Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in
convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more
apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either
he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches
the closer round that little idol of part-truth and
part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or
he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old,
and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New
truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil
and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had
better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he
will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.
*
The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten
commandments; and the bones and the revolutions of the
Kosmos in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more
ancient still.
*
The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we
look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find
them change with every climate, and no country where some
action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is
not branded for a vice; and we look into our experience,
and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are
tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our
religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us,
till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only
please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the
harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.
*
Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all
morality; they are the perfect duties.... If your morals
make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not
say 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but
conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives
of better and simpler people.
*
There is no quite good book without a good morality; but
the world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people
who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's Thousand and One
Nights, one shall have been offended by the animal details;
another to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing,
shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality
and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again,
one shall have been pained by the morality of a religious
memoir, one by that of the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE. And the
point is that neither need be wrong. We shall always shock
each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun into
our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a
thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer
some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven;
enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul
details, a spirit of magnanimity.
*
For to do anything because others do it, and not because
the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is
to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself,
and go post-haste to the devil with the greater number.
The respectable are not led so much by any desire of
applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker
and the tamer the man, the more will he require this
support; and any positive quality relieves him, by just so
much, of this dependence.
*
Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists,
stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never
anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is
never in our own hands; we inherit our constitutions; we
stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built
as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness,
and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we
may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted
with a disease more painful. Virtue will not help us, and
it is not meant to help us. It is not even its own reward,
except for the self-centred and--I had almost said--the
unamiable.
*
Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be
admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.
It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim;
another to maim yourself and stay without.
*
To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to
defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments
of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. If a thing is
wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it;
or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure.
*
There is a certain class, professors of that low morality
so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice,
to whom you must never represent an act that was virtuous
in itself, as attended by any other consequences than a
large family and fortune.
*
All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down
the hearts of those about him, and--let us not blink the
truth--hurries both him and them into the grave. And when
we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault, as all of
us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matte over, with too polite
biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep
with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.
*
The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the
reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be
inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must
afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they
clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from
ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others;
and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see
it for ourselves, but with a singular change--that
monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce,
struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the
human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of
instruction.
*
Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple
pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue.
*
The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be
successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially,
not outwardly, respectable.
*
Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than
the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry,
where rapid judgment and prompt action are alone possible
and right.
*
Each man should learn what is within him, that he may
strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him, that
he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell
him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he
goes his theory of life, steering himself, cheering or
reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to
his conduct; and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt
him, it is still best that he should know it; for it is in
this world as it is, and not in a world made easy by
educational suppression, that he must win his way to shame
or glory.
*
A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition
may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe,
rewarded by some gracious visitation.
*
EVENSONG
The embers of the day are red
Beyond the murky hill.
The kitchen smokes: the bed
In the darkling house is spread:
The great sky darkens overhead,
And the great woods are shrill.
So far have I been led,
Lord, by Thy will:
So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.
The breeze from the enbalmed land
Blows sudden toward the shore,
And claps my cottage door.
I hear the signal, Lord--I understand.
The night at Thy command
Comes. I will eat and sleep and will not question more.
*
It is not at all a strong thing to put one's reliance upon
logic.; and our own logic particularly, for it is generally
wrong. We never know where we are to end if once we begin
following words or doctors. There is an upright stock in a
man's own heart that is trustier than any syllogism; and
the eyes, and the sympathies, and appetites know a thing or
two that have never yet been stated in controversy.
Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and, like
fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides.
Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and are
only logical in so far as they are cleverly put. An able
controversialist no more than an able general demonstrates
the justice of his cause.
*
To any man there may come at times a consciousness that
there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the
wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that
another girds him and carries him whither he would not.
*
The child, the seed, the grain of corn,
The acorn on the hill,
Each for some separate end is born
In season fit, and still
Each must in strength arise to work the almighty will.
So from the hearth the children flee,
By that almighty hand
Austerely led; so one by sea
Goes forth, and one by land;
Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from that command.
So from the sally each obeys
The unseen almighty nod;
So till the ending all their ways
Blindfolded loth have trod:
Nor knew their task at all, but were the tools of God.
*
A few restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the
followers of individual branches of study. The DIVINITY,
for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in
the present day, is unhappily considered by many as a
confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one of two
ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus. Some
swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw
philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in
Him on His own authority. Others again (and this we think
the worst method), finding German grammar a somewhat dry
morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of
independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that
they may hold the others without being laughed at.
*
In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing
their time in explaining to a delighted audience the
physics of the Second Coming. It is not very likely any of
us will be asked to help. If we were, it is likely we
should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on
more reliable authority. And so I can only figure to
myself a congregation truly curious in such flights of
theological fancy, as one of veteran and accomplished
saints, who have fought the good fight to an end and
outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather
as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect
company on earth.
*
The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is
the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the
biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest,
the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the
dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us
the love of an ideal; strive like us--like us are tempted
to grow weary of the struggle--to do well; like us receive
at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support,
returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be
crucified between that double law of the members and the
will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of
some reward, some sugar with the drug? Do they, too, stand
aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those
whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the
prosperity of such as in our blindness we call wicked?
*
But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as
our prophet, and to think of different things in the same
order. To be of the same mind with another is to see all
things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few
indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it
is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force
of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his
vision that whatever he may express, your eyes will light
at once on the original, that whatever he may see to
declare, your mind will at once accept....
Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often,
Christ finds a word that transcends all commonplace
morality; every now and then He quits the beaten track to
pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and
magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry
of thought that men can be strung up above the level of
everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon experience
or accept some higher principle of conduct. To a man who
is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stand at some
centre not too far from His, and looks at the world and
conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing
attitude--or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ's
philosophy--every such saying should come home with a
thrill of joy and corroboration; he should feel each one
below his feet as another sure foundation in the flux of
time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and
great armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed,
he stands immovable, holding by the eternal stars.
*
Those who play by rule will never be more than tolerable
players; and you and I would like to play our game in life
to the noblest and the most divine advantage....For no
definite precept can be more than an illustration, though
its truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was
announced from heaven by the voice of God. And life is so
intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or
perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that nice
consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply....
It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own
soul and its fixed design of righteousness, that the better
part of moral and religious education is directed; not only
that of words and doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity
under which we are all God's scholars till we die. If, as
teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must
say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak
that soul's dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as
his soul would have him think of them. If, from some
conformity between us and the pupil, or perhaps among all
men, we do in truth speak in such a dialect and express
such views, beyond question we shall touch in him a spring;
beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that
he himself has spoken in his better hours; beyond question
he will cry, 'I had forgotten, but now I remember; I too
have eyes, and I had forgot to use them! I too have a soul
of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I will listen
and conform.' In short, say to him anything that he has
once thought, or been upon the point of thinking, or show
him any view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been
on the point of clearly seeing; and you have done your part
and may leave him to complete the education for himself.
*
God, if there be any God, speaks daily in a new language,
by the tongues of men; the thoughts and habits of each
fresh generation and each new-coined spirit throw another
light upon the universe, and contain another commentary on
the printed Bibles; every scruple, every true dissent,
every glimpse of something new, is a letter of God's
alphabet; and though there is a grave responsibility for
all who speak, is there none for those who unrighteously
keep silent and conform? Is not that also to conceal and
cloak God's counsel?
*
Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in
particular. Every man or woman is one of mankind's dear
possessions; to his or her just brain, and kind heart, and
active hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for the
future; he or she is a possible wellspring of good acts and
source of blessings to the race.
*
Morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness
every man fights for his own hand; all the six hundred
precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment; my
magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my
decisions absolute for the time and case. The moralist is
not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my
tribunal. He has to show not the law, but that the law
applies. Can he convince me? then he gains the cause. And
thus you find Christ giving various counsels to varying
people, and often jealously careful to avoid definite
precept. Is He asked, for example, to divide a heritage?
He refuses; and the best advice that He will offer is but a
paraphrase of the tenth commandment which figures so
strangely among the rest. Take heed, and beware of
covetousness. If you complain that this is vague, I have
failed to carry you along with me in my argument. For no
definite precept can be more than an illustration, though
its truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was
announced from heaven by the voice of God. And life is so
intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or
perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that nice
consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.
*
But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our
divisive impulses and march with one mind through life,
there is plainly one thing more unrighteous than all
others, and one declension which is irretrievable and draws
on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself.
In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole
nature is clear, strong, and conscious, and events conspire
to leave us free, that we enjoy communion with our soul.
At the worst we are so fallen and passive that we may say
shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men.
Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating
world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep;
consciousness becomes engrossed among the reflex and
mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the will and
power to look higher considerations in the face. This is
ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal
damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
judgment: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and LOSE HIMSELF?'
*
To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a
transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take
to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.
*
We are are all such as He was--the inheritors of sin; we
must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there
is in all of us--ay, even in me--a sparkle of the divine.
Like Him, we must endure for a little while, until morning
returns, bringing peace.
*
A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as
much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another
truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who
can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our
drowsy consciences.
*
Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to
refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood
and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer
formal questions. To. reach the truth by yea and nay
communications implies a questioner with a share of
inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. YEA
and NAY mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in
the question. Many Words are often necessary to convey a
very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we
never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many
arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to
indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are
aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to
convey the purport of a single principle or a single
thought.
*
The cruellist lies are often told in silence. A man may
have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and
yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile
calumniator. And how many loves have perished because,
from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame
which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a
lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung
his head and held his tongue? And, again, a lie may be
told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie. Truth
to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the
truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the
foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the
feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither
garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a
part of the meaning of each separate statement; the
beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate
conversation. You never speak to God; you address a
fellow-man, full of his own tempers: and to tell truth,
rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to
convey a true impression ; truth in spirit, not truth to
letter, is the true veracity.
*
He talked for the pleasure of airing himself. He was
essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and
essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the
young ass; and so he talked at random. There was no
particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and
universal, to flatter himself, and to please and interest
the present friend.
*
How wholly we all lie at the mercy of a single prater, not
needfully with any malign purpose! And if a man but talk
of himself in the right spirit, refers to his virtuous
actions by the way, and never applies to them the name of
virtues, how easily his evidence is accepted in the court
of public opinion!
*
In one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false;
and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.
*
Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more
than by private thinking. That is not the profit. The
profit is in the exercise, and above all in the experience;
for when we reason at large on any subject, we review our
state and history in life. From time to time, however, and
specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge
like an exploration.
*
Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large
surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological
strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident,
cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole
flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the
matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from
every degree of mental elevation and abasement--these are
the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which
the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise
should still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by
instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should
keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and
businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction, and
experience intersect and illuminate each other.
*
There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to
be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact,
a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and
not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates,
but bear our part in that great international congress,
always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared,
public errors first corrected, and the course of public
opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right.
No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago
prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is
written that has not been largely composed by their
assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other
than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far
short of the original in life, freedom, and effect. There
are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing
experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
tentative, continually 'in further search and progress';
while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the
writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of
obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief,
while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal
with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free
and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the
freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it
would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like
literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is
dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the
contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery
and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in
talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In
short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his
chief business in this world; and talk, which is the
harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most
accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is
all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters
our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in
almost any state of health.
*
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an
indifferent means to such an end. Language is but a poor
bull's-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral
of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words
is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the
absence of. the many which remain unexpressed; like a
bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses
our sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough
in all Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of a
man's experience in an hour. The speed of the eyesight and
the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind,
produce; in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious
volume to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout
approaches. If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be
as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of
fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought
when we put it into words; for the words are all coloured
and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from
former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to
do with the question in hand. So we must always see to it
nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not by
the partial terms that represent them in man's speech; and
at times of choice, we must leave words upon one side, and
act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps
inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument,
but which are truly the sum and fruit of our experience.
Words are for communication, not for judgment. This is
what every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools
and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into the
domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned
in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and
unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a
name upon their acts or motives.
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