Editing Robert Louis Stevenson (section)

==Reflections on the art of writing==
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 |quote  = Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to [[William Hazlitt|Hazlitt]], to [[Charles Lamb|Lamb]], to [[William Wordsworth|Wordsworth]], to [[Thomas Browne|Sir Thomas Browne]], to [[Daniel Defoe|Defoe]], to [[Nathaniel Hawthorne|Hawthorne]], to [[Michel de Montaigne|Montaigne]], to [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]] and to [[Étienne Pivert de Senancour|Obermann]].
 |author = Robert Lewis Stevenson
 |source = "[[Memories and Portraits]]", Chapter IV, relating how he practiced writing in his youth
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Stevenson's critical essays on literature contain "few sustained analyses of style or content".<ref name="Brandeis">{{Cite web |title=Robert Louis Stevenson Biography |url=http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/stevensonbio.html |access-date=27 October 2020 |website=people.brandeis.edu |publisher=Brandeis University |archive-date=23 February 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210223153315/http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/stevensonbio.html |url-status=live }}</ref> In "A Penny Plain and Two-pence Coloured" (1884) he suggests that his own approach owed much to the exaggerated and romantic world that, as a child, he had entered as proud owner of Skelt's Juvenile Drama—a toy set of cardboard characters who were actors in melodramatic dramas. "A Gossip on Romance" (1882) and "A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's" (1887) imply that it is better to entertain than to instruct.<ref name="Brandeis" />

Stevenson very much saw himself in the mould of Sir Walter Scott, a storyteller with an ability to transport his readers away from themselves and their circumstances. He took issue with what he saw as the tendency in French realism to dwell on sordidness and ugliness. In "The Lantern-Bearer" (1888) he appears to take [[Emile Zola]] to task for failing to seek out nobility in his protagonists.<ref name="Brandeis" />

In "A Humble Remonstrance", Stevenson answers [[Henry James]]'s claim in "The Art of Fiction" (1884) that the novel competes with life. Stevenson protests that no novel can ever hope to match life's complexity; it merely abstracts from life to produce a harmonious pattern of its own.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Stevenson |first=Robert Louis |title=A Humble Remonstrance |url=http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/stevenson-remonstrance.pdf |access-date=27 October 2020 |archive-date=1 February 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210201171651/http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/stevenson-remonstrance.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref><blockquote>Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality...Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate...The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material ... but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant.</blockquote> It is not clear, however, that in this there was any real basis for disagreement with James.<ref name="O" /> Stevenson had presented James with a copy of ''Kidnapped'', but it was ''Treasure Island'' that James favoured. Written as a story for boys, Stevenson had thought it in "no need of psychology or fine writing", but its success is credited with liberating children's writing from the "chains of Victorian [[didacticism]]".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Livesey |first=Margot |date=November 1994 |title=The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/11/the-double-life-of-robert-louis-stevenson/306474/ |journal=The Atlantic |access-date=26 October 2020 |archive-date=28 October 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201028113016/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/11/the-double-life-of-robert-louis-stevenson/306474/ |url-status=live }}</ref>
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