Book: Virginibus Puerisque

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Virginibus Puerisque




In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions,
there is a strong probability that age is not much more so.
Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible
credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding
stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion
that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries
of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly
constitutional millennium. Since we have explored the maze so
long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that
we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the
centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental
water. How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley
after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or
issue?

I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which
I take the liberty to reproduce. "What I advance is true,"
said one. "But not the whole truth," answered the other.
"Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a
smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir, there is no such
thing as the whole truth!" Indeed, there is nothing so
evident in life as that there are two sides to a question.
History is one long illustration. The forces of nature are
engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward
intelligences. We never pause for a moment's consideration
but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity
exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into
our ears that this or that question has only one possible
solution; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow,
dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a
doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and
uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other
side and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is
putting everybody exactly right in his INSTITUTES, and hot-
headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already
looking at the other side in his library in Perigord, and
predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the
Bible as they had found already in the Church. Age may have
one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing
more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that
both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but
what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather
than a form of difference?

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a
bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very
face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that
we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no
answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you
please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the
famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to
differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one
undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely
to lend our musical voices.



CHAPTER III - AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS


"BOSWELL: We grow 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 every one is bound, under pain of a decree
in absence convicting them of LESE-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, savours 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 handicap race for sixpenny 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, it "goes for"
them. And while such an one is ploughing 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 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 youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay
may 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 poring 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
Shalott, 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 thought.

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 lack-lustre 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 Emphyteusis 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
Aspects 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 gardened 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 Wiseman accosting such an one, and the
conversation that should thereupon ensue:-

"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"

"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou
not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest
obtain knowledge?"

"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your
leave."

"Learning, quotha! 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't?"

"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."

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with
passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful
countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!"
said he; "I would have all such rogues 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. Wiseman's, 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, with a name to go by;
or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the
work-house 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. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all
experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few
years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether
you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential
calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play
in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person,
looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a
smile on his face all the time, will 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 lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-
like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic 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 business man some of his
half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at
large, and Art of Living? Nay, 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 takes him along a by-road, not much
frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called
Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense.
Thence 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 plangent 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
paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard
workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw 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 medal;
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 breeched, 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 snuff-box 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
gentlemen, 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 fulfil important offices
towards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent
on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and
signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the
policemen 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 Newcome
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 Falstaff was neither
sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-
faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done
without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of
obligation to Northcote, who had never done him anything he
could call a service, than 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 favour 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 he 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 blest. There must always be two
to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever
there is an element of sacrifice, the favour 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 sow 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 every one he passed
into a good humour; 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 goodwill; 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 Liveableness 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 absents himself entirely
from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with
carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; 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
fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is
better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than
daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.

And what, in God's name, is all this pother 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 pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to
the corn, 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 a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great
cause for personal vainglory 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 labour themselves into a great fortune
and thence into the 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 farces was the
bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is
not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless
youth, for all they know, may be chimerical 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.



CHAPTER IV - ORDERED SOUTH



BY a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are
sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.
Often, too, they are places we have visited in former years,
or seen briefly in passing by, and kept ever afterwards in
pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy that we
shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take
up again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we
let it fall. We shall now have an opportunity of finishing
many pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore before our
curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be that we have kept in
mind, during all these years, the recollection of some valley
into which we have just looked down for a moment before we
lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that
we have lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised
ourselves with the thought of corners we had never turned, or
summits we had all but climbed: we shall now be able, as we
tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinished pleasures,
and pass beyond the barriers that confined our recollections.

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led
away when hope and memory are both in one story, that I
daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives
sentence of banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-
health as not the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor
is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the
journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he
tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him,
and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old
quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint
autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and
plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of
fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will
transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so too
he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity of such
little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him
through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a
character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow
might see them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over
the land on some Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a
few children huzzah and wave their hands to the express; but
for the most part it is an interruption too brief and isolated
to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing;
a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal boat,
so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a
leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty
equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and
wood and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very
ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the
averted head, to indicate that she has been even conscious of
its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of
railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs
so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart
becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country;
and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of
carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at
unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley
that leads toward the town; they are left behind with the
signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches the
long train sweep away into the golden distance.

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