A LETTER, 1883 by Robert Louis Stevenson
To R. A. M. Stevenson
La Solitude, Hyères [October 1883].
MY DEAR BOB, — Yes, I got both your letters at Lyons, but have been since then decading in several steps. Toothache; fever; Ferrier’s death; lung. Now it is decided I am to leave to-morrow, penniless, for Nice to see Dr. Williams.
I was much struck by your last. I have written a breathless note on Realism for Henley; a fifth part of the subject hurriedly touched, which will show you how my thoughts are driving. You are now at last beginning to think upon the problems of executive, plastic art, for you are now for the first time attacking them. Hitherto you have spoken and thought of two things — technique and the ars artium, or common background of all arts. Studio work is the real touch. That is the genial error of the present French teaching. Realism I regard as a mere question of method. The “brown foreground,” “old mastery,” and the like, ranking with villanelles, as technical 60 sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same qualities — significance or charm. And the same — very same — inspiration is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism is the brown foreground over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball. All other realism is not art at all — but not at all. It is, then, an insincere and showy handicraft.
Were you to re-read some Balzac, as I have been doing, it would greatly help to clear your eyes. He was a man who never found his method. An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble detail. It is astounding to the riper mind how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and, of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how good and powerful. And yet never plain nor clear. He could not consent to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude of crying and incongruous details. There is but one art — to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.
Your definition of seeing is quite right. It is the first part of omission to be partly blind. Artistic sight is judicious blindness. Sam Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy. He would turn a corner, look for one-half or quarter minute, and then say, “This’ll do, lad.” Down he sat, there and then, with whole artistic plan, scheme of colour, and the like, and begin by laying a foundation of powerful and seemingly incongruous colour on the block. He saw, not the scene, but the water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty should so behold nature. Where does he learn that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to 61 nature for facts, relations, values — material; as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of realistic and ex facto art. He learns it in the crystallisation of day-dreams; in changing, not in copying, fact; in the pursuit of the ideal, not in the study of nature. These temples of art are, as you say, inaccessible to the realistic climber. It is not by looking at the sea that you get
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine,”
nor by looking at Mont Blanc that you find
“And visited all night by troops of stars.”
A kind of ardour of the blood is the mother of all this; and according as this ardour is swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art expression flows clear, and significance and charm, like a moon rising, are born above the barren juggle of mere symbols.
The painter must study more from nature than the man of words. By why? Because literature deals with men’s business and passions which, in the game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to study; but painting with relations of light, and colour, and significances, and form, which, from the immemorial habit of the race, we pass over with an unregardful eye. Hence this crouching upon camp-stools, and these crusts. But neither one nor other is a part of art, only preliminary studies.
I want you to help me to get people to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic in its consequences; when the realist is an artist, that is, and supposing the idealist with whom you compare him to be anything but a farceur and a dilettante. The two schools of working do, and should, lead to the choice of different subjects. But 62 that is a consequence, not a cause. See my chaotic note, which will appear, I fancy, in November in Henley’s sheet.
Poor Ferrier, it bust me horrid. He was, after you, the oldest of my friends.
I am now very tired, and will go to bed having prelected freely. Fanny will finish.
R. L. S.
BALZAC by John Cowper Powys
The real value of the creations of men of genius is to make richer and more complicated what might be called the imaginative margin of our normal life.
We all, as Goethe says, have to bear the burden of humanity — we have to plunge into the bitter waters of reality, so full of sharp rocks and blinding spray. We have to fight for our own hand. We have to forget that we so much as possess a soul as we tug and strain at the resistant elements out of which we live and help others to live.
It is nonsense to pretend that the insight of philosophers and the energy of artists help us very greatly in this bleak wrestling. They are there, these men of genius, securely lodged in the Elysian fields of large and free thoughts — and we are here, sweating and toiling in the dust of brutal facts.
The hollow idealism that pretends that the achievements of literature and thought enter profoundly into the diurnal necessity which prods us forward is a plausible and specious lie. We do not learn how to deal craftily and prosperously with the world from the Machiavels and Talleyrands. We do not learn how to love the world and savour it with exquisite joy from the Whitmans and Emersons. What we do is to struggle on, as best we may; living by custom, by prejudice, by hope, by fear, by envy and jealousy, by ambition, by vanity, by love.
They call it our “environment,” this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and thither; and they call it our “heredity,” this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward from within. But there is more in the lives of the most wretched of us than this blind struggle.
There are those invaluable, unutterable moments, which we have to ourselves, free of the weight of the world. There are the moments — the door of our bedroom, of our attic, of our ship’s cabin, of our monastic cell, of our tenement-flat, shut against the intruder — when we can enter the company of the great shadows and largely and freely converse with them to the forgetting of all vexation.
At such times, it is to the novelists, to the inventors of stories, that we most willingly turn for the poppied draught that we crave. The poets hurt us with the pang of too dear beauty. They remind us too pitifully of what we have missed. There is too much Rosemary which is “for remembrance” about their songs; too many dead violets between their leaves!
But on the large full tide of a great human romance, we can forget all our troubles. We can live in the lives of people who resemble ourselves and yet are not ourselves. We can put our own misguided life into the sweet distance, and see it — it also — as an invented story; a story that may yet have a fortunate ending!
The philosophers and even the poets are too anxious to convert us to their visions and their fancies. There is the fatal odour of the prophet in their perilous rhetoric, and they would fain lay their most noble fingers upon our personal matters. They want to make us moral or immoral. They want to thrust their mysticism, their materialism, their free love, or their imprisoned thoughts, down our reluctant throats.
But the great novelists
are up to no such mischief; they are dreaming of no such outrage. They are telling their stories of the old eternal dilemmas; stories of love and hate and fear and wonder and madness; stories of life and death and strength and weakness and perversion; stories of loyalty and treachery, of angels and devils, of things seen and things unseen. The greatest novelists are not the ones that deal in sociological or ethical problems. They are the ones that make us forget sociological and ethical problems. They are the ones that deal with the beautiful, mad, capricious, reckless, tyrannous passions, which will outlast all social systems and are beyond the categories of all ethical theorising.
First of all the arts of the world was, they say, the art of dancing. The aboriginal cave-men, we are to believe, footed it in their long twilights to tunes played on the bones of mammoths. But I like to fancy, I who have no great love for this throwing abroad of legs and arms, that there were a few quiet souls, even in those days, who preferred to sit on their haunches and listen to some hoary greybeard tell stories, stories I suppose of what it was like in still earlier days, when those lumbering Diplodocuses were still snorting in the remoter marshes.
It was not, as a matter of fact, in any attic or ship’s cabin that I read the larger number of Balzac’s novels. I am not at all disinclined to explain exactly and precisely where it was, because I cannot help feeling that the way we poor slaves of work manage to snatch an hour’s pleasure, and the little happy accidents of place and circumstance accompanying such pleasure, are a noteworthy part of the interest of our experience. It was, as it happens, in a cheerful bow-window in the Oxford High Street that I read most of Balzac; read him in the dreamy half-light of late summer afternoons while the coming on of evening seemed delayed by something golden in the drowsy air which was more than the mere sinking of the sun behind the historic roofs.
Oxford is not my Alma Mater. The less courtly atmosphere which rises above the willows and poplars of the Cam nourished my youthful dreams; and I shall probably to my dying day never quite attain the high nonchalant aloofness from the common herd proper to a true scholar.
It was in the humbler capacity of a summer visitor that I found myself in those exclusive purlieus, and it amuses me now to recall how I associated, as one does in reading a great romance, the personages of the Human Comedy with what surrounded me then.
It is a far cry from the city of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater to the city of Vautrin and Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré and Gobsec and Père Goriot and Diane de Maufrigneuse; and the great Balzacian world has the power of making every other milieu seem a little faded and pallid. But one got a delicious sense of contrast reading him just there in those golden evenings, and across the margin of one’s mind floated rich and thrilling suggestions of the vast vistas of human life. One had the dreamy pleasure that some sequestered seminarist might have, who, on a sunny bench, under high monastic walls, reads of the gallantries and adventures of the great ungodly world outside.
Certainly the heavy avalanches of scoriac passion which rend their way through the pages of the Human Comedy make even the graceful blasphemies of the Oscar Wilde group, in those fastidious enclosures, seem a babyish pretence of naughtiness.
I remember how I used to return after long rambles through those fields and village lanes which one reads about in “Thyrsis,” and linger in one of the cavernous book-shops which lie — like little Bodleians of liberal welcome — anywhere between New College and Balliol, hunting for Balzac in the original French. Since then I have not been able to endure to read him in any edition except in that very cheapest one, in dusty green paper, with the pages always so resistently uncut and tinted with a peculiar brownish tint such as I have not seemed to find in any other volumes. What an enormous number of that particular issue there must be in Paris, if one can find so many of them still, sun-bleached and weather-stained, in the old book-shops of Oxford!
Translations of Balzac, especially in those “editions de luxe” with dreadful interpretative prefaces by English professors, are odious to me. They seem the sort of thing one expects to find under glass-cases in the houses of cultured financiers. They are admirably adapted for wedding presents. And they have illustrations! That is really too much. A person who can endure to read Balzac, or any other great imaginative writer, in an edition with illustrations, is a person utterly outside the pale. It must be for barbarians of this sort that the custom has arisen of having handsome young women, representing feminine prettiness in general, put upon the covers of books in the way they put them upon chocolate boxes. I have seen even “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” prostituted in this manner. It is all on a par with every other aspect of modern life. Indeed it may be said that what chiefly distinguishes our age from previous ages is its habit of leaving nothing to the imagination.
On the whole, Balzac must still be regarded as the greatest novelist that ever lived. Not to love Balzac is not to love the art of fiction, not to love the huge restorative pleasure of wandering at large through a vast region of imaginary characters set in localities and scenes which may be verified and authenticated by contact with original places.
I would flatly refuse to two classes of persons, at any rate, any claim to be regarded as genuine lovers of fiction. The first class are those who want nothing but moral support and encouragement. These are still under the illusion that Balzac is a wicked writer. The second class are those who want nothing but neurotic excitement and tingling sensual thrills. These are under the illusion that Balzac is a dull writer.
There is yet a third class to whom I refuse the name of lovers of fiction. These are the intellectual and psychological maniacs who want nothing but elaborate social and personal problems, the elucidation of which may throw scientific light upon anthropological evolution. Well! We have George Eliot to supply the need of the first; the author of “Homo Sapiens” to supply the need of the second; and Paul Bourget to deal with the last.
It is difficult not to extend our refusal of the noble title of real Fiction-Lovers to the whole modern generation. The frivolous craze for short books and short stories is a proof of this.
The unfortunate illusion which has gone abroad of late that a thing to be “artistic” must be concise and condensed and to the point, encourages this heresy. I would add these “artistic” persons with their pedantry of condensation and the “exact phrase” to all the others who don’t really love this large and liberal art. To a genuine fiction-lover a book cannot be too long. What causes such true amorists of imaginative creation real suffering is when a book comes to an end. It can never be enjoyed again with quite the same relish, with quite the same glow and thrill and ecstasy.
To listen to certain fanatics of the principle of unity is to get the impression that these mysterious “artistic qualities” are things that may be thrust into a work from outside, after a careful perusal of, shall we say, Flaubert’s Letters to Madame Something-or-other, or a course of studies of the Short Story at Columbia University. Chop the thing quite clear of all “surplusage and irrelevancy”; chop it clear of all “unnecessary detail”; chop the descriptions and chop the incidents; chop the characters; “chop it and pat it and mark it with T,” as the nursery rhyme says, “and put it in the oven for Baby and me!” It is an impertinence, this theory, and an insult to natural human instincts.
Art is not a “hole and corner” thing, an affair of professional preciosities and discriminations, a set of tiresome rules to be learned by rote.
Art is the free play of generous and creative imaginations with the life-blood of the demiurgic forces of the universe in their veins. There is a large and noble joy in it, a magnanimous nonchalance and aplomb, a sap, an ichor, a surge of resilient suggestion, a rich ineffable magic, a royal liberality.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1442