Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less concerned for the
mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at
each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. Sometimes
we catch an eye-this is our opportunity in the ages-and we
wag our tail with a poor smile. 'IS THAT ALL?' All? If
you only knew! But how can they know? They do not love
us; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent.
But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear,
is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand
others that we can get our own hearts understood; and
in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the
most successful pleader.
*
There is no friendship so noble, but it is the product of
the time; and a world of little finical observances, and
little frail proprieties and fashions of the hour, go to
make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of
spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
interference. The trick of the country and the age steps
in even between the mother and her child, counts out their
caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the voice of
authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of
confidence between them, and this other thing shall not.
*
There is not anything more bitter than to lose a
fancied friend.
*
The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live
truly with his wife and friends; while another man who
never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be
himself one lie-heart and face, from top to bottom. This
is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice
versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to
your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify
emotion -that is the truth which makes love possible and
mankind happy.
*
But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is
better to give than to receive, to serve than to use our
companions; and, above all, where there is no question of
service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy their
company like a natural man.
*
A man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if
there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget
on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by
a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few light words, a
piece of stamped paper, or a woman's bright eyes--he may be
left in a month destitute of all.
*
In these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times
disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are
disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most
frequently undeserving of the love that unites us; and that
it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually
rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour.
*
'There are some pains,' said he, 'too acute for
consolation, or I would bring them to my kind consoler.'
*
But there are duties which come before gratitude and
offences which justly divide friends, far more
acquaintances.
*
Life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by
literature. We are subject to physical passions and
contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by
unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible
countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said
look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked
into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold
with appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and
gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear
reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the
hearts of others.
*
We are different with different friends; yet if we look
closely we shall find that every such relation reposes on
some particular apotheosis of oneself; with each friend,
although we could not distinguish it in words from any
other, we have at least one special reputation to preserve:
and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend
or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called
better, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek
this society to flatter ourselves with our own good
conduct. And hence any falsehood in the relation, any
incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even the
pleasure of these visits.
But it follows that since they are neither of them so good
as the other hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner,
playing a part above his powers, such an intercourse must
often be disappointing to both.
*
It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly
circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that
was the lawyer's way. His friends were those of his own
blood, or those whom he had known the longest; his
affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied
no aptness in the object.
*
Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we
should expect always something large and public in their
way of life, something more or less urbane and
comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We should not
expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if
they have but a wife to their bosom, ask no more of
womankind, just as they ask no more of their own sex, if
they can find a friend or two for their immediate need.
They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
association-not the great ones alone, but all. They will
know not love only, but all those other ways in which man
and woman mutually make each other happy-by sympathy, by
admiration, by the atmosphere they bear about them-down to
the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces in the
street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of
sex makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most
lukewarm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry
due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are
brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our mothers
otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a
brother to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it
never so unalloyed and innocent, is not the same as
friendship between man and man. Such friendship is not
even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a woman
that is not far short of passionate with such
disinterestedness and beautiful gratuity of affection as
there is between friends of the same sex, requires no
ordinary disposition in the man. For either it would
presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it
were, a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it
would mean that he had accepted the large, simple divisions
of society: a strong and positive spirit robustly virtuous,
who has chosen a better part coarsely, and holds to it
steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain to himself
and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very
scrupulous of small lives under foot.
*
I could have thought he had been eaves-dropping at the
doors of my heart, so entire was the coincidence between
his writing and my thought.
*
A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen
things, even as they are little things, not much otherwise
than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one
of life's choicest pleasures.
*
The morning drum-call on my eager ear
Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew
Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
But now I pause at whiles in what I do,
And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear
(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.
*
The ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria,
and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked,
ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead;
those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for
where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration,
he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner
of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget
oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and
tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself,
giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.
But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured
body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death
appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom
peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or
his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him;
but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving
and yet storing up.
*
The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like
Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility,
and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has
learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of
life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he
seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in
the course of years, and after much rubbing with his
fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see himself from
without and his fellows from within: to know his own for
one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city
street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony
and hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital
doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of
chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of
others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard.
The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and
busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear
to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still
idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has
to do. The parable of the talent is the brief, epitome of
youth. To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is
first needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers
seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in
evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a
moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the
inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that
sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with
strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials
of the dead.
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import,
forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness,
importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand;
books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console;
books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that
game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-
back not least. But the average sermon flees the point,
disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and
need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and
momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.
*
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself
dying will get cold comfort from the very youthful view
expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to
help, some to love, some to correct; it may be some to
punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's
son and a second woman's husband, and a third woman's
father. That life which began so small has now grown, with
a myriad filaments, into the lives of others. It is not
indispensable; another will take the place and shoulder the
discharged responsibilities; but the better the man and the
nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret
the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his
personality. To have lived a generation is not only to
have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to have
assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age has,
for all but the entirely base, something of the air
of a betrayal.
*
Even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in
mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning
monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths
full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped
up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited
in such a termination? and does not life go down with a
better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than
miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the
Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love
die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of
death also in their eye. For, surely, at whatever age it
overtake the man, this is to die young.
*
And so they were at last in 'their resting graves.' So long
as men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a
misapprehension, they will be leading pattern lives; and
whether or not they come to lie beside a martyrs' monument,
we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere in the
providence of God. It is not well to think of death,
unless we temper the thought with that of heroes who
despised it. Upon what ground, is of small account; if it
be only the bishop who was burned for his faith in the
antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us walk
undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is
a wholesome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look
upon it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of
those who have won their discharge, and in another phrase
of Patrick Walker's, got 'cleanly off the stage.'
*
It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters-it
is we ourselves who know not what we do;-thence springs the
glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think:
that to scramble through this random business with hands
reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man or woman
with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the
diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for
the poor human soldier to have done right well.
*
We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of
our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar
and a legend.
*
There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our
actions-eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to
behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and
scruple to offend: our witnesses and judges.
*
How unsubstantial is this projection of a man s existence,
which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed
up again and set forth for the consideration of posterity
by a few dips in an antiquary's ink-pot! This precarious
tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they
are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the immediate
present.
*
But I beard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old
endless ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and
a BEL AMOUREUX, her handsome sweetheart; and I wished I
could have taken up the strain and answered her, as I went
on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in
the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have
told her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires.
How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts
near only to separate them again into distant and strange
lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the
world a garden; and 'hope, which comes to all,' outwears
the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand
beyond the grave and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by
God's mercy, both easy and grateful to believe!
*
As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with
more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few
have less influence on conduct under healthy
circumstances.... If we clung as devotedly as some
philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or
were half as frightened as they make out we are, for the
subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might
sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle--
the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who would climb
into a sea-going ship? Think (if these philosophers were
right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront
the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than
any battle-field in history, where the far greater
proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their
bones! What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so
much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would
it be to grow old?
*
If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a
journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn,
and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon
the thieves. And, above all, where, instead of simply
spending, he makes a profitable investment for some of his
money when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of
brisk living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just
so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall
have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomachs,
when he cries, 'Stand and deliver.'
*
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to
waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done
with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means
begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a
year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave
push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not
only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour
useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means
execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All
who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done
good work, although they may die before they have the time
to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and
cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the
world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
*
Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good
whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a
thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a
very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his
pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs,
until, if he be running towards anything better than
wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the
end.
*
When the time comes that he should go, there need be few
illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant
well, tried a little, failed much:-surely that may be his
epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed, nor will he
complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from
the field; defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus
Aurelius!--but if there is still one inch of fight in his
old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him
in his lifelong blindness and lifelong disappointment will
scarce even be required in this last formality of laying
down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones;
there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out
of the day and the dust and the ecstasy-there goes
another Faithful Failure.
*
We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of the tragedyof
death, and think so little of the enduring tragedy of some
men's lives, that we see more to lament for in a life cut
off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one that
miserably survives all love and usefulness, and goes about
the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or
any consolation.
*
'You are a strange physician,' said Will, looking
steadfastly upon his guest.
'I am a natural law,' he replied, 'and people call
me Death.'
'Why did you not tell me so at first?' cried Will.
'I have been waiting for you these many years.
Give me your hand, and welcome.'
*
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
*
But the girls picked up their skirts, as if they were sure
they had good ankles, and followed until their breath was
out. The last to weary were the three graces and a couple
of companions; and just as they, too, had had enough, the
foremost of the three leaped upon a tree-stump and kissed
her hand to the canoeists. Not Diana herself, although
this was more of a Venus, after all, could have done a
graceful thing more gracefully. 'Come back again!' she
cried; and all the others echoed her; and the hills about
Origny repeated the words, 'Come back.' But the river had
us round an angle in a twinkling, and we were alone with
the green trees and running water.
Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the
impetuous stream of life.
'The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,
The plowman from the sun his season takes.'
And we must all set our pocket watches by the clock of
fate. There is a headlong, forthright tide, that bears
away man with his fancies like straw, and runs fast in time
and space. It is full of curves like this, your winding
river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at
all. For though it should revisit the same acre of meadow
in the same hour, it will have made an ample sweep between-
whiles; many little streams will have fallen in; many
exhalations risen toward the sun; and even although it were
the same acre, it will not be the same river Oise. And
thus, oh graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune
of my life should carry me back again to where you await
death's whistle by the river, that will not be the old I
who walks the streets; and those wives and mothers, say,
will those be you?
*
THE CELESTIAL SURGEON
If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake;
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose Thou, before that spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in!
*
Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give us grace
and strength to forbear and to persevere. Offenders, give
us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders. Forgetful
ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of
others. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless
us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it
may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to
come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation,
temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down
to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
*
PRAYER AT MORNING
The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating
concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to
perform then with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness
abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our
business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary
and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the
gift of sleep.
*
PRAYER AT EVENING
Our guard is relieved, the service of the day is over, and
the hour come to rest. We resign into Thy hands our
sleeping bodies, our cold hearths and open doors. Give us
to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling. As the
sun returns in the east, so let our patience be renewed
with dawn; as the sun lightens the world, so let our
loving-kindness make bright this house of our habitations.
*
Blind us to the offences of our beloved, cleanse them from
our memories, take them out of our mouths for ever. Let
all here before Thee carry and measure with the false
balances of love, and be in their own eyes and in all
conjunctures the most guilty. Help us at the same time
with the grace of courage, that we be none of us cast down
when we sit lamenting amid the ruins of our happiness or
our integrity; touch us with fire from the altar, that we
may be up and doing to rebuild our city.
*
We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of
many families and nations gathered together in the peace of
this roof, weak men and women subsisting under the covert
of Thy patience. Be patient still; suffer us yet a while
longer;-with our broken purposes of good, with our idle
endeavours against evil, suffer us a while longer to
endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to
us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these
must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction.
Be with our friends, be with ourselves. Go with each of us
to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of
watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun
and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with
morning hearts-eager to labour--eager to he happy, if
happiness shall be our portion--and if the day be marked
for sorrow, strong to endure it.
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