Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson Part 3

"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 pa.s.sion, 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 x.x.xix., 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 n.o.ble 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 appet.i.te and a strong sense of personal ident.i.ty. 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 pa.s.s, 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 grat.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+rts; 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 pa.s.s half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the ma.n.u.script 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 d.a.m.ning 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 fellows.h.i.+p, 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 Circ.u.mlocution 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 G.o.d'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 hea.r.s.e 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. x.x.xVI, 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 const.i.tutionally 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: _Lese-respectability._ From the French verb _leser_, to hurt, to injure. The most common employment of this verb is in the phrase "_lese-majeste,"_ 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 suns.h.i.+ne." 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 const.i.tution, 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 Warwicks.h.i.+re.]

[Note 8: _Montenegro ... Richmond_. Montenegro is one of the smallest princ.i.p.alities 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 cla.s.ses 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-l.u.s.tre 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 d.i.c.kens and of Balzac_. The great English novelist d.i.c.kens (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 a.s.semblage, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.sistant 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 n.o.ble _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 G.o.d 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 t.i.tans, who fought the G.o.ds, 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 t.i.tle-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.]