 Section 9 of Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. The editor has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondence. 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, 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 the 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 Mistress Scott Sidon's. Everything has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me, nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burden 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 Vicente de Brajelon. 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 Pilgrims' Progress, a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion. Out 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 Essie of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of today. They will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain. They will have their linen decencies, 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 anyone if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dullly like a portion of the Bible. Anyone 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, 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. 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 gunpowder 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. 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 kaput mortum 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 vigor makes him a bracing writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer. Goethe's life, by Lewis, 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 as well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomeizer, 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. Marshall is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jest as serious passages the image of a kind, wise and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Marshall 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. 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. Take 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 thence forward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue. Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Dawn 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. 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 is a satire, so much must be allowed. But it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious moat 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 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 Thorough and Haslet, 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 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. of section 9 recording by Martin Geeson in Hazelmeer Surrey section 10 of essays of Robert Lewis Stevenson this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Martin Geeson essays of Robert Lewis Stevenson section 10 pull with it umbra dust and shadow we look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed not success not happiness not even peace of conscience crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well our frailties are invincible our 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 and no country where some action is not honored 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 of 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 immaculate 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 cosmos in whose joints we are but moss and fungus more ancient still one of the cosmos 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 wilds through space is but a figment burying inversely as the squares of distances and the suns and wilds themselves imponderable figures of abstraction NH3 and H2O consideration dares not dwell upon this view that way madness lies science carries us into zones of speculation where there is no habitable city for the mind of man but take the cosmos with a grosser faith as our senses give it to us we behold space soon with rotatory islands suns and wilds 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 rocks uncleanly into something we call life seized through all its atoms with a pediculus malady swelling in tumors that become independent sometimes even by an abhorrent prodigy locomotory 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 90 million miles away to what a monstrous specter 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 nearly 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 peace 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 we find in him one thought strange to the point of lunacy the thought of duty the thought of something owing to himself to his neighbor 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 honor 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 a front 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 organized 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 labor if the first view of this creature stalking in his rotatory aisle be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest on this nearer site 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 burdened with what erroneous morality by campfires in asiniboya 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 innuent to hardship and vile pleasures his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedise and 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 neighbors 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 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 honor and the touch of pity 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 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 honor 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 of all earth's meteors here at least is the most strange and consoling that this ennobled lemur this hair crowned bubble of the dust this inheritor of a few years and sorrows should yet deny himself his rare delights and add to his frequent pains and live for an ideal however misconceived nor can we stop with man a new doctrine received with screams a little while ago by counting modelists and still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but noble universe for nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust he stands no longer like a thing apart close at his heels we see the dog prince of another genius and in him too we see dumbly testified the same cult to us of an unattainable ideal the same constancy in failure does it stop with the dog we look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant a creature so small so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings and here also in his ordered polities and rigorous justice we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin does it stop then with the ant rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life rather is this earth from the frosty top of everest to the next margin of the internal fire one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance the whole creation groaneth and traveleth together it is the common and the godlike law of life the browsers the biters the barkers the hairy coats of field and forest the squiddle in the oak the thousand-footed creeper in the dust as they share with us the gift of life share with us the love of an ideal strive like us like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle to do well like us receive at times unmerited refreshment visitings of support returns of courage and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will are they like us i wonder in the timid hope of some reward some sugar with the drug do they too stand aghast at unrewarded virtues at the sufferings of those whom in our partiality we take to be just and the prosperity of such as in our blindness we call wicked it may be and yet god knows what they should look for even while they look even while they repent the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust the yelping hounds burst upon their trail the bullet speeds the knives are heating in the den of the vivisectionist or the dew falls and the generation of a day is blotted out for these are creatures compared with whom our weakness is strength our ignorance wisdom our brief span eternity and as we dwell we living things in our isle of terror and under the imminent hand of death god forbid it should be man the erected the reasoner the wise in his own eyes god forbid it should be man that wearies in well doing that despairs of unrewarded effort or utters the language of complaint let it be enough for faith that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty strives with unconquerable constancy surely not all in vain end of section 10 recording by martin geeson in hazel mere surrey end of essays of robert louis stevensson