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

TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE
the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quaUty
is poorly represented, but still it will be there.
And, on the other hand, how many do we continue
to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only
merit is the elegance of texture ? I am tempted to
mention Cicero ; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is
dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a very
colourless and toothless ' criticism of life ' ; but we
enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and dexterous
pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance
and of good sense ; and the two oranges, even if
one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable
grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly
upon prose ; for though in verse also the implication
of the logical texture is a crowning beauty, yet in
verse it may be dispensed with. You would think
that here was a death-blow to all I have been
saying ; and far from that, it is but a new illustration
of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not
bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because
another pattern has been formally imposed upon him
by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a
prosody. Verse may be rhythmical ; it may be
merely alliterative ; it may, like the French, depend
wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the
rhyme ; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the
strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea.
It does not matter on what principle the law is
based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention ;
it may have no inherent beauty ; all that we have a
243