Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology

by Kevin MacNeil

  Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts, whether for the body or the mind. But the consideration of luxuries leads us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a second proposition no less true, and maybe no less startling, than the last.

  At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment, because our fathers squandered. We eat of the best, not from delicacy, but from brazen habit. We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the presence of a luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence. And not only do we squander money from habit, but still more pitifully waste it in ostentation. I can think of no more melancholy disgrace for a creature who professes either reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he does not desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to drive, or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly. Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy when it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed in its employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their twenty shillings’ worth of profit out of every pound.

  Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one. I find I regret this, or would regret it if I gave myself the time, not only on personal but on moral and philanthropical considerations. For, first, in a world where money is wanting to buy books for eager students and food and medicine for pining children, and where a large majority are starved in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and cruel to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no return of genuine satisfaction. My philanthropy is wide enough in scope to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have at least one good argument that I have acted rightly; but where that is not so, and I have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive that I have robbed the poor. And, second, anything I buy or use which I do not sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy, disturbs the balance of supply and demand, and contributes to remove industrious hands from the production of what is useful or pleasurable and to keep them busy upon ropes of sand and things that are a weariness to the flesh. That extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin to boot, in which we impoverish mankind and ourselves. It is another question for each man’s heart. He knows if he can enjoy what he buys and uses; if he cannot, he is a dog in the manger; nay, if he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for nothing really belongs to a man which he cannot use. Proprietor is connected with propriety; and that only is the man’s which is proper to his wants and faculties.

  A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty. Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply want. It remains to be seen whether with half his present income, or a third, he cannot, in the most generous sense, live as fully as at present. He is a fool who objects to luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest against the waste of luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot enjoy them. It remains to be seen, by each man who would live a true life to himself and not a merely specious life to society, how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely submits as to a social propriety; and all these last he will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he will be surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him in complete contentment and activity of mind and senses. Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived upon a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household must ape the tastes and emulate the display of others. One is delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who care nothing for any of these refinements, who am perhaps a plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel shirts and a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other tastes and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own. It may be cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will spend my money as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification, and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty. I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight in them.

  Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the world; that, in fact and for an obvious reason, of any woman who shall chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind. If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation! There is a kind of idea abroad that a man must live up to his station, that his house, his table, and his toilette, shall be in a ratio of equivalence, and equally imposing to the world. If this is in the Bible, the passage has eluded my inquiries. If it is not in the Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool.

  Throw aside this fancy. See what you want, and spend upon that; distinguish what you do not care about, and spend nothing upon that. There are not many people who can differentiate wines above a certain and that not at all a high price. Are you sure you are one of these? Are you sure you prefer cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of a farthing? Are you sure you wish to keep a gig? Do you care about where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in a cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house? Do you enjoy fine clothes? It is not possible to answer these questions without a trial; and there is nothing more obvious to my mind, than that a man who has not experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to live more cheaply than in his father’s house, has still his education to begin. Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and somnambulous submission to wealth.

  The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life. The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and prefers anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most part a respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living for the outside, and an adventurer. But the man I mean lives wholly to himself, does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys what he wants for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian. And the test is this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed to his friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can do without it, a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had less, and continued to live in some contentment; and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his shilling with a friend. The poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian in virtue of their birth. Do you know where beggars go? Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their thousands, but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the treasury.

  But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his level in society, falls out of society altogether. I suppose the young man to have chosen his career on honourable principles; he finds his talents and instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit; in a certain industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with a healthy and becoming service; and he is not sure that he would be doing so, or doing so equally well, in any other industry within his reach. Then that is his true sphere in life; not the one in which he was born to his father, but the one which is prope
r to his talents and instincts. And suppose he does fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow? Is your heart so dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the love of a few? Do you think society loves you? Put it to the proof. Decline in material expenditure, and you will find they care no more for you than for the Khan of Tartary. You will lose no friends. If you had any, you will keep them. Only those who were friends to your coat and equipage will disappear; the smiling faces will disappear as by enchantment; but the kind hearts will remain steadfastly kind. Are you so lost, are you so dead, are you so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon solid fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the countenance of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who will drop you with insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you and do not care to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn neither know nor care to know in a more human manner? Is it not the principle of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I would go as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not put on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my appetites and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall take me as I choose to be, or go without me. Neither they nor I will lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable to associate.

  But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed many thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life. And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not the best of company? But the principle was this: that which a man has not fairly earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part of mankind’s treasure which he holds as steward on parole. To mankind, then, it must be made profitable; and how this should be done is, once more, a problem which each man must solve for himself, and about which none has a right to judge him. Yet there are a few considerations which are very obvious and may here be stated.

  Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in particular. Every man or woman is one of mankind’s dear possessions; to his or her just brain, and kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of good acts and source of blessings to the race. This money which you do not need, which, in a rigid sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned not only in public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.

  Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should be helped the first. There at least there can be little imposture, for you know their necessities of your own knowledge. And consider, if all the world did as you did, and according to their means extended help in the circle of their affections, there would be no more crying want in times of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with a doubt and received with confusion. Would not this simple rule make a new world out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit?

  * * * * *

  [After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]

  On Morality

  There is no eternal Thou Shalt Not inscribed upon man’s nature; only rumours in the market-place varying from age to age, praising tomorrow what they yesterday condemned.

  I

  THE WORD morality is so old and so important that we begin to pay it an idolatrous adoration. We are like infants that have planted money; it has been buried so long; there must certainly be some increase; the word is so old and venerable, it must surely have acquired a more august significance. In both we are right; if the coins lie buried long enough, they are become antiquities to be treasured in museums; if the word has been long enough familiar in men’s minds, it has acquired the more authority upon their action. In both we are wrong; the sixpence is still only a sixpence; it is not a shilling; though it may now be sold for half-a-crown; and the word even to this day, even when it rules us with the prestige of inherited familiarity, has yet gained no more divine sanction, but still rehearses the humble story of its birth. Morality—from mos, that which is customary, that which is accepted, ‘good form,’ the ‘correct thing’ in our particular day or nation—it must still seem strange, that so poor a name should have been chosen for our whole science of right and wrong, of all that is most passionate, most sad, and most noble in the tragedy of man: a plain word of what we call truth is always so untrue to subjective emotions, seems always indeed so calumnious of life. And yet still, after all these centuries, there is no more in the word than we put in it. And in one sense there is less. Follow the opinions of a single and a very narrow race from the day of Jacob’s remarkable enterprise on Shechem, to the day when Gamaliel stood up and said . . .

  We see there through what an orbit morality runs, and the two attitudes of man to his mores: his savage trust in them, his civilised dubiety:—in the morning of a nation’s life, unflinching loyalty to its own customs; in the evening, curiosity as to those of others, which ‘may be of God’ also. So that here we find the word has actually declined in force; but at the same time we find another idea springing up concurrently.

  The love of approval, the need of human countenance, the ape-like trick of imitating that which we admire, the childish propensity to repeat the same act or the same form of words once used, among low races continually breed fresh customs. They grow up, without much or any thought of use; accident and aesthetic taste led to their acceptance, the ape-like part of man to their perpetuation: and the individual savage was born to the whole mass, and followed the manners of his tribe for the same reason that he spoke its dialect. They were his by birth, and he enquired no further. To men of other parentage, inheriting other customs, he could be justly tolerant, at least, if they were neighbours. Thus the half-breed Indian, if he were a high-minded man, although preferring the habits of his mother tribe, held himself bound to be a Christian. It was his duty (quite apart from intellectual assent) to offer a brave type of the paternal race, and not to tamper with but shiningly to fulfil its least tradition.

  Such being the growth of morals, such their original sanction, it might even seem strange that any should have proved of use. But it is to be observed that even in those days there were leaders of men; the great law-giver, mythical hero, had, doubtless, many avatars; and the Survival of the Fittest was at work. Such being their growth and sanction, it is very plain that at least, of all this mountain-heap of customs, many must be useless and some harmful. And here we see the task of a progressive civilisation. The civilised man, though he has still much of the habitual loyalty, struggles beyond. International religions—Christianity, Islam, and the like—and still more the mighty intellectual labours and monumental example of the Roman Empire, have widened his moral prospect. He conceives himself no longer as the child of a sect nor yet wholly as the subject of a nation, but in a great and growing measure as a member of the general race. With an enfranchised criticism,—in these days at least tending to be hostile—he considers his inheritance of morals; has already discarded many that appeared harmful, or only inert and cumbersome; and would probably (if he knew how) eliminate all but what are needful to preserve the peace. Superstition has changed place; he no longer believes in the sanctity of any particular custom, but he has made a new idol in the place of that. He conceives of morals as being only partly customary, and that part the worse. He deludes himself with a fairy tale that when the body of law and custom shall be dead, the soul of morality will be disengaged and made perfect; that a man may plough up his orchard, and come round again next week and enjoy the shade and gather apples.

  II

  This singular notion, it is well to brush away. There is no eter
nal Thou Shalt Not inscribed upon man’s nature; only rumours in the marketplace varying from age to age, praising tomorrow what they yesterday condemned. There is no Arabian tale so fantastic as the history of right and wrong and perhaps no action conceivable that has not (at one time or other) figured under both categories. If there be anything we can condemn (today and in our race) without after-thought or hesitation, it is the wanton infliction of suffering. Yet it was no degraded race that recognised elaborate cruelty for a duty. And once so recognised, it became one. The Mohawk, when he tortured his prisoners, or was tortured himself, through days of agony not to be narrated, was no less consciously (and no less surely) in the Kingdom of Heaven, than you when you rattle pence into the missionary box. That was right for him; to this business, he brought, with a whole heart, his moral forces: the noblest part of him found exercise among horrors that we sicken to remember. The Jesuit missionary, coming to a new field of labour, rejoiced to find already planted in men’s hearts the root and rudiment of all religion: the doctrine of a future life of bliss for those who have done well. Yet a little, and he was proportionately cast down by a new discovery: that what his penitents meant by doing well was to kill their enemies— and eat them. And the same organ, the same bundle of inherited propensities, the same human conscience, supported the Father in his laborious and peaceful exile, and applauded the Carib at his inhuman banquet. To multiply instances were only to waste space; historic inquiry, international comparison, will furnish them alike, and by the shipload to the dullest. The notions of right and wrong, in so far as they attach to specific acts, are the creatures of mere fashion, like our boots and bonnets. Such a fashion once set, the soul of contemporary man clings about it and will die for it; once overthrown, and the souls of his descendants are astonished to read of his delusion.