-minded men, andbring a general contempt on books and reading. Some time ago, inparticular, a lively, pleasant, popular writer {12} devoted anessay, lively and pleasant like himself, to a very encouraging viewof the profession. We may be glad that his experience is socheering, and we may hope that all others, who deserve it, shall beas handsomely rewarded; but I do not think we need be at all gladto have this question, so important to the public and ourselves, debated solely on the ground of money. The salary in any businessunder heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question. Thatyou should continue to exist is a matter for your ownconsideration; but that your business should be first honest, andsecond useful, are points in which honour and morality areconcerned. If the writer to whom I refer succeeds in persuading anumber of young persons to adopt this way of life with an eye setsingly on the livelihood, we must expect them in their works tofollow profit only, and we must expect in consequence, if he willpardon me the epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and emptyliterature. Of that writer himself I am not speaking: he isdiligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods ofentertainment, and he has achieved an amiable popularity which hehas adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did notwhen he first embraced it, regard his profession from this purelymercenary side. He went into it, I shall venture to say, if notwith any noble design, at least in the ardour of a first love; andhe enjoyed its practice long before he paused to calculate thewage. The other day an author was complimented on a piece of work, good in itself and exceptionally good for him, and replied, interms unworthy of a commercial traveller that as the book was notbriskly selling he did not give a copper farthing for its merit. It must not be supposed that the person to whom this answer wasaddressed received it as a profession of faith; he knew, on theother hand, that it was only a whiff of irritation; just as weknow, when a respectable writer talks of literature as a way oflife, like shoemaking, but not so useful, that he is only debatingone aspect of a question, and is still clearly conscious of a dozenothers more important in themselves and more central to the matterin hand. But while those who treat literature in this penny-wiseand virtue-foolish spirit are themselves truly in possession of abetter light, it does not follow that the treatment is decent orimproving, whether for themselves or others. To treat all subjectsin the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer. If he bewell paid, as I am glad to hear he is, this duty becomes the moreurgent, the neglect of it the more disgraceful. And perhaps thereis no subject on which a man should speak so gravely as thatindustry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight ofhis life; which is his tool to earn or serve with; and which, if itbe unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedybowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subjectalone even to force the note might lean to virtue's side. It is tobe hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation of writerswill follow and surpass the present one; but it would be better ifthe stream were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest Englishbooks were closed, than that esurient book-makers should continueand debase a brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, afamous race. Better that our serene temples were deserted thanfilled with trafficking and juggling priests. 

There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life: thefirst is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utilityin the industry selected. Literature, like any other art, issingularly interesting to the artist; and, in a degree peculiar toitself among the arts, it is useful to mankind. These are thesufficient justifications for any young man or woman who adopts itas the business of his life. I shall not say much about the wages. A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as byother trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work hedoes all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of hisdinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much itbrings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more bycheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about alittle poverty; but such considerations should not move us in thechoice of that which is to be the business and justification of sogreat a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave careerin which we can do the most and best for mankind. Now Nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother. A lad, forsome liking to the jingle of words, betakes himself to letters forhis life; by-and-by, when he learns more gravity, he finds that hehas chosen better than he knew; that if he earns little, he isearning it amply; that if he receives a small wage, he is in aposition to do considerable services; that it is in his power, insome small measure, to protect the oppressed and to defend thetruth. So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit mayarise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing, that itshould combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at onceagreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching. 

This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the fourgreat elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would becowardly to consider it at first in any lesser aspect. But whilewe cannot follow these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very original, or very wise, I still contendthat, in the humblest sort of literary work, we have it in ourpower either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely toplease; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify theidle nine days' curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have todeal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is thedialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the mindsof men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of thesebranches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations whichgoes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total ofa nation's reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly modifiesthe total of the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, takentogether, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A goodman or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; butthe contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on theaverage of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness ofthe American reporter or the Parisian chroniquear, both so lightlyreadable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; theytouch 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 dullpeople to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms therare utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and thecowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while theantidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I havespoken of the American and the French, not because they are so muchbaser, but so much more readable, than the English; their evil isdone more effectively, in America for the masses, in French for thefew that care to read; but with us as with them, the duties ofliterature are daily neglected, truth daily perverted andsuppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an important officer; yet judge ofthe good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instanceonly: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides ofpolitics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news forthe interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (nodiscovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the thingsthat we profess to teach our young is a respect for truth; and Icannot think this piece of education will be crowned with any greatsuccess, so long as some of us practise and the rest openly approveof public falsehood. 

There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on thebusiness of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in thetreatment. In every department of literature, though so low ashardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of importance tothe education and comfort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, thatthe faithful trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man whotries it. Our judgments are based upon two things: first, uponthe original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass oftestimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reachesus, in divers manners, from without. For the most part thesedivers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of pasttimes and much that we learn of our own reaching us through themedium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learningfrom the same source at second-hand and by the report of him whocan. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance ofgood and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those whowrite. Those who write have to see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; thathe shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take thisworld for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights areconcentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in hisown parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell himthe truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes histheory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, allfacts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if afact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that heshould know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in aworld made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win hisway to shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul to tellwhat is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true. The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody waswanting, for one man's meat is another man's poison, and I haveknown a person who was cheered by the perusal of Candide. Everyfact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together; and nonethat comes directly in a writer's path but has some nice relations, unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subjectunder hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally morenecessary than others, and it is with these that literature mustfirst bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature oncemore easily leading us; for the necessary, because the efficacious, facts are those which are most interesting to the natural mind ofman. Those which are coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted inmorality, and those, on the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and a part of science, are alone vital in importance, seizing by their interest, or useful to communicate. So far as thewriter merely narrates, he should principally tell of these. Heshould tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful elements of ourlife; he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of thepresent, to move us with instances: he should tell of wise andgood people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these heshould tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that wemay neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to ourneighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral andfeeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs ofthought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go atall are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do soif the writers chose! There is not a life in all the records ofthe past but, properly studied, might lend a hint and a help tosome contemporary. There is not a juncture in to-day's affairs butsome useful word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has anoffice, and, with clear eyes and honest language, may unveilinjustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word: inall narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to beexact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presupposethe first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to makefailure conspicuous. 

But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled withrage, tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by each ofthese the story will be transformed to something else. Thenewspapers that told of the return of our representatives fromBerlin, even if they had not differed as to the facts, would havesufficiently differed by their spirits; so that the one descriptionwould have been a second ovation, and the other a prolonged insult. The subject makes but a trifling part of any piece of literature, and the view of the writer is itself a fact more important becauseless disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which asubject 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; notonly modifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far largerproportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of thewriter's mind or momentary humour forms not only the leadingfeature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only thing he cancommunicate to others. In all works of art, widely speaking, it isfirst of all the author's attitude that is narrated, though in theattitude there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life. An author who has begged the question and reposes in some narrowfaith cannot, if he would, express the whole or even many of thesides of this various existence; for, his own life being maim, someof them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly andunwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, thetriteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarianreligion; and hence we find equal although unsimilar limitation inworks inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable tastefor high society. So that the first duty of any man who is towrite is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far sethimself up for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see thathis own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everythingbut prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see thegood in all things; where he has even a fear that he does notwholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he shouldrecognise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy. {13}

The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. There are athousand different humours in the mind, and about each of them, when it is uppermost, some literature tends to be deposited. Isthis to be allowed? Not certainly in every case, and yet perhapsin more than rigourists would fancy. It were to be desired thatall literary work, and chiefly works of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent impulses, whether grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or religious. 

Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partiallyinsane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very manytainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe amasterpiece although we gird against its blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults, but merits. There is no bookperfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader. On the one hand, the Hebrewpsalms are the only religious poetry on earth; yet they containsallies that savour rankly of the man of blood. On the other hand, Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am onlyquoting that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when I accusehim of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote waspurely creative, he could give us works like Carmosine or Fantasio, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have beenfound again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote MadameBovary, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism;and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece ofappalling morality. But the truth is, when books are conceivedunder a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine timesheated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being areseized with such an ample grasp, that, even should the main designbe trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to beexpressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an illthing poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And so this canbe no encouragement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, whomust take their business conscientiously or be ashamed to practiseit. 

Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himselfand his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to doa far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to besure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is totravesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal asentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty withtruth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane manbut contains some truth and, in the true connection, might beprofitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any onecould tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinentlyuttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harshas well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorifythe appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes intohis work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be theworld's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality isimmorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading pictureof the world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must bepartial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct, you can never hope todo exactly right. All you can do is to make as sure as possible;and for that there is but one rule. Nothing should be done in ahurry that can be done slowly. It is no use to write a book andput it by for nine or even ninety years; for in the writing youwill have partly convinced yourself; the delay must precede anybeginning; and if you meditate a work of art, you should first longroll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like theflavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from endto end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, youshould first have thought upon the question under all conditions, in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. Itis this nearness of examination necessary for any true and kindwriting, that makes the practice of the art a prolonged and nobleeducation for the writer. 

There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in themeantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful facts orpleasing impressions is a service to the public. It is even aservice to be thankfully proud of having rendered. The slightestnovels are a blessing to those in distress, not chloroform itself agreater. Our fine old sea-captain's life was justified whenCarlyle soothed his mind with The King's Own or Newton Forster. Toplease is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instructwhile you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly withoutthe other. Some part of the writer or his life will crop out ineven a vapid book; and to read a novel that was conceived with anyforce is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies. 

Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every entre-filet, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds ofsome portion of the public, and to colour, however transiently, their thoughts. When any subject falls to be discussed, somescribbler on a paper has the invaluable opportunity of beginningits discussion in a dignified and human spirit; and if there wereenough who did so in our public press, neither the public nor theParliament would find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. The writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on somethingpleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were itonly to a single reader. He will be unfortunate, indeed, if hesuit no one. He has the chance, besides, to stumble on somethingthat a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and for a dullperson to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a marking epoch in his education. 

Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well. Andso, 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 itwas a trade which was useful in a very great and in a very highdegree; which every honest tradesman could make more serviceable tomankind in his single strength; which was difficult to do well andpossible to do better every year; which called for scrupulousthought on the part of all who practised it, and hence became aperpetual education to their nobler natures; and which, pay it asyou please, in the large majority of the best cases will still beunderpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenthcentury, there is nothing that an honest man should fear moretimorously than getting and spending more than he deserves. 

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME {14}

The Editor {15} has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for hiscorrespondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after somereconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find himselfengaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhapsworse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brotherwhom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, theman we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when wordhas been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, bekept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimesweak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the personwho entrapped me. 

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, areworks of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which hemust afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him alesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, theyrearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us fromourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; andthey show us the web of experience, not as we can see it forourselves, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consumingego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they mustbe reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is soserves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education isanswered best by those poems and romances where we breathe amagnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and piouscharacters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friendshave had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet orRosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionablehour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quitepassed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a greateffect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections forlong, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friendoutside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of theVicomte de Bragelonne. I know not a more human soul, nor, in hisway, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of apedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain ofMusketeers. Lastly, I must name the Pilgrim's Progress, a bookthat breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion. 

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profoundand silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; wedrink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. Itis in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out theeffect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which hasbeen very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so maystand first, though I think its influence was only sensible lateron, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easilyoutlived: the Essais of Montaigne. That temperate and genialpicture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons ofto-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroismand wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have their 'linendecencies' and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if theyhave any gift of reading) perceive that these have not beenfluttered without some excuse and ground of reason; and (again ifthey have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing that thisold gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in adozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or theircontemporaries. 

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the NewTestament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make acertain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, notdroningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one wouldthen be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteouslysupposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying. But uponthis subject it is perhaps better to be silent. 

I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of singularservice, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blewinto space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon astrong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But itis, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe it is so with all good booksexcept, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, sowholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are moreapt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he criesout upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer roundthat little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is thecontemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets whatis old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. Newtruth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is onlywanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegantconventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction andthe daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the firstat least, some good. 

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under theinfluence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, andfew better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch oftime, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious toinquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; theredwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked nakedlike an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will findthere a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of itsloveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these twoqualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makeshim a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost mygratitude to Herbert Spencer. 

Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when itfirst fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality ofman's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire thanGoethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breakingopen the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, inthat crowning offence of Werther, and in his own character a merepen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties ofsuperior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of therights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion tohis art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to itsoffice, does here for once perform for us some of the work offiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue ofman's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit andpersevere in the same character. History serves us well to thiseffect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popularepitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to makeus feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identityof man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognisetheir own human virtues and defects in strange forms, ofteninverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is apoet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read hisworks dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's seriouspassages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out thesepleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I foundthem for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand thingsthat help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception ofthe great Roman Empire. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, thenoble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that arethere expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the lifeof its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one canread it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to thefeelings--those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home;when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the manhimself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked intobrave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on youthenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue. 

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influencedby Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certaininnocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, 'thesilence that is in the lonely hills, ' something of the cold thrillof dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to whatis best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you neednot--Mill did not--agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet thespell is cast. Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is onlya new error--the old one was perhaps as good; but a spiritcommunicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climbbeyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what isbest in themselves, that they communicate. 

I should never forgive myself if I forgot The Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from allthe novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in aplace by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is abook to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry pictureof human faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with ourneighbour; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of whichwe are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And The Egoist is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is asatire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of thatobvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with thatinvisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are yourown faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, withlingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friendof Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. 'This is too bad of you, ' he cried. 'Willoughby is me!' 'No, mydear fellow, ' said the author; 'he is all of us. '

I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to readit again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I thinkWilloughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself. 

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten muchthat was most influential, as I see already I have forgottenThoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of Obligations'was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book ofaphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Talesof Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the properattitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all ismore than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more tothe point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say aword or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as Ihave called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a freegrace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understandthat he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differsabsolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold thempassionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, orhold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he hasthe gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side ofvirtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may changehis reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct hisdeductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much alie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who holdanother truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, whocan extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsyconsciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seemsinsolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If hetries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaimsupon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; hewill never be a reader. 

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laiddown my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, afterall, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men canread all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will findhis appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns thisearly, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, layingdown the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says isdemonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that whenhis words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will beweighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will beassimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannotintelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had notwritten. 

A NOTE ON REALISM {16}

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student whodoes not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it isstill the one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned norsimulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities wehave, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, theelision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and thepreservation of a uniform character from end to end--these, whichtaken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degreewithin the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to putin and what to leave out; whether some particular fact beorganically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it bepurely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design;and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do sogrossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: arequestions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinxthat patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerableriddle to propound. 

In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the greatchange of the past century has been effected by the admission ofdetail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromanticfollowers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time itsignified and expressed a more ample contemplation of theconditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France)fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement ofalarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back fromthese extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and thepoetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of thisbaggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story--once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable --begin tobe pampered upon facts. The introduction of these detailsdeveloped a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on arailway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zolaspends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavourand attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may beallowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; butwhat more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of theextreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate intomere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visiblesounds. 

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remindus of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of thecritics. All representative art, which can be said to live, isboth realistic and ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel isa matter purely of externals. It is no especial cultus of natureand veracity, but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has made usturn our back upon the larger, more various, and more romantic artof yore. A photographic exactitude in dialogue is now theexclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands it tells us nomore--I think it even tells us less--than Moliere, wielding hisartificial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste orOrgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is forgotten. Yettruth to the conditions of man's nature and the conditions of man'slife, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may betold us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairytale. The scene may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast ofBohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. And by an odd andluminous accident, if there is any page of literature calculated toawake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that Troilus and Cressidawhich Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy. 

This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only thetechnical method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract asyou please, you will be none the less veracious; but if you beweak, you run the risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and ifyou be very strong and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. 

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during theperiod of gestation it stands more clearly forward from theseswaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes atlength that most faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicableproduct of the human mind, a perfected design. On the approach toexecution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don hisworking clothes, and become the artisan. He now resolutely commitshis airy conception, his delicate Ariel, to the touch of matter; hemust decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his whole design. 

The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technicalpreoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle oflife. And with these the execution is but play; for the stylisticproblem is resolved beforehand, and all large originality oftreatment wilfully foregone. Such are the verses, intricatelydesigned, which we have learnt to admire, with a certain smilingadmiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dobson; such, too, arethose canvases where dexterity or even breadth of plastic styletakes the place of pictorial nobility of design. So, it may beremarked, it was easier to begin to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, since, in the first, the style was dictated by the nature of theplan; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But thecase is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have beenconceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from theauthor's mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is one ofextreme perplexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy andan imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungratefuleffort once for all; and, having formed a style, adhere to itthrough life. But those of a higher order cannot rest content witha process which, as they continue to employ it, must infalliblydegenerate towards the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every freshwork in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engagement ofthe whole forces of their mind; and the changing views whichaccompany the growth of their experience are marked by still moresweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticismloves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods of aRaphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. 

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive moment whenexecution is begun, and thenceforth only in a less degree, that theideal and the real do indeed, like good and evil angels, contendfor the direction of the work. Marble, paint, and language, thepen, the needle, and the brush, all have their grossnesses, theirineffable impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, ofinsubordination. It is the work and it is a great part of thedelight of any artist to contend with these unruly tools, and nowby brute energy, now by witty expedient, to drive and coax them toeffect his will. Given these means, so laughably inadequate, andgiven the interest, the intensity, and the multiplicity of theactual sensation whose effect he is to render with their aid, theartist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in everycase and upon any theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress muchand omit more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, andsuppress what is tedious and necessary. But such facts as, inregard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he willperforce and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of the veryhighest order of creative art to be woven exclusively of such. There, any fact that is registered is contrived a double or atreble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its place, and apillar in the main design. Nothing would find room in such apicture that did not serve, at once, to complete the composition, to accentuate the scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes ofdistance, and to strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothingwould be allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time, expedite the progress of the fable, build up the characters, andstrike home the moral or the philosophical design. But this isunattainable. As a rule, so far from building the fabric of ourworks exclusively with these, we are thrown into a rapture if wethink we can muster a dozen or a score of them, to be the plums ofour confection. And hence, in order that the canvas may be filledor the story proceed from point to point, other details must beadmitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title; manywithout marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceedstowards completion, too often--I had almost written always--losesin force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swampedand dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our littlepassionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence orslipshod talk. 

But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those particularswhich we know we can describe; and hence those most of all which, having been described very often, have grown to be conventionallytreated in the practice of our art. These we choose, as the masonchooses the acanthus to adorn his capital, because they comenaturally to the accustomed hand. The old stock incidents andaccessories, tricks of workmanship and schemes of composition (allbeing admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten) hauntand tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectlyappropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us fromthe study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art. Tostruggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and giveexpression to facts which have not yet been adequately or not yetelegantly expressed, is to run a little upon the danger of extremeself-love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and theartist may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists, and consider any fact as welcome to admission if it be the groundof brilliant handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modernlandscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome andscience well displayed can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of art--charm. A little further, and hewill regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice toprettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelityto art. 

We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather tofill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, brieflytouched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But therealist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence ofanything so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, bringswith it its necessary disabilities and dangers. The immediatedanger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significanceof the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit ofcompletion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he comes inthe last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily tocommunicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger of theidealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip offact, particularity, or passion. 

We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which isconceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. Butthough on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in everycase the artist must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yetafresh for each succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing maybe generally said, that we of the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury, breathing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err upon the side of realism than to sin in questof the ideal. Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correctour own decisions, always holding back the hand from the leastappearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to beginno work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happilymirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design. 

MY FIRST BOOK: 'TREASURE ISLAND' {17}

It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelistalone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards what else I have written with indifference, if notaversion; if it call upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiarand indelible character; and when I am asked to talk of my firstbook, no question in the world but what is meant is my first novel. 

Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. Itseems vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from myearliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginaryseries of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became agood friend to the paper-makers. Reams upon reams must have goneto the making of 'Rathillet, ' 'The Pentland Rising, ' {18} 'TheKing's Pardon' (otherwise 'Park Whitehead'), 'Edward Daven, ' 'ACountry Dance, ' and 'A Vendetta in the West'; and it is consolatoryto remember that these reams are now all ashes, and have beenreceived again into the soil. I have named but a few of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere theywere desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of years. 'Rathillet' was attempted before fifteen, 'The Vendetta' at twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I wasthirty-one. By that time, I had written little books and littleessays and short stories; and had got patted on the back and paidfor them--though not enough to live upon. I had quite areputation, I was the successful man; I passed my days in toil, thefutility of which would sometimes make my cheek to burn--that Ishould spend a man's energy upon this business, and yet could notearn a livelihood: and still there shone ahead of me an unattainedideal: although I had attempted the thing with vigour not lessthan ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. All--allmy pretty ones--had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorablylike a schoolboy's watch. I might be compared to a cricketer ofmany years' standing who should never have made a run. Anybody canwrite a short story--a bad one, I mean--who has industry and paperand time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a badnovel. It is the length that kills. 

The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spenddays upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste toblot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rights;instinct--the instinct of self-preservation--forbids that any man(cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory)should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond aperiod to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hopeto feed upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky veinmust be running, he must be in one of those hours when the wordscome and the phrases balance of themselves--EVEN TO BEGIN. Andhaving begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the bookshall be accomplished! For so long a time, the slant is tocontinue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a timeyou must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long atime your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, alwaysvigorous! I remember I used to look, in those days, upon everythree-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat--notpossibly of literature--but at least of physical and moralendurance and the courage of Ajax. 

In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother atKinnaird, above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and bythe side of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountainsinspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my wife and I projected ajoint volume of logic stories, for which she wrote 'The Shadow onthe Bed, ' and I turned out 'Thrawn Janet, ' and a first draft of'The Merry Men. ' I love my native air, but it does not love me;and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister, and a migration by Strathairdle and Glenshee to the Castleton ofBraemar. 

There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native airwas more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I must consent to passa good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriouslyknown as the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage. And now admire thefinger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late MissMcGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of'something craggy to break his mind upon. ' He had no thought ofliterature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleetingsuffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box ofwater colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picturegallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to beshowman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (soto speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in agenerous emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of theseoccasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (Ithought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyondexpression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; andwith the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed myperformance 'Treasure Island. ' I am told there are people who donot care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, theshapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, theprehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill anddown dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; hereis an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to seeor twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child butmust remember laying his head in the grass, staring into theinfinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. 

Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of 'Treasure Island, 'the future character of the book began to appear there visiblyamong imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weaponspeeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to andfro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of aflat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before meand was writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so, and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements ofsuccess about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys; noneed of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be atouchstone. Women were excluded. I was unable to handle a brig(which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could makeshift to sail her as a schooner without public shame. And then Ihad an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds ofentertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the readervery likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him ofall his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leavehim with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, andhis magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms ofthe culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, Ithink, a common way of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundredwords with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Ourfriend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know--but canwe put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary andimaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife inhand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of hisnature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may atleast be fairly sure of. 

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and therain drumming on the window, I began The Sea Cook, for that was theoriginal title. I have begun (and finished) a number of otherbooks, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them withmore complacency. It is not to be wondered at, for stolen watersare proverbially sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubtthe parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeletonis conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are triflesand details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons ormake a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is fromMasterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. These usefulwriters had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing, they had leftbehind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints whichperhaps another--and I was the other! It is my debt to WashingtonIrving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believeplagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up theTales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology ofprose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, anda good deal of the material detail of my first chapters--all werethere, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had noguess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemedthe spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet dayby day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to thefamily. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to melike my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I found I had two inmy audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romanceand childishness of his original nature. His own stories, thatevery night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealtperpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, andcommercial travellers before the era of steam. He never finishedone of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But inTreasure Island he recognised something kindred to his ownimagination; it was HIS kind of picturesque; and he not only heardwith delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting tocollaborate. When the time came for Billy Bones's chest to beransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I exactly followed; and the name of 'Flint's old ship'--theWalrus--was given at his particular request. And now who shouldcome dropping in, ex machina, but Dr. Japp, like the disguisedprince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness inthe last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or atalisman, but a publisher--had, in fact, been charged by my oldfriend, Mr. Henderson, to unearth new writers for Young Folks. Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before theextreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members ofThe Sea Cook; at the same time, we would by no means stop ourreadings; and accordingly the tale was begun again at thebeginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of Dr. Japp. From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical faculty;for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in hisportmanteau. 

Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now apositive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style. Compare it with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men', one reader mayprefer the one style, one the other--'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is muchmore difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems asthough a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turnout Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipealight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck toit, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the earlyparagraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth wasempty; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom; andhere were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the'Hand and Spear'! Then I corrected them, living for the most partalone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, agood deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than Ican depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I wasthirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I hadnever yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my fatherhad quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judgeda failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I was indeedvery close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during thejourney to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had theresolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novelsof M. De Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat onemorning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me likesmall talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and againat a rate of a chapter a day, I finished Treasure Island. It hadto be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboyremained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whomI timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance. He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters ofTheophrastus: so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to forsympathy on a boy's story. He was large-minded; 'a full man, ' ifthere was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest tohim only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well!he was not far wrong. 

Treasure Island--it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title, The Sea Cook--appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured inthe ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the leastattention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much thesame reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind ofpicturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and tothis day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. Whatwas infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I hadfinished a tale, and written 'The End' upon my manuscript, as I hadnot done since 'The Pentland Rising, ' when I was a boy of sixteennot yet at college. In truth it was so by a set of luckyaccidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the taleflowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid asidelike its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way tothe fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so. I amnot of that mind. The tale seems to have given much pleasure, andit brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wineto a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need scarcelysay I mean my own. 

But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite at an end. I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of myplot. For instance, I had called an islet 'Skeleton Island, ' notknowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery ofMr. Poe and stole Flint's pointer. And in the same way, it wasbecause I had made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on herwanderings with Israel Hands. The time came when it was decided torepublish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but Iheard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had neverbeen received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map atrandom, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write upa story to the measurements. It is quite another to have toexamine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusionscontained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design amap to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in myfather's office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailingships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had ofvarious writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of CaptainFlint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow itwas never Treasure Island to me. 

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost sayit was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, andWashington Irving, a copy of Johnson's Buccaneers, the name of theDead Man's Chest from Kingsley's At Last, some recollections ofcanoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet itis always important. The author must know his countryside, whetherreal or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of thecompass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the moon is! Ihave come to grief over the moon in Prince Otto, and so soon asthat was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommendto other men--I never write now without an almanack. With analmanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted on paper or already and immediatelyapprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of thegrossest possible blunders. With the map before him, he willscarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in TheAntiquary. With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow twohorsemen, 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 theweek is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of Rob Roy. Andit is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such'croppers. ' But it is my contention--my superstition, if you like--that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws fromit his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, andnot mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a rootthere; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind thewords. Better if the country be real, and he has walked every footof it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studiesit, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he willdiscover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints forhis messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it wasin Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion. 

THE GENESIS OF 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE'

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which Ilived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night wasvery dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with thepurity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to beheard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not tolessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here werefine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The PhantomShip. 'Come, ' said I to my engine, 'let us make a tale, a story ofmany years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery andcivilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, andmay be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book youhave been reading and admiring. ' I was here brought up with areflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequelshows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less thanHomer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar andlegendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the verytitle-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chanceI could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of myown meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search therecropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried andresuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle ofmine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour. 

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer belowzero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I hadseen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics tothe Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadianborder. Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had twocountries, two of the ends of the earth involved: and thus thoughthe notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score ofgeneral acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability, it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and thisdecided me to consider further of its possibilities. The man whoshould thus be buried was the first question: a good man, whosereturn to life would be hailed by the reader and the othercharacters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christianpicture, and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of anyuse at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to hisfriends and family, take him through many disappearances, and makethis final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy Americanwilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series. I need nottell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the mostinteresting moment of an author's life; the hours that followedthat night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours ofunadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone, perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who ismy usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her upat all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformedfancies. 

And while I was groping for the fable and the character required, behold I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was there ever a more complete justification ofthe rule of Horace? Here, thinking of quite other things, I hadstumbled on the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (instagewright phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of a storyconceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry andStrathardle, conceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smellof heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Atholecorrespondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So longago, so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and themutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer. 

My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and Americabeing all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to meexcept in books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to allseeing) equally accidental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get into India and out of it again upon afoot of fairy lightness; and I believe this first suggested to methe idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It was at firstintended that he should be Scottish, and I was then filled withfears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my own AlanBreck. Presently, however, it began to occur to me it would belike my Master to curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen; and thatan Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself inIndia with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I wasaware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality could govery deep with my Master: in the original idea of this storyconceived in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended tobe worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant) hewas to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very badIrishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was I toevade Barry Lyndon? The wretch besieged me, offering his services;he gave me excellent references; he proved that he was highlyfitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to disguise his ancient livery wit a littlelace and a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray himself shouldhardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there came to mememories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, andhad spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a verydesolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of anextraordinary moral simplicity--almost vacancy; plastic to anyinfluence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such ayouth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurredto me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and inplace of entering into competition with the Master, would afford aslight though a distinct relief. I know not if I have done himwell, though his moral dissertations always highly entertained me:but I own I have been surprised to find that he reminded somecritics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . . 

PREFACE TO 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE' {19}

Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the followingpages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be anative; and there are few things more strange, more painful, ormore salutary, than such revisitations. Outside, in foreign spots, he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he hadexpected; in his own city, the relation is reversed, and he standsamazed to be so little recollected. Elsewhere he is refreshed tosee attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scoutsthe long streets, with a pang at heart, for the faces and friendsthat are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted with the presence ofwhat is new, there tormented by the absence of what is old. Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smittenwith an equal regret for what he once was and for what he oncehoped to be. 

He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on hislast visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door ofhis friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W. S. , with whom he was to stay. A hearty welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words thatsounded of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse inpassing of the snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesison the dining-room wall, brought him to his bed-room with asomewhat lightened cheer, and when he and Mr. Thomson sat down afew minutes later, cheek by jowl, and pledged the past in apreliminary bumper, he was already almost consoled, he had alreadyalmost forgiven himself his two unpardonable errors, that he shouldever have left his native city, or ever returned to it. 

'I have something quite in your way, ' said Mr. Thomson. 'I wishedto do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my ownyouth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered andwithered state, to be sure, but--well!--all that's left of it. '

'A great deal better than nothing, ' said the editor. 'But what isthis which is quite in my way?'

'I was coming to that, ' said Mr. Thomson: 'Fate has put it in mypower to honour your arrival with something really original by wayof dessert. A mystery. '

'A mystery?' I repeated. 

'Yes, ' said his friend, 'a mystery. It may prove to be nothing, and it may prove to be a great deal. But in the meanwhile it istruly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundredyears; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; andit ought to be melodramatic, for (according to the superscription)it is concerned with death. '

'I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promisingannunciation, ' the other remarked. 'But what is It?'

'You remember my predecessor's, old Peter M'Brair's business?'

'I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang ofreprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it. He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interestwas not returned. '

'Ah well, we go beyond him, ' said Mr. Thomson. 'I daresay oldPeter knew as little about this as I do. You see, I succeeded to aprodigious accumulation of old law-papers and old tin boxes, someof them of Peter's hoarding, some of his father's, John, first ofthe dynasty, a great man in his day. Among other collections wereall the papers of the Durrisdeers. '

'The Durrisdeers!' cried I. 'My dear fellow, these may be of thegreatest interest. One of them was out in the '45; one had somestrange passages with the devil--you will find a note of it inLaw's Memorials, I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy, Iknow not what, much later, about a hundred years ago--'

'More than a hundred years ago, ' said Mr. Thomson. 'In 1783. '

'How do you know that? I mean some death. '

'Yes, the lamentable deaths of my lord Durrisdeer and his brother, the Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles), ' said Mr. Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting. 'Is that it?'

'To say truth, ' said I, 'I have only seen some dim reference to thethings in memoirs; and heard some traditions dimmer still, throughmy uncle (whom I think you knew). My uncle lived when he was a boyin the neighbourhood of St. Bride's; he has often told me of theavenue closed up and grown over with grass, the great gates neveropened, the last lord and his old maid sister who lived in the backparts of the house, a quiet, plain, poor, hum-drum couple it wouldseem--but pathetic too, as the last of that stirring and bravehouse--and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from somedeformed traditions. '

'Yes, ' said Mr. Thomson. Henry Graeme Durie, the last lord, diedin 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss Katherine Durie, in '27;so much I know; and by what I have been going over the last fewdays, they were what you say, decent, quiet people and not rich. To say truth, it was a letter of my lord's that put me on thesearch for the packet we are going to open this evening. Somepapers could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M'Brair suggestingthey might be among those sealed up by a Mr. Mackellar. M'Brairanswered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar's ownhand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrativecharacter; and besides, said he, "I am bound not to open thembefore the year 1889. " You may fancy if these words struck me: Iinstituted a hunt through all the M'Brair repositories; and at lasthit upon that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I proposeto show you at once. '

In the smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet, fastened with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strongpaper thus endorsed:-

Papers relating to the lives and lamentable deaths of the late LordDurisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly called Master ofBallantrae, attainted in the troubles: entrusted into the hands ofJohn M'Brair in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W. S. ; this 20th day ofSeptember Anno Domini 1789; by him to be kept secret until therevolution of one hundred years complete, or until the 20th day ofSeptember 1889: the same compiled and written by me, EPHRAIM MACKELLAR, For near forty years Land Steward on theestates of His Lordship. 

As Mr. Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour hadstruck when we laid down the last of the following pages; but Iwill give a few words of what ensued. 

'Here, ' said Mr. Thomson, 'is a novel ready to your hand: all youhave to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, andimprove the style. '

'My dear fellow, ' said I, 'they are just the three things that Iwould rather die than set my hand to. It shall be published as itstands. '

'But it's so bald, ' objected Mr. Thomson. 

'I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness, ' replied I, 'andI am sure there is nothing so interesting. I would have allliterature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one. '

'Well, well, ' said Mr. Thomson, 'we shall see. '

Footnotes:

{1} First published in the Contemporary Review, April 1885

{2} Milton. 

{3} Milton. 

{4} Milton. 

{5} As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English examples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of which it forms achief adornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all tooRoman freedom of the sense: 'Hanc volo, quae facilis, quaepalliolata vagatur. '

{6} Coleridge. 

{7} Antony and Cleopatra. 

{8} Cymbeline. 

{9} The V is in 'of. '

{10} Troilus and Cressida. 

{11} First published in the Fortnightly Review, April 1881. 

{12} Mr. James Payn. 

{13} A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example setbefore all young writers in the width of literary sympathydisplayed by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to preserve;not only in that, but in every branch of literary work. 

{14} First published in the British Weekly, May 13, 1887. 

{15} Of the British Weekly. 

{16} First published in the Magazine of Art in 1883. 

{17} First published in the Idler, August 1894. 

{18} Ne pas confondre. Not the slim green pamphlet with theimprint of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with amazement fromthe book-lists) the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancyprices; but its predecessor, a bulky historical romance without aspark of merit, and now deleted from the world. 

{19} 1889.