Book: Virginibus Puerisque

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Virginibus Puerisque




One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush
is certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do not quite
see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in
all parts of life - in lying down to sleep, in waking, in
motion, in breathing, in continuing to be - the lover begins
to regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the
world and highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never
been able contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars,
conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner of an
inconsiderable star, does not re-echo among the courts of
Heaven with quite a formidable effect. In much the same
taste, when people find a great to-do in their own breasts,
they imagine it must have some influence in their
neighbourhood. The presence of the two lovers is so
enchanting to each other that it seems as if it must be the
best thing possible for everybody else. They are half
inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that
the sky is blue and the sun shines. And certainly the weather
is usually fine while people are courting. . . In point of
fact, although the happy man feels very kindly towards others
of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of the
magnifico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming and
self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See,
they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life
without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation
is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted
lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other
men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of
life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they
feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they
were so many Joan-of-Arc's; but this does not come out in
their behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian airs
marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain
that women do not like this sort of thing; but really, after
having bemused myself over DANIEL DERONDA, I have given up
trying to understand what they like.

If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous
superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed
to others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness,
would serve at least to keep love generous and great-hearted.
Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all. Other
lovers are hugely interested. They strike the nicest balance
between pity and approval, when they see people aping the
greatness of their own sentiments. It is an understood thing
in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on
the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and a
light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman
and the singing chambermaid. As people are generally cast for
the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can
apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going
wrong. In short, they are quite sure this other love-affair
is not so deep seated as their own, but they like dearly to
see it going forward. And love, considered as a spectacle,
must have attractions for many who are not of the
confraternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of
the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human
being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness
without indulgence and sympathy. For nature commends itself
to people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and
again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or
as cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion
when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of
lovers in the lane.

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at
large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the
sweethearts. To do good and communicate is the lover's grand
intention. It is the happiness of the other that makes his
own most intense gratification. It is not possible to
disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility, pity
and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an
unexpected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the
hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that
puff out the character and attributes and make them imposing
in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but
to offer the most delicate homage at the same time. And it is
in this latter intention that they are done by lovers; for the
essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may be best defined
as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and
become importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal
sense exists no longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure
in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one
after another, accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured
that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for
himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to
set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult
thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act
of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of
art before every one in this world who cares to set about
explaining his own character to others. Words and acts are
easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all
the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we
make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake
our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And
generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are
content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once
a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a
point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have
the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance;
and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former
periods of his life. To all that has not been shared with
her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he
can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the
will. That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of
what alone was really important, that he may have entertained
the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a
burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the
thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a
poisoned wound. That he himself made a fashion of being alive
in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is
deplorable enough in all good conscience. But that She should
have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent
with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that
it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically
inconvenient. This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which
it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself
artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.
I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has
not always been a character of man; formed no part of that
very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to
have begun the world: but waited to make its appearance in
better days and among richer natures. And this is equally
true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight
in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other
things worth having. Love, in particular, will not endure any
historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is
one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you
begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in
Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up,
and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is
logical in comparison. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the
consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but
there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we
reflect on the past of those we love. A bundle of letters
found after years of happy union creates no sense of
insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply.
The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but
this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something
indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had twin
birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that
unites them. Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and
without reserve or afterthought. Then they would understand
each other with a fulness impossible otherwise. There would
be no barrier between them of associations that cannot be
imparted. They would be led into none of those comparisons
that send the blood back to the heart. And they would know
that there had been no time lost, and they had been together
as much as was possible. For besides terror for the
separation that must follow some time or other in the future,
men feel anger, and something like remorse, when they think of
that other separation which endured until they met. Some one
has written that love makes people believe in immortality,
because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great
a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful
of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of
a few years. Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind
analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible.

"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of
terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts
among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he
shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from
under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck;
the other has but time to make one gesture and give one
passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When
the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty
years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage
of the world, we may ask what has become of these great,
weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-hearts who despised
mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show
us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth
remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy
stamp from the disposition of their parents.


IV. - TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE


AMONG sayings that have a currency in spite of being
wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-
truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with
the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the
monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and
hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the truth
is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly
uttered. Even with instruments specially contrived for such a
purpose - with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite - it is
not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact. From
those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure
the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly
stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying
attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure
knowledge even of external and constant things. But it is
easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing
appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this
more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to
communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense -
not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of
fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read
Cervantes in the original when as a matter of fact I know not
one syllable of Spanish - this, indeed, is easy and to the
same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of this sort,
according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a
certain sense even they may or may not be false. The habitual
liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife
and friends; while another man who never told a formal
falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie - heart and
face, from top to bottom. This is the kind of lie which
poisons intimacy. And, VICE VERSA, veracity to sentiment,
truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends,
never to feign or falsify emotion - that is the truth which
makes love possible and mankind happy.

L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-room accomplishment
unless it be pressed into the service of the truth. The
difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what
you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him
precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the
case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or
writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the
world. But one thing you can never make Philistine natures
understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains
as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics -
namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by
means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a
man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the
fulness of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is
supposed, can say what he means; and, in spite of their
notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue to
suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have been reading
- Mr. Leland's captivating ENGLISH GIPSIES. "It is said," I
find on p. 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants
in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of their
appreciation of the beautiful, and of THE ELEMENTS OF HUMOUR
AND PATHOS IN THEIR HEARTS, than do those who know their
thoughts only through the medium of English. I know from my
own observations that this is quite the case with the Indians
of North America, and it is unquestionably so with the gipsy."
In short, where a man has not a full possession of the
language, the most important, because the most amiable,
qualities of his nature have to lie buried and fallow; for the
pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of love,
rest upon these very "elements of humour and pathos." Here is
a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put
none of it out to interest in the market of affection! But
what is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a
foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we
learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different
dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and
meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond
and fit upon the truth of fact - not clumsily, obscuring
lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an
athlete's skin. And what is the result? That the one can
open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more
of what makes life truly valuable - intimacy with those he
loves. An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial,
some absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he
insults, by a side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm;
in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another
in parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know his
task to be delicate and filled with perils. "O frivolous mind
of man, light ignorance!" As if yourself, when you seek to
explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault,
speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently
incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adventure;
as if yourself required less tact and eloquence; as if an
angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to
offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians! Nay, and
the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses
have been discussed a thousand times before; language is
ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut and dry
vocabulary. But you - may it not be that your defence reposes
on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in
Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must
venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and
become yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there
are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may
yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one
could read your heart, you may be sure that he would
understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown -
it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think it is a hard
thing to write poetry? Why, that is to write poetry, and of a
high, if not the highest, order.

I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic
literary labours" of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up in
words their loves and their contentions, and speaking their
autobiography daily to their wives, were it not for a
circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my admiration
by equal parts. For life, though largely, is not entirely
carried on by literature. We are subject to physical passions
and contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by
unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible
countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said
look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked
into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with
appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a
flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the
heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The
message flies by these interpreters in the least space of
time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment of its
birth. To explain in words takes time and a just and patient
hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close relation,
patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely.
But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; they
tell their message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they
cannot stumble, by the way, on a reproach or an allusion that
should steel your friend against the truth; and then they have
a higher authority, for they are the direct expression of the
heart, not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and
sophisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a
friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we met,
and in personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had
written, and added worse to that; and with the commentary of
the body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or say.
Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy; an
absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who know each
other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so
preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet
on the same terms as they had parted.

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the
face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes
of the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for
there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been
denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a
lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a
responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory
speech: people truly made of clay, people tied for life into a
bag which no one can undo. They are poorer than the gipsy,
for their heart can speak no language under heaven. Such
people we must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or
through yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust
on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when we
see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change
our estimate. But these will be uphill intimacies, without
charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief
ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romantically dull,
despise physical endowments. That is a doctrine for a
misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it must
always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things
more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities
as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not
a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every
feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so that we
shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may
never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become
unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all unfortunates
there is one creature (for I will not call him man)
conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who has forfeited his
birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful
intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet
monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his means of
communication with his fellow-men. The body is a house of
many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying
on the passers-by to come and love us. But this fellow has
filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured. His
house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause
before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor
must lie languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to
refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood and
yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer formal
questions. To reach the truth by yea and nay communications
implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is
often found in mutual love. YEA and NAY mean nothing; the
meaning must have been related in the question. Many words
are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in
this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we
can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different
sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we
are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to
convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought.
And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point
entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three
new offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a
most delicate affair. The world was made before the English
language, and seemingly upon a different design. Suppose we
held our converse not in words, but in music; those who have a
bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce,
and no better than foreigners in this big world. But we do
not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how
often the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate
questioners and questions; there are so few that can be spoken
to without a lie. "DO YOU FORGIVE ME?" Madam and sweetheart,
so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to
discover what forgiveness means. "IS IT STILL THE SAME
BETWEEN US?" Why, how can it be? It is eternally different;
and yet you are still the friend of my heart. "DO YOU
UNDERSTAND ME?" God knows; I should think it highly
improbable.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may
have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet
come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.
And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or
spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a
man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical
point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his
tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth
conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to
sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer
to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an
exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which
you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a
conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate
statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the
intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you
address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell
truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but
to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to
letter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a
Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a
kind hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill
name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations;
the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful
passage I remember to have read in any modern author, (1) "two
to speak truth - one to speak and another to hear." He must
be very little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth,
who does not recognise the fact. A grain of anger or a grain
of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes
the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who
have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever
ready to break the truce. To speak truth there must be moral
equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and
child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing
bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is
another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect
notion of the child's character, formed in early years or
during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres,
noting only the facts which suit with his preconception; and
wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once
and finally gives up the effort to speak truth. With our
chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between
lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth
is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the
other. A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of
long and delicate explanations; and where the life is known
even YEA and NAY become luminous. In the closest of all
relations - that of a love well founded and equally shared -
speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process
or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate
directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer
words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each
other's hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical basis;
it is a familiarity of nature's making and apart from
voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort outrun
knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the
acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so
it is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows
more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by
a natural compulsion; and between man and wife the language of
the body is largely developed and grown strangely eloquent.
The thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would
only lose to be set down in words - ay, although Shakespeare
himself should be the scribe.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.