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

A NOTE ON REALISM
indeed, like good and evil angels, contend for the
direction of the work. Marble, paint, and language,
the pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their
grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their hours,
if I may so express myself, of insubordination. It
is the work and it is a great part of the delight of
any artist to contend with these unruly tools, and
now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to
drive and coax them to effect his will. Given these
means, so laughably inadequate, and given the in-
terest, the intensity, and the multiplicity of the
actual sensation whose effect he is to render with
their aid, the artist has one main and necessary
resource which he must, in every case and upon any
theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much
and omit more. He must omit what is tedious or
irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and neces-
sary. But such facts as, in regard to the main
design, subserve a variety of purposes, he will per-
force and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of the
very highest order of creative art to be woven ex-
clusively of such. There, any fact that is registered
is contrived a double or a treble debt to pay, and is
at once an ornament in its place, and a pillar in the
main design. Nothing would find room in such a
picture that did not serve, at once, to complete the
composition, to accentuate the scheme of colour, to
distinguish the planes of distance, and to strike the
note of the selected sentiment ; nothing would be
allowed in such a story that did not, at the same
time, expedite the progress of the fable, build up the
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