THE POCKET R. L. S.

Being favourite passages from the works of Stevenson.


By Robert Louis Stevenson



SELECTED PASSAGES

When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself;
it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes,
and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward,
binding you to life and to the love of virtue.

*****

It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward in its
vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all the emphasis of life,
the hands untainted by decay, the beard that had so often wagged in camp
or senate still spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures,
some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days is handed
down. In this way, public curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any
private aspiration after fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall
in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise;
and so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit
than a portrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS QUAM CORPORIS.

*****

The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious.
It comes sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when
we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days
together, in the very homeland of the beautiful. We may have passed a
place a thousand times and one; and on the thousand and second it will
be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from
the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it 'with a child's first
pleasure,' as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake-side.

*****

But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of
tropical effect, with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief
of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that
seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a
whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the
myrtles and the scented underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing
up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend.

*****

You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched
beside the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest
return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds
among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and
with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more pitched his
camp in the living out-of-doors.

*****

It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer:
of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It
takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides,
which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it
gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with
dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go
far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life
of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him
in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships,
and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining Pharos, he must apply
his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his
inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise
youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against
two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one,
manfully accept the other.

*****

No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put
it, A LA BELLE ETOILE. He may know all their names and distances and
magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind,--their
serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The greater part of poetry
is about the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the most
classical of poets.

*****

He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry--he did so
sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the vein of Scott--and when
he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls, and shaded
by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still
more surprised him that he should find nothing to write. His heart
perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe.

*****

No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end,
because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of
us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious
circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration,
precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up
all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken
into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves
affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain,
which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear
to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great
pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within
us, that gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and
snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions of graduated light
and darkness, that intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or
a view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from
one great man's house to another's in search of works of art, begins
suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he
was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were;
because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And
the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was
working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able
to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a
fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man
to have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in
the long-run, than those who have credit for most wisdom. And yet even
this is not a good unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in
a less degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved and
cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man's enjoyment, brings
with it certain inevitable cares and disappointments. The happiness of
such an one comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation
that heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus
a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his
life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and
to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and
disenchantment of the world and life.

*****

THE VAGABOND

(TO AN AIR OF SCHUBERT)

     Give to me the life I love,
          Let the lave go by me,
     Give the jolly heaven above
          And the byway nigh me.

     Bed in the bush with stars to see,
          Bread I dip in the river--
     There's the life for a man like me,
          There's the life for ever.

     Let the blow fall soon or late,
          Let what will be o'er me;
     Give the face of earth around,
          And the road before me.

     Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
          Nor a friend to know me;
     All I ask, the heaven above
          And the road below me.

*****

Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the
open air, with the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow,
knows true ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set
at rest; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem
big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and the world is
smilingly accepted as it is.

*****

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for
travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and
hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of
civilisation, and find the globe granite under foot and strewn with
cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied
with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To
hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north
is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the
mind. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about
the future?

*****

A SONG OF THE ROAD

     The gauger walked with willing foot,
     And aye the gauger played the flute:
     And what should Master Gauger play
     But OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?

     Whene'er I buckle on my pack
     And foot it gaily in the track,
     O pleasant gauger, long since dead,
     I hear you fluting on ahead.

     You go with me the selfsame way--
     The selfsame air for me you play;
     For I do think and so do you
     It is the tune to travel to.

     For who would gravely set his face
     To go to this or t'other place?
     There's nothing under Heav'n so blue
     That's fairly worth the travelling to.

     On every hand the roads begin,
     And people walk with zeal therein;
     But wheresoe'er the highways tend,
     Be sure there's nothing at the end.

     Then follow you, wherever hie
     The travelling mountains of the sky.
     Or let the streams in civil mode
     Direct your choice upon a road;

     For one and all, or high or low,
     Will lead you where you wish to go;
     And one and all go night and day
     OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY!

*****

A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the
essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this
way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own
pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time
with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions and let your
thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any
wind to play upon.

*****

It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us
fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are
many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in
spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape
on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the
brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain
jolly humours--of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at
morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's rest. He
cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more
delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of the
arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be
further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in
an endless chain.

*****

Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts
affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as through
differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation, a
note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is
no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently
to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever
thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of
story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we
are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere character is
provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others.

*****

There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will stir a little
at sight of a gypsies' camp. 'We are not cotton-spinners all;' or, at
least, not all through. There is some life in humanity yet; and youth
will now and again find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and
throw up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.

*****

I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that
in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only
by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He
may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow
vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the
shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that
turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open
before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some
city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a
pang of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his self-respect.
It is true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free
action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only;
and as they begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that
they have made for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have
entertained for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they
know not why. They will be led by the nose by these vague reports of
which I spoke above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned
one village and not another will compel their footsteps with
inexplicable power. And yet a little while, yet a few days of this
fictitious liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling
on them to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy
expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and lead them back
into the old paths. Once and again we have all made the experiment. We
know the end of it right well. And yet if we make it for the hundredth
time to-morrow, it will have the same charm as ever; our hearts will
beat and our eyes will be bright, as we leave the town behind us, and
we shall feel once again (as we have felt so often before) that we are
cutting ourselves loose for ever from our whole past life, with all its
sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature
into a new world.

*****

Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed
is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it
takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of
the country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain
of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at
unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley that leads
towards town; they are left behind with the signalman as, shading his
eyes with his hand, he watches the long train sweep away into the golden
distance.

*****

Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a
walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost
free. ... If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in
life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the
parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is
then, if ever, that you taste joviality to the full significance of that
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean
and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever
you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if
a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and
pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a
man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies to watch provincial
humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
grave and beautiful like an old tale.

*****

It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetops, and remember time and seasons no
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live
for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an
end only when you are drowsy.

*****

I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows
more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete on
Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month,
and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time
journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives,
over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there
would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of
large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out
each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And
all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with
him, in a watch-pocket!

*****

     The bed was made, the room was fit,
          By punctual eve the stars were lit;
     The air was still, the water ran;
          No need there was for maid or man,
          When we put us, my ass and I,
     At God's green caravanserai.

*****

To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes
in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes
no share in such a cleansing.

*****

I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if
landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one
penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence
every day of my life.

*****

There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and
to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every
nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the
stream. Or, perhaps, they have never got accustomed to the speed and
fury of the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan
once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river,
he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the
Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the
beauty and the terror of the world.

The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with tremulous gestures
tell how the river was as cruel as it was strong and cold, and how death
lurked in the eddy underneath the willows. But the reeds had to stand
where they were; and those who stand still are always timid advisers.

*****

The wholeday was showery, with occasional drenching plumps. We were
soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the sun, then soaked once
more. But there were some calm intervals, and one notably, when we were
skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a
place most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along the
riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft
into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature's own, full
of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses
and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive and yet so quiet
as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very
small and bustling by comparison.

I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil
society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before
the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater
part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and
death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously
rooted, their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart
younglings pushing up about their knees; a whole forest, healthy and
beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air; what
is this but the most imposing piece in nature's repertory?

*****

But indeed it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of
the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes
and renews a weary spirit.

*****

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in
the neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness
of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which
is its own reward and justification.

*****

For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially
if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must set
ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience
of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in
the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as
people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly
on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or
inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit.
The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi
pour se soutenir en chemin.'

*****

There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel,
or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study
for ever, and we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a
statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent,
or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or
another plain upon the farther side. In the infinite universe there is
room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works
of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a
private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for
a lifetime there will be always something to startle and delight us.

*****

It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man
continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look
of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed
appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes
through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is
they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man
may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two
amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.

*****

To look on the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all
created things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing
whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a
child who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the
strains with unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal
dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music
into their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers
through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully,
there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave
of ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.

*****

Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish;
it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which
it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and
hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the
objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance
herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old
myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself
the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting
footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or
when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.

*****

The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his
foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer
noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland
ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of
human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and
elastic ethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone
survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the
type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit
properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.

*****

To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing
light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's,
the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central
features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression
only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places.
So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he
mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his
company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains
of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered
aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular
to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and
Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of
Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about
the hued lowland waters of that shire.

*****

THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS

     We travelled in the print of olden wars;
          Yet all the land was green;
          And love we found, and peace,
          Where fire and war had been.
     They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
          No more the sword they wield;
          And O, how deep the corn
          Along the battlefield!

*****

To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat
that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the
hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death:
this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee
life's pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat,
upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the
ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could
hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as
tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the hand
of Nature's God!

*****

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind
of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,
we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a
fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power
of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

'We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the evening,
VOYEZ-VOUS, NOUS SOMMES SERIEUX.' These were the words. They were all
employed over the frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during the
day; but in the evening they found some hours for the serious concerns
of life. I may have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very
wise remark. People connected with literature and philosophy are
busy all their days in getting rid of second-hand notions and false
standards. It is their profession, in the sweat of their brows,
by dogged thinking, to recover their old fresh view of life, and
distinguish what they really and originally like from what they have
only learned to tolerate perforce. And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen
had the distinction still quite legible in their hearts. They had still
those clean perceptions of what is nice and nasty, what is interesting
and what is dull, which envious old gentlemen refer to as illusions.
The nightmare illusion of middle age, the bear's hug of custom gradually
squeezing the life out of a man's soul, had not yet begun for these
happy-starr'd young Belgians. They still knew that the interest
they took in their business was a trifling affair compared to their
spontaneous, long-suffering affection for nautical sports. To know what
you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you
you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Such a man may be
generous; he may be honest in something more than the commercial sense;
he may love his friends with an elective, personal sympathy, and not
accept them as an adjunct of the station to which he has been called. He
may be a man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his
own shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the social
engine-house, welded on principles that he does not understand, and for
purposes that he does not care for.

*****

I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner hour thankfully
enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read
something, if it were only 'Bradshaw's Guide.' But there is a romance
about the matter, after all. Probably the table has more devotees than
love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than
scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the
less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what
we are. To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human
perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.

*****

For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one
thing; it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to
overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence
in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward,
how the spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows black
under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to
deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could
see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can
fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects
of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you
stand:--think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walk the Edinburgh
streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst
of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he sat
down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps
some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the leaves and
show you his flushed and rustic visage; or as a fisher racing seaward,
with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the wind,
would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.

*****

So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
The sea-surf, the cries of plough-men, the streams and the mill-wheels,
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of
town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear,
the whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable
city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you
may be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
vein for cheerful labour.

*****

The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as
January. Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter
blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes
in the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a man's
nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail;
and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts
dismally sweeping in the distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ross the
wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows
the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw. Sheets of
mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round the isle
of Aros, the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the
reefs and beaches. Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like
the combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was
hardly varied for a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could
hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of
the Merry Men. At that hour there flashed into my mind the reason of
the name that they were called. For the noise of them seemed almost
mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not
mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay, and it seemed
even human. As when savage men have drunk away their reason, and,
discarding speech bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my
ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.

*****

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very
dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity
of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending
with ice and boulders; a few lights, scattered unevenly among the
darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For
the making of a story here were fine conditions.

*****

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their
sides instead of heather; and the great sea-conger to wreathe about the
base of them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days
you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following
you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man
that hears that caldron boiling.

*****

It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. The wind
had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet
weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. An
effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick showed where
the sun was trying to look through; but along the horizon clouds of cold
fog had settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and sea.
Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in the opening of bays,
there was nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it
drew near the edge of the cliff, seemed to skirt the shores of creation
and void space.

*****

When we are looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it
is only when it comes back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can
disentangle the main charm from the thick of particulars. It is just
so with what is lately past. It is too much loaded with detail to be
distinct; and the canvas is too large for the eye to encompass. But
this is no more the case when our recollections have been strained long
enough through the hour-glass of time; when they have been the burthen
of so much thought, the charm and comfort of so many a vigil. All that
is worthless has been sieved and sifted out of them. Nothing remains but
the brightest lights and the darkest shadows.

*****

Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through all reverses
to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Beranger waited till he
was himself beyond the reach of want before writing the OLD VAGABOND or
JACQUES. Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, 'was a
great arguer for the advantages of poverty' in his ill days. Thus it is
that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox burrowing in
their vitals.

*****

Now, what I like so much in France is the clear, unflinching recognition
by everybody of his own luck. They all know on which side their bread is
buttered, and take a pleasure in showing it to others, which is surely
the better part of religion. And they scorn to make a poor mouth over
their poverty, which I take to be the better part of manliness.

*****

If people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a man boasting,
so long as he boasts of what he really has, I believe they would do it
more freely and with a better grace.

*****

A girl at school in France began to describe one of our regiments on
parade to her French school-mates, and as she went on she told me the
recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud to be the countrywoman
of such soldiers, and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
failed her and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl,
and I think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady,
with all its many associations, would be to offer her an insult. She
may rest assured of one thing, although she never should marry a heroic
general, never see any great or immediate result of her life, she will
not have lived in vain for her native land.

*****

As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a look into that
man's mind was like a retrospect over the smiling champaign of his past
life, and very different from the Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a
terrified moment into the dark souls of many good, many wise, and many
prudent men. I cannot be very grateful to such men for their excellence,
and wisdom, and prudence. I find myself facing as stoutly as I can
a hard, combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, defeats,
disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard enough life without their
dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a happy-minded
Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners of my life's wayside,
preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment.

*****

There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom
I dare be known to set before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy
gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they
relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in
cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries--his wife,
that accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard,
but he is often described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for
recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all
sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims of his
old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his
rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our
common ancestors, all must obediently thrill.

*****

This is an age when genealogy has taken a new lease of life, and become
for the first time a human science; so that we no longer study it in
quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to trace out some of the secrets of
descent and destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke
and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do our character and talents lie upon
the anvil and receive their temper during generations; but the very
plot of our life's story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the
biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.

*****

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;
and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our HOMUNCULUS and be reminded of our antenatal
lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us.

*****

What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of
mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that
you love me), not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice,
not a look from my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love,
but has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with
my eyes; other men have heard the pleadings of the same voice that now
sounds in your ears. The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move
me, they pluck me, they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and
I but re-inform features and attributes that have long been laid aside
from evil in the quiet of the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the
race that made me? The girl who does not know and cannot answer for the
least portion of herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory
eddy, the tree of which she is the passing fruit? The race exists; it is
old, it is ever young, it carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon
it, like waves upon the sea, individual succeeds individual, mocked with
a semblance of self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul,
but the soul is in the race.

*****

The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own history, the seed
of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition. It is not
in vain that I return to the nothings of my childhood; for every one
of them has left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted
free-will. In the past is my present fate; and in the past also is my
real life.

*****

For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps
some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not
altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord
Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of
an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as
the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our
communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the
march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the
perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire
upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.

*****

The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much
a man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry; for although we
shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity
to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost appetite for playing at
soldiers.

*****

If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he
laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal
more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

*****

There is something irreverent in the speculation, but perhaps the want
of power has more to do with wise resolutions of age than we are always
willing to admit.

*****

People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the sure
expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a different affair
from giving up youth, with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of
a better quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than
improbable, old age.

*****

Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as, age approaches.
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good
grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to
lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time
arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life
and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.

*****

Age asks with timidity to be spared intolerable pain; youth, taking
fortune by the beard, demands joy like a right.

*****

It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and
blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the
right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance
and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of
enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St.
Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder
Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist
with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment)
that we had better leave these great changes to what we call blind
forces; their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the
little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my
own scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard
propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they
encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with
years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in
the common orbit of men's opinions.

Those who go the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were
probably little worth saving from the first; they must have been feeble
fellows--creatures made of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire,
anger or true joyfulness, in their composition; we may sympathise with
their parents, but there is not much cause to go into mourning for
themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of
mankind.

*****

The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as
the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most
anti-social acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent
sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you
need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. ... But it
is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream
in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars
and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn
stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel
on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's
sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of
himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of
their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce
be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and
such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been
wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that
youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete
our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against
some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to
the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person
with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.