Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely
laid up riches against the day of riches; if prosperity
come, he will not enter poor into his inheritance; he will
not slumber and forget himself in the lap of money, or
spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and
briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which
is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into
living delight and satisfaction. ETRE ET PAS AVOIR--to be,
not to possess--that is the problem of life. To be
wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but
the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share
in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and
free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others,
to love with such generosity of heart that your love is
still a dear possession in absence or unkindness--these are
the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without
which money can buy nothing.
*
An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding;
and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the
heart itself.
*
'Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land they used
to run races each with a lighted candle, and the art was to
keep the candle burning. Well, now, I thought that was
like life; a man's good conscience is the flame he gets to
carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with that still
burning, why, take it how you will, the man is a hero--even
if he was low-born like you and me.'
*
Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.
From first .to last, and in the face of smarting
disillusions, we continue to expect good fortune, better
health, and better conduct; and that so confidently, that
we judge it needless to deserve them.
*
'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of
himself. 'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon
which they stand? Courage, that a poor private carrying a
musket has to spare of; that does not fail a weasel or a
rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder?
But what is courage? The constancy to endure oneself or to
see others suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere
shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient? To inquire
of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we
seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand
still is the least heroic.'
*
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
becoming, is the only end of life.
*
But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is
capable of love; and for this random affection of the body
there is substituted a steady determination, a consent of
all his powers and faculties, which supersedes, adopts, and
commands the others. The desire survives, strengthened,
perhaps, but taught obedience, and changed in scope and
character. Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and
regrets; for the man now lives as a whole; his
consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like a river;
through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
remains approvingly conscious of himself.
Now to me, this seems a type of that righteousness which
the soul demands. It demands that we shall not live
alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual
see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which
the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other
to a common end. It demands that we shall not pursue broken
ends, but great and comprehensive purposes, in which soul
and body may unite, like notes in a harmonious chord. That
were indeed a way of peace and pleasure, that were indeed a
heaven upon earth. It does not demand, however, or, to
speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should
starve my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a
purpose in itself; or, if in a weak despair, pluck out the
eye that I have not learned to guide and enjoy with wisdom.
The soul demands unity of purpose, not the dismemberment of
man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and sweetness,
all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a
perfect man exulting in perfection. To conclude
ascetically is to give up, and not to solve, the problem.
*
The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are
always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts
and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised
dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity. A
flavour of the old school, a touch of something different
in their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come
of what is called a good family, and often more timid and
precise if they are of the middle class--serves, in these
days, to accentuate the difference of age and, add a
distinction to grey hairs. But their superiority is
founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures.
They are before us in the march of man; they have more or
less solved the irking problem; they have battled through
the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their
course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown
and harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of
fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our
spirit tossed. Yet long before we were so much as thought
upon, the like calamity befel the old man or woman that
now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the
clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed of our
distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous
roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under
the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere
presence of contented elders, look forward and take
patience. Fear shrinks before them 'like a thing
reproved,' not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death,
but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities
and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they
report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous
footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent
and tell another story. 'Where they have gone, we will go
also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured
unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a shift
to bear.
*
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think
of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the
principles of the majority of his contemporaries, you must
discredit in his eyes the authoritative voice of his own
soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man.
It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and
chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and
to walk straight before us by what light we have. They may
be right; but so, before heaven, are we. They may know;
but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or
fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's own
better self; and from those who have not that, God help me,
how am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the
most imbecile, at a certain moment turn round, at a certain
point will hear no further argument, but stand unflinching
by their own dumb, irrational sense of right. It is not
only by steel or fire, but through contempt and blame, that
the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul. Be glad
if you are not tried by such extremities. But although all
the world ranged themselves in one line to tell 'This is
wrong,' be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador
of God--throw down the glove and answer, 'This is right.'
Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in
some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully
understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice
and preparing mankind for some truer and more spiritual
grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your own
judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your
body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided
the guilt of false witness against humanity and the little
ones unborn. It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but
much nobler to respect oneself and utter the voice of God.
I think it worth noting how this optimist was acquainted
with pain. It will seem strange only to the superficial.
The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles,
which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear
well. Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds that
have conceived of life as a field of ordered duties, not as
a chase in which to hunt for gratifications.
*
But the race of man, like that iudomitable nature whence it
sprang, has medicating virtues of its own; the years and
seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single
man awakens from the passions of a day. We judge our
ancestors from a more divine position; and the dust
being a little laid with several centuries, we can see
both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with
a show of right.
*
It is a commonplace that we cannot answer for ourselves
before we have been tried. But it is not so common a
reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find
ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought.
I believe this is every one's experience; but an
apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future
prevents mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment
abroad. I wish sincerely, for it would have saved me much
trouble, there had been some one to put me in a good heart
about life when I was younger; to tell sue how dangers are
most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in a
man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and
rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need. But we
are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in
literature; and not a man among us will go to the head of
the march to sound the heady drums.
*
It is a poor heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept
the conditions of life with some heroic readiness.
*
I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at
any rate judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider
small perils in the arrangement of life. Life itself I
submitted, was a far too risky business as a whole to make
each additional particular of danger worth regard.
*
There is nothing but tit for tat in this world, though
sometimes it be a little difficult to trace; for the scores
are older than we ourselves, and there has never yet been a
settling day since things were. You get entertainment
pretty much in proportion as you give. As long as we were
a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like
a quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in
return; but as soon as we sunk into commonplace ourselves,
all whom we met were similarly disenchanted. And here is
one reason of a dozen why the world is dull to dull
persons.
*
All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle
or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human
state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to
rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of
Life. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in
their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a show,
or made out of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in
its more rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages;
and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem,
and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into
dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has the
honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her
contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may
very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely,
surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may
be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy
with a club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly
of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its
dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue
in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact
remains true throughout--that we do not love life in the
sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its
conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life
at all, but living.
*
Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a
mere bag's end, as the French say--or whether we think of
it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and
prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether
we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-
books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly
for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into
a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all
of these views and situations there is but one conclusion
possible: that a man should stop his ears against
paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him
with a single mind.
As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best
worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of
intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life,
and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed
before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage,
not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin
regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured
for this world.
*
It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel
that people are abashed into high resolutions. It may be
because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly
they must have men entering into glory with sonic pomp
and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our
sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of
bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than
any material benefit in all the books of political economy
between Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing
wine-glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any
more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in
the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his
finished tragedy, is an elegant performance; and I contend
it ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go
into battle, but send back merchant-clerks with more heart
and spirit to their book-keeping by double entry.
*
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the
most stolid. 'It may be contended, rather, that this
(somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is
the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to
the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude
mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the
heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark
as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some
kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.
*
For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to
hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the
lantern; it may reside, like Dancer's in the mysterious
inwards of psychology. It may consist with perpetual
failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It has
so little bond with externals (such as the observer
scribbles in his notebook) that it may even touch them not;
and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie
altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman in his
spare hours may be winning battles, the farmer sailing
ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading
another life, plying another trade from that they chose;
like the poet's house-builder, who, after all, is
cased in stone,
'By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts,
Rebuilds it to his liking.'
In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer
(poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to
look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see
the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he
himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage,
hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And
the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after
him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven
for which he lives. And the true realism, always and
everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
resides, and give it voice beyond singing.
*
He who shall pass judgment on the records of our life is
the same that formed us in frailty.
*
We are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to
realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid
habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no
time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among
the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must
sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a
changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the
hours without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in
such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering
gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive
silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of
which these are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in
love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like
frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when
all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the
fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit still and
contemplate--to remember the faces of women without desire,
to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to
remain where and what you are--is not this to know both
wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?
*
Of those who fail, I do not speak--despair should be
sacred; but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes
of their life bring interest: a job found, a shilling
saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure
springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not
from these, but from the villa-dweller, that we hear
complaints of the unworthiness of life.
*
I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and
misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice,
cowardly violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning
imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly
drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to
do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how
tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive;
and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting,
that in a field from which success is banished, our race
should not cease to labour.
*
Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so
inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended,
irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who
should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his
destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and
behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues:
infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often
touchingly kind; sitting down amidst his momentary life, to
debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity;
rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea;
singling out his friends and his mate with cordial
affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing, with
long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart
of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the
point of lunacy: the thought of duty, the thought of
something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God:
an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were
possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible,
he will not stoop.
*
There are two just reasons for the choice any way of life:
the first is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some
high utility in the industry selected.
*
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they
should make their neighbours good. One person I have to
make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour is much
more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him
happy--if I may.
*
In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness,
only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on
duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to
know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask.
Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness
is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he
cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness
to others.
*
Of this one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and
became more humanised and conversible as soon as these
innocent people appeared upon the scene. I would not
readily trust the travelling merchant with any extravagant
sum of money, but I am sure his heart was in the
right place.
In this mixed world, if you can find one or two sensible
places in a man; above all, if you should find a whole
family living together on such pleasant terms, you may
surely he satisfied, and take the rest for granted; or,
what is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind that
you can do perfectly well without the rest, and that ten
thousand bad traits cannot make a single good one any the
less good.
*
His was, indeed, a good influence in life while he was
still among us; he had a fresh laugh; it did you good to
see him; and, however sad he may have been at heart, he
always bore a bold and cheerful countenance and took
fortune's worst as it were the showers of spring.
*
Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the
quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice
blest. There must always be two in a kiss, and there may
be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of
sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among
generous people, received with confusion.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being
happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the
world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
*
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a
five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill;
and their entrance into a room is as though another candle
had been lighted. We need not care whether they could
prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing
than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem
of the Liveableness of Life.
*
Mme. Bazin came out after a while; she was tired with her
day's work, I suppose; and she nestled up to her husband
and laid her head upon his breast. He had his arm about
her and kept gently patting her on the shoulder. I think
Bazin was right, and he was really married. Of how few
people can the same be said!
Little did the Bazins know how much they served us. We
were charged for candles, for food and drink, and for the
beds we slept in. But there was nothing in the bill for
the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the pretty spectacle
of their married life. And there was yet another item
uncharged. For these people's, politeness really set us up
again in our own esteem. We had a thirst for
consideration; the sense of insult was still hot in our
spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our
position in the world.
How little we pay our way in life! Although we have our
purses continually in our hand, the better part of service
goes still unrewarded. But I like to fancy that a grateful
spirit gives as good as it gets. Perhaps the Bazins knew
how much I liked them? perhaps they, also, were healed of
some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my manner?
*
No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many
noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived. And no man,
it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a
cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of
enjoyment.
*
There is yet another class who do not depend on corporal
advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost,
but with too high a wind, and a little past sundown, when
the Lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in the
growing dusk, a brace of barefooted lassies were seen
coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was
as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than
seven. They were miserably clad; and the pavement was so
cold, you would have thought no one could lay a naked foot
on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if you
please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of
bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof which has been
of use to him ever since, and which he now hands on, with
his good wishes, to the reader.
*
Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it joys to
communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for
its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights
that are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a
thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous
passage; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the
prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution, may
even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and
appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help
the rest of us to live.
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