Book: Virginibus Puerisque

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Virginibus Puerisque




Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of
wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed
the indefinable line that separates South from North. And
this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness
is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight
association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not
until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern
sunshine peeping through the PERSIENNES, and the southern
patois confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come
early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the
anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It
will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new
significance to all he may see for many days to come. There
is something in the mere name of the South that carries
enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks
up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to
get by heart the permanent lines and character of the
landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own - an
estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he
was now to receive in free and full possession. Even those
who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and
everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and
finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would
think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of
travelling hourly farther abroad.

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in
his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to understand the
change that has befallen him. Everything about him is as he
had remembered, or as he had anticipated. Here, at his feet,
under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea.
Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of the
naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves
of the railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of
one bay after another along the whole reach of the Riviera.
And of all this, he has only a cold head knowledge that is
divorced from enjoyment. He recognises with his intelligence
that this thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his
heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not beautiful for
him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in
vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there,
looking with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the
pleasure that he remembers in other days, as the sick folk may
have awaited the coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda.
He is like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid,
indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out of
sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of
the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is
disenchanted for him. He seems to himself to touch things
with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil. His life
becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he
has found and struck them. He cannot recognise that this
phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and
delicate and alive.

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and
amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of
the winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and
flourish. A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen
snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for the hale
rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window-
panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes,
and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet
the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is of the
flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its
ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the
snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon
the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry
streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his
memory. The hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways;
the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement;
the sheen of the rainy streets towards afternoon; the
meagreanatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet
garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on days
when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and
such as these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute
themselves for the fanciful winter scenes with which he had
pleased himself a while before. He cannot be glad enough that
he is where he is. If only the others could be there also; if
only those tramps could lie down for a little in the sunshine,
and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier
earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness,
and no hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is
with him!

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all.
If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his
numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a
joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity. There
is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad
activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred and
awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very
trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of
delight" comes often on small wings. For the pleasure that we
take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes
sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when we
expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for
days together, in the very home-land of the beautiful. We may
have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the
thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth
in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of
surroundings; so that we see it "with a child's first
pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side.
And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much
more so with the invalid. Some day he will find his first
violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the
cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be
transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet.
Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a
spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-
gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and
something significant or monumental in the grouping, something
in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic
of the dress of these southern women, will come borne to him
unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we
tell ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful
experience. Or it may be something even slighter: as when the
opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to
produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to
him by the chance isolation - as he changes the position of
his sunshade - of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and
weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of
the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate
and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now
gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on
cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the
wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up
with little momentary silverings and shadows. But every one
sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may
be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens
on their heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock
and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled,
busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they
were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; of the
air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and
the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up,
solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at
evening.

There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of
one such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy
agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration
of many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must
depend. Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some
attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to
and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the
landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just
broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by
some cunning touch, the composition of the picture? And not
only a change of posture - a snatch of perfume, the sudden
singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an
invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the
merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most
infinitesimal nerve of a man's body - not one of the least of
these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings
some refinement of its own into the character of the pleasure
we feel.

And if the external conditions are thus varied and
subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies. No man
can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end,
because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for
any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement
of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest
pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these
circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution
of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can
see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into
account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the
nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the
architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the
beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or
sight. We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet
what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that
gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and
makes out of certain colours, certain distributions of
graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which
alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in one
of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house
to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to
triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was
more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they
were; because they had paid the money and he had received the
pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self-
complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy
the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the
picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself
a fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit.
It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the
event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out
his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have
credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is not a good
unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less
degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved
and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man's
enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares and
disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to depend
greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and
harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree
of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric
of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his
pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and
the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life
of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those
excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too
long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills
are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far
out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the
mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after
day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and
gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him
wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful
uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with
the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes
pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented
prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race
of active life, he now falls out of the little eddy that
circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees
the country people come and go about their everyday affairs,
the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir
of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly
in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal
impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he
pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or
the robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night.

In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of
other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last
quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the
senses there is a gentle preparation for the final
insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality
comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less
as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal
gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way. As we
turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow
feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and easy,
until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so
desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength
decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower;
and he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the
passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of
death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly
and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the
coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild
approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to
persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It
is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that
withdraws and withers up from round about him. He has
outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and
if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young
and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to
him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of
the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall,
he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight
that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly
await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she
comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.

And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are
many and kindly. The sight of children has a significance for
him such as it may have for the aged also, but not for others.
If he has been used to feel humanely, and to look upon life
somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole of personal
pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion of
his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity
of death. He knows that already, in English counties, the
sower follows the ploughman up the face of the field, and the
rooks follow the sower; and he knows also that he may not live
to go home again and see the corn spring and ripen, and be cut
down at last, and brought home with gladness. And yet the
future of this harvest, the continuance of drought or the
coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever.
For he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of
events in which his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful
in a plenty, and sorrowful for a famine, that did not increase
or diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency of his
own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all the disinterested
hopes for mankind and a better future which have been the
solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond
the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes
small difference whether he die five thousand years, or five
thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch for which he
faithfully labours. He has not deceived himself; he has known
from the beginning that he followed the pillar of fire and
cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and that it
was reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of
the land. And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter
about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded
visions accompany his sad decline, and follow him, with
friendly voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of
death. The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in
his days of health, more strongly than these generous
aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward
beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even
when his hands grope already on the face of the impassable.

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of
his friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their thought
for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains
woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the power of bodily
dissolution to undo? In a thousand ways will he survive and
be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during
all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse with
him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what
was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places
that knew him no more, and found no better consolation than
the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be at
rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek
and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in calling ours,
it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our
decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a
monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he
knows on the map or through the report of his vicegerents,
than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are
we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in
the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and
fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us,
than about the real knot of our identity - that central
metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware -
or the diligent service of arteries and veins and
infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a
proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the
whole? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and
honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are
dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and they are not,
perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series of such
impoverishments, till their life and influence narrow
gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and
death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.


NOTE. - To this essay I must in honesty append a word or
two of qualification; for this is one of the points on which a
slightly greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from
particular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself
pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to
the advance of the human species and the coming of the kingdom
of justice and love. As he grows older, he begins to think
more narrowly of man's action in the general, and perhaps more
arrogantly of his own in the particular. He has not that same
unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he been
spared, seeing finally that that would have been little; but
he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will make by
dying. A young man feels himself one too many in the world;
his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious
utility; no ties, but to his parents. and these he is sure to
disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been
made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the
mere fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact
or else the feeling. Either we become so callously accustomed
to our own useless figure in the world, or else - and this,
thank God, in the majority of cases - we so collect about us
the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our
effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to
entertain no longer the question of our right to be.

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies
himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful
view expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some
to help, some to love, some to correct; it may be, some to
punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the
man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son
and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father. That
life which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad
filaments, into the lives of others. It is not indispensable;
another will take the place and shoulder the discharged
responsibility; but the better the man and the nobler his
purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction
of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have
lived a generation, is not only to have grown at home in that
perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To
die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base,
something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only
reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is never
to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter from the
fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done
already. To have been so useless and now to lose all hope of
being useful any more - there it is that death and memory
assail him. And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic
cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily from
strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his
friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how
shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which
was his only business in this world, which was so fitfully
pursued, and which is now so ineffectively to end?



CHAPTER V - AES TRIPLEX



THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp
and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their
consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience,
and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other
accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps
suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a
regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of
years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc
made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which
many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty
chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in
taking away our friends, death does not take them away
utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon
intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence
a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind,
from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of
mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant
going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the
least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of
respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we
must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and
the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and
much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of
poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in
many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down
with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the
bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think,
have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in
practice.

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of
with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few
have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances.
We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the
side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous
neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by
the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving
gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are
serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles
overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the
bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin
may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his
merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young people,
and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably
reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not
credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas,
should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long
distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of
high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a
catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly
be relished in such circumstances without something like a
defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for nobody but
hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils
drowning care in a perpetual carouse.

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