Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
It is never a thankful office to offer advice; and advice
is the more unpalatable, not only from the difficulty of
the service recommended, but often from its very
obviousness. We are fired with anger against those who
make themselves the spokesmen of plain obligations; for
they seem to insult us as they advise.
*
We are not all patient Grizzels, by good fortune, but
the most of us human beings with feelings and tempers
of our own.
*
Men, whether lay or clerical, suffer better the flame of
the stake than a daily inconvenience or a pointed sneer,
and will not readily be martyred without some external
circumstance and a concourse looking on.
*
An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience.
Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in
fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a
clock during a thunderstorm.
*
The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when we find
ourselves alone on a church top, with the blue sky and a
few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs
and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of
the city streets.
*
Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which a
cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation.
If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.
*
Honour can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without
member. The man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins
fresh foundations on the ruins of the old; and when his
sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his dagger.
*
It is easy to be virtuous when one's own convenience is not
affected; and it is no shame to any man to follow the
advice of an outsider who owns that, while he sees which is
the better part, he might not have the courage to profit
himself by this opinion.
*
As soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like
a dismal fungus, it finds its expression in a paralysis of
generous acts.
*
The man who cannot forgive any mortal thing is a green
hand in life.
*
It is a useful accomplishment to be able to say NO, but
surely it is the essence of amiability to prefer to say YES
where it is possible. There is something wanting in the
man who does not hate himself whenever he is constrained to
say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born
dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses;
he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity;
whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was at least
not altogether one of us, for he was not touched with a
feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes have room
for all positive qualities, even those which are
disreputable, in the capacious theatre of their
dispositions. Such can live many lives; while a Thoreau
can live but one, and that only with perpetual foresight.
*
We can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to
be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious,
but his merits, to which we are too blind.
*
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder,
and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock
is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers
of rain.
*
'The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher
becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when
we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his intention.
The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get
our own finger rightly parallel, and we. see what the man
meant, whether it be a new Star or an old street-lamp. And
briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because
we are thinking of something else.
*
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both;
and I believe they both get paid in the end, but the
fools first.
*
Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to
them be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a
secondary matter, after all, so long as they feel
gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man does not know
that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine that
he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the
funniest windbag after all! There is a marked difference
between decreeing light in chaos, and lighting the gas in a
metropolitan back parlour with a box of patent matches;
and, do what we will, there is always something made to our
hand, if it were only our fingers.
*
Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because
he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern
springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having
bought a whistle when I did not want one.
*
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be
no more nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own
offspring; for what can be more hardening and demoralising
than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's
heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them,
as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your
own use for them is at an end.
*
We had needs invent heaven if it had not been revealed
to us; there are some things that fall so bitterly ill on
this side time!
*
To write with authority about another man, we must have
fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with
our subject. We may praise or blame according as we find
him related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; but it
is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be his
judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and
understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's
character; those to which we are strangers in our own
experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions,
inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we
conceive them with repugnance, explain them with
difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we
find them in conjunction with talents that we respect or
virtues that we admire.
*
To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who
fairly pointed out the incalculable influence of
nomenclature upon the whole life--who seems first to have
recognised the one child, happy in an heroic appellation,
soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by
sheer weight of name into the abysses of social failure.
*
It would be well if nations and races could communicate
their qualities; but in practice when they look upon each
other, they have an eye to nothing but defects.
*
Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing apparently
more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the
street and a couple of bad companions round the corner.
*
So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may
arise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and
such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade of
writing, that it should combine pleasure and profit to both
parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and
useful, like good preaching.
*
In all garrison towns, guard-calls, and reveilles, and such
like, make a fine, romantic interlude in civic business.
Bugles, and drums, and fifes are of themselves most
excellent things in nature, and when they carry the mind to
marching armies and the picturesque vicissitudes of war
they stir up something proud in the heart.
*
To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a
great and dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large
proportion of their pleasure then comes to an end; 'the
malady of not marking' overtakes them; they read
thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the
chime of fair words or the march of the stately period.
NON RAGIONIAM of these. But to all the step is dangerous;
it involves coming of age; it is even a kind of second
weaning. In the past all was at the choice of others; they
chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to
their own tune the books of childhood. In the future we
are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone, like
pioneers; and the choice of what we are to read is in our
own hands thenceforward.
*
It remains to .be seen whether you can prove yourselves as
generous as you have been wise and patient.
*
'If folk dinna ken what ye're doing, Davie, they're
terrible taken up with it; but if they think they ken, they
care nae mair for it than what I do for pease porridge.'
*
And perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could
read in yours, our own composure might seem little
less surprising.
*
For charity begins blindfold; and only through a series of
misapprehensions rises at length into a settled principle
of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
fellow-men.
*
There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country
are much more charitably disposed than their superiors in
wealth. And I fancy it must arise a great deal from the
comparative indistinction of the easy and the not so easy
in these ranks. A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter
himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he
treats himself to a luxury, he must do it in the face of a
dozen who cannot. And what should more directly lead to
charitable thoughts? Thus the poor man, camping out in
life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he
puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of
the hungry.
But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon
ascent, the fortunate person passes through a zone of
clouds, and sublunary matters are thenceforward hidden from
his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in
admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds
himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the
attentions of Providence, and compares himself
involuntarily with the lilies and the skylarks. He does
not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
unassuming in his open laudau! If all the world dined
at one table, this philosophy would meet with some
rude knocks.
*
Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the
trees of the mountain; but those who learn much do but skim
the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive
the dignity of the design--the horror of the living fact
fades from the memory. It is we who sit at home with evil
who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.
*
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience
of life; and although you lived it feelingly in your own
person, and had every step of conduct burned in by pains
and joys upon your memory, tell me what definite lesson
does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from both
to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is
but the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never
truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond recognition.
Times and men and circumstances change about your changing
character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane
affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still
the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your
own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
Future? And if this be questionable, with what humble,
with what hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men
driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and
suffering in another sphere of things?
*
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and
then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an
inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks;
and the best teachers can impart only broken images of the
truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one to
another between two natures, and, what is worse, between
two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries
his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and
all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until
it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
*
Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which
is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which
we can perceive relations in that field, whether great
or small.
*
We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over
the circumstances in which we are placed. The great
refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them
practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life,
and they record their unfitness at considerable length.
The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too
many flimsy imitators; for there is always something
consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for
the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of
woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we like
to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating
and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four
hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle
of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who
have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning
of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy
Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary
wires.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be
its result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful
ranks of men. When our little poets have to be sent to
look at the ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful
how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not the
best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and
relishes ale and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the
intervals of dull and unremunerative labour; where a man in
this predicament can afford a lesson by the way to what are
called his intellectual superiors, there is plainly
something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave
him as he is than to teach him whining. It is better that
he should go without the cheerful lights of culture, if
cheerless doubt and paralysing sentimentalism are to be the
consequence. Let us, by all means, fight against that
hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful
pageant of consciousness; let us teach people, as much as
we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to
sympathise; but let us see to it, above all, that we give
these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man
up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
indifference.
*
All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to
truth. It does not follow that a man will travel any
further; but if he has really considered the world and
drawn a conclusion, he has travelled so far. This does not
apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road
to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a
catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an
opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made
one for yourself.
*
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good
deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord
Macaulay may escape from school honours with all his wits
about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they
never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the
world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the
time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to
educate him.... Books are good enough in their own way, but
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems
a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a
mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour
of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old
anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
*
It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a
well, or the far end of a telescope. As a matter of fact,
an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and
hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the
time, will get more true education than many another in a
life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and
arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and
laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for
the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and
palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their
memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will
forget before the week is out, your truant may learn some
really useful art: to play the fiddle, or to speak with
ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who
have 'plied their book diligently,' and know all about some
one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the
study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove
dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter
parts of life. Many make a large fortune who remain
underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And
meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with
them--by your leave, a different picture. He has had time
to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a
great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of
all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read
the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into
it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the
student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some
of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of
life at large, and Art of Living?
*
Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality
than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on
at the childish satisfaction of other people in their
hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical
indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists.
He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of
people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths,
he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood.
His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane,
and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall
command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while
others behold the East and West, the Devil and the sunrise,
he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon
all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running
speedily and in many different directions into the great
daylight of Eternity.
*
I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one
thing to the bottom-- were it only literature. And yet,
sir, the man of the world is a great feature of this age;
he is possessed of an extraordinary mass and variety of
knowledge; he is everywhere at home; he has seen life in
all its phases ; and it is impossible but that this great
habit of existence should bear fruit.
*
I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be
sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of
that branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring at the
price of a brain fever. There are many sordid tragedies in
the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or
drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man s pity
than the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be
learned.
*
'My friend,' said I, 'it is not easy to say who know the
Lord; and it is none of our business. Protestants and
Catholics, and even those who worship stones, may know Him
and be known by Him; for He has made all.'
*
Cheylard scrapes together halfpence or the darkened souls
in Edinburgh; while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoans the
ignorance of Rome. Thus, to the high entertainment of the
angels, do we pelt each other with evangelists, like
schoolboys bickering in the snow.
*
For courage respects courage; but where a faith has been
trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population.
*
Its not only a great flight of confidence for a man to
change his creed and go out of his family for heaven's
sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with
all this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not
changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour
to those who do so, for the wrench is sore. But it argues
something narrow, whether of strength or weakness, whether
of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human
operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful
operation of the mind. And I think I should not leave my
old creed for another, changing only words for words; but
by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other
communions.
*
It is not a basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and
pistol-butts of a regiment of horse, that can change one
tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor rustic people
have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who
has grown a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and
under the stars at night, a frequenter of hills and
forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the end, a sense
of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable
relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth
Brother, he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose
upon a choice of logic; it is the poetry of the man's
existence, the philosophy of the history of his life. God,
like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared
to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become
the ground and essence of his least reflections; and you
may change creeds and dogmas by authority, or proclaim, a
new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you will; but
here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly
adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible
sense that a man is not a woman, or a woman is not a man.
For he could not vary from his faith, unless he could
eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a strict and not
conventional meaning, change his mind.
*
For still the Lord is Lord of might;
In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight;
The plough, the spear, the laden barks,
The field, the founded city, marks;
He marks the smiler of the streets,
The singer upon garden seats;
He sees the climber in the rocks:
To him, the shepherd folds his flocks.
For those he loves that underprop
With daily virtues Heaven's top,
And bear the falling sky with ease,
Unfrowning caryatides.
Those he approves that ply the trade,
That rock the child, that wed the maid,
That with weak virtues, weaker hands,
Sow gladness on the peopled lands,
And still with laughter, song and shout,
Spin the great wheel of earth about.
*
The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at
noon, perfect, clear, and stable like the earth. But let a
man set himself to mark out the boundary with cords and
pegs, and were he never so nimble and never so exact, what
with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of
the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere
he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed.
Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great
and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly
changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the
tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are
renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the
whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the
winds of time. Look now for your shadows. O man of
formulae, is this a place for you? Have you fitted the
spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages
when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of
man? Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood
is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows,
tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the
whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or your heart
say more?
*
Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a
difference; and especially in these high matters, where we
have all a sufficient assurance that, whoever may be in the
wrong, we ourselves are not completely right.... I know
right well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome
world, the children of one Father, striving in many
essential points to do and to become the same.
*
The word 'facts' is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken
with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and
poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in
bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word 'facts'
in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get
no nearer the principle of their division. What was
essential to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue. We
could come to no compromise as to what was, or what was
not, important in the life of man. Turn as we pleased, we
all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along
the sky-line and different constellations overhead. We had
each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more
than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to
its own shade. How would you have people agree, when one
is deaf and the other blind?
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