Page:Stevenson - The Art of Writing (1905).djvu/17

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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

  1. First published in the Contemporary Review, April 1885

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