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

TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE
suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with
another ; and the art of rightly using these concord-
ances is the final art in literature. It used to be a
piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid
alliteration ; and the advice was sound, in so far as
it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it
abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those
blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty
of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends
implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance.
The vowel demands to be repeated ; the consonant
demands to be repeated ; and both cry aloud to be
perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures
of a letter through any passage that has particularly
pleased you ; find it, perhaps, denied a while, to
tantalise the ear ; find it fired again at you in a
whole broadside ; or find it pass into congenerous
sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into
another. And you will find another and much
stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and
for two senses : a sort of internal ear, quick to per-
ceive ' unheard melodies ' ; and the eye, which directs
the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. Well,
even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will
find that there are assonances and alliterations ; that
where an author is running the open a, deceived by
the eye and our strange English spelUng, he will
often show a tenderness for the flat a ; and that
where he is running a particular consonant, he will
not improbably rejoice to write it down even when it
is mute or bears a different value.
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