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 polities 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 welldoing 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 welldoing, 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.

IX

A CHRISTMAS SERMON

By the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for twelve

months;[30] 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 Tacitus of how the veterans mutinied in

the German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouring to 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 shall_ was ever His word, with which He superseded _thou shall

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 be suffered to

engross his thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the further 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

childlike, 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.

A strange temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye on pleasures,

even when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against them.

This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade

against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age.

I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion

of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing

denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic--envy, malice,

the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the backbiter, the

petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life--their standard is

quite different. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so

wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of

gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in themselves that

they reserve the choicest of their indignation. A man may naturally

disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin

old lady of the dolls; for these are gross and naked instances. And yet

in each of us some similar element resides. The sight of a pleasure in

which we cannot or else will not share moves us to a particular

impatience. It may be because we are envious, or because we are sad, or

because we dislike noise and romping--being so refined, or

because--being so philosophic--we have an overweighing sense of life's

gravity: at least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted to frown

upon our neighbour's pleasures. People are nowadays so fond of resisting

temptations; here is one to be resisted. They are fond of self-denial;

here is a propensity that cannot be too peremptorily denied. There is an

idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbours

good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my

neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make

him happy--if I may.

III

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the

relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or

less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our

constitution; we stand buffet among friend and enemies; we may be so

built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and so

circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves

very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful.

Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even

its own reward, except for the self-centred and--I had almost said--the

unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want,

he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid

the penalties of the law, and the minor _capitis diminutio_ of social

ostracism, is an affair of wisdom--of cunning, if you will--and not of

virtue.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit

by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how

or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must

not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he

must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will

do it, he must try to give happiness to others. And no doubt there comes

in here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he to make his neighbour

happy? How far must he respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so

hard to brighten again? And how far, on the other side, is he bound to

be his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far

must he resent evil?

The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on the

point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of them)

hard to accept. But the truth of His teaching would seem to be this: in

our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon

all; it is _our_ cheek we are to turn, _our_ coat that we are to give

away to the man who has taken _our_ cloak. But when another's face is

buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are

to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable, and

surely not desirable. Revenge, says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice;

its judgments at least are delivered by an insane judge; and in our own

quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely. But in the

quarrel of our neighbour, let us be more bold. One person's happiness is

as sacred as another's; when we cannot defend both, let us defend one

with a stout heart. It is only in so far as we are doing this, that we

have any right to interfere: the defence of B is our only ground of

action against A. A has as good a right to go to the devil as we to go

to glory; and neither knows what he does.

The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and militant

mongerings of moral half-truths, though they be sometimes needful,

though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an inferior grade of

duties. Ill-temper and envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious

disguises; this is the playground of inverted lusts. With a little more

patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be

found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady

quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some

denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's

vices, might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.

IV

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven, and

to what small purpose; and how often we have been cowardly and hung

back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all

day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;--it may seem a

paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries a certain

consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity.

He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and

all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it

is--so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend,

or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising

joys--this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall

through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year he must

thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a

friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go,

there need be few illusions left about himself. _Here lies one who meant

well, tried a little, failed much:_--surely that may be his epitaph, of

which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which

calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul

or Marcus Aurelius!--but if there is still one inch of fight in his old

spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his lifelong

blindness and lifelong disappointment will scarce even be required in

this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his

old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day

and the dust and the ecstasy--there goes another Faithful Failure!

From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such beautiful

and manly poem, I take this memorial piece: it says better than I can,

what I love to think; let it be our parting word:--

"A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;

And from the west,

Where the sun, his day's work ended,

Lingers as in content,

There falls on the old, grey city

An influence luminous and serene,

A shining peace.

"The smoke ascends

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires

Shine, and are changed. In the valley

Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,

Closing his benediction,

Sinks, and the darkening air

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night--

Night, with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep.

"So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,

My wages taken, and in my heart

Some late lark singing,

Let me be gathered to the quiet west,

The sundown splendid and serene,

Death."[31]

FOOTNOTES:

[30] _i.e._ in the pages of _Scribner's Magazine_ (1888).

[31] From "A Book of Verses," by William Ernest Henley. D. Nutt, 1888.

X

FATHER DAMIEN

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU

SYDNEY, _February_ 25, 1890.

Sir,--It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and

conversed; on my side, with interest. You may remember that you have

done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful. But

there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which justly

divide friends, far more acquaintances. Your letter to the Reverend H.

B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with

bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my father when he

lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude. You know

enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation to be aware that, a

hundred years after the death of Damien, there will appear a man charged

with the painful office of the _devil's advocate_. After that noble

brother of mine, and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at

rest, one shall accuse, one defend him. The circumstance is unusual that

the devil's advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect

immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly

office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall

leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring. If I

have at all learned the trade of using words to convey truth and to

arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me with a subject. For it is

in the interest of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in

every quarter of the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but

that you and your letter should be displayed at length, in their true

colours, to the public eye.

To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then

proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine

and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and

with more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has

pleased you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you

for ever.

"HONOLULU, _August_ 2, 1889.

"Rev. H. B. GAGE.

"Dear Brother,--In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I

can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the

extravagant newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly

philanthropist. The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man,

headstrong and bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there

without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (before he

became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island

(less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and he came

often to Honolulu. He had no hand in the reforms and improvements

inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion

required and means were provided. He was not a pure man in his

relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be

attributed to his vices and carelessness. Others have done much for

the lepers, our own ministers, the government physicians, and so

forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting eternal

life.--Yours, etc.,

"C. M. HYDE."[32]

To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset

on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect. It may offend

others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold to

publish, gossip on your rivals. And this is perhaps the moment when I

may best explain to you the character of what you are to read: I

conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility:

with what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again;

with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to

plunge home. And if in aught that I shall say I should offend others,

your colleagues, whom I respect and remember with affection, I can but

offer them my regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration

of interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by

anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain

with which they read your letter. It is not the hangman, but the

criminal, that brings dishonour on the house.

You belong, sir, to a sect--I believe my sect, and that in which my

ancestors laboured--which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise, an

exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii. The first missionaries

came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody

faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm;

what troubles they supported came far more from whites than from

Hawaiians; and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes

of God. This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of

their failure, such as it is. One element alone is pertinent, and must

here be plainly dealt with. In the course of their evangelical calling,

they--or too many of them--grew rich. It may be news to you that the

houses of missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of

Honolulu. It will at least be news to you, that when I returned your

civil visit, the driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste, and

the comfort of your home. It would have been news certainly to myself,

had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to drag such

matter into print. But you see, sir, how you degrade better men to your

own level; and it is needful that those who are to judge betwixt you and

me, betwixt Damien and the devil's advocate, should understand your

letter to have been penned in a house which could raise, and that very

justly, the envy and the comments of the passers-by. I think (to employ

a phrase of yours which I admire) it "should be attributed" to you that

you have never visited the scene of Damien's life and death. If you

had, and had recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even

your pen perhaps would have been stayed.

Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has

not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom. When calamity

befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended and took root

in the Eight Islands, a _quid pro quo_ was to be looked for. To that

prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its adornments, God had sent

at last an opportunity. I know I am touching here upon a nerve acutely

sensitive. I know that others of your colleagues look back on the

inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of

Damien, with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so

with yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain

envy, not essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in

that performance. You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of

that which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due

and not rendered. _Time was_, said the voice in your ear, in your

pleasant room, as you sat raging and writing; and if the words written

were base beyond parallel, the rage, I am happy to repeat--it is the

only compliment I shall pay you--the rage was almost virtuous. But, sir,

when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by,

and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming

mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the

eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is

himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour--the

battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It

is a lost battle, and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your

defeat--some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to

cast away.

Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the

honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the

inert: that was what remained to you. We are not all expected to be

Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his

comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that. But will a

gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example from the

fields of gallantry? When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a

lady, and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as will

sometimes happen) matter damaging to the successful rival's credit

reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no

pretensions that his mouth is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily

closed. Your Church and Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do

well: to help, to edify, to set divine examples. You having (in one huge

instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have

occurred to you that you were doomed to silence; that when you had been

outstripped in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of

your well-being, in your pleasant room--and Damien, crowned with glories

and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of

Kalawao--you, the elect who would not, were the last man on earth to

collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would and did.

I think I see you--for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these

sentences--I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical

expression at the best. "He had no hand in the reforms," he was "a

coarse, dirty man"; these were your own words; and you may think it

possible that I am come to support you with fresh evidence. In a sense,

it is even so. Damien has been too much depicted with a conventional

halo and conventional features; so drawn by men who perhaps had not the

eye to remark or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps were

only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy

for myself--such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on

your bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method of

portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate, and

leaves for the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of truth.

For the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of

the enemy. The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if

your letter be the means of substituting once for all a credible

likeness for a wax abstraction. For, if that world at all remember you,

on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in

virtue of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.

You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny to

become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I visited

the lazaretto Damien was already in his resting grave. But such

information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those

who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but

others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no

halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose

unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features

of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge I

possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely

and sensitively understood--Kalawao, which you have never visited, about

which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself; for,

brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into that

confession. "_Less than one-half_ of the island," you say, "is devoted

to the lepers." Molokai--"_Molokai ahina_," the "grey," lofty, and most

desolate island--along all its northern side plunges a front of

precipice into a sea of unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from

east to west, the true end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot

there projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down,

grassy, stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead

crater: the whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the

same relation as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now be

able to pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge

how much of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice,

whether less than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a

tenth--or say, a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print you

will be in a position to share with us the issue of your calculations.

I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of

that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold. You,

who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce

sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your

pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled ashore there one

early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding

farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human

life. One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from

joining her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have

triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you

beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common

manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as

only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare--what a

haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards

the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every

fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and

seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable,

but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have

understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves

of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of

the sun; you would have felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place to

visit and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of possible infection.

That seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the

disgust of the visitor's surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,

disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes. I do not think I am

a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the days and nights I

spent upon that island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without

heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else. I find in my diary that

I speak of my stay as a "grinding experience": I have once jotted in the

margin, "_Harrowing_ is the word"; and when the _Mokolii_ bore me at

last towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new

conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song--

"'Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen."

And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,

bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the

Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the

missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different

place when Damien came there, and made his great renunciation, and slept

that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with

pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful

sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and

stumps.

You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound

in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses. I

have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses. But

there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and

Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of

length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for

what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by

which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to

enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell,

they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time

to their high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to

recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors

of his own sepulchre.

I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.

_A_. "Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in the

field of his labours and sufferings. 'He was a good man, but very

officious,' says one. Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests

so easily do) into something of the ways and habits of thought of a

Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to

laugh at" [over] "it. A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was

a popular."

_B_. "After Ragsdale's death" [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or overseer,

of the unruly settlement] "there followed a brief term of office by

Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness of that noble

man. He was rough in his ways, and he had no control. Authority was

relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign."

_C_. "Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems to have been a man of

the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type: shrewd; ignorant and

bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of receiving and digesting a

reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly generous in the least

thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready to give his last shirt

(although not without human grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his

life; essentially indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome

colleague; domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably

unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that

his boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the means of

bribes. He learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas

against the remedies of his regular rivals: perhaps (if anything matter

at all in the treatment of such a disease) the worst thing that he did,

and certainly the easiest. The best and worst of the man appear very

plainly in his dealings with Mr. Chapman's money; he had originally laid

it out" [intended to lay it out] "entirely for the benefit of Catholics,

and even so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his

error fully and revised the list. The sad state of the boys' home is in

part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly

ways and false ideas of hygiene. Brother officials used to call it

'Damien's Chinatown.' 'Well,' they would say, 'your Chinatown keeps

growing.' And he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his

errors with perfect obstinacy. So much I have gathered of truth about

this plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections

are the traits of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his

martyrdom and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person

here on the spot can properly appreciate their greatness."

I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without

correction; thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness. They

are almost a list of the man's faults, for it is rather these that I was

seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life, I and

the world were already sufficiently acquainted. I was besides a little

suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely because

Damien's admirers and disciples were the least likely to be critical. I

know you will be more suspicious still; and the facts set down above

were one and all collected from the lips of Protestants who had opposed

the father in his life. Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up

the image of a man, with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and

alive with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.

Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of

Damien's character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured

with and (in your own phrase) "knew the man";--though I question whether

Damien would have said that he knew you. Take it, and observe with

wonder how well you were served by your gossips, how ill by your

intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact we are at one, and

how widely our appreciations vary. There is something wrong here;

either with you or me. It is possible, for instance, that you, who seem

to have so many ears in Kalawao, had heard of the affair of Mr.

Chapman's money, and were singly struck by Damien's intended

wrong-doing. I was struck with that also, and set it fairly down; but I

was struck much more by the fact that he had the honesty of mind to be

convinced. I may here tell you that it was a long business; that one of

his colleagues sat with him late into the night, multiplying arguments

and accusations; that the father listened as usual with "perfect

good-nature and perfect obstinacy"; but at the last, when he was

persuaded--"Yes," said he, "I am very much obliged to you; you have done

me a service; it would have been a theft." There are many (not Catholics

merely) who require their heroes and saints to be infallible; to these

the story will be painful; not to the true lovers, patrons, and servants

of mankind.

And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those

who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to

find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to

forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone

introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind. That

you may understand how dangerous, and into what a situation it has

already brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand through the

different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each from the

point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.

Damien was _coarse_.

It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers who had only a

coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But you, who were so

refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of

culture? Or may I remind you that we have some reason to doubt if John

the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter, on whose career you

doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt at all he was a

"coarse, headstrong" fisherman! Yet even in our Protestant Bibles Peter

is called Saint.

Damien was _dirty_.

He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade! But

the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.

Damien was _headstrong_.

I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head and

heart.

Damien was _bigoted_.

I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me. But

what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish in a

priest? Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity of a

peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do. For this, I

wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character, should

have avoided him in life. But the point of interest in Damien, which has

caused him to be so much talked about and made him at last the subject

of your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry, his intense and

narrow faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened him to be one

of the world's heroes and exemplars.

Damien _was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders_.

Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame? I have

heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for imitation on the

ground that His sacrifice was voluntary. Does Dr. Hyde think otherwise?

Damien _did not stay at the settlement, etc_.

It is true he was allowed many indulgences. Am I to understand that you

blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers for granting

them? In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard to issue from the

house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you will find yourself

with few supporters.

Damien _had no hand in the reforms, etc_.

I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my

description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon

this head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere in

the world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than when

he passes from Damien's "Chinatown" at Kalawao to the beautiful

Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa. At this point, in my desire to make all fair

for you, I will break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony. Here is a

passage from my diary about my visit to the Chinatown, from which you

will see how it is (even now) regarded by its own officials: "We went

round all the dormitories, refectories, etc.--dark and dingy enough,

with a superficial cleanliness, which he" [Mr. Dutton, the lay brother]

"did not seek to defend. 'It is almost decent,' said he; 'the sisters

will make that all right when we get them here.'" And yet I gathered it

was already better since Damien was dead, and far better than when he

was there alone and had his own (not always excellent) way. I have now

come far enough to meet you on a common ground of fact; and I tell you

that, to a mind not prejudiced by jealousy, all the reforms of the

lazaretto, and even those which he most vigorously opposed, are properly

the work of Damien. They are the evidence of his success; they are what

his heroism provoked from the reluctant and the careless. Many were

before him in the field; Mr. Meyer, for instance, of whose faithful work

we hear too little: there have been many since; and some had more

worldly wisdom, though none had more devotion, than our saint. Before

his day, even you will confess, they had effected little. It was his

part, by one striking act of martyrdom, to direct all men's eyes on that

distressful country. At a blow, and with the price of his life, he made

the place illustrious and public. And that, if you will consider

largely, was the one reform needful; pregnant of all that should

succeed. It brought money; it brought (best individual addition of them

all) the sisters; it brought supervision, for public opinion and public

interest landed with the man at Kalawao. If ever any man brought

reforms, and died to bring them, it was he. There is not a clean cup or

towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty Damien washed it.

Damien _was not a pure man in his relations with women, etc_.

How do you know that? Is this the nature of the conversation in that

house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving past?--racy

details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling under the

cliffs of Molokai?

Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have heard the

rumour. When I was there I heard many shocking tales, for my informants

were men speaking with the plainness of the laity; and I heard plenty of

complaints of Damien. Why was this never mentioned? and how came it to

you in the retirement of your clerical parlour?

But I must not even seem to deceive you. This scandal, when I read it in

your letter, was not new to me. I had heard it once before; and I must

tell you how. There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu; he in a

public-house on the beach volunteered the statement that Damien had

"contracted the disease from having connection with the female lepers";

and I find a joy in telling you how the report was welcomed in a

public-house. A man sprang to his feet; I am not at liberty to give his

name, but from what I heard I doubt if you would care to have him to

dinner in Beretania Street. "You miserable little ----" (here is a word I

dare not print, it would so shock your ears). "You miserable little ----,"

he cried, "if the story were a thousand times true, can't you see you are

a million times a lower ---- for daring to repeat it?" I wish it could be

told of you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps after

family worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger to receive it

with the same expressions; ay, even with that one which I dare not print;

it would not need to have been blotted away, like Uncle Toby's oath, by

the tears of the recording angel; it would have been counted to you for

your brightest righteousness. But you have deliberately chosen the part of

the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with improvements of your

own. The man from Honolulu--miserable, leering creature--communicated the

tale to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I

will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always at his

noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been drinking--drinking, we

may charitably fancy, to excess. It was to your "Dear Brother, the

Reverend H. B. Gage," that you chose to communicate the sickening story;

and the blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom forbids me to allow you

the extenuating plea that you were drunk when it was done. Your "dear

brother"--a brother indeed--made haste to deliver up your letter (as a

means of grace, perhaps) to the religious papers; where, after many

months, I found and read and wondered at it; and whence I have now

reproduced it for the wonder of others. And you and your dear brother

have, by this cycle of operations, built up a contrast very edifying to

examine in detail. The man whom you would not care to have to dinner, on

the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and the Reverend H. B.

Gage: the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.

But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and

to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true. I will

suppose--and God forgive me for supposing it--that Damien faltered and

stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror

of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who

was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his

priestly oath--he, who was so much a better man than either you or me,

who did what we have never dreamed of daring--he too tasted of our

common frailty. "O, Iago, the pity of it!" The least tender should be

moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could

do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!

Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your

own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer. You had a

father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it

to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your

emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that

you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the

author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to

publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried to do what

Damien did is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and

the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God

had given you grace to see it.

FOOTNOTE:

[32] From the Sydney _Presbyterian_, October 26, 1889.

XI

MY FIRST BOOK--"TREASURE ISLAND"

It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist

alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards

what else I have written with indifference, if not aversion; if it call

upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indelible character;

and when I am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world

but what is meant is my first novel.

Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It seems

vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my earliest

childhood it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events;

and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the

papermakers. Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of

"Rathillet," "The Pentland Rising,"[33] "The King's Pardon" (otherwise

"Park Whitehead"), "Edward Daven," "A Country Dance," and "A Vendetta in

the West"; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams are now all

ashes, and have been received again into the soil. I have named but a few

of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they

were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of years.

"Rathillet" was attempted before fifteen, "The Vendetta" at twenty-nine,

and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one. By

that time I had written little books and little essays and short stories;

and had got patted on the back and paid for them--though not enough to

live upon. I had quite a reputation, I was the successful man; I passed

my days in toil, the futility of which would sometimes make my cheek to

burn--that I should spend a man's energy upon this business, and yet

could not earn a livelihood: and still there shone ahead of me an

unattained ideal: although I had attempted the thing with vigour not less

than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. All--all my

pretty ones--had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a

schoolboy's watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of many years'

standing who should never have made a run. Anybody can write a short

story--a bad one, I mean--who has industry and paper and time enough; but

not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that

kills. The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend

days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot.

Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct--the

instinct of self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and

supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the

miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in

weeks. There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must

have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of

those hours when the words come and the phrases balance of

themselves--_even to begin_. And having begun, what a dread looking

forward is that until the book shall be accomplished! For so long a time

the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long

a time you must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a

time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always

vigorous! I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every

three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat--not, possibly,

of literature--but at least of physical and moral endurance and the

courage of Ajax.

In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird,

above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and by the side of the

golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains inspirited, if it did

not inspire, us, and my wife and I projected a joint volume of bogey

stories, for which she wrote "The Shadow on the Bed," and I turned out

"Thrawn Janet" and a first draft of "The Merry Men." I love my native

air, but it does not love me; and the end of this delightful period was

a cold, a fly-blister and a migration by Strathardle and Glenshee to the

Castleton of Braemar. There it blew a good deal and rained in a

proportion; my native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I

must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a

house lugubriously known as the Late Miss M^cGregor's Cottage. And now

admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late

Miss M^cGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of

"something craggy to break his mind upon." He had no thought of

literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting

suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of

watercolours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a

picture-gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be

showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to

speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous

emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these occasions, I made

the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully

coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained

harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and, with the unconsciousness of

the predestined, I ticketed my performance "Treasure Island." I am told

there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe.

The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and

rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up

hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries,

perhaps the _Standing Stone_ or the _Druidic Circle_ on the heath; here

is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or

twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must

remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal

forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this

way, as I paused upon my map of "Treasure Island," the future character

of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and

their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected

quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on

these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I

had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters. How

often have I done so, and the thing gone on further! But there seemed

elements of success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for

boys: no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to

be a touchstone. Women were excluded. I was unable to handle a brig

(which the _Hispaniola_ should have been), but I thought I could make

shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame. And then I had an

idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of

entertainment: to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very

likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his

finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with

nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his

magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the

culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common

way of "making character"; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can

put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by

the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend with his infinite variety

and flexibility, we know--but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must

engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the

second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless

arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that

remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain

drumming on the window, I began "The Sea Cook," for that was the

original title. I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but

I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.

It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I

am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to

Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think

little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to

have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The

stockade, I am told, is from "Masterman Ready." It may be, I care not a

jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing,

they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints

which perhaps another--and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington

Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe

plagiarism was rarely carried further. I chanced to pick up the "Tales

of a Traveller" some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose

narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest,

the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of

the material detail of my first chapters--all were there, all were the

property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat

writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat

pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud

my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it

seemed to belong to me like my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I

found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all

the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories,

that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt

perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and

commercial travellers before the era of steam. He never finished one of

these romances; the lucky man did not require to finish them! But in

"Treasure Island" he recognised something kindred to his own

imagination; it was _his_ kind of picturesque; and he not only heard

with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate.

When the time came for Billy Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must have

passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal

envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I exactly followed; and

the name of "Flint's old ship"--the _Walrus_--was given at his

particular request. And now who should come dropping in, _ex machina_,

but Dr. Japp, like the disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain

upon peace and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket,

not a horn or a talisman, but a publisher. Even the ruthlessness of a

united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our

guest the mutilated members of "The Sea Cook"; at the same time, we

would by no means stop our readings; and accordingly the tale was begun

again at the beginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of Dr.

Japp. From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical

faculty; for when he left us he carried away the manuscript in his

portmanteau to submit to his friend (since then my own) Mr. Henderson,

who accepted it for his periodical, _Young Folks_.

Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a

positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style. Compare it

with the almost contemporary "Merry Men"; one reader may prefer the one

style, one the other--'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but

no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the

other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown

experienced man of letters might engage to turn out "Treasure Island" at

so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But alas! this was not

my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters;

and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost

hold. My mouth was empty; there was not one word of "Treasure Island" in

my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me

at the "Hand and Spear"! Then I corrected them, living for the most part

alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good

deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict

to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one; I was

the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way,

never yet made L200 a year; my father had quite recently bought back and

cancelled a book that was judged a failure: was this to be another and

last fiasco? I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth

hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter,

had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the

novels of M. du Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one

morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like

small-talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at the

rate of a chapter a day, I finished "Treasure Island." It had to be

transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained

alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly

mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance. He was at that

time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus: so far

out may be the judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure) was

scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy's story. He was

large-minded; "a full man," if there was one; but the very name of my

enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and

solecisms of style. Well! he was not far wrong.

"Treasure Island"--it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title,

"The Sea Cook"--appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in

the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least

attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the same

reason as my father liked the beginning; it was my kind of picturesque.

I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to this day rather

admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What was infinitely more

exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had finished a tale, and

written "The End" upon my manuscript, as I had not done since "The

Pentland Rising," when I was a boy of sixteen not yet at college. In

truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on

his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular ease, it must

have been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and

unlamented way to the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been

better so. I am not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much

pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of bringing) fire and food

and wine to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need

scarcely say I mean my own.

But the adventures of "Treasure Island" are not yet quite at an end. I

had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For

instance, I had called an islet "Skeleton Island," not knowing what I

meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify

this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint's

pointer. And in the same way, it was because I had made two harbours

that the _Hispaniola_ was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands. The

time came when it was decided to republish, and I sent in my manuscript,

and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they

were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was

told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw

a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write

up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a

whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and

with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did

it; and the map was drawn again in my father's office, with

embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father

himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and

elaborately _forged_ the signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing

directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never _Treasure Island_ to

me.

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was

the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington Irving, a

copy of Johnson's "Buccaneers," the name of the Dead Man's Chest from

Kingsley's "At Last," some recollections of canoeing on the high seas,

and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the

whole of my materials. It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so

largely in a tale, yet it is always important. The author must know his

countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances,

the points of the compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour

of the moon, should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the moon

is! I have come to grief over the moon in "Prince Otto," and, so soon as

that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend to

other men--I never write now without an almanac. With an almanac and the

map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted

on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind, a man may

hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders. With the map

before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does

in "The Antiquary." With the almanac at hand, he will scarce allow two

horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days, from

three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night, upon a

journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out,

and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at

length in the inimitable novel of "Rob Roy." And it is certainly well,

though far from necessary, to avoid such "croppers." But it is my

contention--my superstition, if you like--that who is faithful to his

map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and

hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from

accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a

spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country be real, and he

has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with

imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as

he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he

will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for

his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in

"Treasure Island," it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

FOOTNOTE:

[33] _Ne pas confondre_. Not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint

of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with amazement from the

book-lists) the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy

prices; but its predecessor, a bulky historical romance without a

spark of merit and now deleted from the world.--[R. L. S.]

XII

THE GENESIS OF "THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE"

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I

lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very

dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of

forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending

with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among

the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation.

For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved

with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth

perusal of "The Phantom Ship." "Come," said I to my engine, "let us make

a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,

savagery, and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large

features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the

book you have been reading and admiring." I was here brought up with a

reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I

failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton,

and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject;

so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me

cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar

belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course

of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a

buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle

of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below

zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had seen

the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the

Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border.

Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two countries, two

of the ends of the earth involved: and thus though the notion of the

resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general acceptation, or

even (as I have since found) acceptability, it fitted at once with my

design of a tale of many lands; and this decided me to consider further

of its possibilities. The man who should thus be buried was the first

question: a good man, whose return to life would be hailed by the reader

and the other characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian

picture and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any use at

all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his friends and

family, take him through many disappearances, and make this final

restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American wilderness, the

last and the grimmest of the series. I need not tell my brothers of the

craft that I was now in the most interesting moment of an author's life;

the hours that followed that night upon the balcony, and the following

nights and days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were

hours of unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me

alone, perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who

is my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her up at

all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed fancies.

And while I was groping for the fable and the character required, behold

I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge

hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was

there ever a more complete justification of the rule of Horace? Here,

thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on the solution or

perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final

Tableau of a story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry

and Strathardle, conceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smell

of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole

correspondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long ago,

so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual

tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.

My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being

all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me except in

books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my

club in London, equally civilised, and (to all seeing) equally

Occidental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to

get into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness; and I

believe this first suggested to me the idea of the Chevalier Burke for a

narrator. It was at first intended that he should be Scottish, and I was

then filled with fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of

my own Alan Breck. Presently, however, it began to occur to me it would

be like my Master to curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen; and that

an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself in India

with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided

he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a tall shadow

across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord Foppington's

phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep with my Master: in the

original idea of this story conceived in Scotland, this companion had

been besides intended to be worse than the bad elder son with whom (as

it was then meant) he was to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and

a very bad Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was I

to evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch besieged me, offering his services; he

gave me excellent references; he proved that he was highly fitted for

the work I had to do; he, or my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to

disguise his ancient livery with a little lace and a few frogs and

buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then

of a sudden there came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I

was once intimate, and had spent long nights walking and talking with,

upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth

of an extraordinary moral simplicity--almost vacancy; plastic to any

influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in

fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he

would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and, in place of entering

into competition with the Master, would afford a slight though a

distinct relief. I know not if I have done him well, though his moral

dissertations always highly entertained me: but I own I have been

surprised to find that he reminded some critics of Barry Lyndon after

all....

XIII

RANDOM MEMORIES: _ROSA QUO LOCORUM_

I

Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the

consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it should be

not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity

to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind of

childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished up than

from all the printed volumes in a library. The child is conscious of an

interest, not in literature but in life. A taste for the precise, the

adroit or the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before

that he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.

He is first conscious of this material--I had almost said this

practical--pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came the

first. I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that would seem

to imply a prior stage. "The Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with

the sound of a trumpet"--memorial version, I know not where to find the

text--rings still in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps with

something of my nurse's accent. There was possibly some sort of image

written in my mind by these loud words, but I believe the words

themselves were what I cherished. I had about the same time, and under

the same influence--that of my dear nurse--a favourite author: it is

possible the reader has not heard of him--the Rev. Robert Murray

M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I must

have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was breeched; and

I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:--

"Behind the hills of Naphtali

The sun went slowly down,

Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,

A tinge of golden brown."

There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other--it is but a

verse--not only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible even to

my comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to spell the

outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood:

"Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her ";[34]

I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either, since I

had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse, from then to

now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has continued to

haunt me.

I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious and

pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in images,

words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond

their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once

upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd":

and from the places employed in its illustration, which are all in the

immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my father, I am able

to date it before the seventh year of my age, although it was probably

earlier in fact. The "pastures green" were represented by a certain

suburban stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, under an

autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water of Leith: the place is long

ago built up; no pastures now, no stubble-fields; only a maze of little

streets and smoking chimneys and shrill children. Here, in the fleecy

person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow something unseen,

unrealised, and yet benignant; and close by the sheep in which I was

incarnated--as if for greater security--rustled the skirts of my nurse.

"Death's dark vale" was a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery: a

formidable yet beloved spot, for children love to be afraid,--in measure

as they love all experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces

ahead (seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny

passage: on the one side of me a rude, knobby shepherd's staff, such as

cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a

billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress: the staff sturdily

upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like one whispering,

towards my ear. I was aware--I will never tell you how--that the

presence of these articles afforded me encouragement. The third and last

of my pictures illustrated the words:--

"My table Thou hast furnished

In presence of my foes:

My head Thou dost with oil anoint,

And my cup overflows":

and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series. I saw myself

seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over my shoulder a

hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an authentic

shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green court of a ruin, and

from the far side of the court black and white imps discharged against

me ineffectual arrows. The picture appears arbitrary, but I can trace

every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock analysed the dream of Alan

Armadale. The summer-house and court were muddled together out of

Billings' "Antiquities of Scotland"; the imps conveyed from Bagster's

"Pilgrim's Progress"; the bearded and robed figure from any one of a

thousand Bible pictures; and the shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old

illustrated Bible, where it figured in the hand of Samuel anointing

Saul, and had been pointed out to me as a jest by my father. It was

shown me for a jest, remark; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted

it in earnest. Children are all classics; a bottle would have seemed an

intermediary too trivial--that divine refreshment of whose meaning I had

no guess; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn with

delight, even as, a little later, I should have written flagon, chalice,

hanaper, beaker, or any word that might have appealed to me at the

moment as least contaminate with mean associations. In this string of

pictures I believe the gist of the psalm to have consisted; I believe it

had no more to say to me; and the result was consolatory. I would go to

sleep dwelling with restfulness upon these images; they passed before

me, besides, to an appropriate music; for I had already singled out from

that rude psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds of all,

not growing old, not disgraced by its association with long Sunday

tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a companion

thought:--

"In pastures green Thou leadest me,

The quiet waters by."

The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of what

was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these pleased me,

it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great vacant world upon

whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might

re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might

call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland, and

home and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in

durance. "Robinson Crusoe"; some of the books of that cheerful,

ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather gruesome and

bloody for a child, but very picturesque, called "Paul Blake"; these are

the three strongest impressions I remember: "The Swiss Family Robinson"

came next, _longo intervallo_. At these I played, conjured up their

scenes, and delighted to hear them rehearsed unto seventy times seven. I

am not sure but what "Paul Blake" came after I could read. It seems

connected with a visit to the country, and an experience unforgettable.

The day had been warm; H---- and I had played together charmingly all

day in a sandy wilderness across the road; then came the evening with a

great flash of colour and a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my

playmate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the sagas say, but I

was sent into the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy

tales, went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How

often since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was

the first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot,

and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then

that I knew I loved reading.

II

To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and

dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large proportion of their

pleasure then comes to an end; "the malady of not marking" overtakes

them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the

chime of fair words or the march of the stately period. _Non ragioniam_

of these. But to all the step is dangerous; it involves coming of age;

it is even a kind of second weaning. In the past all was at the choice

of others; they chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to

their own tune the books of childhood. In the future we are to approach

the silent, inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of

what we are to read is in our own hands thenceforward. For instance, in

the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my old

nurse; they were of her choice, and she imposed them on my infancy,

reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to read his

own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on assonances and

alliterations. I know very well my mother must have been all the while

trying to educate my taste upon more secular authors; but the vigour and

the continual opportunities of my nurse triumphed, and after a long

search, I can find in these earliest volumes of my autobiography no

mention of anything but nursery rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.

I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their

school Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in "Bingen on the

Rhine," "A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers," or in "The

Soldier's Funeral," in the declamation of which I was held to have

surpassed myself. "Robert's voice," said the master on this memorable

occasion, "is not strong, but impressive": an opinion which I was fool

enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me for years in

consequence. I am sure one should not be so deliciously tickled by the

humorous pieces:--

"What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,

Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?"

I think this quip would leave us cold. The "Isles of Greece" seem rather

tawdry too; but on the "Address to the Ocean," or on "The Dying

Gladiator," "time has writ no wrinkle."

"'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,

Whither flies the silent lark?"--

does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon these

lines in the Fourth Reader; and "surprised with joy, impatient as the

wind," he plunged into the sequel? And there was another piece, this

time in prose, which none can have forgotten; many like me must have

searched Dickens with zeal to find it again, and in its proper context,

and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsiderable measure of

disappointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of

poetry, to London.

But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out for

himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and pleasure. My

father's library was a spot of some austerity: the proceedings of learned

societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above

all, optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in

holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident. The

"Parent's Assistant," "Rob Roy," "Waverley," and "Guy Mannering," the

"Voyages of Captain Woods Rogers," Fuller's and Bunyan's "Holy Wars," "The

Reflections of Robinson Crusoe," "The Female Bluebeard," G. Sand's "Mare

au Diable"--(how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's "Tower of

London," and four old volumes of _Punch_--these were the chief exceptions.

In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early

fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I

knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I

remember my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous,

and signed with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they

were the works of Mr. Punch. Time and again I tried to read "Rob Roy,"

with whom of course I was acquainted from the "Tales of a Grandfather";

time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the

adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure and

surprise with which, lying on the floor one summer evening, I struck of a

sudden into the first scene with Andrew Fairservice. "The worthy Dr.

Lightfoot"--"mistrysted with a bogle"--"a wheen green trash"--"Jenny,

lass, I think I ha'e her": from that day to this the phrases have been

unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided

tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all

with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about

my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half asleep into the

clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith recalled me

to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book

concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or

ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was

reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her father

among the hills, or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I think of that

novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but

shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this

awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's by

nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists. Perhaps Mr. Lang is

right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are always the most

real. And yet I had read before this "Guy Mannering," and some of

"Waverley," with no such delighted sense of truth and humour, and I read

immediately after the greater part of the Waverley Novels, and was never

moved again in the same way or to the same degree. One circumstance is

suspicious: my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed

at all since I was ten. "Rob Roy," "Guy Mannering," and "Redgauntlet"

first; then, a little lower, "The Fortunes of Nigel"; then, after a huge

gulf, "Ivanhoe" and "Anne of Geierstein": the rest nowhere; such was the

verdict of the boy. Since then "The Antiquary," "St. Ronan's Well,"

"Kenilworth," and "The Heart of Midlothian" have gone up in the scale;

perhaps "Ivanhoe" and "Anne of Geierstein" have gone a trifle down; Diana

Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted world of "Rob

Roy"; I think more of the letters in "Redgauntlet" and Peter Peebles, that

dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about with equanimity, interest,

and I had almost said pleasure, while to the childish critic he often

caused unmixed distress. But the rest is the same; I could not finish "The

Pirate" when I was a child, I have never finished it yet; "Peveril of the

Peak" dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have

since waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was

quite without enjoyment. There is something disquieting in these

considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto's the best part of the

"Book of Snobs": does that mean that I was right when I was a child, or

does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the child is not the

man's father, but the man? and that I came into the world with all my

faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of

boredom?...

FOOTNOTE:

[34] "Jehovah Tsidkenu," translated in the Authorised Version as "The

Lord our Righteousness" (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. 16).

XIV

REFLECTIONS AND REMARKS ON HUMAN LIFE

I. JUSTICE AND JUSTIFICATION.--(1) It is the business of this life to

make excuses for others, but none for ourselves. We should be clearly

persuaded of our own misconduct, for that is the part of knowledge in

which we are most apt to be defective. (2) Even justice is no right of a

man's own, but a thing, like the king's tribute, which shall never be

his, but which he should strive to see rendered to another. None was

ever just to me; none ever will be. You may reasonably aspire to be

chief minister or sovereign pontiff: but not to be justly regarded in

your own character and acts. You know too much to be satisfied. For

justice is but an earthly currency, paid to appearances; you may see

another superficially righted; but be sure he has got too little or too

much; and in your own case rest content with what is paid you. It is

more just than you suppose; that your virtues are misunderstood is a

price you pay to keep your meannesses concealed. (3) When you seek to

justify yourself to others, you may be sure you will plead falsely. If

you fail, you have the shame of the failure; if you succeed, you will

have made too much of it, and be unjustly esteemed upon the other side.

(4) You have perhaps only one friend in the world, in whose esteem it is

worth while for you to right yourself. Justification to indifferent

persons is, at best, an impertinent intrusion. Let them think what they

please; they will be the more likely to forgive you in the end. (5) It

is a question hard to be resolved, whether you should at any time

criminate another to defend yourself. I have done it many times, and

always had a troubled conscience for my pains.

II. PARENT AND CHILD.--(1) The love of parents for their children is, of

all natural affections, the most ill-starred. It is not a love for the

person, since it begins before the person has come into the world, and

founds on an imaginary character and looks. Thus it is foredoomed to

disappointment; and because the parent either looks for too much, or at

least for something inappropriate, at his offspring's hands, it is too

often insufficiently repaid. The natural bond, besides, is stronger from

parent to child than from child to parent; and it is the side which

confers benefits, not which receives them, that thinks most of a

relation. (2) What do we owe our parents? No man can _owe_ love; none

can _owe_ obedience. We owe, I think, chiefly pity; for we are the

pledge of their dear and joyful union, we have been the solicitude of

their days and the anxiety of their nights, we have made them, though by

no will of ours, to carry the burthen of our sins, sorrows, and physical

infirmities; and too many of us grow up at length to disappoint the

purpose of their lives and requite their care and piety with cruel

pangs. (3) _Mater Dolorosa_. It is the particular cross of parents that

when the child grows up and becomes himself instead of that pale ideal

they had preconceived, they must accuse their own harshness or

indulgence for this natural result. They have all been like the duck and

hatched swan's eggs, or the other way about; yet they tell themselves

with miserable penitence that the blame lies with them; and had they sat

more closely, the swan would have been a duck, and home-keeping, in

spite of all. (4) A good son, who can fulfil what is expected of him,

has done his work in life. He has to redeem the sins of many, and

restore the world's confidence in children.

III. DIALOGUE ON CHARACTER AND DESTINY BETWEEN TWO PUPPETS.--At the end

of Chapter XXXIII. Count Spada and the General of the Jesuits were left

alone in the pavilion, while the course of the story was turned upon the

doings of the virtuous hero. Profiting by this moment of privacy, the

Jesuit turned with a very warning countenance upon the peer.

"Have a care, my lord," said he, raising a finger. "You are already no

favourite with the author; and for my part, I begin to perceive from a

thousand evidences that the narrative is drawing near a close. Yet a

chapter or two at most, and you will be overtaken by some sudden and

appalling judgment."

"I despise your womanish presentiments," replied Spada, "and count

firmly upon another volume; I see a variety of reasons why my life

should be prolonged to within a few pages of the end; indeed, I permit

myself to expect resurrection in a sequel, or second part. You will

scarce suggest that there can be any end to the newspaper; and you will

certainly never convince me that the author, who cannot be entirely

without sense, would have been at so great pains with my intelligence,

gallant exterior, and happy and natural speech, merely to kick me hither

and thither for two or three paltry chapters and then drop me at the end

like a dumb personage. I know you priests are often infidels in secret.

Pray, do you believe in an author at all?"

"Many do not, I am aware," replied the General softly; "even in the last

chapter we encountered one, the self-righteous David Hume, who goes so

far as to doubt the existence of the newspaper in which our adventures

are now appearing; but it would neither become my cloth, nor do credit

to my great experience, were I to meddle with these dangerous opinions.

My alarm for you is not metaphysical, it is moral in its origin: You

must be aware, my poor friend, that you are a very bad character--the

worst indeed that I have met with in these pages. The author hates you,

Count; and difficult as it may be to connect the idea of

immortality--or, in plain terms, of a sequel--with the paper and

printer's ink of which your humanity is made, it is yet more difficult

to foresee anything but punishment and pain for one who is justly

hateful in the eyes of his creator."

"You take for granted many things that I shall not easily be persuaded

to allow," replied the villain. "Do you really so far deceive yourself

in your imagination as to fancy that the author is a friend to good?

Read; read the book in which you figure; and you will soon disown such

crude vulgarities. Lelio is a good character; yet only two chapters ago

we left him in a fine predicament. His old servant was a model of the

virtues, yet did he not miserably perish in that ambuscade upon the road

to Poitiers? And as for the family of the bankrupt merchant, how is it

possible for greater moral qualities to be alive with more irremediable

misfortunes? And yet you continue to misrepresent an author to yourself,

as a deity devoted to virtue and inimical to vice? Pray, if you have no

pride in your own intellectual credit for yourself, spare at least the

sensibilities of your associates."

"The purposes of the serial story," answered the Priest, "are, doubtless

for some wise reason, hidden from those who act in it. To this

limitation we must bow. But I ask every character to observe narrowly

his own personal relations to the author. There, if nowhere else, we may

glean some hint of his superior designs. Now I am myself a mingled

personage, liable to doubts, to scruples, and to sudden revulsions of

feeling; I reason continually about life, and frequently the result of

my reasoning is to condemn or even to change my action. I am now

convinced, for example, that I did wrong in joining in your plot against

the innocent and most unfortunate Lelio. I told you so, you will

remember, in the chapter which has just been concluded and though I do

not know whether you perceived the ardour and fluency with which I

expressed myself, I am still confident in my own heart that I spoke at

that moment not only with the warm approval, but under the direct

inspiration, of the author of the tale. I know, Spada, I tell you I

_know_, that he loved me as I uttered these words; and yet at other

periods of my career I have been conscious of his indifference and

dislike. You must not seek to reason me from this conviction; for it is

supplied me from higher authority than that of reason, and is indeed a

part of my experience. It may be an illusion that I drove last night

from Saumur; it may be an illusion that we are now in the garden chamber

of the chateau; it may be an illusion that I am conversing with Count

Spada; you may be an illusion, Count, yourself; but of three things I

will remain eternally persuaded, that the author exists not only in the

newspaper but in my own heart, that he loves me when I do well, and that

he hates and despises me when I do otherwise."

"I too believe in the author," returned the Count. "I believe likewise

in a sequel, written in finer style and probably cast in a still higher

rank of society than the present story; although I am not convinced that

we shall then be conscious of our pre-existence here. So much of your

argument is, therefore, beside the mark; for to a certain point I am as

orthodox as yourself. But where you begin to draw general conclusions

from your own private experience, I must beg pointedly and finally to

differ. You will not have forgotten, I believe, my daring and

single-handed butchery of the five secret witnesses? Nor the sleight of

mind and dexterity of language with which I separated Lelio from the

merchant's family? These were not virtuous actions; and yet, how am I to

tell you? I was conscious of a troubled joy, a glee, a hellish gusto in

my author's bosom, which seemed to renew my vigour with every sentence,

and which has indeed made the first of these passages accepted for a

model of spirited narrative description, and the second for a

masterpiece of wickedness and wit. What result, then, can be drawn from

two experiences so contrary as yours and mine? For my part, I lay it

down as a principle, no author can be moral in a merely human sense.

And, to pursue the argument higher, how can you, for one instant,

suppose the existence of free-will in puppets situated as we are in the

thick of a novel which we do not even understand? And how, without

free-will upon our parts, can you justify blame or approval on that of

the author? We are in his hands; by a stroke of the pen, to speak

reverently, he made us what we are; by a stroke of the pen he can

utterly undo and transmute what he has made. In the very next chapter,

my dear General, you may be shown up for an impostor, or I be stricken

down in the tears of penitence and hurried into the retirement of a

monastery!"

"You use an argument old as mankind, and difficult of answer," said the

Priest. "I cannot justify the free-will of which I am usually conscious;

nor will I ever seek to deny that this consciousness is interrupted.

Sometimes events mount upon me with such swiftness and pressure that my

choice is overwhelmed, and even to myself I seem to obey a will external

to my own; and again I am sometimes so paralysed and impotent between

alternatives that I am tempted to imagine a hesitation on the part of my

author. But I contend, upon the other hand, for a limited free-will in

the sphere of consciousness; and as it is in and by my consciousness

that I exist to myself, I will not go on to inquire whether that

free-will is valid as against the author, the newspaper, or even the

readers of the story. And I contend, further, for a sort of empire or

independence of our own characters when once created, which the author

cannot or at least does not choose to violate. Hence Lelio was conceived

upright, honest, courageous, and headlong; to that first idea all his

acts and speeches must of necessity continue to answer; and the same,

though with such different defects and qualities, applies to you, Count

Spada, and to myself. We must act up to our characters; it is these

characters that the author loves or despises; it is on account of them

that we must suffer or triumph, whether in this work or in a sequel.

Such is my belief."

"It is pure Calvinistic election, my dear sir, and, by your leave, a

very heretical position for a churchman to support," replied the Count.

"Nor can I see how it removes the difficulty. I was not consulted as to

my character; I might have chosen to be Lelio; I might have chosen to be

yourself; I might even have preferred to figure in a different romance,

or not to enter into the world of literature at all. And am I to be

blamed or hated, because some one else wilfully and inhumanely made me

what I am, and has continued ever since to encourage me in what are

called my vices? You may say what you please, my dear sir, but if that

is the case, I had rather be a telegram from the seat of war than a

reasonable and conscious character in a romance; nay, and I have a

perfect right to repudiate, loathe, curse, and utterly condemn the

ruffian who calls himself the author."

"You have, as you say, a perfect right," replied the Jesuit; "and I am

convinced that it will not affect him in the least."

"He shall have one slave the fewer for me," added the Count. "I discard

my allegiance once for all."

"As you please," concluded the other; "but at least be ready, for I

perceive we are about to enter on the scene."

And, indeed, just at that moment, Chapter XXXIV. being completed,