Across The Plains
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Across The Plains
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And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of
writers. LES BLANCS ET LES BLEUS (for instance) is of an order of
merit very different from LE VICOMTE DE BRAGLONNE; and if any
gentleman can bear to spy upon the nakedness of CASTLE DANGEROUS,
his name I think is Ham: let it be enough for the rest of us to
read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart. Thus in
old age, when occupation and comfort are most needful, the writer
must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner. The
painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of
the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel until a
great age without dishonourable failure. The writer has the double
misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable of
working when he is old. It is thus a way of life which conducts
directly to a false position.
For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary)
must look to be ill-paid. Tennyson and Montepin make handsome
livelihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not
all perhaps desire to be Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your
trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money. What
you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry,
is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a
twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you the right to look
for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade,
lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It will be seen I
have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist
class. Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field
labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have
never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer;
or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more
important than the services of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on
how little Millet was content to live; or do they think, because
they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal
virtues? But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man
be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he be not
frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of LE VIEUX
SALTIMBANQUE; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue
to be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door,
he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a
slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen
through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commanded; for
words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man
should support his family, than that he should attain to - or
preserve - distinction in the arts. But if the pressure comes,
through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and
stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can
reach him.
And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debutant artist is to have
no thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is to expect no
honours from the State, he may not at least look forward to the
delights of popularity? Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury
dish. And in so far as you may mean the countenance of other
artists you would put your finger on one of the most essential and
enduring pleasures of the career of art. But in so far as you
should have an eye to the commendations of the public or the notice
of the newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing a dream. It
is true that in certain esoteric journals the author (for instance)
is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a great deal more
than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided himself
on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have denied
themselves the privilege of reading his work. But if a man be
sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to
that which often accompanies and always follows it - wild ridicule.
A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will
hear of his failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still
do well, but the critics may have tired of praising him, or there
may have sprung up some new idol of the instant, some "dust a
little gilt," to whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is
the obverse and the reverse of that empty and ugly thing called
popularity. Will any man suppose it worth the gaining?
CHAPTER XI - PULVIS ET UMBRA
We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our
ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down
of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and
we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them
change with every climate, and no country where some action is not
honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice;
and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the
wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It is not
strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much.
Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till
they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and
weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life,
faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more
ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of
the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more
ancient still.
I
Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful
things and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this
solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios.
Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down;
gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through
space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of
distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures
of abstraction, NH3, and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon
this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of
speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.
But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us.
We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the
shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing;
some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in
desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we call
matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to
whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds.
This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots
uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms
with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become
independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory;
one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the
malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of
the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional
disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or
the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our
breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean:
the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it
bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the
hard rock the crystal is forming.
In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the
earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the
inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first
coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the
myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of
birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered,
the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have
little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their
delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These
share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of
hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the
miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived,
and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and
brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and
staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this
mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these
prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming
them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat:
the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion
of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.
Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied
ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns
alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety
million miles away.
II
What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the
agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of
himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that
move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; -
and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how
surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast
among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and
so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended,
irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should
have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being
merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with
imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant,
often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to
debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising
up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his
friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in
pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch
the heart of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to
the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something
owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of
decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of
shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The
design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked
natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming
martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a
bosom thought: - Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and
cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of
honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we
know so little: - But in man, at least, it sways with so complete
an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the
selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains
supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a
glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most cowardly
stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly
conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death.
Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted
practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life:
stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think
this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for
eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and
misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly
violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of
the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked
for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best
consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should
continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and
inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our
race should not cease to labour.
If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle,
be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer
sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not
where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of
society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous
morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his
shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the
ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman
senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile
pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple,
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted
perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering
with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time)
kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her
child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society,
living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief,
the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour
and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with
service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches: - everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the
ensign of man's ineffectual goodness: - ah! if I could show you
this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over,
in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every
circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour,
the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet
they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their
doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long,
the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.
Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and
consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of
the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet
deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and
live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man.
A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting
moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our
thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but
noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his
kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing
apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus:
and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an
unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop
with the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened
with the swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the
hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend
his doings; and here also, in his ordered politics and rigorous
justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of
individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this
desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the
grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of
Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of
ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance.
The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the
common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the
barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the
oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us
the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like
us - like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle - to do
well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of
support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be
crucified between that double law of the members and the will. Are
they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some
sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded
virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we
take to be just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness,
we call wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look
for. Even while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man
treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon
their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den
of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a
day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom
our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span
eternity.
And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under
the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the
erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes - God forbid it
should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of
unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be
enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty,
strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not all in vain.
CHAPTER XII - A CHRISTMAS SERMON
BY the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for
twelve months; and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal
and seasonable manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-
bed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles
Second, wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson
in human incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king -
remembered and embodied all his wit and scepticism along with more
than his usual good humour in the famous "I am afraid, gentlemen, I
am an unconscionable time a-dying."
I
An unconscionable time a-dying - there is the picture ("I am
afraid, gentlemen,") of your life and of mine. The sands run out,
and the hours are "numbered and imputed," and the days go by; and
when the last of these finds us, we have been a long time dying,
and what else? The very length is something, if we reach that hour
of separation undishonoured; and to have lived at all is doubtless
(in the soldierly expression) to have served.
There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in the
German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouing go
home; and of how, seizing their general's hand, these old, war-worn
exiles passed his finger along their toothless gums. SUNT LACRYMAE
RERUM: this was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon. And
when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears his marks of service.
He may have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the
army; at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.
The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble
character. It never seems to them that they have served enough;
they have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more
modest to be singly thankful that we are no worse. It is not only
our enemies, those desperate characters - it is we ourselves who
know not what we do, - thence springs the glimmering hope that
perhaps we do better than we think: that to scramble through this
random business with hands reasonably clean to have played the part
of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often
resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is
for the poor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to see
some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving
for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed
of hire.
And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require
much of others? If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies,
is it not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of
others? And he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no
more than that he has been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not
be tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably long of getting
hanged? It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at
all, think of it too much; it is certain we all think too much of
sin. We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right;
Christ would never hear of negative morality; THOU SHALT was ever
his word, with which he superseded THOU SHALT NOT. To make our
idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the
imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a
secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not
dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with
inverted pleasure. If we cannot drive it from our minds - one
thing of two: either our creed is in the wrong and we must more
indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right,
we are criminal lunatics and should place our persons in restraint.
A mark of such unwholesomely divided minds is the passion for
interference with others: the Fox without the Tail was of this
breed, but had (if his biographer is to be trusted) a certain
antique civility now out of date. A man may have a flaw, a
weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his
temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into
cruelty. It has to be conquered; but it must never he suffered to
engross his thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the farther
side, and must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as this
preliminary clearing of the decks has been effected. In order that
he may be kind and honest, it may be needful he should become a
total abstainer; let him become so then, and the next day let him
forget the circumstance. Trying to be kind and honest will require
all his thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a wise companion;
in so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will still be
the worse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will
be required in judging life, and a great deal of humility in
judging others.
It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's
endeavour springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher
tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have.
Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too
inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather
set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had
rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or
mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to co-endure
with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the
heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the
Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little
less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to
renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to
keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on
the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a
task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an
ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who
should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is
indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can
controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not
intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in
every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of
living well. Here is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for
the end of life. Only self-deception will be satisfied, and there
need be no despair for the despairer.
II
But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us
to thoughts of self-examination: it is a season, from all its
associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of
joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to
sadness. And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest
and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well
he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face. Noble
disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even
to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter
the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay
without. And the kingdom of heaven is of the child-like, of those
who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men
of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have
lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely
character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns,
the shame were indelible if WE should lose it. Gentleness and
cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect
duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have
neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom
Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend
upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may
be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should
spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
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