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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and
notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of
plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that
patrols the highways of executive art has no more
unanswerable riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great
change of the past century has been effected by the admission
of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at
length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the
novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more
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