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

Ill
ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF
STYLE IN LITERATURE
There is nothing more disenchanting to man than
to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art.
All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the
surface ; it is on the surface that we perceive their
beauty, fitness, and significance ; and to pry below is
to be appalled by their emptiness 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 rather
from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty
native to' the mind. And perhaps in eesthetics the
reason is the same : those disclosures which seem
fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps only in
the proportion of our ignorance ; and those conscious
and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of
the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the
power to trace them to their springs, indications of
a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and
hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignor-
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