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: _LГЁse-respectability._ From the French verb _leser_, to hurt,
to injure. The most common employment of this verb is in the phrase
"_lГЁse-majestГ©,"_ 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.]