No art — to use the daring phrase of Mr. James — can successfully “compete with life;” and the art that seeks to do so is condemned montibus aviis. Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind — the seat of wonder, to the touch — so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly — so imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of life’s majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems. To “compete with life,” whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us — to compete with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separation — here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can “compete with life:” not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and justly commend the author’s talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does “compete with life.” Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary abstraction.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, A Humble Remonstrance)
Stevenson n’est pas que l’auteur de super romans d’aventures, c’est un scoop — pour moi ! (et qui vaut bien le trésor d’une certaine île).
Le texte de 1884 dont ce passage est issu est un régal, enfin je trouve. Il me paraît difficile de n’en citer qu’un extrait, ça doit se remarquer, non ? (Je souligne)
L’article complet est disponible au format HTML et Word.
Le recueil d’où il est extrait, Memories and Portraits, est disponible au format TXT sur le site eBooks@Adelaide.
Je ne pense enfreindre aucun droit en proposant l’article au format PDF ?