116 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
style, analyzed their methods and effects, and imitated them
in many volumes of manuscript. Whether work of this sort
is the only way to learn to write, as he avers, is an open ques-
tion; but it is not an open question that the only way to learn
to write is to work. Merely to read the account of Steven-
son’s apprenticeship to letters is enough to make a lazy man
tired. It has been said that he would write a three-volume
novel, cut it down to a one-volume novel, rewrite that into a
short story, and then burn the short story.
The proverb tells us that there is no royal road to learn-
ing, and assuredly there is no royal road to art. An ama-
teur painter was showing his productions to a trained art-
ist, prattling foolish platitudes about “little things that I
dashed off in idle moments,” and concluded with “I never
took a painting lesson in my life.” “So I see,” said the art-
ist, “but why did n’t you?” Some true art has been “dashed
off” in an ecstasy of inspiration, but only by men who have
studied their technique through wearisome plodding years
of application; the same painter who “does” a portrait at a
sitting may take six weeks to do the next. The problem is
to make it “come right.” It may come right in a flash, or it
may come right only by slow and laborious processes; but it
never comes right except from the trained hand, and the
trained hand, or the trained mind, is the product of long and
self-sacrificing toil.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde” in three days, but “The Master of Ballantrae” was
the result of years of thinking and months of writing; and
both were the result of a lifetime of “learning how.” So
this Stevenson, with a boy’s heart and essays in defense of
idleness, turns out to be just one of the hardest-working men
that ever acquired skill by unrelenting endeavor, turns out
to be about the least consolation that a lazy man could find.