Book: Virginibus Puerisque

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Virginibus Puerisque




(1) A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS,
Wednesday, p. 283.

Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others,
that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a
doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and
confidence is but another charge against the person doubted.
"WHAT A MONSTROUS DISHONESTY IS THIS IF I HAVE BEEN DECEIVED
SO LONG AND SO COMPLETELY!" Let but that thought gain
entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the
past; why, that is your crime! Make all clear, convince the
reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof against you. "IF
YOU CAN ABUSE ME NOW, THE MORE LIKELY THAT YOU HAVE ABUSED ME
FROM THE FIRST."

For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting,
and they will end well; for your advocate is in your lover's
heart and speaks her own language; it is not you but she
herself who can defend and clear you of the charge. But in
slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union? Indeed,
is it worth while? We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less
concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right;
all fawning at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-
dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye - this is our opportunity in
the ages - and we wag our tail with a poor smile. "IS THAT
ALL?" All? If you only knew! But how can they know? They
do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the
indifferent.

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear,
is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others
that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of
human feeling the clement judge is the most successful
pleader.



CHAPTER II - CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH



"You know my mother now and then argues very notably;
always very warmly at least. I happen often to differ from
her; and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we
very seldom are so happy as to convince one another. A pretty
common case, I believe, in all VEHEMENT debatings. She says,
I am TOO WITTY; Anglice, TOO PERT; I, that she is TOO WISE;
that is to say, being likewise put into English, NOT SO YOUNG
AS SHE HAS BEEN." - Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, CLARISSA, vol.
ii. Letter xiii.


THERE is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and
prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is full
of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with
some qualification. But when the same person has
ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should
be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is
conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them
from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their
mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of
humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not
follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than
the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and
perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful
Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is
still in his counting-house counting out his money; and
doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other
hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races
and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side,
and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog.
It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such
sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every
lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your
umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser
flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so
long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money
matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.

It is a still more difficult consideration for our
average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down
to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated
the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability, those
characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the
face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of
praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of
our commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral
sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and
reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-
colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the
enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's
daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered
America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent
navigator. His life is not the kind of thing one would like
to put into the hands of young people; rather, one would do
one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of
adventure and disintegrating influence in life. The time
would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history
whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to
the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine
it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar
attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national
life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the
same spirit as they assist at a performance of the LYONS MAIL.
Persons of substance take in the TIMES and sit composedly in
pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in
business. As for the generals who go galloping up and down
among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats - as for the actors
who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the
stage - they must belong, thank God! to a different order of
beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the
windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in
ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would no
more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of
doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in
consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of
their school history of England.

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly
proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another instance
of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life
have been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances are made
for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the
disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old
gentleman waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I
was your age." It is not thought an answer at all, if the
young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably
think when I am yours." And yet the one is as good as the
other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in
the making." All opinions, properly so called, are stages on
the road to truth. It does not follow that a man will travel
any further; but if he has really considered the world and
drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far. This does not
apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road to
nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a
catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an
opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one
for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the
world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way
of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual
counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with
nothing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory
in the background. The imputed virtue of folios full of
knockdown arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as
some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the
constable's truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as
old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet
they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofitable
discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings.
And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual
growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at
once amusing and fortifying to the mind.

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having
passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good
places to pass through, and I am none the less at my
destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the way
to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to
something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot
Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a
sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a
million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to
convince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile you must do
something, be something, believe something. It is not
possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and
blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming
ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to
remain in a state of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in
quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing
to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a
very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian.
For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist
with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the
moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what
we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more
perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of
men. I seem to see that my own scheme would not answer; and
all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress
some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged
others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with
years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and
travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to
this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant
of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not
acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better - I
daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I have no choice in
the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind
than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and
decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless
outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about
that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the
immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself
on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism.
Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become
cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth
of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age
leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of
course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards
the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these
forms and sources of error.

As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of
knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities,
now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare the
headlong course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man
is carried away; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he
grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is
hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We
have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from
our theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or
the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to
their opinions. We take a sight at a condition in life, and
say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more
than an impression. If we had breathing space, we should take
the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck
hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in
love than married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin
to be another, and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood
than we begin to decline towards the grave. It is in vain to
seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a
medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science,
in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a
pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of
conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgment, but
to take action, before the hour is at an end. And we cannot
even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things,
our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not
infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the
masquerade. In the course of time, we grow to love things we
hated and hate things we loved. Milton is not so dull as he
once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing. It is decidedly
harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard to sit still.
There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide
and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are
modified or chanced and it will be a poor account of us if our
views do not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the
same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been
stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a
prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the
wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from
the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames
on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no
other for the whole voyage.

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at
Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. SI JEUNESSE SAVAIT, SI
VIEILLESSE POUVAIT, is a very pretty sentiment, but not
necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, it is not so
much that the young people do not know, as that they do not
choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but
perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise
resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit. It
would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young
again and leave him all his SAVOIR. I scarcely think he would
put his money in the Savings Bank after all; I doubt if he
would be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and as
for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod
Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.
Prudence is a wooden juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin
walks with the portly air of a high priest, and after whom
dances many a successful merchant in the character of Atys.
But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth. If a man lives
to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments
his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a
deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

It is customary to say that age should be considered,
because it comes last. It seems just as much to the point,
that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam,
if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never
comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of even
the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the
expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the
happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of
ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man
has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and
saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it
becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on
the confines of farce. The victim is dead - and he has
cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities
none the less absurd for being grim. To husband a favourite
claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful
stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar - a
whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with
cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality;
but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all
its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of
gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable,
old age. We should not compliment a hungry man, who should
refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the
dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or
not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we
surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great
and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old
naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know
that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we
are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco
among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have
a pipe before we go!

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous
preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away. We fall
on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us.
After the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to
fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of
equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups
and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that
restrains our hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the
pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder and more
tolerable; and in a word, this period for which we are asked
to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is, in its own
right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by
managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration,
youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A
full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and
independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the
bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon
their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to
scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End,
to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be
about it while we are still young. It will not do to delay
until we are clogged with prudence and limping with
rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What does Gravity out
of bed?" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the
world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners
of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see
sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to
circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a
mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to
applaud HERNANI. There is some meaning in the old theory
about wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness
and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended on
as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," says Lord
Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of
youths up to the date of his last novel, (1) "it is
extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings
of an inexperienced young man." And this mobility is a
special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible
virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt
through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest
passages. Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do
all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will
live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse.
Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair
chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they
must have been feeble fellows - creatures made of putty and
pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness,
in their composition; we may sympathise with their parents,
but there is not much cause to go into mourning for
themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the
worst of mankind.

(1) LOTHAIR.

When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I
thought when I was your age," he has proved the youth's case.
Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or decline of
animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he thought so while
he was young; and all men have thought so while they were
young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May;
and here is another young man adding his vote to those of
previous generations and rivetting another link to the chain
of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a young man
to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and
circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing
newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something
worthier than their lives.

By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more
than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend
the following little tale. A child who had been remarkably
fond of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found
himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without
any abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen;
already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the
playbox; he had to blush if he was found among his lead
soldiers; the shades of the prison-house were closing about
him with a vengeance. There is nothing more difficult than to
put the thoughts of children into the language of their
elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this
juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings,
in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure
myself against idle jeers. At the same time, I am sure that
playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up
out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a
little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as
they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I
shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of
their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money,
I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until
the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in the train along the
Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a
pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and
decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux;
childhood was to come again! The idea has an air of simple
nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the
reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be
carried into effect. There was a worm i' the bud, a fatal
error in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and then
youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be
always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing
circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an
adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time
arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist
in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.

You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may
have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are
probably over the score on the other. But they had a point;
they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and
passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you,
and implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which
you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now
see that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is
a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.
The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as
much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings.
Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our
society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder,
you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised
if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the
Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in
universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices
of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of
everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young
fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is
better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a
scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible
to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as
it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the
universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like
smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the
young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As
for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their
hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the
farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at
the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance
for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have
not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If
we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures,
and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some
nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves
to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull,
respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of
an angel.

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