 Section 1 of Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. On the enjoyment of unpleasant places. It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently, from one side after another, generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few months ago some words were said in the portfolio as to an austere regimen in scenery, and such a discipline was then recommended as healthful and strengthening to the taste. It is the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the appetite. 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, to 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 Brentome quaintly tells us, fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin. And into these discourses he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by the way. They take their tone greatly from the varying character of the scene. A sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road, and the man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as though 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. And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction of romance. We may learn to go far afield for associations and handle them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes an old print comes to our aid. I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations by a reminiscence of Calo or Sadler or Paul Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs. For most tourists, if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious figures, and brought them dither their minds rightly prepared for the impression. There is half the battle in this preparation. For instance, I have rarely been able to visit in the proper spirit the wild and inhospitable places of our own highlands. I am happier where it is tame and fertile and not readily pleased without trees. I understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul. And the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity, so that I can never hit on the right humour for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence. Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time enough were given, I should have all manner of pleasure, and take many clear and beautiful images away with me when I left. When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among the grass for flowers, or pour for long times together over the changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. We begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader will recollect the little summer scene in Wuthering Heights, the one warm scene, perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel, and the great feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sunshine. This is in the spirit of which I now speak. And lastly, we can go indoors. Interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque than the shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter, of which I shall presently have more to say. 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. Reminisances 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. Looking back the other day on some recollections of my own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to such a residence. Six weeks in one unpleasant countryside had done more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination. The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau, over which the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided, but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest. For as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning. There was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stonebreaker. And you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea wind. To one who has learned to know their song in warm, pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not as hawthorn-like to put it taken back to nature by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the south, bare sun-burnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air. But this was of another description. This was the nakedness of the north. The earth seemed to know that it was naked and was ashamed and cold. It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when they met with breezy breezy. Instead of the customary fine day of farther south, these continual winds were not like the harvest breeze that just keeps an equitable pressure against your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort that interferes with sight and respiration and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses of shadow, and what a power they have over the colour of the world, how they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow. There is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all its sights and noises, and the effect gets between some painters and their sober eyesight, so that even when the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows and clouds, or those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure, for nowhere could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull or a place of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean. He must remember how when he has sat himself down behind a dike on a hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his back, how his body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn upon him with a sort of slow surprise that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the faraway hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of the prelude, has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great thoroughfares, and the comparison may be turned the other way with as good effect. Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length escaped us from an enemy we turn abruptly into some sequestered nook, still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud. I remember meeting a man once in a train who told me of what must have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had gone up one sunny windy morning to the top of a great cathedral somewhere abroad. I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine. And after a long while in dark stairways he issued at last into the sunshine on a platform high above the town. At that elevation it was quite still and warm. The gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the church and during his long ascent. And so you may judge of his surprise when resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into the plots far below him he saw the good people holding on their hats and leaning hard against the wind as they walked. There is something to my fancy quite perfect in this little experience of my fellow travelers. The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a church top with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses and the silent activity of the city streets. But how much more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood not only above other men's business but above other men's climate in a golden zone like Apollo's. This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write. The pleasure was to be out of the wind and to keep it in memory all the time and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten headlands there are little bites and havens well screened from the wind and the commotion of the external sea where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water and the seabirds screaming and flickering from the ruined crags alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle. The two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas and yet feud had run so high between their owners that one from out of a window shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall fires at night when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are there. When we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a contrary impression and association is turned against itself. I remember walking thither three afternoons in succession. My eyes weary with being set against the wind and how dropping suddenly over the edge of the down I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. The wind from which I had escaped as from an enemy was seemingly quite local. It carried no clouds with it and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles black and ruinous as the rocks about them were still distinguishable from these by something more insecure and fantastic in the outline something that the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely. It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out as I have said by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemoiled by previous tempests. I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the pygmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and enmity and knew I had only to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes and yet there were the two great tracks of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on unconcerned and apart at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky. It seems to have no root in the constitution of things. It must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came very near together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments in the being of the eternal silence and the wind in the face of that great field of stationary blue was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks of the sea as hungering for calm and in this place one learned to understand the phrase looking down into these green waters from the broken edge of the rock or swimming leisurely in the sunshine it seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquility and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface or the quick black passage of a fish far below they settled back again one could fancy with relief. Onshore too in the little nook of shelter everything was so subdued and still that the least particular they are pleasurable surprise. The desultory crackling of the windpots in the afternoon sun usurped the ear. The hot sweet breath of the bank that had been saturated all day long with sunshine and now exhaled it into my face was like the breath of a fellow creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines of French verse in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and give expression to the contentment that was in me and I kept repeating to myself Mon coeur est un lut suspendu si tôt qu'on le touche il résonne my heart is hung up like a loot at the first touch it resounds. I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time and for that very cause I repeat them here for all I know they may serve to complete the impression in the mind of the reader as they were certainly a part of it for me and this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my owning gratitude out of the strong came forth sweetness there in the bleak and gusty north I received perhaps my strongest impression of peace I saw the sea to be great and calm and the earth in that little corner was all alive and friendly to me so wherever a man is he will find something to please and pacify him in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and women and see beautiful flowers at a window or hear a cage bird singing at the corner of the gloomiest street and for the country there is no country without some amenity let him only look for it in the right spirit and he will surely find. Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Martin Giesen Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson Section 2 An Apology for Idlers Bosswell We grew weary when idle Johnson That is, sir, because others being busy we want company but if we were idle there would be no growing weary we should all entertain one another Just now when everyone is bound under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lair's respectability to enter on some lucrative profession and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile save us a little of bravado and gasconade and yet this should not be Idleness so called which does not consist in doing nothing but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class has as good a right to state its position as industry itself it is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicapped race for sixpony pieces is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do a fine fellow as we see so many takes his determination votes for the sixpences and in the emphatic Americanism goes for them and while such an one is plowing distressfully up the road it is not hard to understand his resentment when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of diogenes where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians who poured into the Senate House and found the fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success it is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops and when all is done find humanity indifferent to your achievement hence physicists condemn the unphysical financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks literary persons despise the unlettered and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none but though this is one difficulty of the subject it is not the greatest you could not be put in prison for speaking against industry but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool the greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well therefore please to remember this is an apology it is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence only there is something to be said against it and that is what on the present occasion I have to say to state one argument it is not necessarily to be deaf to all others and that a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond it is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in use for though here and there a Lord Macaulay to escape from school honours with all his wits about him most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker and begin the world bankrupt and the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself or suffering others to educate him it must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words young man, ply your book diligently now and acquire a stock of knowledge for when years come upon you you will find that pouring upon books will be but an irksome task the old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome and not a few become impossible by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick books are good enough in their own way but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life it seems a pity to sit like the lady of shallot peering into a mirror with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality and if a man reads very hard as the old anecdote reminds us he will have little time for thoughts if you look back on your own education I am sure it will not be the full vivid instructive hours of truantry that you regret you would rather cancel some lacklustre periods between sleep and waking in the class for my own part I have attended a good many lectures in my time I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of kinetic stability I still remember that emphitosis is not a disease nor stillicide a crime but though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant this is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the science of the aspect of life suffice it to say this if a lad does not learn in the streets it is because he has no faculty of learning nor is the truant always in the streets for if he prefers he may go out by the garden suburbs into the country he may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones a bird will sing in the thicket and there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought and see things in a new perspective why if this be not education what is we may conceive Mr. worldly wise man a costing such in one and the conversation that should there upon ensue how now young fellow what dust thou here truly sir I take my knees is it not the hour of the class and should thou not be plying thy book with diligence to the end thou mayst obtain knowledge nay but thus also I follow after learning by your leave learn in quother after what fashion I pray thee is it mathematics no to be sure is it metaphysics nor that is it some language nay it is no language is it a trade nor a trade neither why then what is indeed sir as a time may soon come for me to go upon pilgrimage I am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case and where are the ugliest sloughs and thickets on the road as also what manner of staff is of the best service moreover I lie here by this water to learn by root of heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call peace or contentment here upon Mr. worldly wise man was much commuved with passion and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance broke forth upon this wise learning quother said he I would have all such rogue scourged by the hangman and so he would go his way ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch like a turkey when it spread its feathers now this of Mr. wise man is the common opinion a fact is not called a fact but a piece of gossip if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories an inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction the name to go by or else you are not inquiring at all only lounging and the workhouse is too good for you it is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well or the far end of a telescope as he grew older came to regard all experience as a single great book in which to study for a few years air we go hence and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in chapter 20 which is the differential calculus or in chapter 39 which is hearing the band play in the gardens as a matter of fact an intelligent person looking out of his eyes and harkening in his ears with a smile on his face all the time who get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils there is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science but it is all round about you and for the trouble of looking that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life while others are filling their memory with a lumber of words one half of which they will forget before the week be out your truant may learn some really useful art to play the fiddle to know a good cigar or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men many who have plied their book diligently and know all about some one branch or another of accepted law come out of the study with an ancient and owl like demeanor and prove dry stockish and dispeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life many make a large fortune who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last and meantime there goes the idler who began life along with them by your leave a different picture he has had time to take care of his health and his spirits he has been a great deal in the open air which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind and if he has never read the great book in very recondite places he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose might not the student afford some Hebrew roots and the businessman some of his half crowns for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large and art of living and the idler has another and more important quality than these I mean his wisdom he who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence he will not be heard among the dogmatists he will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions if he finds no out of the way truths he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood his way took him along a by-road not much frequented but very even and pleasant which is called commonplace lane and leads to the Belvedere of common sense dense he shall command an agreeable if no very noble prospect and while others behold the east and west the devil and the sunrise he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of eternity the shadows and the generations the shrill doctors and the plungent wars go by into ultimate silence and emptiness but underneath all this a man may see out of the Belvedere windows much green and peaceful landscape many firelit parlours good people laughing drinking and making love as they did before the flood or the French Revolution and the old shepherd telling his tale under the Hawthorn extreme busyness whether at school or college Kirk or market is a symptom of deficient vitality and a faculty for idleness implies a Catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity there is a sort of dead alive hackneyed people about who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation bring these fellows into the country or set them aboard ship and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study they have no curiosity they cannot give themselves over to random provocations they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake and unless necessity lays about them with a stick they will even stand still it is no good speaking to such folk they cannot be idle their nature is not generous enough and they pass those hours in a sort of coma which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold mill when they do not require to go to the office when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink the whole breathing world is a blank to them if they have to wait an hour or so for a train they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open to see them you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way and have good eyesight for a floor in a deed or a turn of the market they have been to school and college but all the time they had their eye on the metal they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs as if a man's soul were not too small to begin with they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play until here they are at forty with a listless attention a mind vacant of all material of amusement and not one thought to rub against another while they wait for the train before he was breached he might have clambered on the boxes when he was twenty he would have stared at the girls but now the pipe is smoked out the snuffbox empty and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench with lamentable eyes this does not appeal to me as being success in life but it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits but his wife and children his friends and relations and down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things and it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do to an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest most virtuous and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the theatre of life are filled by gratuitous performers and pass among the world at large as phases of idleness for in that theatre not only the walking gentleman singing chambermaids and diligent fiddlers in the orchestra but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches do really play a part and fulfill important offices towards the general result you are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker of the guards and signalman who convey you rapidly from place to place and the policeman who walk the streets for your protection but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way or season your dinner with good company Colonel Newcomb helped to lose his friend's money Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes and though fall staff was neither sober nor very honest I think I could name one or two long faced Barabbuses whom the world could better have done without haslet mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote who had never done him anything he could call a service done to his whole circle of ostentatious friends for he thought a good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favor has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty but this is a churlish disposition a man may send you six sheets of letter paper covered with the most entertaining gossip or you may pass half an hour pleasantly perhaps profitably over an article of his do you think the service would be greater if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood like a compact with the devil do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your correspondent if you had been damning you all the while for your importunity pleasures are more beneficial than duties because like the quality of mercy they are not strained and they are twice blessed there must always be two to a kiss and there may be a score in a jest but there is an element of sacrifice the favor is conferred with pain and among generous people received with confusion there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy by being happy we so anonymous benefits upon the world which remain unknown even to ourselves or when they are disclosed surprise nobody so much as the benefactor the other day a ragged barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble with so jolly an air that he set everyone he passed into a good humor one of these persons who had been delivered from more than usually black thoughts stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with this remark you see what sometimes comes of looking pleased if he had looked pleased before he had now to look both pleased and mystified for my part I justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity a happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five pound note he or she is a radiating focus of good will and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted we need not care whether they could prove the forty seventh proposition they do a better thing than that they practically demonstrate the great theorem of the livableness of life consequently if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle idle he should remain it is a revolutionary precept but thanks to hunger and the workhouse one not easily to be abused and within practical limits it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole body of morality look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment I beseech you he sows hurry and reaps indigestion he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return either he upsents himself entirely from all fellowship and lives a recluse in a garret with carpet slivers and a leaden ink pot or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly in a contraction of his whole nervous system to discharge some temper before he returns to work I do not care how much or how well he works this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives they would be happier if he were dead they could easier do without his services in the circumlocution office than they can tolerate his fracture spirits he poisons life at the wellhead it is better to be beggard out of hand by escape grace nephew than daily haggred by a peevish uncle and what in God's name is all this father about for what cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives that a man should publish three or thirty articles a year that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture are questions of little interest to the world the ranks of life are full and although a thousand fall there are always some to go into the breach when they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work she answered there were plenty to spin and wash and so even with your own rare gifts when nature is so careless of the single life why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves the world would have wagged on better or worse the picture gone to the well the scythe to the born and the student to his book and no one been any the wiser of the loss there are not many works extant if you look the alternative all over which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means this is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities even Lacanist may upon consideration find no great cause for personal vain glory in the phrase for although tobacco is an admirable sedative the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves alas and alas you may take it how you will but the services of no single individual are indispensable Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare and yet you see merchants who go and labor themselves into a great fortune and thence into bankruptcy court scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid and fine young men who work themselves into a decline and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it would you not suppose these persons had been whispered by the master of the ceremonies the promise of some momentous destiny and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their fastest was the bull's eye and center point of all the universe and yet it is not so the ends for which they gave away their priceless youth for all they know may be chemical or hurtful the glory and riches they expect may never come or may find them indifferent and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought. End of Section 2. Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmayer Surrey. Section 3 of Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Giesen. Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. Section 3. Eyes triplex. Triple brass. The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences that the thing stands alone in man's experience and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims like a thug. Sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done there is sore havoc made in other people's lives and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks and single beds at night. Again in taking away our friends death does not take them away utterly but leaves behind a mocking, tragical and soon intolerable residue which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dual trees of medieval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb. Memorial stones are set up over the least memorable and in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this and much more of the same sort accompanied by the eloquence of poets has got a great way to put humanity in error. Nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic. Although in real life the bustle and swiftness in leaving people little time to think have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice. As a matter of fact although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death few have less influence on conduct and a healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains and how even in this tremendous neighbourhood the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot the bowels of the mountain growl and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young people and very dull old ones there is something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that respectable married people with umbrellas should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain. Ordinary life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a catastrophe and even cheese and salad it seems could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the creator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration or mere born devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse. And yet when one comes to think upon it calmly the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. This world itself travelling blindly and swiftly in overcrowded space among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions may very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what pathologically looked at is the human body with all its organs but a mere bag full of petards. The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder magazine to the ship and with every breath we breathe and every meal we eat we are putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life or we're half as frightened as they make out we are for the subversive accident that ends it all the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle the blue Peter might fly at the truck but who would climb into a sea-going ship? Think if these philosophers were right with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner table a deadlier spot than any battlefield in history where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their bones what woman would ever be lured into marriage so much more dangerous than the wildest sea and what would it be to grow old? for after a certain distance every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through by the time a man gets well into the seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day do the old men mind it as a matter of fact? why no they would never marry her they have their grog at night and tell the racist stories they hear of the death of people about their own age or even younger not as if it was a grisly warning but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived someone else and when a draft might puff them out like a fluttering candle or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass their old hearts keep sound and unafrighted and they go on bubbling with laughter through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket green on Sunday it may fairly be questioned if we look to the peril only whether it was a much more daring feat for Kurtius to plunge into the gulf than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed indeed it is a memorable subject for consideration with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the valley of the shadow of death the whole way is one wilderness of snares and the end of it for those who fear the last pinch is irrevocable ruin and yet we go spinning through it all like a party for the derby perhaps the reader remembers one of the humorous devices of the deified Calicula how he encouraged a vast concourse of holiday makers onto his bridge over Bay Eye Bay and when they were in the height of their enjoyment turned loose the praetorian guards among the company and had them tossed into the sea this is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man only what a checkered picnic we have of it even while it lasts and into what great waters not to be crossed by any swimmer God's pale praetorian throws us over in the end we live the time that a match flickers we pop the cork of a ginger beer bottle and the earthquake swallows us on the instant is it not odd is it not incongruous is it not in the highest sense of human speech incredible that we should think so highly of the ginger beer and regard so little the devouring earthquake the love of life and the fear of death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more we think about them it is a well-known fact that an immense proportion of boat accidents would never happen if people held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast and yet unless it be some Martinette of a professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves every one of God's creatures makes it fast a strange instance of man's unconcern and brazen boldness in the face of death we confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases which we import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness we have no idea of what death is apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others and although we have some experience of living there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the word life all literature from Job and Omar Kayam to Thomas Carlisle or Walt Whitman is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the definition of life and our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapor or a show or made out of the same stuff with dreams philosophy in its more rigid sense has been at the same work for ages and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end philosophy has the honor of laying before us with modest pride her contribution towards the subject that life is a permanent possibility of sensation truly a fine result a man may very well love beef or hunting or a woman but surely surely not a permanent possibility of sensation he may be afraid of a precipice or a dentist or a large enemy with a club or even an undertaker's man but not certainly of abstract death we may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking we may argue in terms of all of philosophies on earth but one fact remains true throughout that we do not love life in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation that we do not properly speaking love life at all but living into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of providence no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour but although we have some anticipation of good health good weather, wine, active employment, love and self-approval the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life's possibilities and issues nor are those who cherish the most vividly at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety to be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience rather leads a man to disregard precautions and risk his neck against a straw for surely the love of living is stronger in an alpine climber roping over a peril or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution there is a very great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession so short as to be partly decent and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner indeed a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question when a man's heart warms to his viands he forgets a great deal of sophistry and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation death may be knocking at the door like the commander's statue we have something else in hand thank God and let him knock passing bells are ringing all the world over all the world over and every hour someone is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies for us also the trap is laid but we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death it is a honeymoon with us all through and none of the longest small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours to the appetites to honor to the hungry curiosity of the mind to the pleasure of the eyes in nature and the pride of our own nimble bodies we all of us appreciate the sensations but as for caring about the permanence of the possibility a man's head is generally very bald and his sense is very dull before he comes to that whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall a mere bag's end as the French say or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny whether we thunder in a pulpit or pool in little atheistic poetry books about its validity and brevity whether we look justly for years of health and vigor or are about to mount into a bath chair as a step towards the hearse in each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible that a man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind no one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer and yet we know how little it affected his conduct how wisely and boldly he walked and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life already an old man he ventured on his highland tour and his heart bound with triple brass did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea as courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact a frank and somewhat headlong carriage not looking too anxiously before not dallying in maudlin regret over the past stamps the man who is well armoured for this world and not only well armoured for himself but a good friend and a good citizen to boot we do not go to cowards for tender dealing there is nothing so cruel as panic the man who has least fear for his own carcass as most time to consider others that eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin shoes and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own digestion so soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain like a dismal fungus it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts the victim begins to shrink spiritually he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk the care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain to be over wise is to ossify and the scruple monger ends by standing stock still now the man who has his heart on his sleeve and a good whirling weathercock of a brain who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded makes a very different acquaintance of the world keeps all his pulses going true and fast and gathers impetus as he runs until if he be running towards anything better than wildfire he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end Lord look after his health Lord have a care of his soul says he and he has at the key of the position and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries as he is on all sides of all of us Unfortunate surprises gird him round Mim-mouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path and what cares he for all this being a true lover of living a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside he must like any other soldier in any other stirring deadly warfare push on at his best pace until he touch the goal A peerage all west Minster Abbey cried Nelson in his bright boyish heroic manner these are great incentives not for any of these but for the plain satisfaction of living of being about their business in some sort or other do the brave serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger and pass flyingly over all the stumbling blocks of prudence think of the heroism of Johnson think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary and carried him through triumphantly until the end who if he were wisely considerate of things at large would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a hipony postcard who would project a serial novel after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course who would find heart enough to begin to live if he dallied with the consideration of death and after all what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is to forego all the issues of living in a parlor with a regulated temperature as if that were not to die a hundred times over and for ten years at a stretch as if it were not to die in one's own lifetime and without even the sad immunities of death as if it were not to die and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change the permanent possibility is preserved but the sensations carefully held at arm's length as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber it is better to lose health like a spendthrift and to waste it like a miser it is better to live and be done with it than to die daily in the sick room by all means begin your folio even if the doctor does not give you a year even if he hesitates about a month make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week it is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour a spirit goes out of the man who means execution which outlives the most untimely ending all who have meant good work with their whole hearts have done good work although they may die before they have the time to sign it every heart that is beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world and bettered the tradition of mankind and even if death catch people like an open pitfall and in mid-career laying out vast projects and planning monstrous foundations flushed with hope and their mouths full of boastful language they should be at once tripped up and silenced is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination and does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body over a precipice the miserably struggling to an end in sandy deltas when the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye for surely at whatever age it overtake the man this is to die young death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart in the hot fit of life a tiptoe on the highest point of being he passes at a bound onto the other side the noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched the trumpets are hardly done blowing when trailing with him clouds of glory this happy-starred full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land End of section 3 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmayer Surrey