Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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'The cost of a thing,' says he, 'is the amount OF WHAT I
WILL CALL LIFE which is required to be exchanged for it,
immediately or in the long-run.' I have been accustomed to
put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we
have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these
two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail
to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on
one or other, that a man may pay too dearly for his
livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life
for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his
available liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There
are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we
buy, and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a
thousand a year, a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a
year livelihood? and can you afford the one you want? It
is a matter of taste; it is not in the least degree a
question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there
is no authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in
the Bible. It is true that we might do a vast amount of
good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable;
not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite
distinct from that of doing good, hut the practice of the
one does not at all train a man for practising the other.
*
We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial. It is only to transact some
higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant
from Admetus. We must all work for the sake of work;
we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any 'absorbing
pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest';
but the most profitable work is that which combines into one
continued effort the largest proportion of the powers and
desires of a man's nature; that into which he will plunge
with ardour, and from which he will desist with reluctance;
in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not
that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing and
stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together,
braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or
wander; it keeps him actively conscious of himself, yet
raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit of
industry with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his
art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree
unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other
professions stand apart from the human business of life;
but an art has the seat at the centre of the artist's
doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences,
teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,
and becomes a part of his biography.
*
Farewell fair day and fading light!
The clay-born here, with westward sight,
Marks the huge sun now downward soar.
Farewell. We twain shall meet no more.
Farewell. I watch with bursting sigh
My late contemned occasion die.
I linger useless in my tent:
Farewell, fair day, so foully spent!
Farewell, fair day. If any God
At all consider this poor clod,
He who the fair occasion sent
Prepared and placed the impediment.
Let him diviner vengeance take--
Give me to sleep, give me to wake
Girded and shod, and bid me play
The hero in the coming day!
*
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is
only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other
things. And it is not by any means certain that a man's
business is the most important thing he has to do. To an
impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the
wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are
to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by
gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large,
as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the
walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent
fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap
their hands from the benches, do really play a part and
fulfil important offices towards the general result.
*
The fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought,
but it is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in
moments of swift and momentous decision. It is from
something more immediate, some determination of blood to
the head, some trick of the fancy, that the breach is
stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow
shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much
thought about fame as most commanders going into battle;
and yet the action, fall out how it will, is not one of
those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed, it is
difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless
and yet so formidable to look at, unless on the theory that
he likes it.
*
It is but a lying cant that would represent the merchant
and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for
mankind, and then most useful when absorbed in their
transactions; for the man is more important than
his services.
*
It was my custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat the
question, 'When will the carts come in?' and repeat it
again and again until at last those sounds arose in the
street that I have heard once more this morning. The road
before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts.
I know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence
they come, or whither they go. But I know that, long ere
dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously
past, with the same rolling and jerking of wheels, and the
same clink of horses' feet. It was not for nothing that
they made the burthen of my wishes all night through. They
are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of
day; and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must
please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of
flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude. They
have the freshness of the daylight life about them. You
can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying
hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes
even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to
you through the darkness. There is now an end to mystery
and fear. Like the knocking at the door in MACBETH, or the
cry of the watchman in the TOUR DE NESLE, they show that
the horrible caesura is over, and the nightmares have fled
away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of
men is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.
*
She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than
bone and parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with
which she interrogated mine, were vacant of sense. It
depends on what you call seeing, whether you might not call
her blind. Perhaps she had known love; perhaps borne
children, suckled them, and given them pet names. But now
that was all gone by, and had left her neither happier nor
wiser; and the best she could do with her mornings was to
come up here into the cold church and juggle for a slice of
heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped into the
streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired
of it she would be before night! and if she did not sleep,
how then? It is fortunate that not many of us are brought
up publicly to justify our lives at the bar of threescore
years and ten; fortunate that such a number are knocked
opportunely on the head in what they call the flower of
their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in
private somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children
and discontented old folk, we might be put out of all
conceit of life.
*
When I was going, up got my old stroller, and off with his
hat. 'I am afraid,' said he, 'that monsieur will think me
altogether a beggar; but I have another demand to make upon
him.' I began to hate him on the spot. 'We play again
to-night,' he went on. 'Of course I shall refuse to accept
any more money from monsieur and his friends, who have been
already so liberal. But our programme of to-night is
something truly creditable; and I cling to the idea that
monsieur will honour us with his presence. And then, with
a shrug and a smile: 'Monsieur understands--the vanity of
an artist!' Save the mark! The vanity of an artist!
That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life:
a ragged, tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the
manners of a gentleman and the vanity of an artist,
to keep up his self-respect!
*
Time went on, and the boy's health still slowly declined.
The Doctor blamed the weather, which was cold and
boisterous. He called in his CONFRERE from Burron, took a
fancy for him, magnified his capacity, and was pretty soon
under treatment himself--it scarcely appeared for what
complaint. He and Jean-Marie had each medicine to take at
different periods of the day. The Doctor used to lie in
wait for the exact moment, watch in hand. 'There is
nothing like regularity,' he would say, fill out the doses,
and dilate on the virtues of the draught; and if the boy
seemed none the better, the Doctor was not at all the
worse.
*
'I lead you,' he would say, 'by the green pastures. My
system, my beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one
phrase--to avoid excess. Blessed nature, healthy,
temperate nature, abhors and exterminates excess. Human
law in this matter imitates at a great distance her
provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of
the law. Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for
our neighbours--LEX ARMATA--armed, emphatic, tyrannous law.
If you see a crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him
his box! The judge, though in a way an admission of
disease, is less offensive to me than either the doctor or
the priest. Above all, the doctor--the doctor and the
purulent trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia! Pure
air--from the neighbourhood of a pinetum for the sake of the
turpentine--unadulterated wine, and the reflections of an
unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works of
nature--these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and
the best religious comforts. Devote yourself to these.
Hark! there are the bells of Bourron (the wind is in the
North, it will be fair). How clear and airy is the sound!
The nerves are harmonised and quieted; the mind attuned to
silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats the
heart! Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in
these sensations; and yet you yourself perceive they are a
part of health. Did you remember your cinchona this
morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is,
after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather
for, ourselves if we lived in the locality.'
*
The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it
down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more
than he makes haste to blot. Not so the Beginner. Human
nature has certain rights ; instinct--the instinct of
self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported
by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure
the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period
to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hope
to feed upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a
lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those
hours when the words come and the phrases balance
themselves--EVEN TO BEGIN. And having begun, what a dread
looking forward is that until the book shall he
accomplished! For so long a time the slant is to continue
unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you
must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long
a time your puppets are to be always vital, always
consistent, always vigorous!
*
What is this fortunate circumstance, my friend? inquired
Anastasie, not heeding his protest, which was of daily
recurrence.
'That we have no children, my beautiful,' replied the
Doctor. 'I think of it more and more as the years go on,
and with more and more gratitude towards the Power that
dispenses such afflictions. Your health, my darling, my
studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies, how they
would all have suffered, how they would all have been
sacrificed! And for what? Children are the last word of
human imperfection. Health flees before their face. They
cry, my dear; they put vexatious questions; they demand to
be fed, to be washed, to be educated, to have their noses
blowed; and then, when the time comes, they break our
hearts, as I break this piece of sugar. A pair of
professed egoists, like you and me, should avoid offspring,
like an infidelity.'
'Indeed!' said she; and she laughed. 'Now, that is like
you--to take credit for the thing you could not help.'
*
I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our
life is bound for ever on man s shoulders, and when the
attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with
more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
*
Forth from the casement, on the plain
Where honour has the world to gain,
Pour forth and bravely do your part,
O knights of the unshielded heart!
'Forth and for ever forward! --out
From prudent turret and redoubt,
And in the mellay charge amain,
To fall, but yet to rise again!
Captive? Ah, still, to honour bright,
A captive soldier of the right!
Or free and fighting, good with ill?
Unconquering but unconquered still!
O to be up and doing, O
Unfearing and unshamed to go
In all the uproar and the press
About my human business!
My undissuaded heart I hear
Whisper courage in my ear.
With voiceless calls, the ancient earth
Summons me to a daily birth.
*
Yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are
born. They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are
their own paymasters on parole; and must pay themselves
fair wages and no more. For I suppose that in the course
of ages, and through reform and civil war and invasion,
mankind was pursuing some other and more general design
than to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century
beyond the reach of needs and duties. Society was scarce
put together, and defended with so much eloquence and
blood, for the convenience of two or three millionaires and
a few hundred other persons of wealth and position. It is
plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered during all
these generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some
wellbeing, for themselves and their descendants; that if
they supported law and order, it was to secure fair-play
for all; that if they denied themselves in the present,
they must have had some designs on the future. Now a great
hereditary fortune is a miracle of man's wisdom and
mankind's forbearance; it has not only been amassed and
handed down, it has been suffered to be amassed and handed
down; and surely in such consideration as this, its
possessor should find only a new spur to activity and
honour, that with all this power of service he should not
prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should
return in benefits upon the race. If he bad twenty, or
thirty, or a hundred thousand at his banker's, or if all
Yorkshire or all California were his to manage or to sell,
he would still be morally penniless, and have the world to
begin like Whittington, until he had found some way of
serving mankind. His wage is physically in his own hand;
but, in honour, that wage must still be earned. He is only
steward on parole of what is called his fortune. He must
honourably perform his stewardship. He must estimate his
own services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for
that will be one among his functions. And while he will
then be free to spend that salary, great or little, on his
own private pleasures, the rest of his fortune he but holds
and disposes under trust for mankind; it is not his,
because he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his
services have already been paid; but year by year it is his
to distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright
and outfit has been swallowed up in his, or to further
public works and institutions.
*
'Tis a fine thing to smart for one's duty; even in the
pangs of it there is contentment.
*
We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a
little poverty; but such considerations should not move us
in the choice of that which is to be the business and
justification of so great a portion of our lives and like
the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should
all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do
the most and best for mankind.
*
The salary in any business under heaven is not the only,
nor indeed the first, question. That you should continue
to exist is a matter for your own consideration; but that
your business should be first honest, and second useful,
are points in which honour and morality are concerned.
*
There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one
thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And from a
variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether
it be worth attaining.
A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras,
ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest;
indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we
shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable
that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries
and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find
ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O
toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye
know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you,' you must
come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little
way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of
El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to
travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the
true success is to labour.
*
A man who must separate himself from his neighbours' habits
in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who
requires to take opium for the same purpose. What we want
to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man's
work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment
of existence.
There is apt to be something unmanly, something almost
dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and
freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world.
*
You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some time
fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and
where you stand?
*
Life as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the nature of
tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be
not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel
according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard
the existence of temporal evil. Whitman accepts the fact
of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and instead
of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism,
sets himself to spur people up to be helpful.
*
Indeed, I believe this is the lesson; if it is for fame
that men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows
after all.
*
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of
failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall. It
is lawful to pray God that we be not led into temptation;
but not lawful to skulk from those that come to us.
*
To be honest, to be kind--to earn a little and to spend a
little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for
his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and
not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these
without capitulation--above all, on the same grim
conditions, to keep friends with himself--here is a task
for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
*
As we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and
under the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should
be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own
eyes'--God forbid it should be man that wearies in welldoing,
that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language
of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole
creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with
unconquerable constancy: surely not all in vain.
*
I find I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite
kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily
inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as single and
specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet, on
examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in
detail. The height of spires cannot be taken by
trigonometry; they measure absurdly short, but how tall
they are to the admiring eye! And where we have so many
elegant proportions, growing one out of the other, and all
together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended
itself and became something different and more imposing. I
could never fathom how a man dares to lift up his voice to
preach in a cathedral. What is he to say that will not be
an anti-climax? For though I have heard a considerable
variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so
expressive as a cathedral. 'Tis the best preacher itself,
and preaches day and night; not only telling you of man's
art and aspirations in the past, but convicting your own
soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like all good
preachers, it sets you preaching to yourself--and every man
is his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.
*
As the business man comes to love the toil, which he only
looked upon at first as a ladder towards other desires and
less unnatural gratifications, so the dumb man has felt the
charm of his trade and fallen captivated before the eyes of
sin. It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is
hideous and loathsome; for even vice has her Horsel and her
devotees, who love her' for her own sake.
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two
natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were
most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was
composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now
with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures
and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll,
or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the
cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll
had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a
son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to
die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged,
and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde
was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to
become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless.
The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still
another consideration in the scale ; for while Jekyll would
suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be
not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my
circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and
commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms
cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it
fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my
fellows, that I chose the better part, and was found
wanting in the strength to keep to it.
*
Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as
I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set
before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid
sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of
my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults
that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench
than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces
of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual
nature. In this case I was driven to reflect deeply and
inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the
root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs
of distress. Though so profound a double dealer, I was in
no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead
earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint
and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of
day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of
sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of
my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic
and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on
this consciousness of the perennial war among my members.
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the
moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to
that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed
to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one,
but truly two.
*
It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's
endeavour springs in some degree from dulness. We require
higher tasks because we do not recognise the height of
those we have. Trying to be kind and honest seems an
affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of
our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves something
bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism
or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an
appetite. But the task before us, which is to co-endure
with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness,
and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no
cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be
smilingly unravelled.
*
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for
collecting shells than to be born a millionaire. Although
neither is to be despised, it is always better policy to
learn an interest than to make a thousand pounds; for the
money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel no joy in
spending it; but the interest remains imperishable and ever
new. To become a botanist, a geologist, a social
philosopher, an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge
one's possessions in the universe by an incalculably higher
degree, and by a far surer sort of property, than to
purchase a farm of many acres.
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