Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
Had he but talked--talked freely--let himself gush out in
words (the way youth loves to do, and should) there might
have been no tale to write upon the Weirs of Hermiston.
*
A young man feels himself one too many in the world; his is
a painful situation; he has no calling; no obvious utility;
no ties but to his parents, and these he is sure to
disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been
made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the
mere fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the
fact or else the feeling. Either we become so callously
accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or
else--and this, thank God, in the majority of cases--we so
collect about us the interest or the love of our fellows,
so multiply our effective part in the affairs of life,
that we need to entertain no longer the question of our
right to be.
*
It had been long his practice to prophesy for his second
son a career of ruin and disgrace. There is an advantage
in this artless parental habit. Doubtless the father is
interested in his son; but doubtless also the prophet grows
to be interested in his prophecies. If the one goes wrong
the others come true.
*
When the old man waggles his head and says, 'Ah, so I
thought when I was your age,' he has proved the youth's
case. Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or
decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he
thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so
while they were young, since there was dew in the morning
or hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding
his vote to those of previous generations and riveting
another link to the chain of testimony. It is as natural
and as right for a young man to be imprudent and
exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about
his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is
for old men to turn grey, or mothers to love their
offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier
than their lives.
*
Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world
to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of
different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see
sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival;
to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses,
run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the
theatre to applaud HERNANI. There is some meaning in the
old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his
green-sickness and got done with it for good is as little
to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant.
*
When we grow elderly, how the room brightens and begins to
look as it ought to look, on the entrance of youth, grace,
health and comeliness! You do not want them for yourself,
perhaps not even for your son, but you look on smiling; and
when you recall their images--again it is with a smile. I
defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an
infinite and intimate but quite impersonal pleasure.
*
To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no
respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is
apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing-bout, and
misapprehensions to become engrained. And there is another
side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect
notion of the child's character, formed in early years or
during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres,
noting only the facts which suit with his pre-conception;
and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he
at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.
*
So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling
is substituted for the violent ups and downs of passion and
disgust; the same influence that restrains our hopes quiets
our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the
troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this
period for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for
a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest,
easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its own
work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is
doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full,
busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained
and independent age; and the muff inevitably develops
into a bore.
*
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old
age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm
of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self
as well as ignorance of life.
*
The schoolboy has a keen sense of humour. Heroes he learns
to understand and to admire in books; but he is not forward
to recognise the heroic under the traits of any
contemporary.
*
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs
hold their own in theory; and it is another instance of the
same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have
been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances are made
for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for
the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt,
and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when
an old gentleman waggles his head and says: 'Ah, so I
thought when I was your age.' It is not thought an answer
at all, if the young man retorts: My venerable sir, so I
shall most probably think when I am yours.' And yet the
one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a
Roland for an Oliver.
*
What shall we be when we grow really old? Of yore, a man
was thought to lay on restrictions and acquire new
deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till
he looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse
and freedom.
*
And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled
away in their season, and that all clouds roll away at
last, and the troubles of youth in particular are things
but of a moment.
*
Through what little channels, by what hints and
premonitions, the consciousness of the man's art dawns
first upon the child, it should be not only interesting but
instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity to-day, it
will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind
of childhood there is more history and more philosophy to
be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a
library.
*
I could not finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have
never finished it yet; PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way
through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since
waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the
exercise was quite without enjoyment. There is something
disquieting in the considerations. I still think the visit
to Ponto's the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that
mean that I was right when I was a child, or does it mean
that I have never grown since then, that the child is not
the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the
world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom?
*
The child thinks much in images, words are very live
to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
their value.
*
Somehow my playmate had vanished, or is out of the story,
as the sagas say, but I was sent into the village on an
errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down alone
through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often since
then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was
the first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never
since forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never
shall; for it was then I knew I loved reading.
*
The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the
matter that was read to me, and not of any manner in the
words. If these pleased me, it was unconsciously; I
listened for news of the great vacant world upon whose
edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might
re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances
that I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I
was tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of
the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.
*
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black
belt of the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street,
with here and there a lighted window. How often before had
my nurse lifted me out of bed and pointed them out to me,
while we wondered together if, there also, there were
children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs
were signs of those that waited like us for the morning.
*
There never was a child but has hunted gold, and been a
pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the
mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and
prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly
retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected
innocence and beauty.
*
None more than children are concerned for beauty, and,
above all, for beauty in the old.
*
So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we have sights
of that House Beautiful of art which we shall never enter.
They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style that
repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-throb
of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before
the artist can be born. But they come in such a rainbow of
glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and
earthly in comparison. We are all artists; almost all in
the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and
walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small
wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever
nature, is a kind of mistress; and though these dreams of
youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, grave
and more substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable
malady endures; and still at an equal distance, the House
Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.
*
Children, for instance, are able enough to see, but they
have no great faculty for looking; they do not use their
eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of
their own; and the things I call to mind seeing most
vividly were not beautiful in themselves, but merely
interesting or enviable to me, as I thought they might be
turned to practical account in play.
*
The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course,
in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is
itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely
upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood.
It is when we make castles in the air and personate the
leading character in our own romances, that we return to
the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several
reasons why the spirit is no longer so agreeable to
indulge. Nowadays, when we admit this personal element
into our divagations, we are apt to stir up uncomfortable
and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of old
wounds. .Alas! when we betake ourselves to our
intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or
lying prone in bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we
can find no outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable to the
mature mind, which desires the thing itself; and even to
rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one's enemy, although
it is perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still
left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is
even apt to lead to a visit and an interview which may be
the reverse of triumphant after all.
Whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it
should not be any peddling exactitude about matters of
fact. They walk in a vain show, and among mists and
rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned
about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly
learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or
purposes to teach them what we mean by abstract
truthfulness. When a bad writer is inexact, even if he can
look back on half a century of years, we charge him with
incompetence and not, with dishonesty. And why not extend
the same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a
stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or a poet inexact
in the details of business, and we excuse them heartily
from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human
entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a
fortified town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto,
and who passes three-fourths of his time in a dream and the
rest in open self-deception, and we expect him to be as
nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing
evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less than decent: you
do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he
is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and
that he cares no more for what you call truth, than you for
a gingerbread dragoon.
It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland,
where they figure so prettily--pretty like flowers and
innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens
soon enough, and have to go into offices and the
witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent!
Let them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who
knows what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them
in the future?
*
'You are a friend of Archie Weir's?' said one to Frank Innes;
and Innes replied, with his usual flippancy and more than his
usual insight: 'I know Weir, but I never met Archie.' No one
had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons. He flew
his private signal, and none heeded it; It seemed he was abroad
in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished;
and he looked round about him on the concourse of his
fellow-students, and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances
that were to come, without hope or interest.
*
'My poor, dear boy!' observed Glenalmond. 'My poor, dear
and, if you will allow me to say so, very foolish boy! You
are only discovering where you are; to one of your
temperament, or of mine, a painful discovery. The world
was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions
of me, all different from each other and from us; there's
no royal road, we just have to sclamber and tumble.'
*
Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas
was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet
you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great
fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers
who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper
is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh
should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a
pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a
decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes
upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been
whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies the promise of
some momentous destiny? and that this Lukewarm bullet on
which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and
centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so.
The ends for which they give away their priceless youth,
for all they know, may be chimerical, or hurtful; the glory
and riches they expect may never come, or may find them
indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so
inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.
*
As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of
knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous
possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we
may compare the headlong course of our years to a swift
torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed
against a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a
trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and
overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have no
more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our
theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or the
other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to
their opinions.... All our attributes are modified or changed;
and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not
modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views
at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for
a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as
an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It
is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port
of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck
at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other
for the whole voyage.
*
It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on,
to grow older. Many are already old before they are
through their teens; but to travel deliberately through
one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education.
Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and still
this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing,
and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what
can be more encouraging than to find the friend who was
welcome at one age, still welcome at another? Our
affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is
in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded
beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from
one age on to another.
*
But faces have a trick of growing more and more
spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing
remains of them but a look, a haunting expression; just
that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out
somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the
portrait dead for the lack of it.
*
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face;
pitiful that of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of
the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for
there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have
been denied all the symbols of communication, who have
neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking
gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of
frank, explanatory speech: people truly made of clay,
people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo.
They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak
no language under heaven.
*
For my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the
possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour
and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid
countenance; to have looks to correspond with every
feeling; to be elegant arid delightful in person, so that
we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing,
and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or
become unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all
unfortunates there is one creature (for I will not call him
man) conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who has
forfeited his birthright of expression, who has cultivated
artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a
pet monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his
means of communication with his fellow-men. The body is a
house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves
and crying on the passersby to come and love us. But this
fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly
coloured. His house may be admired for its design, the
crowd may pause before the stained windows, but meanwhile
the poor proprietor must lie languishing within,
uncomforted, unchangeably alone.
*
The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure and
the desire to rise in Life, and leave their homespun elders
grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, at a village
called Lausanne, I met one of these disappointed parents: a
drake who had fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing
and disappear. The wild swan in question was now an
apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and
first landed in America, bare-headed and bare-footed, and
with a single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an
apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life!
I thought he might as well have stayed at home; but you
never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in what
he sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to marry, a
third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned
in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an
apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, he could
conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour. 'I had always
bread for him,' he said; 'he ran away to annoy me. He
loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude.' But at heart he
was swelling with pride over his travelled offspring, and
he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said,
it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it
gloriously in the air. 'This comes from America,' he
cried, 'six thousand leagues away!' And the wine-shop
audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.
*
The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the
eternal city rang in their ears; they were not colonists,
but pilgrims; they travelled towards wine and gold and
sunshine, but their hearts were set on something higher.
That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of humanity
that makes all high achievements and all miserable
failures, the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same
that sent Columbus into the desolate Atlantic, inspired and
supported these barbarians on their perilous march.
*
There is more adventure in the life of the working man who
descends as a common soldier into the battle of life, than
in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an office,
like Von Moltke, and only directs the manoeuvres by
telegraph. Give me to hear about the career of him who is
in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market
means an empty belly, and another a copious and savoury
meal. This is not the philosophical, but the human side of
economics; it interests like a story; and the life of all
who are thus situated partakes in a small way of the charm
of Robinson Crusoe; for every step is critical, and human
life is presented to you naked and verging to its
lowest terms.
*
An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a
landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and
which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable
activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.
*
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to
have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the
higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice
to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards
without excitement.
*
Study and experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken
pastime of a life. These are enviable natures; people shut
in the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the
commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes:
his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood boils for
physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the
looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them
in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing
stage of life.
*
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.
*
Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery
bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring
peace of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of
hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and
permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish
manner.
*
But struggle as you please, a man has to work in this
world. He must be an honest man or a thief, Loudon.
*
Industry is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful
and profitable to the worker; and when your toil has been a
pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money,
health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
*
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