II

The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted
among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,
Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an
accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings
of the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with
pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like
some goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in
their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table,
many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a
former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read;
here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks
askance at these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect
on the whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned
mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt
of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very
humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit
for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the
pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in particular,
proud of being in the next room to three very distinguished students,
who were then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has
now his name on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn,
is influential in the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have
just been reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped
out of that battle of life in which be fought so hard, it may be so
unwisely. They were all three, as I have said, notable students; but
this was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious,
adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and of all men that I
have known, the most like to one of Balzac's characters, he led a
life, and was attended by an ill fortune, that could be properly set
forth only in the _ComГ©die Humaine_. He had then his eye on
Parliament; and soon after the time of which I write, he made a showy
speech at a political dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the
_Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower than earth with a charge
of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_. Report would have it (I daresay, very
wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted,
and that the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own
lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and
envied by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly
disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered spirit;
and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took flight to
London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his
considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years
thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in
good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of
his manner may have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners
are very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood;
and to explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall
back upon the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all
of the same kind, "there was a suffering relative in the background."
From this genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently
sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this
part that I best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful
stoop; looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an
urbane adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you
one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low
and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with
singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect.
After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich student
that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure
of himself and certain of his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of
his last overthrow. He had set himself to found the strangest thing in
our society: one of those periodical sheets from which men suppose
themselves to learn opinions; in which young gentlemen from the
universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts,
insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals; and which
are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough
printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will pardon
him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and
crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other
day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you
have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon some great
enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite
slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life
that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily
earwigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and
doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also,
for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he
died, and his paper died after him; and of all this grace, and tact,
and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come
literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
mural tablet that records the virtues of Machean, the former
secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and leave no
more behind one than Machean. And yet of these three, two are gone and
have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and
some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and glances through
it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the
love of _Alma Mater_ (which may be still extant and flourishing) buys
it, not without haggling, for some pence--this book may alone preserve
a memory of James Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they
were all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to
them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with
pride and hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of
little, active brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the
foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against
the University building--had been debauched to play the part of
publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the
main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every
rule of arithmetic--that flatterer of credulity--the adventure must
succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I
went home that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these
three distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance;
it was my first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself
and to my fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron,
I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom
of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it
would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would
read it; and I kept wondering, how I should be able, upon my compact
income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share
in the expense. It was a comfortable thought to me that I had a
father.

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which was the best part of
it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed
obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all
four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into
the hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long
been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would
perhaps be still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet,
that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless
paper, that might have gone to print a _Shakespeare_ on, and was
instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor
Editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no
news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when
the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and
subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart
was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to
break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my
cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased
at this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the
work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste. I
cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my
share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed
their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than formerly,
having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some
graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told
myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to work
I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one
day from the printed author to the manuscript student.


III

From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own
papers. The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my
best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it
remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would
print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any
worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly
to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this
volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener,
may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John
and Robert drew very close together in their lives; for John was
rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked
of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked
John the better of the two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the
Old Adam that pleases men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he
was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may
be, and however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch
that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature,
whom, if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should
like well to draw again with a maturer touch. And as I think of him
and of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be
found dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the
woody fold of a green hill.


NOTES

This article made its first appearance in the volume _Memories and
Portraits_ (1887). It was divided into three parts. The interest of
this essay is almost wholly autobiographical, telling us, with more or
less seriousness, how its author "learned to write." After Stevenson
became famous, this confession attracted universal attention, and is
now one of the best-known of all his compositions. Many youthful
aspirants for literary fame have been moved by its perusal to adopt a
similar method; but while Stevenson's system, if faithfully followed,
would doubtless correct many faults, it would not of itself enable a
man to write another _Aes Triplex_ or _Treasure Island_. It was
genius, not industry, that placed Stevenson in English literature.

[Note 1: _Pattern of an Idler_. See his essay in this volume, _An
Apology for Idlers_.]

[Note 2: _A school of posturing_. It is a nice psychological question
whether or not it is possible for one to write a diary with absolutely
no thought of its being read by some one else.]

[Note 3: _Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Beaudelaire, and to Obermann_.
For Hazlitt, see Note 19 of Chapter II above. Charles Lamb
(1775-1834), author of the delightful _Essays of Elia_ (1822-24), the
_tone_ of which book is often echoed in Stevenson's essays.... Sir
Thomas Browne (1605-1682), regarded by many as the greatest prose
writer of the seventeenth century; his best books are _Religio Medici_
(the religion of a physician), 1642, and _Urn Burial_ (1658). The
300th anniversary of his birth was widely celebrated on 19 October
1905.... Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), an enormously prolific writer; his
first important novel, _Robinson Crusoe_ (followed by many others) was
written when he was 58 years old.... Nathaniel Hawthorne, the greatest
literary artist that America has ever produced was born 4 July 1804,
and died in 1864. His best novel (the finest in American Literature)
was _The Scarlet Letter_ (1850).... Montaigne. Stevenson was heavily
indebted to this wonderful genius. See Note 4 of Chapter VI above. ...
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote the brilliant and decadent
_Fleurs du Mai_ (1857-61). He translated Poe into French, and was
partly responsible for Poe's immense vogue in France. Had Baudelaire's
French followers possessed the power of their master, we should be
able to forgive them for writing.... Obermann. _Г’bermann_ is the title
of a story by the French writer Etienne Pivert de SГ©nancour
(1770-1846). The book, which appeared in 1804, is full of vague
melancholy, in the Werther fashion, and is more of a psychological
study than a novel. In recent years, _Amiel's Journal_ and
Sienkiewicz's _Without Dogma_ belong to the same school of literature.
Matthew Arnold was fond of quoting from SГ©nancour's _Obermann_.]

[Note 4: _Ruskin ... Pasticcio ... Bordello ... Morris ... Swinburne
... John Webster ... Congreve_. These names exhibit the astonishing
variety of Stevenson's youthful attempts, for they represent nearly
every possible style of composition. John Ruskin (1819-1900) exercised
a greater influence thirty years ago than he does to-day Stevenson in
the words "a passing spell," seems to apologise for having been
influenced by him at all.... Pasticcio, an Italian word, meaning
"pie": Swinburne uses it in the sense of "medley," which is about the
same as its significance here. _Sordello_: Stevenson naturally
accompanies this statement with a parenthetical exclamation.
_Sordello_, published in 1840, is the most obscure of all Browning's
poems, and for many years blinded critics to the poet's genius.
Innumerable are the witticisms aimed at this opaque work. See, for
example, W. Sharp's _Life of Browning_ ... William Morris (1834-96),
author of the _Earthly Paradise_ (1868-70): for his position and
influence in XIXth century literature see H.A. Beers, _History of
English Romanticism_, Vol. II.... Algernon Charles Swinburne, born
1837, generally regarded (1906) as England's foremost living poet, is
famous chiefly for the melodies of his verse. His influence seems to
be steadily declining and he is certainly not so much read as
formerly.... For John Webster and Congreve, see Notes 37 and 26 of
Chapter IV above.]

[Note 5: _City of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs._
Thackeray's _Book of Snobs_ was published in 1848. Peebles is the
county town of Peebles County in the South of Scotland.]

[Note 6: _My later plays_, etc. Stevenson's four plays were not
successful. They were all written in collaboration with W.E. Henley.
_Deacon Brodie_ was printed in 1880: _Admiral Guinea_ and _Beau
Austin_ in 1884: _Macaire_ in 1885. In 1892, the first three were
published in one volume, under the title _Three Plays_: In 1896 all
four appeared in a volume called _Four Plays_. At the time the essay
_A College Magazine_ was published, only one of these plays had been
acted, _Deacon Brodie_, to which Stevenson refers in our text. This
"came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors" at Pullan's
_Theatre of Varieties_, Bradford, England, 28 December 1882, and in
March 1883 at Her Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, "when it was styled a
'New Scotch National Drama.'"--Prideaux, _Bibliography_, p. 10. It was
later produced at Prince's Theatre, London, 2 July 1884, and in
Montreal, 26 September 1887. _Beau Austin_ was played at the Haymarket
Theatre, London, 3 Nov. 1890. _Admiral Guinea_ was played at the
_Avenue Theatre_, on the afternoon of 29 Nov. 1897, and, like the
others, was not successful. _The Athenaeum_ for 4 Dec. 1897 contains
an interesting criticism of this drama.... _Semiramis_ was the
original plan of a "tragedy," which Stevenson afterwards rewrote as a
novel, _Prince Otto_, and published in 1885.]

[Note 7: _It was so Keats learned_. This must be swallowed with a
grain of salt. The best criticism of the poetry of Keats is contained
in his own _Letters_, which have been edited by Colvin and by Forman.]

[Note 8: _Montaigne ... Cicero_. Montaigne, as a child, spoke Latin
before he could French: see his _Essays_. Montaigne is always
original, frank, sincere: Cicero (in his orations) is always a
_Poseur_.]

[Note 9: _Burns ... Shakespeare_. Some reflection on, and
investigation of these statements by Stevenson, will be highly
beneficial to the student.]

[Note 10: The literary scales. It is very interesting to note that
Thomas Carlyle had completely mastered the technique of ordinary prose
composition, before he deliberately began to write in his own
picturesque style, which has been called "Carlylese"; note the
enormous difference in style between his _Life of Schiller_ (1825) and
his _Sartor Resartus_ (1833-4). Carlyle would be a shining
illustration of the point Stevenson is trying to make.]

No notes have been added to the second and third parts of this essay,
as these portions are unimportant, and may be omitted by the student;
they are really introductory to something quite different, and are
printed in our edition only to make this essay complete.


VIII

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME[1]


The Editor[2] has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly
cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance
and review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon
something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a
chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all
had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have
been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to
an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am
wise and say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the
blame must lie at the door of the person who entrapped me.

The most influential books,[3] and the truest in their influence, are
works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson,
which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they
clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web
of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular
change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce,
struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human
comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But
the course of our education is answered best by those poems and
romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet
generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few
living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as
Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the
reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an
impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons.[4] Nothing has ever
more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence
quite passed away. Kent's brief speech[5] over the dying Lear had a
great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for
long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so
overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside
of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the _Vicomte
de Bragelonne_.[6] I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a
finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in
morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I
must name the _Pilgrim's Progress_,[7] a book that breathes of every
beautiful and valuable emotion.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound
and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we
drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in
books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect,
and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very
influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first,
though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the
_Essais_ of Montaigne.[8] That temperate and genial picture of life is
a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will
find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of
an antique strain; they will have their "linen decencies"[9] and
excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of
reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some
excuse and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of
reading) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a
dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of
life, than they or their contemporaries.

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New
Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I
believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain
effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly
and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to
see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know
and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is
perhaps better to be silent.

I come next to Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_,[10] a book of singular
service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into
space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having
thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong
foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once
more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.[11] I will
be very frank--I believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps,
fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in
convention, that gun-powder charges of the truth are more apt to
discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon
blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little
idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary
deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and
becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only
useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand,
not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot
judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will
get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer.[12] No more persuasive rabbi exists. How
much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is
clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his
words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages
a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic
symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput
mortuum_[13] of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with
most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome,
as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be
much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.

_Goethe's Life_, by Lewes,[14] had a great importance for me when it
first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of
man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than
Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open
the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that
crowning offence of _Werther_, and in his own character a mere
pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior
talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties
of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest
and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained!
Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform
for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the
truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining
virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us
well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the
popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to
make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential
identity of man, and even in the originals only to those who can
recognise their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often
inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial[15] is a
poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his
works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious
passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It
is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these
pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found them
for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that
help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great
Roman Empire.

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the
_Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius.[16] The dispassionate gravity, the
noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there
expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its
writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and
not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings--those
very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies
further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read,
you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though
you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble
friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to
life and to the love of virtue.

Wordsworth[17] should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced
by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain
innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a night of the stars, "the
silence that is in the lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of
dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is
best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not--Mill
did not--agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast.
Such are the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error--the
old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual
possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of
art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they
communicate.

I should never forgive myself if I forgot _The Egoist_. It is art, if
you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the
novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by
itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David;[18] here is a book to
send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of human
faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; what
we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too
conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And _The
Egoist_[19] is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire
of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote,
which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is
yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are
dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel
cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the
story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of you," he cried.
"Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author; "he is all
of us." I have read _The Egoist_ five or six times myself, and I mean
to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I
think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much
that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten
Thoreau,[20] and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations"
was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of
aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's
_Tales[21] of Old Japan_, wherein I learned for the first time the
proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret
found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all
is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to
the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a
word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I
have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It
consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free
grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understand that
he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely
wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may
know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or
hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these
others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of
propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his
dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he
must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth,
which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays.
It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a
dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and
rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that
seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If
he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift,
and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon
his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will
never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down
my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we
are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books;
it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food;
and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves
welcome to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief
support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at
heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a
mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service;
but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any
genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which
suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one
who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and
inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he
had not written.


NOTES

This article first appeared in the _British Weekly_ for 13 May 1887,
forming Stevenson's contribution to a symposium on this subject by
some of the celebrated writers of the day, including Gladstone,
Ruskin, Hamerton; and others as widely different as Archdeacon Farrar
and Rider Haggard. In the same year (1887) the papers were all
collected and published by the _Weekly_ in a volume, with the title
_Books Which Have Influenced Me_. This essay was later included in the
complete editions of Stevenson's _Works_ (Edinburgh ed., Vol. XI,
Thistle ed., Vol. XXII).

[Note 1: First published in the _British Weekly_, May 13, 1887.]

[Note 2: Of the _British Weekly_.]

[Note 3: _The most influential books ... are works of fiction_. This
statement is undoubtedly true, if we use the word "fiction" in the
sense understood here by Stevenson. It is curious, however, to note
the rise in dignity of "works of fiction," and of "novels"; people
used to read them with apologies, and did not like to be caught at it.
The cheerful audacity of Stevenson's declaration would have seemed
like blasphemy fifty years earlier.]

[Note 4: _Mrs. Scott Siddons_. Not for a moment to be confounded with
the great actress Sarah Siddons, who died in 1831. Mrs. Scott Siddons,
in spite of Stevenson's enthusiasm, was not an actress of remarkable
power.]

[Note 5: _Kent's brief speech_. Toward the end of _King Lear_.]

  "Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him
  That would upon the rack of this tough world
  Stretch him out longer."]

[Note 6: _D'Artagnan ... Vicomte de Bragelonne_. See Stevenson's
essay, _A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's_ (1887), in _Memories and
Portraits_. See also Note 3 of Chapter II above and Note 43 of Chapter
IV above. _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ is the title of the sequel to
_Twenty Years After_, which is the sequel to the _Musketeers_. Dumas
wrote 257 volumes of romance, plays, travels etc.]

[Note 7: _Pilgrim's Progress_. See Note 13 of Chapter V above.]

[Note 8: _Essais of Montaigne_. See Note 6 of Chapter VI above. The
best translation in English of the _Essais_ is that by the
Elizabethan, John Florio (1550-1625), a contemporary of Montaigne. His
translation appeared in 1603, and may now be obtained complete in the
handy "Temple" classics. There is a copy of Florio's _Montaigne_ with
Ben Jonson's autograph, and also one that has what many believe to be
a genuine autograph of Shakspere.]

[Note 9: "_Linen decencies_." "The ghost of a linen decency yet haunts
us."--Milton, _Areopagitica_.]

[Note 10: _Whitman's Leaves of Grass_. See Stevenson's admirable essay
on _Walt Whitman_ (1878), also Note 12 of Chapter III above.]

[Note 11: _Have the gift of reading_. "Books are written to be read by
those who can understand them. Their possible effect on those who
cannot, is a matter of medical rather than of literary interest."
--Prof. W. Raleigh, _The English Novel_, remarks on _Tom Jones_,
Chap. VI.]

[Note 12: _Herbert_. See Note 18 of Chapter IV above.]

[Note 13: _Caput mortuum_. Dry kernel. Literary, "dead head."]

[Note 14: _Goethe's Life, by Lewes_. The standard Life of Goethe (in
English) is still that by George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), the husband
of George Eliot. His _Life of Goethe_ appeared in 1855; he later made
a simpler, abridged edition, called _The Story of Goethe's Life_.
Goethe, the greatest literary genius since Shakspere, and now
generally ranked among the four supreme writers of the world, Homer,
Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, was born in 1749, and died in 1832.
Stevenson, like most British critics, is rather severe on Goethe's
character. The student should read Eckermann's _Conversations with
Goethe_, a book full of wisdom and perennial delight. For _Werther_,
see Note 18 of Chapter VI above. The friendship between Goethe and
Schiller (1759-1805), "his honest and serviceable friendship," as
Stevenson puts it, is among the most beautiful things to contemplate
in literary history. Before the theatre in Weimar, Germany, where the
two men lived, stands a remarkable statue of the pair: and their
coffins lie side by side in a crypt in the same town.]

[Note 15: _Martial_. Poet, wit and epigrammatist, born in Spain 43 A.
D., died 104. He lived in Rome from 66 to 100, enjoying a high
reputation as a writer.]

[Note 16: _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,
often called "the noblest of Pagans" was born 121 A. D., and died 180.
His _Meditations_ have been translated into the chief modern
languages, and though their author was hostile to Christianity, the
ethics of the book are much the same as those of the New Testament.]

[Note 17: _Wordsworth ... Mill_. William Wordsworth (1770-1850),
poet-laureate (1843-1850), is by many regarded as the third poet in
English literature, after Shakspere and Milton, whose places are
unassailable. Other candidates for the third place are Chaucer and
Spenser. "The silence that is in the lonely hills" is loosely quoted
from Wordsworth's _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, Upon the
Restoration of Lord Clifford_, published in 1807. The passage reads:

  "The silence that is in the starry sky,
  The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

... In the _Autobiography_ (1873) of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873),
there is a remarkable passage where he testifies to the influence
exerted upon him by Wordsworth.]

[Note 18: _A Nathan for the modern David_. The famous accusation of
the prophet to the king, "Thou art the man." See II _Sam_. 12.]

[Note 19: _The Egoist_. See Note 47 of Chapter IV above. Stevenson
never tired of singing the praises of this novel.]

[Note 20: _Thoreau ... Hazlitt ... Penn ... Mitford's Tales.._. Henry
David Thoreau (1817-1862), the American naturalist and writer, whose
works impressed Stevenson deeply. See the latter's excellent essay on
Thoreau (1880), in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_.... Hazlitt,
See Note 19 of Chapter II above. His paper, _On the Spirit of
Obligations_, appeared in _The Plain Speaker_, 2 Vols., 1826. _Penn,
whose little book of aphorisms_. This refers to William Penn's famous
book, _Some Fruits of Solitude: in Reflections and Maxims relating to
the Conduct of Human Life_ (1693). Edmund Gosse says, in his
Introduction to a charming little edition of this book in 1900,
"Stevenson had intended to make this book and its author the subject
of one of his critical essays. In February 1880 he was preparing to
begin it... He never found the opportunity... But it has left an
indelible stamp on the tenor of his moral writings. The philosophy of
B. L. S. ... is tinctured through and through with the honest, shrewd,
and genial maxims of Penn." Stevenson himself, in his _Letters_ (Vol.
I, pp. 232, 233), spoke of this little book in the highest terms of
praise.]

[Note 21: _Mitford's Tales_. Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855), a
novelist and dramatist who enjoyed an immense vogue. "Her inimitable
series of country sketches, drawn from her own experiences at Three
Mile Cross, entitled 'Our Village,' began to appear in 1819 in the
'Lady's Magazine,' a little-known periodical, whose sale was thereby
increased from 250 to 2,000. ... The sketches had an enormous success,
and were collected in five volumes, published respectively in 1824,
1826, 1828, 1830, and 1832. ... The book may be said to have laid the
foundation of a branch of literature hitherto untried. The sketches
resemble Dutch paintings in their fidelity of detail."--_Dic. Nat.
Biog_.]


IX

PULVIS ET UMBRA

We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our
ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, are
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of
the sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look
abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with
every climate,[1] and no country where some action is not honoured for
a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in
our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but
at the best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted
to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have
been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and
sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher
strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.
The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and
the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but
moss and fungus, more ancient still.


I

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things
and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid
globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and
ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that
swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a
figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns
and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 and
H2O.[2] Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness
lies;[3] science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is
no habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it to us.
We behold space sown with rotatory islands; suns and worlds and the
shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some
rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation.
All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing
which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible
properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when
not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something
we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady;
swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an
abhorrent prodigy) locomotory;[4] one splitting into millions,
millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying
stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet
strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a
piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects,
will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner
places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the
pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of
worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth:
the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the
other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of
its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or
towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so
inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what
passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they
have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it
appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong,
we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the
miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that
bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present
is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains
of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious
desires and staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon
this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these
prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming
them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the
vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the
desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotary island loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied
ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate
cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles
away.


II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated
dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon
with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his
face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier,
known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor
soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with
desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded,
savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow
lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his
destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him
instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often
admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his
momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the
deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling
out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in
pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the
heart of his mystery,[5] we find in him one thought, strange to the
point of lunacy: the thought of duty;[6] the thought of something
owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency,
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below
which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is
one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends
itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence;
but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought:--Not in man
alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and
doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster,
and the louse, of whom we know so little:--But in man, at least, it
sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come
second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are
conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the
reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most
cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having
strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace
death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted
practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life:
stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this
blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I
shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man
at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and
treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They
cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his
efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how
tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely
we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from
which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be
a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he
startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look,
under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what
depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by
camp-fires in Assiniboia,[7] the snow powdering his shoulders, the
wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet
and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea,
a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a
fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him,
and he for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child,
constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; in the slums of cities,
moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without
hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present,
and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his
neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps
long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman
this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she
drowns her child in the sacred river;[8] in the brothel, the discard
of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool,
a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of
honour and the touch of pity,[9] often repaying the world's scorn with
service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches:--everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign
of man's ineffectual goodness:--ah! if I could show you this! if I
could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage
of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of
failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely
fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or
on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!
They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their
privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some
nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels,
the implacable hunter.