--Robert Louis Stevenson, from "A Gossip on Romance," an essay I find useful and influential when I consider how literary arts truly work and what I feel such arts should aim at.
I've written about Stevenson's Treasure Island also; here's the link:
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Passages: Stevenson on "How" in Literature
Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventures, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life.
