Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

A NOTE ON REALISM
conventional disguise : are questions of plastic style
continually re-arising. And the sphinx that patrols
the highways of executive art has no more unanswer-
able riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my in-
stances) the great change of the past century has
been effected by the admission of detail. It was
inaugurated by the romantic Scott ; and at length,
by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on
the novelist. For some time it signified and ex-
pressed a more ample contemplation of the con-
ditions of man's hfe ; but it has recently (at least
in France) fallen into a merely technical and decora-
tive stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call
survival. With a movement of alarm, the wiser or
more timid begin to fall a little back from these
extremities ; they begin to aspire after a more naked,
narrative articulation ; after the succinct, the dig-
nified, and the poetic ; and as a means to this, after
a general lightening of this baggage of detail. After
Scott we beheld the starveling story — once, in the
hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable — begin to
be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these
details developed a particular ability of hand ; and
that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works
that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of
the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself
on technical successes. To afford a popular flavour
and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of
what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is
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