Book: Virginibus Puerisque

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Virginibus Puerisque




And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the
situation of these South American citizens forms only a very
pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. This world
itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space,
among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in
contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would
set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what,
pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its
organs, but a mere bagful of petards? The least of these is
as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder-
magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and
every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in
peril. If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend
we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened
as they make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends
it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would
follow them into battle - the blue-peter might fly at the
truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if
these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of
spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table:
a deadlier spot than any battle-field in history, where the
far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left
their bones! What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so
much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it
be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we
take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet,
and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries
going through. By the time a man gets well into the
seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle, and when
he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an
overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do
the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were
never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the
raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their
own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning,
but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some
one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a
guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so
much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and
they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age
compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and
peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may fairly
be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a
much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf,
than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and
clamber into bed.

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with
what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley
of the Shadow of Death. The whole way is one wilderness of
snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch,
is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning through it all,
like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers one
of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he
encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge
over Baiae bay; and when they were in the height of their
enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the
company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad
miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race
of man. Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even
while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed
by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over in the
end!

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork
of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the
instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in
the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should
think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the
devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of Death
are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more
we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an immense
proportion of boat accidents would never happen if people held
the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet,
unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some
landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures
makes it fast. A strange instance of man's unconcern and
brazen boldness in the face of death!

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we
import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have
no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and
some of its consequences to others; and although we have some
experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has
flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess
at the meaning of the word LIFE. All literature, from Job and
Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an
attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of
view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of
living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about
the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is
a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the
same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged
over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon
another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy
has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her
contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may
very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely,
surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be
afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a
club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of
abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its dozen
senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms
of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true
throughout - that we do not love life, in the sense that we
are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do
not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living. Into
the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of
providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing
hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health,
good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-
approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to
anything like a general view of life's possibilities and
issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all
the most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be deeply
interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly
the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to
disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. For
surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber
roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff
fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a
measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon
both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the
dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be
hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the
tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel
a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they
draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a
bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the
question. When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets
a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of
contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, like the
Commander's statue; we have something else in hand, thank God,
and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the world
over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting
company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us also the
trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no
leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon
with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to
us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours,
to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the
mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of
our own nimble bodies.

We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring
about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is
generally very bald, and his senses very dull, before he comes
to that. Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead
wall - a mere bag's end, as the French say - or whether we
think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our
turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny;
whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic
poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look
justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount
into a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and
all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion
possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing
terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single
mind. No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache
and terror from the thought of death than our respected
lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his
conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh
and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he
ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with
triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual
cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two
qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the
first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate
in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all
abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong
carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in
maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well
armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend
and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for
tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man
who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to
consider others. That eminent chemist who took his walks
abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had
all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his
own digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in
the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression
in a paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink
spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated
temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin
shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul
becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world
begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the
regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward
over blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the
scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now the man who
has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock
of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly
used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different
acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and
fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running
towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and
become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his
health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at
the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and
peril towards his aim. Death is on all sides of him with
pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us;
unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends and
relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal
synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a
true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and
spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in
any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace
until he touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!"
cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are
great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain
satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some
sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation
tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the
stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of
Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal
limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him
through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely
considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any
work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who
would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had
each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to
begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this
is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a
regulated temperature - as if that were not to die a hundred
times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it were not
to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad
immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be the
patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent
Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at
arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark
chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than
to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done
with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means
begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year,
even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and
see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in
finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour.
A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which out-
lives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work
with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they
may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart
that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse
behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in
mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous
foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of
boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and
silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a
termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably
straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made
their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I
cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in
their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man,
this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so
much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life,
a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound
on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is
scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when,
trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-
blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.



CHAPTER VI - EL DORADO



IT seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world
where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and
where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great
gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and
irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it would
seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as
possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet,
as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an
ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to
another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon
for onward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small
planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a
brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes
are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is
prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a
question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we
want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy for
ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune
which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a
revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to
be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-
directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece;
and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a
mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may
very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own
desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with
even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and
people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed
appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the
two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted
colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils
interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to
beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in
the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal
so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any
more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of
the world and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to
do the like in any province of experience - would not that man
be in a poor way for amusement ever after?

One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his
knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to reflect,
and often laying the book down to contemplate the landscape or
the prints in the inn parlour; for he fears to come to an end
of his entertainment, and be left companionless on the last
stages of his journey. A young fellow recently finished the
works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright,
with the ten note-books upon Frederick the Great. "What!"
cried the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more
Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?" A more celebrated
instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly because he
had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished
the DECLINE AND FALL, he had only a few moments of joy; and it
was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.

Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows;
our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end
of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow
themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the
child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it
is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have
seen it through its teething and its education, and at last
its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new
quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of
your children's children grows as touching a concern as that
of your own. Again, when you have married your wife, you
would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go
downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended courting
to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often
difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to
keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which
both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true
love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the
married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and
generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable
ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very
fact that they are two instead of one.

"Of making books there is no end," complained the
Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising
letters as an occupation. There is no end, indeed, to making
books or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth.
Problem gives rise to problem. We may study for ever, and we
are never as learned as we would. We have never made a statue
worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a
continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find
another ocean or another plain upon the further side. In the
infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence and
to spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle, which can be
read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or
in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather and the
seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there
for a lifetime there will be always something new to startle
and delight us.

There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one
thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And from a
variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it
be worth attaining.

A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras,
ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest;
indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall
never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there
is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were
endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not
much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of
mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither!
Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some
conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the
setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye
know your own blessednes; for to travel hopefully is a better
thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.



CHAPTER VII - THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS



"Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am
sure it is so in States to honour them." - SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.


THERE is one story of the wars of Rome which I have
always very much envied for England. Germanicus was going
down at the head of the legions into a dangerous river - on
the opposite bank the woods were full of Germans - when there
flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal the Romans
on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared
into the forest where the enemy lay concealed. "Forward!"
cried Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration,
"Forward! and follow the Roman birds." It would be a very
heavy spirit that did not give a leap at such a signal, and a
very timorous one that continued to have any doubt of success.
To appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to make
imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and
its military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of
those individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in
Germany, looked altogether greater and more hopeful. It is a
kind of illusion easy to produce. A particular shape of
cloud, the appearance of a particular star, the holiday of
some particular saint, anything in short to remind the
combatants of patriotic legends or old successes, may be
enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives
to the one party a feeling that Right and the larger interests
are with them.

If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must
be about the sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not been
taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalised as an
English emblem. We know right well that a lion would fall
foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian
Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of battle.
But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene
of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in
lyrical strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating
experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always
an agreeable side to English prepossessions. A man from
Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from the
other until she begins to move, swaggers among such persons
with a sense of hereditary nautical experience. To suppose
yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you
are the countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just
as unwarrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient
guarantee that you will look well in a kilt. But the feeling
is there, and seated beyond the reach of argument. We should
consider ourselves unworthy of our descent if we did not share
the arrogance of our progenitors, and please ourselves with
the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is
looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we
regard it as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of
our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet;
for I suppose no other nation has lost as many ships, or sent
as many brave fellows to the bottom.

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