Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly
stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by
the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he
charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. And the Greeks, in
so figuring, uttered the last word of human experience. To
certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic
ethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all
ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of
all the classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph;
goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the type of
the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit
properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.
*
To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened
with novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a
more endearing light upon the past. As in those composite
photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of each new sitter
brings out but the more clearly the central features of the
race; when once youth has flown, each new impression only
deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native
places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany
Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may
some officer marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among
the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon
his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma
of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in
particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was
jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race
nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child
of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the hued
lowland waters of that shire.
*
THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
We travelled in the print of olden wars;
Yet all the land was green;
And love we found, and peace,
Where fire and war had been.
They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
No more the sword they wield;
And O, how deep the corn
Along the battlefield!
*
To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently
for the threat that runs through all the winning music of
the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of
the thorn, and from life because of death: this it is to be
afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee life's
pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat,
upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the
left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they
would be if they could hear their attitude mythologically
expressed, and knew themselves as tooth-chattering ones,
who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of
Nature's God!
*
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are
still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all
that is valuable in our lot, we must continually face some
other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in
love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of
character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures.
*
Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or
market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty
for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense
of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive,
hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of
living except in the exercise of some conventional
occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set
them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their
desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot
give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its
own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a
stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking
to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their nature is not
generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the
gold-mill.
*
If a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he
should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks
to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused;
and within practical limits, it is one of the most
incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look
at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech
you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast
deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large
measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he
absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a
recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden
inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly,
in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge
some temper before he returns to work. I do not care
how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil
feature in other people's lives. They would be happier
if he were dead.
*
'We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the
evening, VOYEZ-VOUS, NOUS SOMMES SERIEUX.'
These were the words. They were all employed over the
frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day;
but in the evening they found some hours for the serious
concerns of life. I may have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I
think that was a very wise remark. People connected with
literature and philosophy are busy all their days in
getting rid of second-hand notions and false standards. It
is their profession, in the sweat of their brows, by dogged
thinking, to recover their old fresh view of life, and
distinguish what they really and originally like from what
they have only learned to tolerate perforce. And these
Royal Nautical Sportsmen had the distinction still quite
legible in their hearts. They had still those clean
perceptions of what is nice and nasty, what is interesting
and what is dull, which envious old gentlemen refer to as
illusions. The nightmare illusion of middle age, the
bear's hug of custom gradually squeezing the life out of a
man's soul, had not yet begun for these happy-starr'd young
Belgians. They still knew that the interest they took in
their business was a trifling affair compared to their
spontaneous, long-suffering affection for nautical sports.
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to
what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have
kept your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; he may
be honest in something more than the commercial sense; he
may love his friends with an elective, personal sympathy,
and not accept them as an adjunct of the station to which
he has been called. He may be a man, in short, acting on
his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made
him in; and not a mere crank in the social engine-house,
welded on principles that he does not understand, and for
purposes that he does not care for.
*
I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is
played in life by eating and drinking. The appetite is so
imperious that we can stomach the least interesting viands,
and pass off a dinner hour thankfully enough on bread and
water; just as there are men who must read something, if it
were only 'Bradshaw's Guide.' But there is a romance about
the matter, after all. Probably the table has more
devotees than love; and I am sure that food is much more
generally entertaining than scenery. Do you give in, as
Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less immortal
for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we
are. To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece
of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of
the sunset.
*
For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops,
is one thing; it is another for the citizen, from the thick
of his affairs, to overlook the country. It should be a
genial and ameliorating influence in life; it should prompt
good thoughts and remind him of Nature's unconcern: that he
can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the
spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows
black under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in
this connection, to deplore the slender faculties of the
human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull
ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as
people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you
can fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note
of the objects of vision, not only a few yards, but a few
miles from where you stand:--think how agreeably your sight
would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts would be
diversified, as you walk the Edinburgh streets! For you
might pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst of
the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the
Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country
elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed
and rustic visage; or as a fisher racing seaward, with
the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in
the wind, would fling you a salutation from between
Anst'er and the May.
*
So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from
afar upon men's life. The city is as silent as a city of
the dead: from all its humming thoroughfares, not a voice,
not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill. The sea-surf,
the cries of plough-men, the streams and the mill-wheels,
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through
the plain; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks
contend together in defiance; and yet from this Olympian
station, except for the whispering rumour of a train, the
world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of
town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying
hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry
grass, seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, the
stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes
a music at once human and rural, and discourses pleasant
reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable
city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and
the straight highways, tell visibly of man's active and
comfortable ways; and you may be never so laggard and never
so unimpressionable, but there is something in the view
that spirits up your blood and puts you in the vein for
cheerful labour.
*
The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as
dark as January. Intervals of a groping twilight
alternated with spells of utter blackness; and it was
impossible to trace the reason of these changes in the
flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of
a man's nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead
like one huge sail; and when there fell a momentary lull on
Aros, we could hear the gusts dismally sweeping in the
distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ross the wind must
have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows
the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw.
Sheets of mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces.
All round the isle of Aros, the surf, with an incessant,
hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs and beaches. Now
louder in one place, now lower in another, like the
combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of
sound was hardly varied for a moment. And loud above all
this hurly-burly I could hear the changeful voices of the
Roost and the intermittent roaring of the Merry Men. At
that hour there flashed into my mind the reason of the name
that they were called. For the noise of them seemed almost
mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night;
or if not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous
joviality. Nay, and it seemed even human. As when savage
men have drunk away their reason, and, discarding speech
bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my ears,
these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.
*
I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in
which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was
winter; the night was very dark; the air extraordinary
clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From
a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with
ice and boulders; a few lights, scattered unevenly among
the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of
isolation. For the making of a story here were fine
conditions.
*
On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros,
these great granite rocks that I have spoken of go down
together in troops into the sea, like cattle on a summer's
day. There they stand, for all the world like their
neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming
on their sides instead of heather; and the great sea-conger
to wreathe about the base of them instead of the poisonous
viper of the land. On calm days you can go wandering
between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you
about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help
the man that hears that caldron boiling.
*
It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up;
they were tucked in among the snow, and their shape was
modelled through the pliant counterpane, like children
tucked in by a fond mother. The wind had made ripples and
folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet
weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle
in the air. An effusion of coppery light on the summit of
Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look
through; but along the horizon clouds of cold fog had
settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and
sea. Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in
the opening of bays, there was nothing but a great vacancy
and blackness; and the road as it drew near the edge of
the cliff, seemed to skirt the shores of creation and
void space.
*
When we are looking at a landscape we think ourselves
pleased; but it is only when it comes back upon us by the
fire o' nights that we can disentangle the main charm from
the thick of particulars. It is just so with what is
lately past. It is too much loaded with detail to be
distinct; and the canvas is too large for the eye to
encompass. But this is no more the case when our
recollections have been strained long enough through the
hour-glass of time; when they have been the burthen of so
much thought, the charm and comfort of so many a vigil.
All that is worthless has been sieved and sifted out of
them. Nothing remains but the brightest lights and the
darkest shadows.
*
Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through
all reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note.
Beranger waited till he was himself beyond the reach of
want before writing the OLD VAGABOND or JACQUES. Samuel
Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, 'was a
great arguer for the advantages of poverty' in his ill
days. Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and
smile with the fox burrowing in their vitals.
*
Now, what I like so much in France is the clear,
unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck. They
all know on which side their bread is buttered, and take a
pleasure in showing it to others, which is surely the
better part of religion. And they scorn to make a poor
mouth over their poverty, which I take to be the better
part of manliness.
*
If people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a
man boasting, so long as he boasts of what he really has,
I believe they would do it more freely and with a
better grace.
*
A girl at school in France began to describe one of our
regiments on parade to her French school-mates, and as she
went on she told me the recollection grew so vivid, she
became so proud to be the countrywoman of such soldiers,
and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
failed her and she burst into tears. I have never
forgotten that girl, and I think she very nearly deserves a
statue. To call her a young lady, with all its niminy
associations, would be to offer her an insult. She may
rest assured of one thing, although she never should marry
a heroic general, never see any great or immediate result
of her life, she will not have lived in vain for her
native land.
*
As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a
look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the
smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from
the Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment
into the dark souls of many good, many wise, and many
prudent men. I cannot be very grateful to such men for
their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I find myself
facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence,
full of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and
dangers, quite a hard enough life without their dark
countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a
happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of
quiet and contentment.
*
There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of
matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a
certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in
the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of
a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries--his wife, that
accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never
heard, but he is often described as Probably Arboreal,
which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of
ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal;
in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild,
tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his
rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
moved our common ancestors, all must obediently thrill.
*
This is an age when genealogy has taken a new lease of
life, and become for the first time a human science; so
that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths,
but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and
destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard
Burke and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do our character
and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
during generations; but the very plot of our life's story
unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography
of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.
*
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic
of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long
pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our
HOMUNCULUS and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our
conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us.
*
What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this
poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of
which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a gesture
that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not a look from
my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but
has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed
other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleadings
of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The hands
of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me,
they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but
re-inform features and attributes that have long been laid
aside from evil in the quiet of the grave. Is it me you
love, friend? or the race that made me? The girl who does
not know and cannot answer for the least portion of
herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory eddy,
the tree of which she is the passing fruit? The race
exists; it is old, it is ever young, it carries its eternal
destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the sea,
individual succeeds individual, mocked with a semblance of
self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul,
but the soul is in the race.
*
The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own
history, the seed of my present thoughts, the mould of my
present disposition. It is not in vain that I return to
the nothings of my childhood; for every one of them has
left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted
free-will. In the past is my present fate; and in the past
also is my real life.
*
For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation,
still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man
the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is
already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England.
We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading
army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the
phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep
open our communications with the extreme rear and first
beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is
not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our
faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion
into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
*
The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly
justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of
public ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the
change, we are not unconscious of the manifold advantages
of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and
the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost
appetite for playing at soldiers.
*
If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied
that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often
laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more
genuine intonation.
*
There is something irreverent in the speculation, but
perhaps the want of power has more to do with wise
resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit.
*
People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the
sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a
different affair from giving up youth, with all its
admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of
gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than
improbable, old age.
*
Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as, age
approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable,
and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous
and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives,
into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in
life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
*
Age asks with timidity to be spared intolerable pain;
youth, taking fortune by the beard, demands joy like a
right.
*
It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate
balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead of
coming ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be
very apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to
perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of
enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the
retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zealous
Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. For my
part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with
something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the
moment) that we had better leave these great changes to
what we call blind forces; their blindness being so much
more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial
eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own scheme would
not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard
propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as
much as they encouraged others. Now I know that in thus
turning Conservative with years, I am going through the
normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit
of men's opinions.
Those who go the devil in youth, with anything like a fair
chance, were probably little worth saving from the first;
they must have been feeble fellows--creatures made of putty
and pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true
joyfulness, in their composition; we may sympathise with
their parents, but there is not much cause to go into
mourning for themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak
brother is the worst of mankind.
*
The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as
much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and
sucklings. Their most anti-social acts indicate the
defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man
against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you
need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.
. . . But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is
better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be
entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life
and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel
on through the world, like smiling images pushed from
behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has
brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the
others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their
hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the
farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing
at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of
countenance for all those who have been wise in their own
esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth
hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and
complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and
more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future,
we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we
have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with
wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
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