Part 4

‘Be with our friends, be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest. If any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts--eager to labour: eager to be happy, if happiness be our portion; and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.’ Certainly the prayers of R. L. S. should have a place on every bedside shelf. That you are familiar with the foregoing prayer, I cannot doubt. ‘Many are the golden passages the lover of good books has by heart.’ It may be that you have upon your own particular bedside shelf many ‘devotional authors’ with whose every word you are familiar--books, small and great, which are as jewels in your shelf. And no doubt you have upon the same shelf many every-day and every-hour books, acting, as it were, as a setting to your gems. For certainly the bedside shelf, if it is to be complete, must contain books to suit all moods. One cannot be certain in what mood the night watches will find one. The over-excited brain, for instance, needs its own particular medicine, and sometimes two, three, or more drugs are required, according to the state and nature of the patient. In the majority of cases it is futile to attempt a cure with a book less lively than the patient’s own brain. His abnormal condition must be righted by degrees. One book, or drug, must follow another, till his mind has been restored to a normal state. Then may he resort to his accustomed ‘rest books,’ and so fall asleep.

But I fear that such talk ‘smacks’ of the doctor and his medicine chest, and I desire to conjure up restful thoughts. Well may the reader be forgiven if he starts up in protest. Indeed, here is the difficulty and the danger of seeking to promote a restful condition. One is so apt to make, with the best intentions possible, a remark which has the reverse effect. There is, I say, the risk of naming a book which to the reader might come as a call to action--to daring deeds and mighty enterprises--a mood as far removed from slumber as the North Pole from the South.

I may, however, speak freely enough in the company of book-lovers who wake with the rising sun and take to themselves one of their beloved books. They will not resent my likes and dislikes--they who open the day with a ‘jolly good book.’ In their company I may confess that for the early morning I prefer a book with plenty of ‘go’ in it. Give me life and spirit and enterprise. Thus may I hope to retain some measure of the buoyancy of youth. It is good to have been young in youth, and, as the years go, to grow _younger_. ‘Many,’ it is written, ‘are already old before they are through their teens; but to travel deliberately through one’s ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education. Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and still the world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what can be more encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome at one age welcome at another?’

Let _Westward Ho!_ stand on your bedside shelf, and many other books of the same brave and lively order--‘the travel and adventure books of our spirited youth.’ These, if you meet fresh days with a book, will brace you for the battle. Stevenson must, of course, remain one of your companions--your faithful friend both night and morning. Bravery he will give you, and grace also.

Forth from the casement, on the plain Where honour has the world to gain, Pour forth and bravely do your part, O knights of the unshielded heart! Forth and for ever forward!--out From prudent turret and redoubt, And in the mellay charge amain To fall, but yet to rise again! Captive? Ah, still, to honour bright, A captive soldier of the right! Or free and fighting, good with ill? Unconquering but unconquered still!

And mark again with what ‘manly grace’ and beauty of expression Stevenson turns our thoughts to the ‘Giver of all strength.’

‘Give us grace and strength to bear and to persevere. Offenders, give us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders. Forgetful ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of others. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.’

If there is a more helpful bedside author than Stevenson, I should much like to make his acquaintance. To few is it given to speak ‘the word that cheers’ with such a fine combination of tenderness and courage.

‘It is a commonplace,’ he says, ‘that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought. I believe this is every one’s experience; but an apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in a man’s spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need.’

To the troubled, relaxed mind such words come as a bracing tonic. Too often have we passed sleepless hours for the want of a word in season--something to put a little ‘grit’ into us for the duties of the morrow. Where the average mortal is concerned Stevenson certainly supplies that need. Should he by any chance fail--well, there is an essayist of our own day, waiting to minister to the most exacting needs. I have in mind the many beautiful and tender pages written by one whom we associate with a certain college window. Certainly of him it may be said that he seeks to comfort and console, and to soothe and lull to rest.

X

OLD FRIENDS

Come, and take choice of my library, And so beguile thy sorrow. GOLDSMITH.

NOW let us dwell upon our every-day and every-hour books--our dear old familiar friends. ‘On a shelf in my bookcase,’ says Alexander Smith, ‘are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear. Those of them that originally possessed gilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, and they open of themselves in places wherein I have been happy, and with whose every word I am familiar as with the furniture of the room in which I nightly slumber; each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant scribbled on their margins. Those favourite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books I have singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men.’

Ah! that makes pleasant reading. For do not the sentiments expressed reflect our own feelings? And do they not place us in gracious and distinguished company? In his charming way, Goldsmith whispers, ‘The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.’ And to this Dillon adds, ‘Choose an author as you would choose a friend’; whilst Langford, touching the same theme, declares that ‘a wise man will select his book with care, for he will not wish to class them all under the sacred name of friends.’

And as friendship has its roots deep set in love and sympathy, and is for ‘serene days and country rambles, and also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution, and, moreover, keeps company with the sallies of the wit,’ it is easy enough to understand why such authors as Charles Lamb, Oliver Goldsmith, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Richard Jefferies, Thomas De Quincey, Joseph Addison, and, of later years, Robert Louis Stevenson, have our affections.

Here they stand--Lamb, Goldsmith, Hazlitt, Hunt, Jefferies--the whole lovable company. What shall I say concerning these friends of ours? I am moved by deep and serious feelings. But, according to his own telling, the gentle Elia, the first in mind, ‘had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy man. The _toga virilis_ never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood.’ And therein, surely, rests the secret of his charm. In spite of his brave confessions, how firm to discerning hearts is the bed of the stream over which his thoughts flow! Who can doubt the source of a stream that flows so sweetly?

And what of Oliver Goldsmith--poor ‘Goldy,’ as he was called by his circle of intimates on earth? He, too, was very human, and, indeed, had many weaknesses. And they tell us--they who write of such matters with authority--that his days of poverty and wretchedness were largely, if not entirely, the outcome of his follies. Even in the sphere in which he shines--a clear, bright, inextinguishable star--it is said that he had many short-comings. ‘He had neither the gift of knowledge nor the power of research. As an essayist and poet, he has neither extended views nor originality; as a critic, upon the few occasions upon which he embarks on criticism his sympathies are of the most restricted kind.’ And yet for the warmth and gentleness of his heart and the purity of his style we love him. ‘His playful and delicate style transformed everything he touched into something radiant with warmth and fragrant with a perfume all its own.’

And how fared it with Hazlitt--the keen critic, the impassioned writer--‘unbending and severe, insurgent in his political views’? Are we not told that he was really more of an artist and sentimentalist than a politician? ‘As for his life, it was aesthetic, Bohemian, and irregular in the extreme. The restraints of domestic life were intolerable; he wanted to be alone to write; rough accommodation and coarse fare appeased him best; _tinkerdom_ was the ordinary state of his interior environment; save for two pictures (which served as a link with past aspiration and were treasured accordingly), he had no property; a fugitive amour seemed to furnish the emotional side of him with the stimulant it most required; he was a night rambler and a reveller in Rousseau, over whose _Héloise_ and _Confessions_ he expended literally pints of tears.’ Such was the temperament of the writer, artist, and sentimentalist who gave us those incomparable essays ‘On Going a Journey,’ ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned,’ and ‘On Familiar Style.’

And what of those other old friends, Hunt, Jefferies, De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson? But our inquiries have gone far enough. What boots it to repeat that our friends were human in life, just as surely as they are human in their books, but with a humanity that allures, charms, captivates? They do not preach to us, these old friends of ours, or make open claims to virtue; and yet we are never so conscious of goodness as when they are near. Their lightest raillery scorns a mean act. In their company meanness flees as from a pestilence.... Our _friends_!

Wisely is it said that the ‘best way to represent to life the manifold use of friendship is to cast and see how many things there are which a wise man cannot do himself; and then it will appear that it was a sparing speech of the ancients to say, “that a friend is more than himself”: for that a friend is far more than himself.’

And so I thank heaven for my friends, for the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded who stand side by side, ever willing, ever ready, upon my humble shelf.

XI

THROUGH ROSE-COLOURED SPECTACLES

NOW let another occupy the printed page. I have promised to give the experiences of other book-lovers, to show how books influence their thoughts and ways; and I am anxious to introduce a short, slim gentleman of sixty odd summers, with a smiling face and an air of wellbeing, a retiring, peaceful book-lover, whom you would never suspect of playing any part in a mystery.

Nevertheless, my friend must plead guilty to practising the ‘art of make-believe’ to such a degree that one could never be certain how much was real concerning him and his affairs and how much was imaginary. Indeed, the only sure and unchanging thing about him was his spectacles and the manner in which he viewed life through them--his _point of view_.

‘My spectacles,’ he told me, over and over again, ‘are rose-coloured. You understand, _rose-coloured_. They and myself are inseparable. Without them I am as bad as stone-blind, and dare not take a step in any direction.’

Then he would smile in a manner that led one to suspect that he was merely drawing upon his imagination. But I learnt that my friend’s life had been lived under such peculiar difficulties, and that he had passed through so much sorrow and affliction, that without his rose-coloured spectacles he was, in _one_ sense, stone-blind.

It pleased him to imagine that the lenses in his treasured spectacles, which were gold-rimmed and old-fashioned in shape, had been cut from rose-coloured pebbles, with the power of giving a rosy hue to life, and bringing all things into correct perspective.

‘Correct perspective and the right point of view,’ he remarked on a certain day, ‘are everything in life. My spectacles give me the correct vision. They bring men and affairs into proper focus, and, what is more, they give them a rose tint. Robert Louis Stevenson wore spectacles something like mine, but his were far and away more powerful. They enabled him to see farther and more clearly. They were of a deeper and purer tint.’

He drew from his pocket a small cloth-bound edition of passages from Stevenson’s works. The little volume did not measure more than, say, three by five inches, and was considerably soiled and worn; but he handled it as though it were worth its weight in precious stones.

It was clear, before he opened the volume, that he knew the greater part of the contents by heart; for he commenced to quote as he ran his fingers round the edge of the cover:

‘“When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.”’

He accompanied the quotation with a pleasing smile, as who should say, ‘How true that is and how nobly expressed!’ Then he turned the leaves hastily as though looking for a favourite passage; but he abandoned the search a moment later, and glanced up.

‘I fancy I can give you the passage correctly. I should like you to hear it. It will throw light upon what I have said about my rose-coloured spectacles.’

He looked up, as he spoke, at the trees overhanging the lane through which we walked.

‘“Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as through differently-coloured glasses.”’

He paused a moment, then repeated the last line slowly and with emphasis: ‘_We see places through our humours as through differently-coloured glasses._’

‘“We are ourselves,”’ he continued, ‘“a term in the quotation, a note of the chord, and make discord and harmony almost at will. There is no fear for the result, if we but surrender ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, such as a gentle and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others....”’

Then he told me ‘some suitable sort of story’ about a certain man who built a castle upon dry land, a castle of stone, firm as a rock, and filled it with his heart’s desire. But no sooner had the man taken up his abode therein than the tide of circumstances turned. Misfortune followed misfortune; sorrow followed sorrow; first, the loss of earthly possessions, then the loss of loved ones. All brightness and hope were taken out of the man’s life, and for many years he dwelt in darkness.

At this point my friend turned away, and slowly, thoughtfully, polished his spectacles. One could not help thinking that he was relating in a parable the story of his own past. This suspicion was strengthened, if not actually confirmed, when he readjusted his spectacles and continued:

‘Then this same man built a castle in the air partly out of the creations of his own mind, partly out of the creations of others, a castle of thought, a building without visible support. He found, however, that this castle in the air, built on lines he had been taught to smile at in his youth, was more enduring than his castle of stone. Moat and drawbridge were impassable, the gates impregnable. Changed circumstances could not affect it; misfortune and sorrow could not shake it; even death left it unmoved.’

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘what I am driving at? Listen to this from my little volume: “No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his own heart.” And this: “An inspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune 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.”’

The next moment he drew from his pocket a worn leather case and showed me a portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson. He had it wrapped in two layers of paper, both yellow with age and stained from much handling. But the likeness was well preserved, as clear, perhaps, as on the day it was taken.

‘I number this likeness,’ he said, ‘amongst my treasures. They go everywhere with me--this portrait of Stevenson and this little volume of extracts from his works.’ He fingered the cover affectionately. ‘The case,’ he continued, ‘is worn with much handling, but the rose-coloured lenses have not lost their power. Listen to this: “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 awakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.” And this: “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 outside.”’

He glanced up and handed me the volume. ‘Make your own selection,’ he suggested; ‘read something that condemns me.’

I acted on the suggestion, or, rather, the _first_ part of it; for my selection, contrary to his request, was in the form of commendation:

‘“His was, indeed, a good influence in life while he was still among us; he had a fresh laugh; it did you good to see him; and, however sad he may have been at heart, he always bore a bold and cheerful countenance, and took fortune’s worst as it were the showers of spring.”’

I was not aware how entirely this fitted my friend’s case until some months had passed. Our friendship was only in its infancy at that time, little more than an acquaintance. We had no formal introduction. He had asked the time of day, then gone on to talk of his rose-coloured spectacles. We had much to say concerning his spectacles in the days that followed--always in a light and pleasant vein. To be tedious or heavy was, to his mind, a grievous fault, particularly in books. In life and in letters he would always look for, and never fail to find, the brightest side, the happiest passages. And he would apply the one to the other--a passage from Stevenson, or some other author, to an incident in his own or some other life--in a manner that was wonderfully illuminating and helpful.

In brief, his was ‘the life that loves, that gives, that loses itself, that overflows; the warm, hearty, social, helpful life.’ From a sorrowful chapter in his history he would weave a story for the help of others, always from a rose-coloured standpoint; from a calamity he would make a fairy tale, showing that, in spite of adversity, the _House Beautiful_ was still upon its hill-top.

I remarked, in introducing him, that he was guilty of playing a part in a mystery. You will have seen through the mystery by now; at least, as regards his rose-coloured spectacles. But there is more to be said concerning his life and his love of books.

XII

WITH NATURE

ANOTHER meeting with my friend of the rose-coloured spectacles was beneath a blue sky and in a ‘glow of sunlight.’ This was some while after a visit to the little room that formed his home, where I had seen certain photographs which had aroused my interest and curiosity.

‘Come,’ he wrote, ‘and saunter with me for an hour or two in the best stretch of country within easy reach of London, which, to us, shall be the best between the two Poles. Take rail to Hampstead and meet me near the flagstaff, overlooking the heath valley, at any hour you care to name. But, mark you, I only promise to _saunter_. I have no legs for hard walking, and even if I had, would prefer an easy pace. You remember Thoreau’s words in praise of sauntering: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking; that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_; which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going _a la Sainte Terra_, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a _Sainte-Terrer_,’ a Saunterer--a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from _sans terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.”’

‘That is so very pleasingly and bravely expressed,’ the letter continued, ‘that I am hoping it will convert you to “the gentle pace.” But have no fear that my spirit will prove as slow as my legs. I am still in possession of my rose-coloured spectacles, and can take full share in joy derived from pleasing thoughts and impressions.’

This, too, was bravely expressed; for when I met my friend at the spot named, I was pained to find him considerably thinner and paler than at our last meeting. But his greeting was as cordial as on any previous occasion, and I was glad to find that his voice had lost none of its familiar ring of enjoyment.