The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson (thriller book recommendations TXT) 📖
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or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so
little recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which
we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect, not,
as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is
the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which attains the
highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively;
or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour.
Even the derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) natural
order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the means of such
designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most
pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most
perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical,
an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the
foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be
read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality
is poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on the
other hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with
pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted
to mention Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will.
It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless
‘criticism of life’; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate
and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance and
of good sense; and the two oranges, even if one of them be rotten,
kept dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though
in verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning
beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think
that here was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from
that, it is but a new illustration of the principle involved. For
if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is
because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the
laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be
rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French,
depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or,
like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of
repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the
law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it may
have no inherent beauty; all that we have a right to ask of any
prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, and
that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard.
Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility to
write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for
in prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the
difficulties first created before they can be solved. Hence,
again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the true versifier:
such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo, whom I place beside
them as versifier merely, not as poet. These not only knit and
knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and
strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse
with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a
rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of
counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now
contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and
the verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on,
the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will
reach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that
can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the
development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in
hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with
a great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of
conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of
triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed only
two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from
melody to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the juggler,
behold him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the
spectators, juggling with three oranges instead of two. Thus it
is: added difficulty, added beauty; and the pattern, with every
fresh element, becoming more interesting in itself.
Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition;
something is lost as well as something gained; and there remains
plainly traceable, in comparing the best prose with the best verse,
a certain broad distinction of method in the web. Tight as the
versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still
leaves the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat loose. In
prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, nicely balanced, and fits
into itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear
remarks and is singly gratified by this return and balance; while
in verse it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparable
passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the superior
of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his more
delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his inferior. But
let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was
ambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour’s Prologue to the
Second Part of Henry IV., a fine flourish of eloquence in
Shakespeare’s second manner, and set it side by side with
Falstaff’s praise of sherris, act iv. scene iii.; or let us compare
the beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando;
compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando’s speech to
Adam, with what passage it shall please you to select—the Seven
Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of nobility as
Othello’s farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive,
if you have an ear for that class of music, a certain superior
degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of the
parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbing
pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take from those who
have little, the little that they have; the merits of prose are
inferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an
independent.
3. Rhythm of the Phrase.—Some way back, I used a word which still
awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but
what is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points,
literature, being a representative art, must look for analogies to
painting and the like; but in what is technical and executive,
being a temporal art, it must seek for them in music. Each phrase
of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be
so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and
unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is
the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the secret of
the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those phrases, such
as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless and yet
to please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I owe
it all to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however,
particularly interesting in the present connection. We have been
accustomed to describe the heroic line as five iambic feet, and to
be filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious
schoolboy, we have heard our own description put in practice.
‘All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,’ {2}
goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our
definition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr.
Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the
heroic line consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase,
contains four pauses:
‘All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.’
Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, in
this case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a
trochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with
no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly
scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this fresh richness of
intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but
still kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thing
it now appears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the
verse is made at the same time to read in fives and to read in
fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find verses
in six groups, because there is not room for six in the ten
syllables; and we do not find verses of two, because one of the
main distinctions of verse from prose resides in the comparative
shortness of the group; but it is even common to find verses of
three. Five is the one forbidden number; because five is the
number of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two patterns would
coincide, and that opposition which is the life of verse would
instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect of
polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common and
make so brave an architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is
a group of Nature’s making. If but some Roman would return from
Hades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the
voice these thundering verses should be uttered—‘Aut Lacedoe-monium Tarentum,’ for a case in point—I feel as if I should enter
at last into the full enjoyment of the best of human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by the
mere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a
question of elegance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so;
and I am certain that for choice no two of them should scan the
same. The singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so
far as analysis can carry us, part, indeed, to the clever
repetition of L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scansion in
the groups. The groups which, like the bar in music, break up the
verse for utterance, fall uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it may so happen that we never utter one
iambic foot. And yet to this neglect of the original beat there is
a limit.
‘Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,’ {3}
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it
scarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly
suggests no other measure to the ear. But begin
‘Mother Athens, eye of Greece,’
or merely ‘Mother Athens,’ and the game is up, for the trochaic
beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is
an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten,
they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought;
but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this
variety is lost, and we fall back on sameness. Thus,
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