Part 7
Most admirable, thrown in thus by the way, amid unaffected, matter-of-fact description and every-day sense, and with its homely “brags” and “switches” to hold it true,--to save it from a touch of foppery, a shade too much of prettiness. How differently some writers have dealt with similar themes: men so afraid of the commonplace as to be incapable of saying a thing in so many words, though it were only to mention the day of the week; men whose every other sentence must contain a “felicity;” whose pages are as full of floweriness and dainty conceits as a milliner’s window; who surfeit you with confections, till you think of bread and water as a feast. Whether Thoreau’s temperance is to be credited to the restraints of stoical philosophy or to plain good taste, it is a virtue to be thankful for.
With him the study of nature was not an amusement, nor even a more or less serious occupation for leisure hours, but the work of his life; a work to which he gave himself from year’s end to year’s end, as faithfully and laboriously, and with as definite a purpose,--a crop as truly in his eye,--as any Concord farmer gave himself to his farm. He was no amateur, no dilettante, no conscious hobbyist, laughing between times at his own absorption. His sense of a mission was as unquestioning as Wordsworth’s, though happily there went with it a sense of humor that preserved it in good measure from over-emphasis and damaging iteration.
In degree, if not in kind, this wholehearted, lifelong devotion was something new. It was one of Thoreau’s originalities. To what a pitch he carried it, how serious and all-controlling it was, the pages of his journal bear continual witness. His was a Puritan conscience. He could never do his work well enough. After a eulogy of winter buds, “impregnable, vivacious willow catkins, but half asleep along the twigs” (there, again, is fancy of an uncloying type), he breaks out: “How healthy and vivacious must he be who would treat of these things. You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.” “Must” was a great word with Thoreau. In hard times, especially, he braced himself with it. “The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. While the milkmen in the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise, these winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. It is true it is like a cow that is dry, and our fingers are numb, and there is none to wake us up.... But the winter was not given us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty.”
In these winter journalizings, we not only have example and proof of the earnestness with which Thoreau pursued his outdoor studies, but are shown their method and their sufficient object. He was to be a writer, and nature was to be his theme, or, more exactly, his medium of expression. He required, therefore, in the way of raw material, a considerable store of outward knowledge,--knowledge of the outside or aspect of things,--classified, for convenience, as botany, ornithology, entomology, and the like; but after this, and infinitely more than this, he needed a living, deepening intimacy with the life of the world itself. For observation of the ways of plants and animals, of the phases of earth and sky, he had endless patience and all necessary sharpness of sense; work of this kind was easy,--he could do it in some good degree to his satisfaction; the vexatious thing about it was that it readily became too absorbing; but his real work, his _hard_ work, the work that was peculiarly his, that taxed his capacities to the full, and even so was never accomplished, this work was not an amassing of relative knowledge, an accumulation of facts, a familiarizing of himself with appearances, but a perfecting of sympathy, the organ or means of that absolute knowledge which alone he found indispensable, which alone he cared greatly to communicate. There, except at rare moments, he was to the last below his ideal. His “task” was never done. His union with nature was never complete.
The measure of this union was gauged, as we have seen already, by its spiritual and emotional effects, by the mental states it brought him into; as the religious mystic measures the success of his prayers. He walked in the old Carlisle road, as the saint goes to his knees, to “put off worldly thoughts.” The words are his own. There, when the hour favored him, he “sauntered near to heaven’s gate.”
It must be only too evident that success of this transcendental quality is not to be counted upon as one counts upon finding specimens for a botanical box. There is no comparison between scientific pursuits, so called, and this kind of supernatural history. For this, as Thoreau says, “you must be in a different state from common.” “If it were required to know the position of the fruit dots or the character of the indusium, nothing could be easier than to ascertain it; but if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end is not so easily accomplished.”
This, then, it was for which Thoreau was ever on the alert; this was the prize set before him; this he required of ferns and clouds, of birds and swamps and deserted roads,--that they should stir him inwardly, that they should do something to redeem his life, or, as he said elsewhere, to affect the quality of the day. For this he cultivated the “fellowship of the seasons,” a fellowship on which no man ever made larger drafts. Even when nature seemed to be getting “thumbed like an old spelling-book,” even in the month that tempted him sometimes to “eat his heart,” he still “sat the bench with perfect contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be unrolled for any treasure or heaven that could be imagined.” A new November was a novelty more tempting than any voyage to Europe or even to another world. “Young men have not learned the phases of nature:” so he comforted himself, when the fervors and inspirations of youth seemed at times to be waning: “I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover.”
Here, as everywhere with Thoreau, nature, in his ultimate conception of it, was nothing of itself. Everything is for man. This belief underlies all his writing upon natural themes, and, as well, all his personal dealings with the natural world. His idlest wanderings, whether in the Maine forests or in Well Meadow field, were made serious by it. To judge him by his own testimony, he seems to have known comparatively little of a careless, purposeless, childish delight in nature for its own sake. Nature was a better kind of book; and books were for improvement. In this respect he was sophisticated from his youth, like some model of “early piety.” Nature was not his playground, but his study, his Bible, his closet, his means of grace. As we have said, and as Channing long ago implied, his was a Puritan conscience. He must get at the heart of things, sparing no pains nor time, holding through thick and thin to the devotee’s faith: “To him that knocketh it shall be opened.” In this spirit he waited upon nature and the motions of his own genius. Patience, solitude, stillness, sincerity, and a quiet mind,--these were the instruments of his art. With them, not with prying sharp-sightedness, was the secret to be won. In his own phrase, characteristic in its homely expressiveness, if you would appreciate a phenomenon, though it be only a fern, you must “camp down beside it.” And you must invent no distinctions of great and small. The humming of a gnat must be as significant as the music of the spheres.
Was he too serious for his own good, whether as man or as writer? And did he sometimes feel himself so? Was he whipping his own fault when he spoke against conscientious, duty-ridden people, and praised
“simple laboring folk Who love their work, Whose virtue is a song”?
It is not impossible, of course. But he, too, loved his work,--loved it so well as perhaps to need no playtime. Some have said that he made too much of his “thoughts and moods,” that he was unwholesomely beset with the idea of self-improvement. Others have thought that he would have written better books had he stuck closer to science, and paid less court to poetry and Buddhistic philosophy. Such objections and speculations are futile. He did his work, and with it enriched the world. In the strictest sense it was his _own_ work. If his ideal escaped him, he did better than most in that he still pursued it.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Stevenson was one of the happy few: he knew his life’s business from childhood. He was to write books. Happier still, and one of even a smaller minority, he early discovered that authorship is an art requiring a long and rigorous apprenticeship; that, if a man is to write, he must first study how, putting himself under tuition and devoting himself to practice; that an author no more than a pianist can begin with “pieces” and a public performance. In short, Stevenson had from the beginning an idea of literary composition as a fine art,--an art not to be picked up some pleasant day by the roadside (as later in life he essayed, for whim’s sake, to pick up the art of writing music), nor carried away, as a matter of course, along with other more or less useful odds and ends of knowledge, from the grammar school or university, but to be acquired, if at all, by years on years of drill. Another man may write “well enough,” and perhaps successfully, so far as material rewards go, by nature and the rule of thumb; but the artist aims at perfection,--perfection for its own sake. That aim, the pursuit of that ideal, is what _makes_ him an artist. And such was Stevenson.
“All through my boyhood and youth,” he says, “I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny-version book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas.”
So he “lived with words.” And the point of the confession is that these “childish tasks,” as he calls them in another place, were done “consciously for practice.” “I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practiced to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.”
But he did more than to practice. A man does not learn to whittle, or to paint, or to play the flute, by the primitive process of merely trying his hand, be it ever so patiently. The fine arts are no longer things to be invented, every man for himself. Others have whittled and painted; one generation has bequeathed its increment of skill to the next; here and there a master has arisen, and the masters have set up a standard; and now, the standard being established, the essential matter is, not to paint or write to the satisfaction of village critics, but to prove one’s self a workman beside the best of the craft. For this there needs acquaintance with the masters’ work,--such acquaintance, or so young Stevenson was persuaded, as could come from nothing but an imitative study of it. And he set himself to imitate. He had never heard the dictum, or he disbelieved it, that a boy should read the best writers, but pattern after nobody. Wherever he saw excellence of a kind that appealed to him, he took it for the time being as his model, a mark to aim at. This he did consciously and unashamed.
Such a course would never give him originality; but no matter. For the present it was not originality he was seeking; he was not yet writing books: he was learning his trade. Whether, having learned it, he should turn out to have original genius to go with his knowledge and put it to use, was a question that the event alone could determine. Originality is a gift of the gods; it is born with a man, or it is not born with him. The technique of a prose style, on the other hand, could be learned, and Stevenson’s present business was to learn it, in the only way of which he had any knowledge, the way in which his masters themselves had learned it,--practice based on imitation.[7]
How could the boy have done better? He was called to write; he had “the love of words” which, as he says, marks the writer’s vocation; and for such a boy “to work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else, is, for a while at least, the king’s highway of progress.” Yes, “for a while;” and after the while, if he is not merely one of the many that are called, but one of the few that are chosen, he will have found his own line, and such originality as nature endowed him with at birth (or before) will declare itself in the way appointed.
Stevenson had the name of an idler, he tells us, and it must be said that he wore it jauntily,--as he wore his old clothes. Whatever he did or failed to do, it would have been hard to catch him without defense. He wrote “An Apology for Idlers,” which, as he confided to a correspondent, was “an apology for R. L. S.;” and to this day it sounds like a good one. It would do many a hard-working man and useful member of society a service to read it. He believed that, for the young especially, a certain kind and measure of idleness is a profitable kind of industry; while they are seemingly unemployed they may perchance be learning something that is really worth while: “to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.”
For himself, like many another man of genius, he was very little of a scholar in the traditional sense of the word. What the schools had taken upon themselves to teach were mostly not the things that he had taken upon himself to learn. At the university he devised “an extensive and highly rational system of truantry,” and no one “ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education.” Like his antitype in Mr. Barrie’s novel, he could always find a way. No doubt his personal attractiveness counted for much here, as it did everywhere. One of his earlier teachers had pronounced him “without exception the most delightful boy he ever knew;” and his mother’s testimony is that his masters found it pleasanter to talk with him than to teach him. How his wits and his fine gift of plausibility helped him over a hard place in one of the last of his examinations--for admission to the bar--is related as from himself, by Mr. Balfour. The subject in hand was “Ethical and Metaphysical Philosophy,” and a certain book had been prescribed. “The examiner asked me a question,” Stevenson says, “and I had to say to him, ‘I beg your pardon, but I do not understand your phraseology.’ ‘It’s the text-book,’ he said. ‘Yes; but you couldn’t possibly expect me to read so poor a book as that.’ He laughed like a hunchback, and then put the question in another form. I had been reading Mayne, and answered him by the historical method. They were probably the most curious answers ever given in the subject. I don’t know what he thought of them, but they got me through.”
It is a good story, and thoroughly characteristic. There was nothing academic in Stevenson’s turn of mind, whether in youth or manhood. “I was inclined to regard any professor as a joke,” he remarks, in his “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin,” and the words may be taken as fairly expressive of his attitude toward the whole business of what is called education. The last thing he meant to be was a conventional man,--“a consistent first-class passenger in life,”--and why should he disquiet himself over a conventional training? Allow him his own subject and his own method, and he would be studious with anybody.
So throughout his early years, as we have seen, he studied the art of authorship. Then, as happens to all artists, came the critical point of production or non-production. Would the plant so sedulously watered and tended, so promising in the leaf, prove to be fertile or sterile? Having so lofty an idea of his art, so exalted a standard of excellence in it, would he go on indefinitely putting himself off with preparations, “prelusory gymnastic,” as he saw so many painters doing at Barbizon (“snoozers” instead of painters, covering their walls with studies, and never coming to the picture), and as is so easy for art students of all kinds to do, or, having learned the handling of his tools, would he set himself to use them in the performance of a man’s work?
Such a question is by no means one that answers itself. In any particular case there is perhaps more than an even chance that the student will never have the industry, the courage, and the intellectual and moral stuff to accomplish, or even seriously put his hand to, any of the great things for which he has so long been making ready. Stevenson himself, from all that appears, may have had at the beginning a period when the issue hung more or less in doubt. “I remember a time,” he wrote afterward, “when I was very idle, and lived and profited by that humor.” Now, he says, the case is different with him, he knows not why. Perhaps it is “a change of age.” He made many slight efforts at reform, “had a thousand skirmishes to keep himself at work upon particular mornings;” the life of Goethe affected him, as did also some noble remarks of Balzac, but he was never conscious of a struggle, “never registered a vow, nor seemingly had anything personally to do with the matter.” “I came about like a well-handled ship,” he concludes. “There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we call God.”
In his twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, at all events, he was really getting under way, though for the present, as was becoming, with small ventures; and from that time, except for the frequent occasions when illness and the likelihood of speedy death constrained him to “twiddle his fingers and play patience,” he kept his pen busy as few men of anything like his physical disabilities and his roving disposition have ever done. For it is important to note that he was by inheritance a wanderer. Even had his health allowed it, he could never have sat month after month at the same desk, turning off so many hundred words as his daily stint. Once, when he has lived for six months at Davos, he writes to his friend Colvin that he is in a bad way,--a result, he believes, of having been too long in one place. “That tells on my old gypsy nature; like a violin hung up, I begin to lose what music there was in me.” And when his mother complained that he was little at home, he bade her not be vexed at his nomadic habits. “I _must_ be a bit of a vagabond; it’s your own fault, after all, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have had a tramp for a son.”
For a man who had studied authorship, and wished to write not mainly from books, but from the experience of his own mind and body, this ineradicable gypsy strain was of the highest value. How much it imported to Stevenson should be evident even to those who know his books only by the backs of them. Bodily health excepted, he had all the qualifications of a traveler. Happy man that he was, he was always a boy, rich to the last in some of the best of youthful virtues,--buoyancy, curiosity, “interest in the whole page of experience,” and the capacity for surprise. The world for him was never an old story. When he saw a ship or a train of cars, he wished himself aboard. Discomforts and dangers were nothing; nay, they could be turned into excellent fun, and after that into almost as excellent copy. His spirit was habitually strung up to out-of-door pitch, to borrow his own expression. He felt “the incommunicable thrill of things.” Not for him a staid life in drawing-rooms or city clubs. He would be out in the open, “where men still live a man’s life.” At forty he wrote his own formula thus: “0.55 artist, 0.45 adventurer.” Near the same time, being just from the island of Molokai, where he had played croquet with seven leper girls (and would not wear gloves, though cautioned to that effect, lest it should make the girls unhappy to be reminded of their condition), he writes to a friend: “This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new forested harbors; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives,--the whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem.” A lucky combination it was, both for the man himself and for the world of readers,--fifty-five per cent artist, and forty-five per cent adventurer.
And the adventures, of course, need not be so extraordinarily venturesome, with an artist’s pen to put them on the paper. In 1887 Stevenson had been once more at the gates of death with hemorrhages, this time so often repeated that they had ceased almost to be exciting, and were rather grown tiresome; and when the doctors prescribed another change of climate, he sailed for America. The steamer turned out to be loaded with cattle,--“a ship with no style on, and plenty of sailors to talk to;” and this is how the consumptive patient describes the voyage: “I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea.... My heart literally sang.... It is worth having lived these last years, partly because I have written some better books, which is always pleasant, but chiefly to have had the joy of this voyage.”
Later, in the South Seas, he ran more than once upon the very edge of shipwreck, but always with the same brave heart and the same gayety. “We had a near squeak,” he writes to a friend, after one such experience. “The reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf! The pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, ‘Isn’t that nice? We shall soon be ashore!’ Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity.” And thus, be it added, does the artistic masculine mind turn even the face of death itself “to favor and to prettiness.”
By this time Stevenson had almost settled it with himself that he should never again leave the sea. “My poor grandfather, it is from him that I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded.... Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney-stacks and telegraph wires.” One feels like saying again, What a blessing it was for the world that a man so perennially boyish, so endowed with the capacity for enjoyment, so conscious of his life, so incurably in love with the romantic side of things, was also the master of a style and an industrious lover of the art of writing!