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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: 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
ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it
has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely
technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still
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