Book: Virginibus Puerisque

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Virginibus Puerisque




In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in
all. "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he
cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could
not learn my alphabet without some suitable MISE-EN-SCENE, and
had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down
to my book. Will you kindly question your memory, and find
out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and
soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with
some invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the
expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came
with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was
none to see. Children are even content to forego what we call
the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance. When
they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter
senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because
they are making believe to speak French. I have said already
how even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be
gulled and led by the nose with the fag end of an old song.
And it goes deeper than this: when children are together even
a meal is felt as an interruption in the business of life; and
they must find some imaginative sanction, and tell themselves
some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to render
entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking.
What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern
upon tea-cups! - from which there followed a code of rules and
a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take
rank as a game. When my cousin and I took our porridge of a
morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal.
He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country
continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and
explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation.
You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an
island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with
snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in
cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was
always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last
corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew
smaller every moment; and how in fine, the food was of
altogether secondary importance, and might even have been
nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams. But
perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal, were
in the case of calves' feet jelly. It was hardly possible not
to believe - and you may be sure, so far from trying, I did
all I could to favour the illusion - that some part of it was
hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the
secret tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some
miniature RED BEARD await his hour; there, might one find the
treasures of the FORTY THIEVES, and bewildered Cassim beating
about the walls. And so I quarried on slowly, with bated
breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little
palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste
when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because
the cream dimmed the transparent fractures.

Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-
minded children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-
eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance,
and the actions and the excitement to which it gives rise lend
themselves to almost any sort of fable. And thus cricket,
which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about nothing
and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving. It
is a game, if you like, but not a game of play. You cannot
tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls
forth can be justified on no rational theory. Even football,
although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow
of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young
sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little
boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball,
and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with
an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a
sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian
nations.

To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted
about the bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a
mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their
parents. What can they think of them? what can they make of
these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their
games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown
designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the
tenderest solicitude for children, and yet every now and again
reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the
prerogatives of age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting,
but morally rebellious. Were there ever such unthinkable
deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know what,
in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling.
A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at
best very feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of
terror for the untried residue of mankind go to make up the
attraction that he feels. No wonder, poor little heart, with
such a weltering world in front of him, if he clings to the
hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole affair,
as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. "O, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can
we not all be happy and devote ourselves to play?" And when
children do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much
the same purpose.

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these
considerations; that whatever we are to expect at the hands of
children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about
matters of fact. They walk in a vain show, and among mists
and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned
about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned;
and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach
them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer
is inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of
years, we charge him with incompetence and not with
dishonesty. And why not extend the same allowance to
imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about
poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we
excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable,
unbreeched, human entity, whose whole profession it is to take
a tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush for the deadly
stiletto, and who passes three-fourths of his time in a dream
and the rest in open self-deception, and we expect him to be
as nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing
evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less than decent. You do
not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to
weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he
cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a
gingerbread dragoon.

I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very
inquiring as to the precise truth of stories. But indeed this
is a very different matter, and one bound up with the subject
of play, and the precise amount of playfulness, or
playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such burning
questions must arise in the course of nursery education.
Among the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the
pretty soldier and the terrifying Irish beggarman, is, or is
not, the child to expect a Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or
is he not, to look out for magicians, kindly and potent? May
he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast away upon a
desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that
he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a
cruise in his own toy schooner? Surely all these are
practical questions to a neophyte entering upon life with a
view to play. Precision upon such a point, the child can
understand. But if you merely ask him of his past behaviour,
as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such and
such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone
by a forbidden path, - why, he can see no moment in the
inquiry, and it is ten to one, he has already half forgotten
and half bemused himself with subsequent imaginings.

It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland,
where they figure so prettily - pretty like flowers and
innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens soon
enough, and have to go into offices and the witness-box.
Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let them doze
among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a
rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?



CHAPTER X - WALKING TOURS



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. It is this that so few can understand;
they will either be always lounging or always at five miles an
hour; they do not play off the one against the other, prepare
all day for the evening, and all evening for the next day.
And, above all, it is here that your overwalker fails of
comprehension. His heart rises against those who drink their
curacoa in liqueur glasses, when he himself can swill it in a
brown john. He will not believe that the flavour is more
delicate in the smaller dose. He will not believe that to
walk this unconscionable distance is merely to stupefy and
brutalise himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort
of frost on his five wits, and a starless night of darkness in
his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening of the
temperate walker! He has nothing left of man but a physical
need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if
he be a smoker, will be savourless and disenchanted. It is
the fate of such an one to take twice as much trouble as is
needed to obtain happiness, and miss the happiness in the end;
he is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes further and
fares worse.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be
gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it
is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is
something else and more in the nature of a picnic. 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. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of
walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the
country I wish to vegetate like the country," - which is the
gist of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be
no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative
silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he
cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes
of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of
dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that
passes comprehension.

During the first day or so of any tour there are moments
of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly
towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it
bodily over the hedge and, like Christian on a similar
occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it
soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic;
the spirit of the journey enters into it. And no sooner have
you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of
sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a
shake, and fall at once into your stride. And surely, of all
possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the
best. Of course, if he WILL keep thinking of his anxieties,
if he WILL open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-
arm with the hag - why, wherever he is, and whether he walk
fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy. And
so much the more shame to himself! There are perhaps thirty
men setting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large
wager there is not another dull face among the thirty. It
would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one
after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the
first few miles upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with
a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind;
he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the
landscape to words. This one peers about, as he goes, among
the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies;
he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough
upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking,
laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from
time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger
clouds his forehead. He is composing articles, delivering
orations, and conducting the most impassioned interviews, by
the way. A little farther on, and it is as like as not he
will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be no
great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid
peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know
which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer
the confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of
your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to
the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no
wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew
one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because,
although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as
he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were
to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed
to me that, when on walking tours, they sang - and sang very
ill - and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the
inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from round a
corner. And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is
Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay ON GOING A JOURNEY,
which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who
have not read it:-

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and
the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and
a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking! It is
hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I
laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."

Bravo! After that adventure of my friend with the
policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to publish
that in the first person? But we have no bravery nowadays,
and, even in books, must all pretend to be as dull and foolish
as our neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And notice
how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the
theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in
purple stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three
hours' march is his ideal. And then he must have a winding
road, the epicure!

Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his,
one thing in the great master's practice that seems to me not
wholly wise. I do not approve of that leaping and running.
Both of these hurry the respiration; they both shake up the
brain out of its glorious open-air confusion; and they both
break the pace. Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the
body, and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas, when
once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no
conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents
you from thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting,
like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and
sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind. We can think
of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child thinks, or
as we think in a morning dose; we can make puns or puzzle out
acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words and
rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the
trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the
mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at
home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his
own private thought!

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much
variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to
the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly
great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one
extreme towards the other. He becomes more and more
incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air
drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts
along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a
cheerful dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the
second stage is the more peaceful. A man does not make so
many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but
the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing,
the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles
tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the
others, and bring him to his destination still content.

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to
a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet
under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to
smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the
birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates
upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun
lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck
and turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you
must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you
like by the roadside. It is almost as if the millennium were
arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the
housetop, 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! It is to be
noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted
days before the flood. It follows, of course, there were no
appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon.
"Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says
Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of
his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of
business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden,
give him the elixir of life - he has still a flaw at heart, he
still has his business habits. 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.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour
comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that
follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a
thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and
so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own
there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity
spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If
you read a book - and you will never do so save by fits and
starts - you find the language strangely racy and harmonious;
words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for
half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you,
at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It
seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a
dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back
with special favour. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798,"
says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a
volume of the new HELOISE, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a
bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote
more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we
cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of
Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a
journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for TRISTRAM
SHANDY I can pledge a fair experience.

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.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the
night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You may
remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the
hours when he has been "happy thinking." It is a phrase that
may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by
clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming
dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off
projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into
solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no
time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the
Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all
night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world
for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without
discontent and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be
doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice
audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we
forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts -
namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to
and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now you are
to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been
better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To
sit still and contemplate, - to remember the faces of women
without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men
without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy, and
yet content to remain where and what you are - is not this to
know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?
After all, it is not they who carry flags, but they who look
upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the
procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very
humour of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or
for big, empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by
fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you
go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so
vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and
so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions
of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot
stop to split differences between two degrees of the
infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman
Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's end.

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