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by Robert Louis Stevenson

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Title: Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

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ESSAYS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON


SELECTED AND EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY WILLIAM LYON
PHELPS M.A.(HARVARD) PH.D.(YALE)


PREFACE

The text of the following essays is taken from the Thistle Edition of
Stevenson's _Works_, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, in New
York. I have refrained from selecting any of Stevenson's formal essays
in literary criticism, and have chosen only those that, while ranking
among his masterpieces in style, reveal his personality, character,
opinions, philosophy, and faith. In the _Introduction_, I have
endeavoured to be as brief as possible, merely giving a sketch of his
life, and indicating some of the more notable sides of his literary
achievement; pointing out also the literary school to which these
Essays belong. A lengthy critical Introduction to a book of this kind
would be an impertinence to the general reader, and a nuisance to a
teacher. In the _Notes_, I have aimed at simple explanation and some
extended literary comment. It is hoped that the general recognition of
Stevenson as an English classic may make this volume useful in school
and college courses, while it is not too much like a textbook to repel
the average reader. I am indebted to Professor Catterall of Cornell
and to Professor Cross of Yale, and to my brother the Rev. Dryden W.
Phelps, for some assistance in locating references. W.L.P., YALE
UNIVERSITY, _13 February 1906_.


CONTENTS

     INTRODUCTION

     BIBLIOGRAPHY

   I ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES
     NOTES

  II AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
     NOTES

 III AES TRIPLEX
     NOTES

  IV TALK AND TALKERS
     NOTES

   V A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
     NOTES

  VI THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
     NOTES

 VII A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
     NOTES

VIII BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME
     NOTES

  IX PULVIS ET UMBRA
     NOTES


INTRODUCTION


I

LIFE OF STEVENSON

Robert Louis Stevenson[1] was born at Edinburgh on the 13 November
1850. His father, Thomas, and his grandfather, Robert, were both
distinguished light-house engineers; and the maternal grandfather,
Balfour, was a Professor of Moral Philosophy, who lived to be ninety
years old. There was, therefore, a combination of _Lux et Veritas_ in
the blood of young Louis Stevenson, which in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
took the form of a luminous portrayal of a great moral idea.

In the language of Pope, Stevenson's life was a long disease. Even as
a child, his weak lungs caused great anxiety to all the family except
himself; but although Death loves a shining mark, it took over forty
years of continuous practice for the grim archer to send the black
arrow home. It is perhaps fortunate for English literature that his
health was no better; for the boy craved an active life, and would
doubtless have become an engineer. He made a brave attempt to pursue
this calling, but it was soon evident that his constitution made it
impossible. After desultory schooling, and an immense amount of
general reading, he entered the University of Edinburgh, and then
tried the study of law. Although the thought of this profession became
more and more repugnant, and finally intolerable, he passed his final
examinations satisfactorily. This was in 1875.

He had already begun a series of excursions to the south of France and
other places, in search of a climate more favorable to his incipient
malady; and every return to Edinburgh proved more and more
conclusively that he could not live in Scotch mists. He had made the
acquaintance of a number of literary men, and he was consumed with a
burning ambition to become a writer. Like Ibsen's _Master-Builder_,
there was a troll in his blood, which drew him away to the continent
on inland voyages with a canoe and lonely tramps with a donkey; these
gave him material for books full of brilliant pictures, shrewd
observations, and irrepressible humour. He contributed various
articles to magazines, which were immediately recognised by critics
like Leslie Stephen as bearing the unmistakable mark of literary
genius; but they attracted almost no attention from the general
reading public, and their author had only the consciousness of good
work for his reward. In 1880 he was married.

Stevenson's first successful work was _Treasure Island_, which was
published in book form in 1883, and has already become a classic. This
did not, however, bring him either a good income or general fame. His
great reputation dates from the publication of the _Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,_ which appeared in 1886. That work had an
instant and unqualified success, especially in America, and made its
author's name known to the whole English-speaking world. _Kidnapped_
was published the same year, and another masterpiece, _The Master of
Ballantrae_, in 1889.

After various experiments with different climates, including that of
Switzerland, Stevenson sailed for America in August 1887. The winter
of 1887-88 he spent at Saranac Lake, under the care of Dr. Trudeau,
who became one of his best friends. In 1890 he settled at Samoa in the
Pacific. Here he entered upon a career of intense literary activity,
and yet found time to take an active part in the politics of the
island, and to give valuable assistance in internal improvements.

The end came suddenly, exactly as he would have wished it, and
precisely as he had unconsciously predicted in the last radiant,
triumphant sentences of his great essay, _Aes Triplex_. He had been at
work on a novel, _St. Ives_, one of his poorer efforts, and whose
composition grew steadily more and more distasteful, until he found
that he was actually writing against the grain. He threw this aside
impatiently, and with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm began a new
story, _Weir of Hermiston_, which would undoubtedly have been his
masterpiece, had he lived to complete it. In luminosity of style, in
nobleness of conception, in the almost infallible choice of words,
this astonishing fragment easily takes first place in Stevenson's
productions. At the end of a day spent in almost feverish dictation,
the third of December 1894, he suddenly fainted, and died without
regaining consciousness. "Death had not been suffered to take so much
as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the
highest point of being, he passed at a bound on to the other side. The
noise of the mallet and chisel was scarcely quenched, the trumpets
were hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory,
this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shot into the spiritual land."

He was buried at the summit of a mountain, the body being carried on
the shoulders of faithful Samoans, who might have sung Browning's
noble hymn,

  "Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
    Singing together!
  Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
    Each in its tether
  Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain...
  That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
    Rarer, intenser,
  Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
    Chafes in the censer.
  Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
    Seek we sepulture
  On a tall mountain...
  Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
    Wait ye the warning!
  Our low life was the level's and the night's;
    He's for the morning.
  Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
    'Ware the beholders!
  This is our master, famous, calm and dead,
    Borne on our shoulders...

  Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot clouds form,
              Lightnings are loosened,
  Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
              Peace let the dew send!
  Lofty designs must close in like effects
              Loftily lying,
  Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
              Living and dying."


II

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER

Stevenson had a motley personality, which is sufficiently evident in
his portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and
the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of
fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one
side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny--the mysterious
charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal
world--the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of
Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas
Browne, are seen with varying degrees of emphasis in his literary
temperament. He was whimsical as an imaginative child; and everyone
has noticed that he never grew old. His buoyant optimism was based on
a chronic experience of physical pain, for pessimists like
Schopenhauer are usually men in comfortable circumstances, and of
excellent bodily health. His courage and cheerfulness under depressing
circumstances are so splendid to contemplate that some critics believe
that in time his _Letters_ may be regarded as his greatest literary
work, for they are priceless in their unconscious revelation of a
beautiful soul.

Great as Stevenson was as a writer, he was still greater as a Man. So
many admirable books have been written by men whose character will not
bear examination, that it is refreshing to find one Master-Artist
whose daily life was so full of the fruits of the spirit. As his
romances have brought pleasure to thousands of readers, so the
spectacle of his cheerful march through the Valley of the Shadow of
Death is a constant source of comfort and inspiration. One feels
ashamed of cowardice and petty irritation after witnessing the steady
courage of this man. His philosophy of life is totally different from
that of Stoicism; for the Stoic says, "Grin and bear it," and usually
succeeds in doing neither. Stevenson seems to say, "Laugh and forget
it," and he showed us how to do both.

Stevenson had the rather unusual combination of the Artist and the
Moralist, both elements being marked in his writings to a very high
degree. The famous and oft-quoted sonnet by his friend, the late Mr.
Henley, gives a vivid picture:

  "Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
  Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face--
  Lean, large-honed, curved of beak, and touched with race,
  Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,
  The brown eyes radiant with vivacity--
  There shown a brilliant and romantic grace,
  A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
  Of passion, impudence, and energy.
  Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
  Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
  Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist;
  A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
  And something of the Shorter Catechist."

He was not primarily a moral teacher, like Socrates or Thomas Carlyle;
nor did he feel within him the voice of a prophetic mission. The
virtue of his writings consists in their wholesome ethical quality, in
their solid health. Fresh air is often better for the soul than the
swinging of the priest's censer. At a time when the school of Zola was
at its climax, Stevenson opened the windows and let in the pleasant
breeze. For the morbid and unhealthy period of adolescence, his books
are more healthful than many serious moral works. He purges the mind
of uncleanness, just as he purged contemporary fiction.

As Stevenson's correspondence with his friends like Sidney Colvin and
William Archer reveals the social side of his nature, so his
correspondence with the Unseen Power in which he believed shows that
his character was essentially religious. A man's letters are often a
truer picture of his mind than a photograph; and when these epistles
are directed not to men and women, but to the Supreme Intelligence,
they form a real revelation of their writer's heart. Nothing betrays
the personality of a man more clearly than his prayers, and the
following petition that Stevenson composed for the use of his
household at Vailima, bears the stamp of its author.

  "At Morning. The day returns and brings us the petty round of
  irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to
  perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound
  with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day,
  bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured,
  and grant us in the end the gift of sleep."


III

STEVENSON'S VERSATILITY

Stevenson was a poet, a dramatist, an essayist, and a novelist,
besides writing many political, geographical, and biographical
sketches. As a poet, his fame is steadily waning. The tendency at
first was to rank him too high, owing to the undeniable charm of many
of the poems in the _Child's Garden of Verses_. The child's view of
the world, as set forth in these songs, is often originally and
gracefully expressed; but there is little in Stevenson's poetry that
is of permanent value, and it is probable that most of it will be
forgotten. This fact is in a way a tribute to his genius; for his
greatness as a prose writer has simply eclipsed his reputation as a
poet.

His plays were failures. They illustrate the familiar truth that a man
may have positive genius as a dramatic writer, and yet fail as a
dramatist. There are laws that govern the stage which must be obeyed;
play-writing is a great art in itself, entirely distinct from literary
composition. Even Browning, the most intensely dramatic poet of the
nineteenth century, was not nearly so successful in his dramas as in
his dramatic lyrics and romances.

His essays attracted at first very little attention; they were too
fine and too subtle to awaken popular enthusiasm. It was the success
of his novels that drew readers back to the essays, just as it was the
vogue of Sudermann's plays that made his earlier novels popular. One
has only to read such essays, however, as those printed in this volume
to realise not only their spirit and charm, but to feel instinctively
that one is reading English Literature. They are exquisite works of
art, written in an almost impeccable style. By many judicious readers,
they are placed above his works of fiction. They certainly constitute
the most original portion of his entire literary output. It is
astonishing that this young Scotchman should have been able to make so
many actually new observations on a game so old as Life. There is a
shrewd insight into the motives of human conduct that makes some of
these graceful sketches belong to the literature of philosophy, using
the word philosophy in its deepest and broadest sense. The essays are
filled with whimsical paradoxes, keen and witty as those of Bernard
Shaw, without having any of the latter's cynicism, iconoclasm, and
sinister attitude toward morality. For the real foundation of even the
lightest of Stevenson's works is invariably ethical.

His fame as a writer of prose romances grows brighter every year. His
supreme achievement was to show that a book might be crammed with the
most wildly exciting incidents, and yet reveal profound and acute
analysis of character, and be written with consummate art. His tales
have all the fertility of invention and breathless suspense of Scott
and Cooper, while in literary style they immeasurably surpass the
finest work of these two great masters.

His best complete story, is, I think, _Treasure Island_. There is a
peculiar brightness about this book which even the most notable of the
later works failed to equal. Nor was it a trifling feat to make a
blind man and a one-legged man so formidable that even the reader is
afraid of them. Those who complain that this is merely a pirate story
forget that in art the subject is of comparatively little importance,
whereas the treatment is everything. To say, as some do, that there is
no difference between _Treasure Island_ and a cheap tale of blood and
thunder, is equivalent to saying that there is no difference between
the Sistine Madonna and a chromo Virgin.


IV

THE PERSONAL ESSAY

The Personal Essay is a peculiar form of literature, entirely
different from critical essays like those of Matthew Arnold and from
purely reflective essays, like those of Bacon. It is a species of
writing somewhat akin to autobiography or firelight conversation;
where the writer takes the reader entirely into his confidence, and
chats pleasantly with him on topics that may be as widely apart as the
immortality of the soul and the proper colour of a necktie. The first
and supreme master of this manner of writing was Montaigne, who
belongs in the front rank of the world's greatest writers of prose.
Montaigne talks endlessly on the most trivial subjects without ever
becoming trivial. To those who really love reading and have some
sympathy with humanity, Montaigne's _Essays_ are a "perpetual refuge
and delight," and it is interesting to reflect how far in literary
fame this man, who talked about his meals, his horse, and his cat,
outshines thousands of scholarly and talented writers, who discussed
only the most serious themes in politics and religion. The great
English prose writers in the field of the personal essay during the
seventeenth century were Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham
Cowley, though Walton's _Compleat Angler_ is a kindred work. Browne's
_Religio Medici_, and his delightful _Garden of Cyrus_, old Tom
Fuller's quaint _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_ and Cowley's charming
_Essays_ are admirable examples of this school of composition.
Burton's wonderful _Anatomy of Melancholy_ is a colossal personal
essay. Some of the papers of Steele and Addison in the _Tatler_,
_Guardian,_ and the _Spectator_ are of course notable; but it was not
until the appearance of Charles Lamb that the personal essay reached
its climax in English literature. Over the pages of the _Essays of
Elia_ hovers an immortal charm--the charm of a nature inexhaustible in
its humour and kindly sympathy for humanity. Thackeray was another
great master of the literary easy-chair, and is to some readers more
attractive in this attitude than as a novelist. In America we have had
a few writers who have reached eminence in this form, beginning with
Washington Irving, and including Donald G. Mitchell, whose _Reveries
of a Bachelor_ has been read by thousands of people for over fifty
years.

As a personal essayist Stevenson seems already to belong to the first
rank. He is both eclectic and individual. He brought to his pen the
reminiscences of varied reading, and a wholly original touch of
fantasy. He was literally steeped in the gorgeous Gothic diction of
the seventeenth century, but he realised that such a prose style as
illumines the pages of William Drummond's _Cypress Grove_ and Browne's
_Urn Burial_ was a lost art. He attempted to imitate such writing only
in his youthful exercises, for his own genius was forced to express
itself in an original way. All of his personal essays have that air of
distinction which attracts and holds one's attention as powerfully in
a book as it does in social intercourse. Everything that he has to say
seems immediately worth saying, and worth hearing, for he was one of
those rare men who had an interesting mind. There are some literary
artists who have style and nothing else, just as there are some great
singers who have nothing but a voice. The true test of a book, like
that of an individual, is whether or not it improves upon
acquaintance. Stevenson's essays reflect a personality that becomes
brighter as we draw nearer. This fact makes his essays not merely
entertaining reading, but worthy of serious and prolonged study.

[Note 1: His name was originally Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. He
later dropped the "Balfour" and changed the spelling of "Lewis" to
"Louis," but the name was always pronounced "Lewis."]


BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following information is taken from Col. Prideaux's admirable
_Bibliography_ of Stevenson, London, 1903. I have given the titles and
dates of only the more important publications in book form; and of the
critical works on Stevenson, I have included only a few of those that
seem especially useful to the student and general reader. The detailed
facts about the separate publications of each essay included in the
present volume are fully given in my notes.


WORKS

1878. An Inland Voyage.
1879. Travels with a Donkey.
1881. Virginibus Puerisque.
1882. Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
1882. New Arabian Nights.
1883. Treasure Island.
1885. Prince Otto.
1885. A Child's Garden of Verses.
1885. More New Arabian Nights. The Dynamiter.
1886. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
1886. Kidnapped.
1887. The Merry Men.
1887. Memories and Portraits.
1888. The Black Arrow.
1889. The Master of Ballantrae. (A few copies privately printed in
      1888.)
1889. The Wrong Box.
1890. Father Damien.
1892. Across the Plains.
1892. The Wrecker.
1893. Island Nights' Entertainments.
1893. Catriona.
1894. The Ebb Tide.
1895. Vailima Letters.
1896. Weir of Hermiston.
1898. St. Ives.
1899. Letters, Two Volumes.


NOTE. The _Edinburgh Edition_ of the _works_, in twenty-eight volumes,
is often referred to by bibliographers; it can now be obtained only at
second-hand bookshops, or at auction sales. The best complete edition
on the market is the _Thistle Edition_, in twenty-six volumes,
including the _Life_ and the _Letters_, published by Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York.


WORKS ON STEVENSON

_Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_, by Graham Balfour. 1901. Two
Volumes. _This is the standard Life, and indispensable._

_Robert Louis Stevenson_, by Henry James, in _Partial Portraits,_
1894. _Admirable criticism_.

_Robert Louis Stevenson_, by Walter Raleigh. 1895. _An excellent
appreciation of his character and work._

_Robert Louis Stevenson: Personal Memories_, by Edmund Gosse, in
_Critical Kit-Kats,_ 1896. _Entertaining gossip._

_Stevenson's Shrine, The Record of a Pilgrimage_, by Laura Stubbs.
1903. _Very interesting full-page illustrations._

_(For further critical books and articles, which are numerous, consult
Prideaux.)_


ESSAYS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON


I

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES

It is a difficult matter[1] to make the most of any given place, and
we have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one
side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.
A few months ago some words were said in the _Portfolio_ as to an
"austere regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then
recommended as "healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the
text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in
scenery,[2] it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk
before breakfast to whet the appetite. For when we are put down in
some unsightly neighborhood, 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: to 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 Brantôme quaintly tells us, "_fait des discours en soi pour se
soutenir en chemin_";[3] and into these discourses he weaves something
out of all that he sees and suffers by the way; they take their tone
greatly from the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings
different thoughts from a level road; and the man's fancies grow
lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. Nor does the
scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the
scenery. We see places through our humours as though differently
colored 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,[4] much as a gentle and sincere character
is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others. And even where
there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most obedient
of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction of
romance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and handle
them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes an old print comes to
our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque
imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul
Brill.[5] Dick Turpin[6] has been my lay figure for many an English
lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs[7] for
most tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled
it for them with harmonious figures, and brought them thither their
minds rightly prepared for the impression. There is half the battle in
this preparation. For instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in
the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our own
Highlands. I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily
pleased without trees.[8] I understand that there are some phases of
mental trouble that harmonise well with such surroundings, and that
some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back
several centuries in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the
hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon
these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out
of my sadness, like David before Saul;[9] and the thought of these
past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can
never hit on the right humour for this sort of landscape, and lose
much pleasure in consequence. Still, even here, if I were only let
alone, and time enough were given, I should have all manner of
pleasure, and take many clear and beautiful images away with me when I
left. When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy with the great
features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among
the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times together, over the
changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in
stones,[10] when we are shut out from any poem in the spread
landscape. We begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds
and insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader
will recollect the little summer scene in _Wuthering Heights_[11]--the
one warm scene, perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel--and
the great feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a
little sunshine: this is in the spirit of which I now speak. And,
lastly, we can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often
more picturesque, than the shows of the open air, and they have that
quality of shelter of which I shall presently have more to say.

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. Looking back the
other day on some recollections of my own, I was astonished to find
how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant
country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my
sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more nearly with
my inclination.

The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau, over
which the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A
river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but
the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I
had the heart to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads
that had no beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but
little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you
from the beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to
expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an
unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled
stone-breaker;[12] and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly
forward by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires
in the keen sea-wind. To one who has learned to know their song in
warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the
country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the
waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to
put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation.
Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a
certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like
a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this
was of another description--this was the nakedness of the North; the
earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold.[13]

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were
of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have
their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them
brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the
colour of the world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their
passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There
is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods,
with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some
painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of
their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a
gale.[14] There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a
country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the
passive shadows and clouds or those of rigid houses and walls. But the
wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you
taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of
opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean; he must remember how,
when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a hill-side, he
delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his
back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn
upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the country was
beautiful, the heather purple, and the faraway hills all marbled with
sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage[15] of the
"Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by
the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great
thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with as
good effect:

  "Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
  Escaped as from an enemy we turn,
  Abruptly into some sequestered nook,
  Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!"

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape.
He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great
cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the
great unfinished marvel by the Rhine;[16] and after a long while in
dark stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform
high above the town. At that elevation it was quite still and warm;
the gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten
it in the quiet interior of the church and during his long ascent; and
so you may judge of his surprise when, resting his arms on the sunlit
balustrade and looking over into the _Place_ far below him, he saw the
good people holding on their hats and leaning hard against the wind as
they walked. There is something, to my fancy, quite perfect in this
little experience of my fellow-traveller's. 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; but how much more must they not have
seemed so to him as he stood, not only above other men's business, but
above other men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's![17]

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all
the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea
that any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black
worm-eaten headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened
from the wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand
and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil
water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined
crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has
impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the
water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double
castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet
feud had run so high between their owners, that one, from out of a
window, shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There is
something in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic
irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking
hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at night,[18] when
the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was
loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct for
ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are
there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a
contrary impression, and association is turned against itself.[19] I
remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy,"[20] was
seemingly quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from
such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two
castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about them, were still
distinguishable from these by something more insecure and fantastic in
the outline, something that the last storm had left imminent and the
next would demolish entirely. It would be difficult to render in words
the sense of peace that took possession of me on these three
afternoons. It was helped out, as I have said, by the contrast. The
shore was battered and bemauled by previous tempests; I had the memory
at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies who had erected these two
castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I
had only to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the
hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great tracts
of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and
apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of the
precarious past. There is ever something transitory and fretful in the
impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to have no
root in the constitution of things; it must speedily begin to faint
and wither away like a cut flower. And on those days the thought of
the wind and the thought of human life came very near together in my
mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments[21] in the being of the
eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that great field of
stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity
of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks of
the sea as "hungering for calm,"[22] and in this place one learned to
understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the
broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it
seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when
now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the
quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.

On shore, too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so
subdued and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable
surprise. The desultory crackling of the whin-pods[23] in the
afternoon sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that
had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into
my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I
was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed
to fit my surroundings and give expression to the contentment that was
in me, and I kept repeating to myself--

  "Mon coeur est un luth suspendu,[24]
  Sitôt qu'on le touche, il résonne."

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to
complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.

And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out
of the strong came forth sweetness."[25] There, in the bleak and gusty
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw
the sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner,
was all alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find
something to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant
faces of men and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear
a cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the
country, there is no country without some amenity--let him only look
for it in the right spirit, and he will surely find.


NOTES

This article first appeared in the _Portfolio_, for November 1874, and
was not reprinted until two years after Stevenson's death, in 1896,
when it was included in the _Miscellanies_ (Edinburgh Edition,
_Miscellanies_, Vol. IV, pp. 131-142). The editor of the _Portfolio_
was the well-known art critic, Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-1894),
author of the _Intellectual Life_ (1873). Just one year before,
Stevenson had had printed in the _Portfolio_ his first contribution to
any periodical, _Roads_. Although _The Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places_
attracted scarcely any attention on its first appearance, and has
since become practically forgotten, there is perhaps no better essay
among his earlier works with which to begin a study of his
personality, temperament, and style. In its cheerful optimism this
article is particularly characteristic of its author. It should be
remembered that when this essay was first printed, Stevenson was only
twenty-four years old.

[Note 1: _It is a difficult matter_, etc. The appreciation of nature
is a quite modern taste, for although people have always loved the
scenery which reminds them of home, it was not at all fashionable in
England to love nature for its own sake before 1740. Thomas Gray was
the first person in Europe who seems to have exhibited a real love of
mountains (see his _Letters_). A study of the development of the
appreciation of nature before and after Wordsworth (England's greatest
nature poet) is exceedingly interesting. See Myra Reynolds, _The
Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and Wordsworth_
(1896).]

[Note 2: _This discipline in scenery._ Note what is said on this
subject in Browning's extraordinary poem, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, vs.
300-302.

  "For, don't you mark? We're made so that we love
  First when we see them painted, things we have passed
  Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see."]

[Note 3: _Brantôme quaintly tells us, "fait des discours en soi pour
se soutenir en chemin."_ Freely translated, "the traveller talks to
himself to keep up his courage on the road." Pierre de Bourdeille,
Abbé de Brantôme, (cir. 1534-1614), travelled all over Europe. His
works were not published till long after his death, in 1665. Several
complete editions of his writings in numerous volumes have appeared in
the nineteenth century, one edited by the famous writer, Prosper
Mérimée.]

[Note 4: _We are provocative of beauty._ Compare again, _Fra Lippo
Lippi_, vs. 215 et seq.

  "Or say there's beauty with no soul at all--
  (I never saw it--put the case the same--)
  If you get simple beauty and nought else,
  You get about the best thing God invents:
  That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed,
  Within yourself, when you return him thanks."]

[Note 5: _Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill._ Jacques Callot was an
eminent French artist of the XVII century, born at Nancy in 1592, died
1635. Matthaeus and Paul Brill were two celebrated Dutch painters.
Paul, the younger brother of Matthaeus, was born about 1555, and died
in 1626. His development in landscape-painting was remarkable. Gilles
Sadeler, born at Antwerp 1570, died at Prague 1629, a famous artist,
and nephew of two well-known engravers. He was called the "Phoenix of
Engraving."]

[Note 6: _Dick Turpin_. Dick Turpin was born in Essex, England, and
was originally a butcher. Afterwards he became a notorious highwayman,
and was finally executed for horse-stealing, 10 April 1739. He and his
steed Black Bess are well described in W. H. Ainsworth's _Rookwood_,
and in his _Ballads_.]

[Note 7: _The Trossachs_. The word means literally, "bristling
country." A beautifully romantic tract, beginning immediately to the
east of Loch Katrine in Perth, Scotland. Stevenson's statement, "if a
man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
harmonious figures," refers to Walter Scott, and more particularly to
the _Lady of the Lake_ (1810).]

[Note 8: _I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily
pleased without trees_. Notice the kind of country he begins to
describe in the next paragraph. Is there really any contradiction in
his statements?]

[Note 9: _Like David before Saul_. David charmed Saul out of his
sadness, according to the Biblical story, not with nature, but with
music. See I _Samuel_ XVI. 14-23. But in Browning's splendid poem,
_Saul_ (1845), nature and music are combined in David's inspired
playing.

"And I first played the tune all our sheep know," etc.]

[Note 10: _The sermon in stones_. See the beginning of the second act
of _As You Like It_, where the exiled Duke says,

  "And this our life exempt from public haunt
  Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
  Sermons in stones and good in everything."

It is not at all certain that Shakspere used the word "sermons" here
in the modern sense; he very likely meant merely discourses,
conversations.]

[Note 11: _Wuthering Heights_. The well-known novel (1847) by Emily
Bronte (1818-1848) sister of the more famous Charlotte Bronte. The
"little summer scene" Stevenson mentions, is in Chapter XXIV.]

[Note 12: _A solitary, spectacled stone-breaker_. To the pedestrian or
cyclist, no difference between Europe and America is more striking
than the comparative excellence of the country roads. The roads in
Europe, even in lonely and remote districts, where one may travel for
hours without seeing a house, are usually in perfect condition, hard,
white and absolutely smooth. The slightest defect or abrasion is
immediately repaired by one of these stone-breakers Stevenson
mentions, a solitary individual, his eyes concealed behind large green
goggles, to protect them from the glare and the flying bits of stone.]

[Note 13: _Ashamed and cold_. An excellent example of what Ruskin
called "the pathetic fallacy."]

[Note 14: _The foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale_. Cf.
Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, LXXII:--

  "With blasts that blow the poplar white."]

[Note 15: _Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage_. The passage Stevenson
quotes is in Book VII of _The Prelude_, called _Residence in London_.]

[Note 16: _Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel by the
Rhine_. This great cathedral, generally regarded as the most perfect
Gothic church in the world, was begun in 1248, and was not completed
until 1880, seven years after Stevenson wrote this essay.]

[Note 17: _In a golden zone like Apollo's._ The Greek God Apollo,
later identified with Helios, the Sun-god. The twin towers of Cologne
Cathedral are over 500 feet high, so that the experience described
here is quite possible.]

[Note 18: _The two hall-fires at night_. In mediaeval castles, the
hall was the general living-room, used regularly for meals, for
assemblies, and for all social requirements. The modern word
"dining-hall" preserves the old significance of the word. The familiar
expression, "bower and hall," is simply, in plain prose, bedroom and
sitting-room.]

[Note 19: _Association is turned against itself_. It is seldom that
Stevenson uses an expression that is not instantly transparently
clear. Exactly what does he mean by this phrase?]

[Note 20: "_As from an enemy_." Alluding to the passage Stevenson has
quoted above, from Wordsworth's _Prelude_.]

[Note 21: _Our noisy years did indeed seem moments_. A favorite
reflection of Stevenson's, occurring in nearly all his serious
essays.]

[Note 22: _Shelley speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm."_ This
passage occurs in the poem _Prometheus Unbound_, Act III, end of Scene
2.

  "Behold the Nereids under the green sea--
  Their wavering limbs borne on the wind like stream,
  Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair,
  With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns,--
  Hastening to grace their mighty Sister's joy.
  It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm."]

[Note 23: _Whin-pods._ "Whin" is from the Welsh _çwyn_, meaning
"weed." Whin is gorse or furze, and the sound Stevenson alludes to is
frequently heard in Scotland.]

[Note 24: "_Mon coeur est un luth suspendu_." These beautiful words
are from the poet Béranger (1780-1857). It is probable that Stevenson
found them first not in the original, but in reading the tales of Poe,
for the "two lines of French verse" that "haunted" Stevenson are
quoted by Poe at the beginning of one of his most famous pieces, _The
Fall of the House of Usher_, where, however, the third, and not the
first person is used:--

  "_Son_ coeur est un luth suspendu;
  Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne."]

[Note 25: "_Out of the strong came forth sweetness_." Alluding to the
riddle propounded by Samson. See the book of _Judges_, Chapter XIV.]


II

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS

BOSWELL: "We grow weary when idle."

JOHNSON: "That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another."[1]

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of _lèse_-respectability,[2] to enter on some
lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short
of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they
have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a
little of bravado and gasconade.[3] And yet this should not be.
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in
doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the
ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry
itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter
in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult
and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so
many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the
emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them.[4] And while such an one is
ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his
resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the
wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at
their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the
disregard of Diogenes.[5] Where was the glory of having taken Rome[6]
for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and
found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a
sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and
when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence
physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial
toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons
despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to
disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against
industry, but you can be sent to Coventry[7] for speaking like a fool.
The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well;
therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that
much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is
something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present
occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to
be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in
Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.[8]

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[9] 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. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who
addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come
upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome
task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other
things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible,
by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a
stick. 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,[10] 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 thoughts.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking[11] in
the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my
time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide[12] a crime. But though I would not willingly part with
such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by
certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I
was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty
place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of
Balzac,[13] and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the
Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does
not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning.
Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go
out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some
tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of
the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he
may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new
perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may conceive
Mr. Worldly Wiseman[14] accosting such an one, and the conversation
that should thereupon ensue:--

"How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"

"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying
thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"

"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."

"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it
mathematics?"

"No, to be sure."

"Is it metaphysics?"

"Nor that."

"Is it some language?"

"Nay, it is no language."

"Is it a trade?"

"Nor a trade neither."

"Why, then, what is't?"

"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I
am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and
where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what
manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this
water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me
to call Peace, or Contentment."

Hereupon, Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and
shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon
this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues
scourged by the Hangman!"

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of
starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman, is the common opinion. A fact is not called
a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your
scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged
direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,
only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a
telescope. Sainte-Beuve,[15] as he grew older, came to regard all
experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years
ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read
in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter
xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. 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
be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the
fiddle, to know a good cigar, 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 took 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.[16] 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. The shadows and the
generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars,[17] go by into
ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may
see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape;
many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and making love
as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old
shepherd[18] telling his tale under the hawthorn.

Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.
Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you
will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no
curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations;
they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its
own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will
even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they _cannot_
be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those
hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in
the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they
are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is
a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they
fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would
suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you
would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly
they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a
flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and
college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have
gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time
they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not
too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a
life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a
listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and
not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he
was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is
smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright
upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as
being Success in Life.

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy
habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down
to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus.
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be
sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by
any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he
has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of
the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be
played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers,
and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that
Theatre not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and
diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap
their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil
important offices towards the general result. You are no doubt very
dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards
and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the
policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a
thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who
set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with
good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred
Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better
people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither
sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced
Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt
mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote,[19] who
had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole
circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion
emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the
world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at
the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A
man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most
entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps
profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be
greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a
compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more
beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the
while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties
because, like the quality of mercy,[20] they are not strained, and
they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there
may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of
sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous
people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate
as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits
upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other
day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with
so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humour;
one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with
this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he
had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and
mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling rather
than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but
upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite
commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a
five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and
their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been
lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh
proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically
demonstrate the great Theorum of the liveableness of Life.
Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle
he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger
and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical
limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body
of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I
beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal
of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous
derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all
fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and
a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a
contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper
before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he
works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They
would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his
services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his
fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to
be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden
by a peevish uncle.

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand
fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan
of Arc[21] she should be at home minding women's work, she answered
there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare
gifts! When nature is "so careless of the single life,"[22] why should
we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional
importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark
night in Sir Thomas Lucy's[23] preserves, the world would have wagged
on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the
corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of
the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative
all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of
limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our
earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no
great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco
is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are
neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take
it how you will, but the services of no single individual are
indispensable. Atlas[24] was just a gentleman with a protracted
nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into
a great fortune and thence into bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep
scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who
come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a
pin instead of a pyramid;[25] and fine young men who work themselves
into a decline,[26] and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes
upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by
the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny?
and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the
bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so.
The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they
know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect
may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world
they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the
thought.


NOTES

This essay was first printed in the _Cornhill Magazine_, for July
1877, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 80-86. It was next published in the volume,
_Virginibus Puerisque_, in 1881. Although this book contains some of
the most admirable specimens of Stevenson's style, it did not have a
large sale, and it was not until 1887 that another edition Appeared.
The editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_ from 1871 to 1882 was Leslie
Stephen (1832-1904), whose kindness and encouragement to the new
writer were of the utmost importance at this critical time. That so
grave and serious a critic as Leslie Stephen should have taken such
delight in a _jeu d'esprit_ like _Idlers_, is proof, if any were
needed, for the breadth of his literary outlook. Stevenson had been at
work on this article a year before its appearance, which shows that
his _Apology for Idlers_ demanded from him anything but idling. As
Graham Balfour says, in his _Life of Stevenson_, I, 122, "Except
before his own conscience, there was hardly any time when the author
of the _Apology for Idlers_ ever really neglected the tasks of his
true vocation." In July 1876 he wrote to Mrs. Sitwell, "A paper called
'A Defence of Idlers' (which is really a defence of R.L.S.) is in a
good way." A year later, after the publication of the article, he
wrote (in August 1877) to Sidney Colvin, "Stephen has written to me
apropos of 'Idlers,' that something more in that vein would be
agreeable to his views. From Stephen I count that a devil of a lot."
It is noteworthy that this charming essay had been refused by
_Macmillan's Magazine_ before Stephen accepted it for the _Cornhill._
(_Life,_ I, 180).

[Note 1: The conversation between Boswell and Johnson, quoted at the
beginning of the essay, occurred on the 26 October 1769, at the famous
Mitre Tavern. In Stevenson's quotation, the word "all" should be
inserted after the word "were" to correspond with the original text,
and to make sense. Johnson, though constitutionally lazy, was no
defender of Idlers, and there is a sly humour in Stevenson's appealing
to him as authority. Boswell says in his _Life_, under date of 1780,
"He would allow no settled indulgence of idleness upon principle, and
always repelled every attempt to urge excuses for it. A friend one day
suggested, that it was not wholesome to study soon after dinner.
JOHNSON: 'Ah, sir, don't give way to such a fancy. At one time of my
life I had taken it into my head that it was not wholesome to study
between breakfast and dinner.'"]

[Note 2: _Lèse-respectability._ From the French verb _leser_, to hurt,
to injure. The most common employment of this verb is in the phrase
"_lèse-majesté,"_ high treason. Stevenson's mood here is like that of
Lowell, when he said regretfully, speaking of the eighteenth century,
"Responsibility for the universe had not then been invented." (_Essay
on Gray_.)]

[Note 3: _Gasconade_. Boasting. The inhabitants of Gascony
(_Gascogne)_ a province in the south-west of France, are proverbial
not only for their impetuosity and courage, but for their willingness
to brag of the possession of these qualities. Excellent examples of
the typical Gascon in literature are D'Artagnan in Dumas's _Trois
Mousquetaires_ (1844) and Cyrano in Rostand's splendid drama, _Cyrano
de Bergerac_ (1897).]

[Note 4: _In the emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them._ When
Stevenson wrote this (1876-77), he had not yet been in America. Two
years later, in 1879, when he made the journey across the plains, he
had many opportunities to record Americanisms far more emphatic than
the harmless phrase quoted here, which can hardly be called an
Americanism. Murray's _New English Dictionary_ gives excellent English
examples of this particular sense of "go for" in the years 1641, 1790,
1864, and 1882!]

[Note 5: _Alexander is touched in a very delicate place_. Alluding to
the famous interview between the young Alexander and the old Diogenes,
which took place at Corinth about 330 B.C. Alexander asked Diogenes in
what way he could be of service to him, and the philosopher replied
gruffly, "By standing out of my sunshine." As a young man Diogenes had
been given to all excesses of dissipation; but he later went to the
opposite extreme of asceticism, being one of the earliest and most
striking illustrations of "plain living and high thinking." The
debauchery of his youth and the privation and exposure of his old age
did not deeply affect his hardy constitution, for he is said to have
lived to the age of ninety. In the charming play by the Elizabethan,
John Lyly, _A moste excellente Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and
Diogenes_ (1584), the conversations between the man who has conquered
the world and the man who has overcome the world are highly
entertaining.]

[Note 6: _Where was the glory of having taken Rome_. This refers to
the invasion by the Gauls about the year 389 B. C. A good account is
given in T. Arnold's _History of Rome_ I, pp. 534 et seq.]

[Note 7: _Sent to Coventry_. The origin of this proverb, which means
of course, "to ostracise," probably dates back to 1647, when,
according to Clarendon's _History of the Great Rebellion_, VI, par.
83, Royalist prisoners were sent to the parliamentary stronghold of
Coventry, in Warwickshire.]

[Note 8: _Montenegro ... Richmond_. Montenegro is one of the smallest
principalities in the world, about 3,550 square miles. It is in the
Balkan peninsula, to the east of the lower Adriatic, between
Austro-Hungary and Turkey. When Stevenson was writing this essay,
1876-77, Montenegro was the subject of much discussion, owing to the
part she took in the Russo-Turkish war. The year after this article
was published (1878) Montenegro reached the coast of the Adriatic for
the first time, and now has two tiny seaports. Tennyson celebrated the
hardy virtues of the inhabitants in his sonnet _Montenegro_, written
in 1877.

  "O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
  Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
  Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years."

_Richmond_ is on the river Thames, close to the city of London.]

[Note 9: _Lord Macaulay may escape from school honours._ Stevenson
here alludes to the oft-heard statement that the men who succeed in
after life have generally been near the foot of their classes at
school and college. It is impossible to prove either the falsity or
truth of so general a remark, but it is easier to point out men who
have been successful both at school and in life, than to find
sufficient evidence that school and college prizes prevent further
triumphs. Macaulay, who is noted by Stevenson as an exception, was
precocious enough to arouse the fears rather than the hopes of his
friends. When he was four years old, he hurt his finger, and a lady
inquiring politely as to whether the injured member was better, the
infant replied gravely, "Thank you, Madam, the agony is abated."]

[Note 10: _The Lady of Shalott_. See Tennyson's beautiful poem (1833).

  "And moving thro' a mirror clear
  That hangs before her all the year,
  Shadows of the world appear."]

[Note 11: _Some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking._ Cf.
_King Lear_, Act I, Sc. 2, vs. 15. "Got 'tween asleep and wake."]

[Note 12: _Kinetic Stability ... _Emphyteusis ... Stillicide_ For
Kinetic Stability, see any modern textbook on Physics. _Emphyteusis_
is the legal renting of ground; _Stillicide_, a continual dropping of
water, as from the eaves of a house. These words, _Emphyteusis_ and
_Stillicide_, are terms in Roman Law. Stevenson is of course making
fun of the required studies of Physics and Roman Law, and of their
lack of practical value to him in his chosen career.]

[Note 13: _The favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac_. The great
English novelist Dickens (1812-1870) and his greater French
contemporary Balzac (1799-1850), show in their works that their chief
school was Life.]

[Note 14: _Mr. Worldly Wiseman_. The character in Bunyan's _Pilgrim's
Progress_ (1678), who meets Christian soon after his setting out from
the City of Destruction. _Pilgrim's Progress_ was a favorite book of
Stevenson's; he alludes to it frequently in his essays. See also his
own article _Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress_, first published in the
_Magazine of Art_ in February 1882. This essay is well worth reading,
and the copies of the pictures which he includes are extremely
diverting.]

[Note 15: _Sainte-Beuve._ The French writer Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869)
is usually regarded today as the greatest literary critic who ever
lived. His constant change of convictions enabled him to see life from
all sides.]

[Note 16: _Belvedere of Commonsense_. Belvedere is an Italian word,
which referred originally to a place of observation on the top of a
house, from which one might enjoy an extensive prospect. A portion of
the Vatican in Rome is called the Belvedere, thus lending this name to
the famous statue of Apollo, which stands there. On the continent,
anything like a summer-house is often called a Belvedere. One of the
most interesting localities which bears this name is the Belvedere
just outside of Weimar, in Germany, where Goethe used to act in his
own dramas in the open air theatre.]

[Note 17: _The plangent wars_. Plangent is from the Latin _plango_, to
strike, to beat. Stevenson's use of the word is rather unusual in
English.]

[Note 18: _The old shepherd telling his tale_.. See Milton,
_L'Allegro:_--

  "And every shepherd tells his tale
  Under the hawthorn in the dale."

"Tells his tale" means of course "counts his sheep," not "tells a
story." The old use of the word "tell" for "count" survives to-day in
the word "teller" in a parliamentary assemblage, or in a bank.]

[Note 19: _Colonel Newcome ... Fred Bayham ... Mr. Barnes ... Falstaff
... Barabbases ... Hazlitt ... Northcote._ Colonel Newcome, the great
character in Thackeray's _The Newcomes_ (1854). _Fred Bayham_ and
_Barnes Newcome_ are persons in the same story. One of the best essays
on Falstaff is the one printed in the first series of Mr. Augustine
Birrell's _Obiter Dicta_ (1884). This essay would have pleased
Thackeray. One of the finest epitaphs in literature is that pronounced
over the supposedly dead body of Falstaff by Prince Hal--"I could have
better spared a better man." (_King Henry IV_, Part I, Act V, Sc. 4.)
_Barabbas_ was the robber who was released at the time of the trial of
Christ.... _William Hazlitt_ (1778-1830), the well-known essayist,
published in 1830 the _Conversations_ of _James Northcote_
(1746-1831). Northcote was an artist and writer, who had been an
assistant in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Stevenson projected a
_Life of Hazlitt_, but later abandoned the undertaking. (_Life,_ I,
230.)]

[Note 20: _The quality of mercy_. See Portia's wonderful speech in the
_Merchant of Venice_, Act IV, Scene I.]

[Note 21: _Joan of Arc_. The famous inspired French peasant girl, who
led the armies of her king to victory, and who was burned at Rouen in
1431. She was variously regarded as a harlot and a saint. In
Shakspere's historical plays, she is represented in the basest manner,
from conventional motives of English patriotism. Voltaire's scandalous
work, _La Pucelle_, and Schiller's noble _Jungfrau von Orleans_ make
an instructive contrast. She has been the subject of many dramas and
works of poetry and fiction. Her latest prominent admirer is Mark
Twain, whose historical romance _Joan of Arc_ is one of the most
carefully written, though not one of the most characteristic of his
books.]

[Note 22: "_So careless of the single life_." See Tennyson's _In
Memoriam_, LV, where the poet discusses the pessimism caused by
regarding the apparent indifference of nature to the happiness of the
individual.

  "Are God and Nature then at strife,
  That Nature lends such evil dreams?
  So careful of the type she seems,
  So careless of the single life."]

[Note 23: _Shakespeare ... Sir Thomas Lucy_. The familiar tradition
that Shakspere as a boy was a poacher on the preserves of his
aristocratic neighbor, Sir Thomas Lucy. See Halliwell-Phillipps's
_Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_. In 1879, at the first
performance of _As You Like It_ at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, the
deer brought on the stage in Act IV, Scene 2, had been shot that very
morning by H.S. Lucy, Esq., of Charlecote Park, a descendant of the
owner of the herd traditionally attacked by the future dramatist.]

[Note 24: _Atlas_. In mythology, the leader of the Titans, who fought
the Gods, and was condemned by Zeus to carry the weight of the vault
of heaven on his head and hands. In the sixteenth century the name
Atlas was given to a collection of maps by Mercator, probably because
a picture of Atlas had been commonly placed on the title-pages of
geographical works.]

[Note 25: _Pharaoh ... Pyramid_. For _Pharaoh's_ experiences with the
Israelites, see the book of _Exodus_. Pharaoh was merely the name
given by the children of Israel to the rulers of Egypt: cf. Caesar,
Kaiser, etc. ... The Egyptian pyramids were regarded as one of the
seven wonders of ancient times, the great pyramid weighing over six
million tons. The pyramids were used for the tombs of monarchs.]

[Note 26: _Young men who work themselves into a decline._ Compare the
tone of the close of this essay with that of the conclusion of _AEs
Triplex_. Stevenson himself died in the midst of the most arduous work
possible--the making of a literary masterpiece.]


III

AES TRIPLEX[1]

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and
so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing
stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It
outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes
it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug;[2] sometimes it lays
a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years.
And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other
people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary
friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and
single beds at night. Again in taking away our friends, death does not
take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and
soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a
whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the
pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees[3] of mediaeval
Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the
tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in
order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old
loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous
ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All
this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of
poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many
philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every
circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness,
in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough
to go dangerously wrong in practice.

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more
fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less
influence on conduct under healthy circumstances. We have all heard of
cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and
how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a
jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they
were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are
serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead;
and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the
mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into
the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the
eyes of very young people, and very dull old ones, there is something
indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not
credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find
appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery
mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it
is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it
seems, could hardly be relished in such circumstances without
something like a defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for
nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere
born-devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse.

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of
these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the
state of ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and
swiftly in overcrowded space, among a million other worlds travelling
blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a
knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what,
pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a
mere bagful of petards? The least of these is as dangerous to the
whole economy as the ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and with
every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we are putting one or
more of them in peril. If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers
pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened
as they make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends it all,
the trumpets might sound[4] by the hour and no one would follow them
into battle--the blue-peter might fly at the truck,[5] but who would
climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if these philosophers were right)
with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of
the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battlefield in history,
where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left
their bones! What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much
more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it be to grow old?
For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the
ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we
see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into
the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he
lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming
probability that he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as
a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their
grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of
people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly
warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived
someone else; and when a draught might puff them out like a fluttering
candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their
old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with
laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at
Balaclava[6] was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on
Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only)
whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius[7] to plunge into
the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and
clamber into bed.

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what
unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow
of Death. The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of
it, for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we
go spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby.[8] Perhaps the
reader remembers one of the humorous devices of the deified
Caligula:[9] how he encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on
to his bridge over Baiae[10] bay; and when they were in the height of
their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards[11] among the
company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of
the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man. Only, what a
chequered picnic we have of it, even while it lasts! and into what
great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian
throws us over in the end!

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a
ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is
it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of
human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the
ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love
of Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder
to understand the more we think about them. It is a well-known fact
that an immense proportion of boat accidents would never happen if
people held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and
yet, unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some
landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures makes it
fast. A strange instance of man's unconcern and brazen boldness in the
face of death!

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into
daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death
is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to
others; and although we have some experience of living, there is not a
man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any
practical guess at the meaning of the Word _life_. All literature,
from Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman,[12] is
but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of
view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to
the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best
satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a
show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams.[13] Philosophy, in
its more rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages; and after a
myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words
have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without
end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride,
her contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation.[14] Truly a fine result! A man may very well
love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation. He may be afraid of a precipice, or a
dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's man;
but not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life
in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in
terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true
throughout--that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly
preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking,
love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least careful
there will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed
entirely on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation
of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and
self-approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to
anything like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor
are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of
their personal safety. To be deeply interested in the accidents of our
existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience,
rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against
a straw. For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine
climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff
fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured
distance in the interest of his constitution.

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of
the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere
funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy
unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away.
Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and
again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal
and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the
question. When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great
deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death
may be knocking at the door, like the Commander's statue;[15] we have
something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells
are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every
hour,[16] someone is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies.
For us also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have
no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us
all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our
whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to
honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the
eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring about the
Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is generally very bald,
and his senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard
life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's end,[17] as the
French say--or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium,
where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble
destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic
poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for
years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a Bath-chair,
as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views and
situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should
stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set
before him with a single mind. No one surely could have recoiled with
more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected
lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how
wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he
spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour;
and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before
twenty-seven individual cups of tea.[18] As courage and intelligence
are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is
the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in
life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before
the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too
anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps
the man who is well armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good
citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is
nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own
carcass, has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who
took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid
milk, had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with
his own digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the
brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a
paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually;
he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature, and
takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The
care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the
noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the
parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably
forward over blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the
scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now the man who has his
heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who
reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully
hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all
his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until,
if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot
up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his health,
Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of the
position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim.
Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all
sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed
friends[19] and relations hold up their hands in quite a little
elegiacal synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being
a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and
spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any
other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he
touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!"[20] cried Nelson in
his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for
any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about
their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of
every nation tread down the nettle danger,[21] and pass flyingly over
all the stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson,
think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him
upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the
end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever
embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post
card? Who would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens
had each fallen in mid-course?[22] Who would find heart enough to
begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To
forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated
temperature--as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for
ten years at a stretch! As if it were not to die in one's own
lifetime, and without even the sad immunities of death! As if it were
not to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable
change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations
carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in
a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to
waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than
to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if
the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a
month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.
It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful
labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which
outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with
their whole hearts, have done good work,[23] although they may die
before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong
and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and
bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people,
like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and
planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths
full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and
silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a
termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in
full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in
sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom
the gods love die young,[24] I cannot help believing they had this
sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it
overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to
take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a
tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the
other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched,
the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds
of glory,[25] this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the
spiritual land.


NOTES

This essay, which is commonly (and justly) regarded as Stevenson's
masterpiece of literary composition, was first printed in the
_Cornhill Magazine_ for April 1878, Vol. XXXVII, pp. 432-437. In 1881
it was published in the volume _Virginibus Puerisque_. For the success
of this volume, as well as for its author's relations with the editor
of the _Cornhill_, see our note to _An Apology for Idlers_. It was
this article which was selected for reprinting in separate form by the
American Committee of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Fund; to
every subscriber of ten dollars or more, was given a copy of this
essay, exquisitely printed at the De Vinne Press, 1898. Copies of this
edition are now eagerly sought by book-collectors; five of them were
taken by the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of Yale College, consisting
of a few undergraduates of the class of 1898, who subscribed fifty
dollars to the fund.

Stevenson's cheerful optimism was constantly shadowed by the thought
of Death, and in _Aes Triplex_ he gives free rein to his fancies on
this universal theme.

[Note 1: The title, _AEs Triplex_, is taken from Horace, _aes triplex
circa pectus_, "breast enclosed by triple brass," "aes" used by Horace
as a "symbol of indomitable courage."--Lewis's Latin Dictionary.]

[Note 2: _Thug_. This word, which sounds to-day so slangy, really
comes from the Hindoos (Hindustani _thaaa_, deceive). It is the name
of a religious order in India, ostensibly devoted to the worship of a
goddess, but really given to murder for the sake of booty. The
Englishmen in India called them _Thugs_, hence the name in its modern
general sense.]

[Note 3: _Pyramids ... dule trees_. For pyramids, see our note 25 of
chapter II above... _Dule trees_. More properly spelled "dool." A dool
was a stake or post used to mark boundaries.]

[Note 4: _The trumpets might sound_. "For if the trumpet give an
uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?" I _Cor_.
XIV, 8.]

[Note 5: _The blue-peter might-fly at the truck_. The blue-peter is a
term used in the British navy and widely elsewhere; it is a blue flag
with a white square employed often as a signal for sailing. The word
is corrupted from _Blue Repeater_, a signal flag. _Truck_ is a very
small platform at the top of a mast.]

[Note 6: _Balaclava_. A little port near Sebastopol, in the Crimea.
During the Crimean War, on the 25 October 1854, occurred the cavalry
charge of some six hundred Englishmen, celebrated by Tennyson's
universally known poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_. It has
recently been asserted that the number reported as actually killed in
this headlong charge referred to the horses, not to the men.]

[Note 7: _Curtius_. Referring to the story of the Roman youth, Metius
Curtius, who in 362 B.C. leaped into a chasm in the Forum, in order to
save his country. The chasm immediately closed over him, and Rome was
saved. Although the truth of the story has naturally failed to survive
the investigations of historical critics, its moral inspiration has
been effective in many historical instances.]

[Note 8: _Party for the Derby_. Derby Day, which is the occasion of
the most famous annual running race for horses in the world, takes
place in the south of England during the week preceding Whitsunday.
The race was founded by the Earl of Derby in 1780. It is now one of
the greatest holidays in England, and the whole city of London turns
out for the event. It is a great spectacle to see the crowd going from
London and returning. The most faithful description of the event, the
crowds, and the interest excited, may be found in George Moore's
novel, _Esther Waters_ (1894).]

[Note 9: _The deified Caligula_. Caius Caligula was Roman Emperor from
37 to 41 A. D. He was brought up among the soldiers, who gave him the
name Caligula, because he wore the soldier's leather shoe, or
half-boot, (Latin _caliga_). Caligula was deified, but that did not
prevent him from becoming a madman, which seems to be the best way to
account for his wanton cruelty and extraordinary caprices.]

[Note 10: _Baiae_ was a small town on the Campanian Coast, ten miles
from Naples. It was a favorite summer resort of the Roman
aristocracy.]

[Note 11: The _Praetorian Guard_ was the body-guard of the Roman
emperors. The incident Stevenson speaks of may be found in Tacitus.]

[Note 12: _Job_ ... _Walt Whitman_. The book of _Job_ is usually
regarded as the most poetical work in the Bible, even exceeding
_Psalms_ and _Isaiah_ in its splendid imaginative language and
extraordinary figures of speech. For a literary study of it, the
student is recommended to Professor Moulton's edition. Omar Khayyam
was a Persian poet of mediaeval times, who became known to English
readers through the beautiful paraphrase of some of his stanzas by
Edward Fitzgerald, in 1859. If any one will take the trouble to
compare a literal prose rendering of Omar (as in N.H. Dole's variorum
edition) with the version by Fitzgerald, he will speedily see that the
power and beauty of the poem is due far more to the skill of "Old
Fitz" than to the original. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was perhaps the
foremost writer of English prose in the nineteenth century. Although a
consummate literary artist, he was even more influential as a moral
tonic. His philosophy and that of Omar represent as wide a contrast as
could easily be found. Walt Whitman, the strange American poet
(1819-1892), whose famous _Leaves_ _of Grass_ (1855) excited an uproar
in America, and gave the author a much more serious reputation in
Europe. Stevenson's interest in him was genuine, but not partisan, and
his essay, _The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (The New Quarterly
Magazine_, Oct. 1878), is perhaps the most judicious appreciation in
the English language of this singular poet. Job, Omar Khayyam, Carlyle
and Whitman, taken together, certainly give a curious collection of
what the Germans call _Weltanschauungen_.]

[Note 13: _A vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams_. For constant comparisons of life with a vapour or a show, see
Quarles's _Emblems_ (1635), though these conventional figures may be
found thousands of times in general literature. The latter part of the
sentence refers to the _Tempest_, Act IV, Scene I.

              "We are such stuff
  As dreams are made on, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep."]

[Note 14: _Permanent Possibility of Sensation_. "Matter then, may be
defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation."--John Stuart Mill,
_Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy_, Vol. I. Chap. XI.]

[Note 15: _Like the Commander's Statue_. In the familiar story of Don
Juan, where the audacious rake accepts the Commander's invitation to
supper. For treatments of this theme, see Molière's play _Don Juan_,
or Mozart's opera _Don Giovanni_; see also Bernard Shaw's paradoxical
play, _Man and Superman_.... _We have something else in hand, thank
God, and let him knock_. It is possible that Stevenson's words here
are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley Cibber's letter to the
novelist Richardson. This unabashed old profligate celebrated the
Christmas Day of his eightieth year by writing to the apostle of
domestic virtue in the following strain: "Though Death has been
cooling his heels at my door these three weeks, I have not had time to
see him. The daily conversation of my friends has kept me so agreeably
alive, that I have not passed my time better a great while. If you
have a mind to make one of us, I will order Death to come another
day."]

[Note 16: _All the world over, and every hour_. He might truthfully
have said, "every second."]

[Note 17: _A mere bag's end, as the French say. A cul de sac._]

[Note 18: _Our respected lexicographer ... Highland tour ... triple
brass ... twenty-seven individual cups of tea._ Dr. Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary appeared in 1755. For his horror of death, his fondness for
tea, and his Highland tour with Boswell, see the latter's _Life of
Johnson_; consult the late Dr. Hill's admirable index in his edition
of the _Life_.]

[Note 19: _Mim-mouthed friends_. See J. Wright's _English Dialect
Dictionary_. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly prim or proper in
speech."]

[Note 20: "_A peerage or Westminster Abbey!_" Horatio Nelson
(1758-1805), the most famous admiral in England's naval history, who
won the great battle of Trafalgar and lost his life in the moment of
victory. Nelson was as ambitious as he was brave, and his cry that
Stevenson quotes was characteristic.]

[Note 21: _Tread down the nettle danger_. Hotspur's words in _King
Henry IV_, Part I, Act II, Sc. 3. "Out of this nettle, danger, we
pluck this flower, safety."]

[Note 22: _After Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course?_
Thackeray and Dickens, dying in 1863 and in 1870 respectively, left
unfinished _Denis Duval_ and _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. Stevenson
himself left unfinished what would in all probability have been his
unquestioned masterpiece, _Weir of Hermiston_.]

[Note 23: _All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have
done good work_. See Browning's inspiring poem, _Rabbi Ben Ezra_,
XXIII, XXIV, XXV:--

    "Not on the vulgar mass
    Called "work," must sentence pass,
  Things done, which took the eye and had the price;
    O'er which, from level stand,
    The low world laid its hand,
  Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

    But all, the world's coarse thumb
    And finger failed to plumb,
  So passed in making up the main account;
    All instincts immature,
    All purposes unsure,
  That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

    Thoughts hardly to be packed
    Into a narrow act,
  Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
    All I could never be,
    All, men ignored in me,
  This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."]

[Note 24: _Whom the Gods love die young._ "Quem di diligunt adolescens
moritur."--Plautus, _Bacchides_, Act IV, Sc. 7.]

[Note 25: _Trailing with him clouds of glory._ This passage, from
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ (1807), was a
favorite one with Stevenson, and he quotes it several times in various
essays.]


IV

TALK AND TALKERS

I

"Sir, we had a good talk."[1]--JOHNSON.

"As we must account[2] for every idle word, so we must for every idle
silence."--FRANKLIN.

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[3] 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[4] and may call a spade a spade.[5] 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.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a
kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in
our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and
wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of
body, or power of character or intellect; that we attain to worthy
pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love,
like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges
in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or
conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same
degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human
beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition.
Now, the relation that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly
that airy one of friendship; and hence, I suppose, it is that good
talk most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the
scene and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone that the
friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable
counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and
the sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not
that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and
more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of
conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not
dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and
he is rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those
changing prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There
is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an
idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are
few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the
half of them may be reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you,
and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the
same as either. Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time
on these eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as
on an instrument; asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain
for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his
own surprise and the admiration of his adversary. 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;[6] each
declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by
slow declension. I remember, in the _entr'acte_ of an afternoon
performance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green,
gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music
moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate _The Flying
Dutchman_[7] (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful
sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride; and the noises of the
city, voices, bells and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a
symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk
lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within
you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around
you with the colours of the sunset.

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. I am I, and You are You, with all
my heart; but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten
when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the
spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices
to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the
change when we leave off to speak of generalities--the bad, the good,
the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus[8]--and call up
other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature;
or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still
glowing with the hues of life. Communication is no longer by words,
but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of
philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which is understood
excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus
figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin; and
the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate
thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will,
for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse.
If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe,
Vautrin and Steenie Steenson,[9] they can leave generalities and begin
at once to speak by figures.

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and
that embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear
discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social or
most radically human; and even these can only be discussed among their
devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in
athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on
technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both know and love
their business. No human being[10] ever spoke of scenery for above two
minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in
literature. The weather is regarded as the very nadir and scoff of
conversational topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic element in
scenery, is far more tractable in language, and far more human both in
import and suggestion than the stable features of the landscape.
Sailors and shepherds, and the people generally of coast and mountain,
talk well of it; and it is often excitingly presented in literature.
But the tendency of all living talk draws it back and back into the
common focus of humanity. Talk is a creature of the street and
market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last resort is still in a
discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in
virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip, because it turns on
personalities. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen[11] at all, off
moral or theological discussion. These are to all the world what law
is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities; the medium through
which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express their
judgments. I knew three young men who walked together daily for some
two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in cloudless summer
weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce wandered
that whole time beyond two subjects--theology and love. And perhaps
neither a court of love[12] nor an assembly of divines would have
granted their premises or welcomed their conclusions.

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. A point arises; the question takes a
problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel
lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this
they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling
for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter
with a shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him;
and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a
mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the
sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiring. And in
the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither
few nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the
hour of mirth; and by the nature of the process, they are always
worthily shared.

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager
to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the
talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a
certain proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my
amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but
huntsmen questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys
to be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may, wrangle and
agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of
consent; for without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not
wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort
wherein pleasure lies.

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd
Jack.[13] I say so, because I never knew anyone who mingled so largely
the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the
fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack
is that madman. I know not what is more remarkable; the insane
lucidity of his conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language,
or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of
the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken
god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken
kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so,
in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions
inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a
triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct
puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness,
such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur
him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required
character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in
question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the _vim_ of these
impersonations, the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare
to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell[14]--

  "As fast as a musician scatters sounds
  Out of an instrument--"

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos,
each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired
disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though
belonging to the same school, is Burly.[15] Burly is a man of great
presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a
grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that
his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the
same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned
to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic
in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this
impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands,
he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his
attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after
Pistol has been out-Pistol'd,[16] and the welkin rung for hours, you
begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents,
points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of
mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union the
more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect
sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always
to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have,
with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd
Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on
yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously
fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites,
and both are loud, copious intolerant talkers. This argues that I
myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love
a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in
much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full
measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat
from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard
adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an
enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its
own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real
existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a
theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the
chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the
far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated
poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances
high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many
changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration;
but both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same
unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps
of contradiction.

Cockshot[17] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry,
brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point
about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound
nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have
one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch
it in your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I
_should_ have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the
vigour with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is
possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and
bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and
lively effort. He has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would
call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer,[18] who
should see the fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he,
to place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are
right enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a
cock-shy--as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle