Essays in the Art of Writing

By: Stevenson, Robert Louis

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanismof any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that weperceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by theiremptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but ratherfrom the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in sthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of artseem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious andunconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist to employ were yet, ifwe had the power to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finerthan we conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least islargely irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep innature and too far back in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated but never can whollybe explained; nay, on the principle laid down in Hudibras, that'Still the less they understand, The more they admire the sleight-of-hand, 'many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the ardour of theirpleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known character, the general reader, that I amhere embarked upon a most distasteful business: taking down the picture from the walland looking on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08F81FLKG
• ISBN13: 9798673712405
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 42 Pages
• Weight: 0.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.0" x 8.0"