The Art of Writing(写作的艺术).pdf

The Art of Writing
The Art of Writing
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The Art of Writing
CHAPTER I - ON SOME
TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF
STYLE IN LITERATURE (1)
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 aesthetics 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 ignorance at
least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of
beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the
mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will always
grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated but never can
wholly be explained; nay, on the principle laid down in HUDIBRAS,
that
'Still the less they understand, The more they admire the sleight-of-
hand,'
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the
ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known
character, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most
distasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall and looking
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The Art of Writing
on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to
pieces.
1. CHOICE OF WORDS. - The art of literature stands apart from