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by Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Pocket R.L.S.
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10 *END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
This Etext of THE POCKET R. L. S. scanned and proofread
by Sean Hackett (shack@eircom.net)
THE POCKET R. L. S.
Being favourite passages from the works of Stevenson.
SELECTED PASSAGES
When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the
man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand,
looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is
another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and
to the love of virtue.
*
It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward
in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all
the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay, the
beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still
spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures,
some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days
is handed down. In this way, public curiosity may be
gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after fame.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us,
but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and
so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his
spirit than a portrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS
QUAM CORPORIS.
*
The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is
essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least
look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most
certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days
together, in the very homeland of the beautiful. We may
have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the
thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand
forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull
circle of surroundings; so that we see it 'with a child's
first pleasure,' as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the
lake-side.
*
But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the
glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and
their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of
women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effect,
with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of
cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of
sea-pines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and
swept together by a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden
with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented
underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing up, solemn and
sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one
such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy
agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious
vibration of many nerves, that the whole delight of the
moment must depend.
*
You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the
tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars
overhead at night; of the blest return of morning, the peep
of day over the moors, the awaking birds among the birches;
how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and with
what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more
pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors.
*
It was one of the best things I got from my education as an
engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to
speak with sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; it
keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest
form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives
him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies
him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his
ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever
he had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it
has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an
office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the
tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a
memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and
the shining Pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to
the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate
mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a
wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine
life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and
for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.
*
No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French
happily put it, A LA BELLE ETOILE. He may know all their
names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of
what alone concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome
influence on the mind. The greater part of poetry is about
the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the
most classical of poets.
*
He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry--
he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the
vein of Scott--and when he had taken his place on a
boulder, near some fairy falls, and shaded by a whip of a
tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still
more surprised him that he should find nothing to write.
His heart perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling
rhythm of the universe.
*
No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning
to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it is
impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to
end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances that
creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely
because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have
reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there
still remains to be taken into account some sensibility
more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some
exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain,
which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or
the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire
splendid views and great pictures; and yet what is truly
admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers
together these scattered details for its delight, and
snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions of
graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which
alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in
one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's
house to another's in search of works of art, begins
suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners,
because he was more capable of enjoying their costly
possessions than they were; because they had paid the money
and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a
fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was
working to be able to buy the picture, the other was
working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited
aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;
only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the
other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair
occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event
shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out
his life more wisely, in the long-run, than those who have
credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is not a good
unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less
degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus
improved and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a
man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares
and disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to
depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that
heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And
thus a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men
would be hardly disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for
him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare
moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him
wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and
disenchantment of the world and life.
*
THE VAGABOND
(TO AN AIR OF SCHUBERT)
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river--
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.
*
Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour,
living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise
and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The
irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in
a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough,
and great things no longer portentous; and the world is
smilingly accepted as it is.
*
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I
travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to
feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the
globe granite under foot and strewn with cutting flints.
Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with
our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked
for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale
out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it
is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind.
And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself
about the future?
*
A SONG OF THE ROAD
The gauger walked with willing foot,
And aye the gauger played the flute:
And what should Master Gauger play
But OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?
Whene'er I buckle on my pack
And foot it gaily in the track,
O pleasant gauger, long since dead,
I hear you fluting on ahead.
You go with me the selfsame way--
The selfsame air for me you play;
For I do think and so do you
It is the tune to travel to.
For who would gravely set his face
To go to this or t'other place?
There's nothing under Heav'n so blue
That's fairly worth the travelling to.
On every hand the roads begin,
And people walk with zeal therein;
But wheresoe'er the highways tend,
Be sure there's nothing at the end.
Then follow you, wherever hie
The travelling mountains of the sky.
Or let the streams in civil mode
Direct your choice upon a road;
For one and all, or high or low,
Will lead you where you wish to go;
And one and all go night and day
OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY!
*
A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom
is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and
go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you;
and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot
alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.
And then you must be open to all impressions and let your
thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a
pipe for any wind to play upon.
*
It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would
have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing
the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite
as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting
dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a
walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the
brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque,
but of certain jolly humours--of the hope and spirit with
which the march begins at morning, and the peace and
spiritual repletion of the evening's rest. He cannot tell
whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more
delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key
for that of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only a
reward in itself, but will be further rewarded in the
sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless
chain.
*
Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the
thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our
humours as through differently-coloured glasses. We are
ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and
make discord or harmony almost at will. There is no fear
for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us,
so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling
ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go. We become
thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we are provocative
of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere character is
provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others.
*
There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will
stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. 'We are not
cotton-spinners all;' or, at least, not all through. There
is some life in humanity yet; and youth will now and again
find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and throw
up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.
*
I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all
humours: that in which a person, with a sufficiency of
money and a knapsack, turns his back on a town and walks
forward into a country of which he knows only by the vague
report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a
railway. He may change his mind at every finger-post, and,
where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the
low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sunshine,
suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns
immediately into the woods, or the broad road that
lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the
far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops,
or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. In short,
he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang
of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his
self-respect. It is true, however, that most men do not
possess the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of
being able to live for the moment only; and as they begin to
go forward on their journey, they will find that they have
made for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may
have entertained for a moment, half in jest, become iron
laws to them, they know not why. They will be led by the
nose by these vague reports of which I spoke above; and the
mere fact that their informant mentioned one village and
not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable
power. And yet a little while, yet a few days of this
fictitious liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious
voices calling on them to return; and some passion, some
duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation, will set its
hand upon their shoulder and lead them back into the old
paths. Once and again we have all made the experiment. We
know the end of it right well. And yet if we make it for
the hundredth time to-morrow, it will have the same charm
as ever; our hearts will beat and our eyes will be bright,
as we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once
again (as we have felt so often before) that we are cutting
ourselves loose for ever from our whole past life, with all
its sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward
as a new creature into a new world.
*
Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway
travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so
little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart
becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country;
and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of
carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them,
at unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar
alley that leads towards town; they are left behind with
the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he
watches the long train sweep away into the golden distance.
*
Now, there is no time when business habits are more
mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these
halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.
. . . If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing
better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the
sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch
the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that
you taste joviality to the full significance of that
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you
feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you
move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a
kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one,
wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot
walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all
narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part
freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside
all your own hobbies to watch provincial humours develop
themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
grave and beautiful like an old tale.
*
It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we
shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetops, and
remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a
lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever. You
have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and
bring to an end only when you are drowsy.
*
I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where
no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of
instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person
can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally
wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in
that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives,
over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I
believe there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool,
Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose
their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than
the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all
these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery
along with him, in a watch-pocket!
*
The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran;
No need there was for maid or man,
When we put us, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai.
*
To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship.
To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make
clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in
such a cleansing.
*
I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of
characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of
my life.
*
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not)
founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many
things in nature more striking to man's eye. It is such an
eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of
terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along
the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist
deep in the stream. Or, perhaps, they have never got
accustomed to the speed and fury of the river's flux, or
the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played upon
their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he
still plays upon these later generations down all the
valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet
and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror
of the world.
The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with
tremulous gestures tell how the river was as cruel as it
was strong and cold, and how death lurked in the eddy
underneath the willows. But the reeds had to stand
where they were; and those who stand still are always
timid advisers.
*
The wholeday was showery, with occasional drenching plumps.
We were soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the
sun, then soaked once more. But there were some calm
intervals, and one notably, when we were skirting the
forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a place
most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along
the riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and
piling them up aloft into a wall of leaves. What is a
forest but a city of nature's own, full of hardy and
innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves
are the houses and public monuments? There is nothing so
much alive and yet so quiet as a woodland; and a pair of
people, swinging past in canoes, feel very small and
bustling by comparison.
I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the
most civil society. An old oak that has been growing where
he stands since before the Reformation, taller than many
spires, more stately than the greater part of mountains,
and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and death,
like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
history? But acres on acres full of such. patriarchs
contiguously rooted, their green tops billowing in the
wind, their stalwart younglings pushing up about their
knees; a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour
to the light, giving perfume to the air; what is this but
the most imposing piece in nature's repertory?
*
But indeed it is not so much for its beauty that the forest
makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle
something, that quality of the air, that emanation from
the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews
a weary spirit.
*
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put
forth the paradox that any place is good enough to live a
life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly
favoured, that we can pass a few hours agreeably. For, if
we only stay long enough, we become at home in the
neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers,
about uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the
superior loveliness of other places, and fall into a
tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and
justification.
*
For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood,
and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent
on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful
things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after
a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art
of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with
her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our
eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn,
also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The
traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des
discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin.'
*
There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or
to travel, or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to
problem. We may study for ever, and we are never as
learned as we would. We have never made a statue worthy of
our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or
crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another
ocean or another plain upon the farther side. In the
infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence
and to spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle, which
can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a
private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet,
the weather and the seasons keep so deftly changing that
although we walk there for a lifetime there will be always
something to startle and delight us.
*
It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any
man continues to exist with even patience, that he is
charmed by the look of things and people, and that he
wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and
pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through
which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it
is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting:
and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary,
but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the
possibilities of pleasure.
*
To look on the happy side of nature is common, in their
hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under a good
influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand
on their happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon
lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with
unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal
dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive
the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance,
and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But
let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but
has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of
ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.
*
Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a
starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to
the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high
in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the
earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of
sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance
herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back
to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the
music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and
when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan
leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our
hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
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