Books: The Pocket R.L.S.
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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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*
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you
have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids
your eye. If a man were made of gutta-percha, his heart
would quail at such a moment. But when the word is out,
the worst is over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all
may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every
bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd
missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a
fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking readiness,
one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.
*
All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the
laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the
other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent,
and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast
proportion. For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow
the limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height
of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out for
the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their
most shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for
themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace of
delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the
round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods,
exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes
his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still
trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of
his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.
*
No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in
him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is
eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself;
and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind,
but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from
hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events
and circumstances.
*
Overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in
life--alas! pain has its own way with all of us; it breaks
in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden where the child
wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon the
field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering
to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can
protect us from this sting.
*
Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you
find that in your Bible? Easy? It is easy to be an ass
and follow the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a
stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs.
Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the
stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
*
Though I have all my life been eager for legitimate
distinction, I can lay my hand upon my heart, at the end of
my career, and declare there is not one--no, nor yet life
itself--which is worth acquiring or preserving at the
slightest cost of dignity.
*
For surely, at this time of the day in the nineteenth
century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear
more timorously than getting and spending more than he
deserves.
*
It remains to be seen, by each man who would live a true
life to himself and not a merely specious life to society,
how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely
submits as to a social propriety; and all these last he
will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he will be
surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him
in complete contentment and activity of mind and senses.
Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived upon
a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household
must ape the tastes and emulate the display of others.
One is delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in
furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who care
nothing for any of these refinements, who am perhaps a
plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer,
flannel-shirts, and a camp bed, am yet called upon to
assimilate all these other tastes and make these foreign
occasions of expenditure my own. It may be cynical; I am
sure I will be told it is selfish; but I will spend my money
as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification,
and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the
colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.
I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless
I am born with a delight in them. Dress is my own affair,
and that of one other in the world; that, in fact, and for
an obvious reason, of any woman who shall chance to be in
love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind. If I
do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent;
and even if I do, they have no further right but to
refuse the invitation.
*
To a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in
every relation and grade of society. It is a high calling,
to which a man must first be born, and then devote himself
for life. And, unhappily, the manners of a certain
so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet
with a certain external acceptation throughout all the
others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments
of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human
and central.
*
Respectability is a very thing in its way, but it does not
rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a
moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I
think I will go as far as this: that if a position is
admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as
the Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the
better for himself and all concerned.
*
After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough
into his neighbours to find that the outside is false,
without caring to go farther and discover what is really
true. He is content to find that things are not what they
seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do not
exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they
pretend they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies
us the possession of virtue altogether. He has learned the
first lesson, that no man is wholly good; but he has not
even suspected that there is another equally true, to wit,
that no man is wholly bad.
*
Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work
which is not as good as you can make it, which you have
palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in
execution, upon mankind, who is your paymaster on parole,
and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or
untrue performance, should rise up against you in the court
of your own heart and condemn you for a thief.
*
Sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane
considerations, because it supplies us with the materials
for wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a
sneaking kindness for any unpopular person.... than to give
way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his
abstract vices.
*
In the best fabric of duplicity there is some weak point,
if you can strike it, which will loosen all.
*
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to
decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain
heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an
Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat
of admiration.
*
After an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
civilisation than a court of law? Hither come envy,
malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out in
public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed
households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low
building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's
bell told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them
pause to count the strokes and wander on again into the
moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.
*
There are two things that men should never weary of--
goodness and humility.
*
It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the
earning itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or
something else must follow. To live is sometimes very
difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we
should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If
Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of
trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a
reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he
would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those
who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of
private means, and even those who can, by abstinence,
reduce the necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year,
having the more liberty, have only the higher moral
obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.
*
A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail;
he will hear of his failure. Or he may have done well for
years, and still do well, but the critic may have tired of
praising him, or there may have sprung up some new idol of
the instant, some 'dust a little gilt,' to whom they now
prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the
reverse of that empty and ugly thing called popularity.
Will any man suppose it worth gaining?
*
Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly
false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth
upon another subject which is accidentally combined with
the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the
monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and
hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the
truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly
and exactly uttered.
*
For such things as honour and love and faith are not only
nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think that we
desire them more, and suffer more sharply for their
absence.
*
There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and
prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is
full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed,
with some qualification. But when the same person has
ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he
should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket
wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to
discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally
console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre
people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt
very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort
of proposition is any less true than the other, or that
Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied,
than Mr. Samuel Budgett the successful merchant.
*
'You know it very well, it cannot in any way help that you
should brood upon it, and I sometimes wonder whether you
and I--who are a pair of sentimentalists--are quite good
judges of plain men.'
*
For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content.
Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few
that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest
lessons are the most, palatable, and make themselves
welcome to the mind.
*
It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six
hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one
brutal rejection from an inn-door change your views upon
the subject like a course of lectures. As long as you keep
in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as
you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but
once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the
devil. I will give most respectable men a fortnight of
such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what
remains of their morality.
*
I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil;
unless, perhaps, the two were the same thing? And yet 'tis
a good tonic; the cold tub and bath-towel of the
sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases of
advanced sensibility.
*
Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own
disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most
men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the
bitterness of that repentance.
*
Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this
itch of doing that undoes men.
*
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
*
That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go.
*
It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they
are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them
feel bigger.
*
But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men.
He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is
who has the wealth and glory.
*
For truth that is suppressed by friends is the
readiest weapon of the enemy.
*
But O, what a cruel thing is a farce to those
engaged in it!
*
It is not always the most faithful believer who
makes the cunningest apostle.
*
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases
it outlives the man.
*
A man may live in dreams, and yet be unprepared
for their realisation.
*
'Be soople, Davie, in things immaterial.'
*
No class of man is altogether bad; but each
has its own faults and virtues.
*
But it is odd enough, the very women who profess
most contempt for mankind as a sex seem to find even
its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded
in their own sons.
*
To cling to what is left of any damaged quality
is virtue in the man.
*
But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books,
must all pretend to be as dull and foolish
as our neighbours.
*
It always warms a man to see a woman brave.
*
Condescension is an excellent thing, but it is strange
how one-sided the pleasure of it is!
*
Some strand of our own misdoing is involved
in every quarrel.
*
There was never an ill thing made better by meddling.
*
Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.
*
Every one lives by selling something, whatever
be his right to it.
*
A man dissatisfied with endeavour is a man
tempted to sadness.
*
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the
poetry of circumstance.
*
It is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw
cold water on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a
part, since everything worth judging, whether it be a man,
a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its
merits as a whole.
*
I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the
negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a
certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably over a
hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the
imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint
that I could have made a better one myself--I really do not
know where my head can have been.
*
It's deadly commonplace, but, after all, the commonplaces
are the great poetic truths.
*
Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the
matter of their recollections, setting and resetting little
coloured memories of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be)
some especial friend in the attire of a buccaneer, and
decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on the
playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy
gift which cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen
services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of
the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament
defaced, not a tint impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD
GESANG, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in
time, begins to wonder at the perdurable life of these
impressions; begins, perhaps, to fancy that he wrongs them
when he weaves them in with fiction; and looking back on
them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
*
Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in
yellow overalls, do what you will, young Jessamy
finds young Jenny.
*
'You fret against the common law,' I said. 'You rebel
against the voice of God, which He has made so winning to
convince, so imperious to command. Hear it, and how it
speaks between us! Your hand clings to mine, your heart
leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we are
compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of
the earth remembers its independent life, and yearns to
join us; we are drawn together as the stars are turned
about in space, or as the tides ebb and flow; by things
older and greater than we ourselves.'
*
'Olalla,' I said, 'the soul and the body are one, and
mostly so in love. What the body chooses, the soul loves;
where the body clings, the soul cleaves; body for body,
soul to soul, they come together at God's signal; and the
lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the footstool
and foundation of the highest.'
*
She sent me away, and yet I had but to call upon her name
and she came to me. These were but the weaknesses of
girls, from which even she, the strangest of her sex, was
not exempted.
*
For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous
acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind
sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart,
you may be sure that he would understand and pardon;
but, alas! the heart cannot be shown--it has to be
demonstrated in words.
*
There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a
young woman fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and
he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the
thing he wanted.
*
There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and
bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking,
adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a
part of this or the other person's spiritual bill of fare,
are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a
little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of
every one to fall in love....A wet rag goes safely by the
fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much
impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many
lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under
some unfavourable star.
*
To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in
love, most people would die unwed; and among the others,
there would be not a few tumultuous households. The Lion
is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a
domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather
too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good
domestic sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it
throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and
smallest, in men's characters. Just as some people are
malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the
influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous,
and exacting when they are in love, who are honest,
downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday
affairs and humours of the world.
*
There is only one event in life which really astonishes a
man and startles him out of his prepared opinions.
Everything else befalls him very much as he expected.
Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety indeed,
but with little that is either startling or intense; they
form together no more than a sort of background, or running
accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls
naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind,
and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects
to-morrow to be after the pattern of to-day and yesterday.
He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friend and
acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometime
look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible
expectation. But it is a subject in which neither
intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the
philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing
rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love
that is not a piece of the person's experience.
*
It is the property of things seen for the first time, or
for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring,
to re-awaken in us the sharp edge of sense, and that
impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out
of life with the coming years; but the sight of a loved
face is what renews a man's character from the fountain
upwards.
*
Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no
true love, even on your own side, without devotion;
devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows; but if
you will give enough of that, if you will pay the price in
a sufficient 'amount of what you call life,' why then,
indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months
and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet
improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and
kindness a delight.
*
Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. 'O yes, believe me,'
as the song says, 'Love has eyes!' The nearer the
intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of
those we love; and because you love one, and would die for
that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
will forgive that friend's misconduct. If you want a
person's faults, go to those who love him. They will
not tell you, but they know. And herein lies the
magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this
knowledge without change.
*
Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at
large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between
the sweethearts. To do good and communicate is the lover's
grand intention. It is the happiness of the other that
makes his own most intense gratification. It is not
possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride,
humility, pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of
happy love or an unexpected caress. To make one's self
beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do
anything and all things that puff out the character and
attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others,
is not only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most
delicate homage at the same time. And it is in this latter
intention that they are done by lovers, for the essence of
love is kindness; and, indeed, it may be best defined as
passionate kindness; kindness, so to speak, run mad and
become importunate and violent.
*
What sound is so full of music as one's own name uttered
for the first time in the voice of her we love!
*
We make love, and thereby ourselves fall the deeper in it.
It is with the heart only that one captures a heart.
*
O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with
young gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love;
I have too much experience, thank you.
*
And love, considered as a spectacle, must have attractions
for many who are not of the confraternity. The sentimental
old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and he must be
rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure, who can look
on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy.
For nature commends itself to people with a most
insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested
by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or as
cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion
when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of
lovers in the lane.
*
Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love;
you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.
*
With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more
between lovers (for mutual understanding is love's
essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one and
aptly comprehended by the other. A hint taken, a look
understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate
explanations; and where the life is known even YEA and NAY
become luminous. In the closest of all relations--that of
a love well founded and equally shared-speech is half
discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process or a
ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate
directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer
words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each
other's hearts in joy.
*
And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became
aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near
me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within
touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than
solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made
perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man
loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
*
The flower of the hedgerow and the star of heaven satisfy
and delight us: how much more the look of the exquisite
being who was created to bear and rear, to madden and
rejoice mankind!
*
So strangely are we built: so much more strong is the love
of woman than the mere love of life.
*
You think that pity--and the kindred sentiments-have the
greatest power upon the heart. I think more nobly of
women. To my view, the man they love will first of all
command their respect; he will be steadfast-proud, if you
please; dry-possibly-but of all things steadfast. They
will look at him in doubt; at last they will see that stern
face which he presents to all of the rest of the world
soften to them alone. First, trust, I say. It is so that
a woman loves who is worthy of heroes.
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