Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology Read online

  All these patent truisms have a very strange air, when written down. But that, my dear sir, is no fault of mine or of the truisms. There they are. I beseech you, do not trifle with them. Bethink yourself like a man. This is the time.

  But, you say, all this is very well; it does not help me to a choice. Once more, sir, you have me; it does not. What shall I say? A choice, let us remember, is almost more of a negative than a positive. You embrace one thing; but you refuse a thousand. The most liberal profession imprisons many energies and starves many affections. If you are in a bank, you cannot be much upon the sea. You cannot be both a first-rate violinist and a first-rate painter: you must lose in the one art if you persist in following both. If you are sure of your preference, follow it. If not—nay, my dear sir, it is not for me or any man to go beyond this point. God made you; not I. I cannot even make you over again. I have heard of a schoolmaster, whose speciality it was to elicit the bent of each pupil: poor schoolmaster, poor pupils! As for me, if you have nothing indigenous in your own heart, no living preference, no fine, human scorn, I leave you to the tide; it will sweep you somewhere. Have you but a grain of inclination, I will help you. If you wish to be a costermonger, be it, shame the devil; and I will stand the donkey. If you wish to be nothing, once more I leave you to the tide. I regret profoundly, my dear young sir, not only for you in whom I see such a lively promise of the future, but for the sake of your admirable and truly worthy father and your no less excellent mamma, that my remarks should seem no more conclusive. I can give myself this praise, that I have kept back nothing; but this, alas! is a subject on which there is little to put forward. It will probably not much matter what you decide upon doing; for most men seem to sink at length to the degree of stupor necessary for contentment in their different estates. Yes, sir, this is what I have observed. Most men are happy, and most men dishonest. Their mind sinks to the proper level; their honour easily accepts the custom of the trade. I wish you may find degeneration no more painful than your neighbours, soon sink into apathy, and be long spared in a state of respectable somnambulism, from the grave to which we haste.

  Gentlemen

  A quality of exquisite aptitude marks out the gentlemanly act; without an element of wit, we can be only gentlemen by negatives.

  I

  WHAT DO we mean today by that common phrase, a gentleman? By the lights of history, from gens, gentilis, it should mean a man of family, ‘one of a kent house’, one of notable descent: thus embodying an ancient stupid belief and implying a modern scientific theory. The ancient and stupid belief came to the ground, with a prodigious dust and the collapse of several polities, in the latter half of the last century. There followed upon this an interregnum, during which it was believed that all men were born ‘free and equal’, and that it really did not matter who your father was. Man has always been nobly irrational, bandaging his eyes against the facts of life, feeding himself on the wind of ambitious falsehood, counting his stock to be the children of the gods; and yet perhaps he never showed in a more touching light than when he embraced this boyish theory. Freedom we now know for a thing incompatible with corporate life and a blessing probably peculiar to the solitary robber; we know besides that every advance in richness of existence, whether moral or material, is paid for by a loss of liberty; that liberty is man’s coin in which he pays his way; that luxury and knowledge and virtue, and love and the family affections, are all so many fresh fetters on the naked and solitary freeman. And the ancient stupid belief having come to the ground and the dust of its fall subsided, behold the modern scientific theory beginning to rise very nearly on the old foundation; and individuals no longer (as was fondly imagined) springing into life from God knows where, incalculable, untrammelled, abstract, equal to one another—but issuing modestly from a race; with virtues and vices, fortitudes and frailties, ready made; the slaves of their inheritance of blood; eternally unequal. So that we in the present, and yet more our scientific descendants in the future, must use, when we desire to praise a character, the old expression, gentleman, in nearly the old sense: one of a happy strain of blood, one fortunate in the descent from brave and self-respecting ancestors, whether clowns or counts.

  And yet plainly this is of but little help. The intricacy of descent defies prediction; so that even the heir of a hundred sovereigns may be born a brute or a vulgarian. We may be told that a picture is an heirloom; that does not tell us what the picture represents. All qualities are inherited, and all characters; but which are the qualities that belong to the gentleman? what is the character that earns and deserves that honourable style?

  II

  The current ideas vary with every class, and need scarce be combated, need scarce be mentioned save for the love of fun. In one class, and not long ago, he was regarded as a gentleman who kept a gig. He is a gentleman in one house who does not eat peas with his knife; in another who is not to be discountenanced by any created form of butler. In my own case I have learned to move among pompous menials without much terror, never without much respect. In the narrow sense, and so long as they publicly tread the boards of their profession, it would be difficult to find more finished gentlemen; and it would often be a matter of grave thought with me, sitting in my club, to compare the bearing of the servants with that of those on whom they waited. There could be no question which were the better gentlemen. And yet I was hurried into no democratic theories; for I saw the members’ part was the more difficult to play, I saw that to serve was a more graceful attitude than to be served, I knew besides that much of the servants’ gentility was ad hoc and would be laid aside with their livery jackets; and to put the matter in a nutshell, that some of the members would have made very civil footmen and many of the servants intolerable members. For all that, one of the prettiest gentlemen I ever knew was a servant. A gentleman he happened to be, even in the old stupid sense, only on the wrong side of the blanket; and a man besides of much experience, having served in the Guards’ Club, and been valet to old Cooke of the Saturday Review, and visited the States with Madame Sinico (I think it was) and Portugal with Madame Someone-else, so that he had studied, at least from the chair-backs, many phases of society. It chanced he was waiter in a hotel where I was staying with my mother; it was midwinter and we were the only guests; all afternoons, he and I passed together on a perfect equality in the smoking-room; and at meal-time, he waited on my mother and me as a servant. Now here was a trial of manners from which few would have come forth successful. To take refuge in a frozen bearing would have been the timid, the inelegant, resource of almost all. My friend was much more bold; he joined in the talk, he ventured to be jocular, he pushed familiarity to the nice margin, and yet still preserved the indefinable and proper distance of the English servant, and yet never embarrassed, never even alarmed, the comrade with whom he had just been smoking a pipe. It was a masterpiece of social dexterity—on artificial lines no doubt, and dealing with difficulties that should never have existed, that exist much less in France, and that will exist nowhere long—but a masterpiece for all that, and one that I observed with despairing admiration, as I have watched Sargent paint.

  I say these difficulties should never have existed; for the whole relation of master and servant is today corrupt and vulgar. At home in England it is the master who is degraded; here in the States, by a triumph of inverted tact, the servant often so contrives that he degrades himself. He must be above his place; and it is the mark of a gentleman to be at home. He thinks perpetually of his own dignity; it is the proof of a gentleman to be jealous of the dignity of others. He is ashamed of his trade, which is the essence of vulgarity. He is paid to do certain services; yet he does them so gruffly that any man of spirit would resent them if they were gratuitous favours; and this (if he will reflect upon it tenderly) is so far from the genteel as to be not even coarsely honest. Yet we must not blame the man for these mistakes; the vulgarity is in the air. There is a tone in popular literature much to be deplored; deprecating service, like a disgrace;
honouring those who are ashamed of it; honouring even (I speak not without book) such as prefer to live by the charity of poor neighbours instead of blacking the shoes of the rich. Blacking shoes is counted (in these works) a thing specially disgraceful. To the philosophic mind, it will seem a less exceptionable trade than to deal in stocks, and one in which it is more easy to be honest than to write books. Why, then, should it be marked out for reprobation by the popular authors? It is taken, I think, for a type; inoffensive in itself, it stands for many disagreeable household duties; disagreeable to fulfil, I had nearly said shameful to impose; and with the dullness of their tribe, the popular authors transfer the shame to the wrong party. Truly, in this matter there seems a lack of gentility somewhere; a lack of refinement, of reserve, of common modesty; a strain of the spirit of those ladies in the past, who did not hesitate to bathe before a footman. And one thing at least is easy to prophesy, not many years will have gone by before those shall be held the most ‘elegant’ gentlemen, and those the most ‘refined’ ladies, who wait (in a dozen particulars) upon themselves. But the shame is for the masters only. The servant stands quite clear. He has one of the easiest parts to play upon the face of earth; he must be far misled, if he so grossly fails in it.

  III

  It is a fairly common accomplishment to behave with decency in one character and among those to whom we are accustomed and with whom we have been brought up. The trial of gentility lies in some such problem as that of my waiter’s, in foreign travel, or in some sudden and sharp change of class. I once sailed on the emigrant side from the Clyde to New York; among my fellow-passengers I passed generally as a mason, for the excellent reason that there was a mason on board who happened to know; and this fortunate event enabled me to mix with these working people on a footing of equality. I thus saw them at their best, using their own civility; while I, on the other hand, stood naked to their criticism. The workmen were at home, I was abroad, I was the shoe-black in the drawing-room, the Huron at Versailles; and I used to have hot and cold fits, lest perchance I made a beast of myself in this new environment. I had no allowances to hope for; I could not plead that I was ‘only a gentleman after all’, for I was known to be a mason; and I must stand and fall by my transplanted manners on their own intrinsic decency. It chanced there was a Welsh blacksmith on board, who was not only well-mannered himself and a judge of manners, but a fellow besides of an original mind. He had early diagnosed me for a masquerader and a person out of place; and as we had grown intimate upon the voyage, I carried him my troubles. How did I behave? Was I, upon this crucial test, at all a gentleman? I might have asked eight hundred thousand blacksmiths (if Wales or the world contain so many) and they would have held my question for a mockery; but Jones was a man of genuine perception, thought a long time before he answered, looking at me comically and reviewing (I could see) the events of the voyage, and then told me that ‘on the whole’ I did ‘pretty well’. Mr Jones was a humane man and very much my friend, and he could get no further than ‘on the whole’ and ‘pretty well’. I was chagrined at the moment for myself; on a larger basis of experience, I am now only concerned for my class. My co-equals would have done but little better, and many of them worse. Indeed, I have never seen a sight more pitiable than that of the current gentleman unbending; unless it were the current lady! It is these stiff-necked condescensions, it is that graceless assumption, that make the diabolic element in times of riot. A man may be willing to starve in silence like a hero; it is a rare man indeed who can accept the unspoken slights of the unworthy, and not be embittered. There was a visit paid to the steerage quarters on this same voyage, by a young gentleman and two young ladies; and as I was by that time pretty well accustomed to the workman’s standard, I had a chance to see my own class from below. God help them, poor creatures! As they ambled back to their saloon, they left behind, in the minds of my companions, and in my mind also, an image and an influence that might well have set them weeping, could they have guessed its nature. I spoke a few lines past of a shoe-black in a drawing-room; it is what I never saw; but I did see that young gentleman and these young ladies on the forward deck, and the picture remains with me, and the offence they managed to convey is not forgotten.

  IV

  And yet for all this ambiguity, for all these imperfect examples, we know clearly what we mean by the word. When we meet a gentleman of another class, through all contrariety of habits, the essentials of the matter stand confessed: I never had a doubt of Jones. More than that, we recognise the type in books; the actors of history, the characters of fiction, bear the mark upon their brow; at a word, by a bare act, we discern and segregate the mass, this one a gentleman, the others not. To take but the last hundred years, Scott, Gordon, Wellington in his cold way, Grant in his plain way, Shelley for all his follies, these were clearly gentlemen; Napoleon, Byron, Lockhart, these were as surely cads, and the two first cads of a rare water.

  Let us take an anecdote of Grant and one of Wellington. On the day of the capitulation, Lee wore his presentation sword; it was the first thing Grant observed, and from that moment he had but one thought: how to avoid taking it. A man, who should perhaps have had the nature of an angel, but assuredly not the special virtues of the gentleman, might have received the sword, and no more words about it: he would have done well in a plain way. One who wished to be a gentleman, and knew not how, might have received and returned it: he would have done infamously ill, he would have proved himself a cad; taking the stage for himself, leaving to his adversary confusion of countenance and the ungraceful posture of the man condemned to offer thanks. Grant, without a word said, added to the terms this article: ‘All officers to retain their side-arms’; and the problem was solved and Lee kept his sword, and Grant went down to posterity, not perhaps a fine gentleman, but a great one. And now for Wellington. The tale is on a lower plane, is elegant rather than noble; yet it is a tale of a gentleman too, and raises besides a pleasant and instructive question. Wellington and Marshal Marmont were adversaries (it will not have been forgotten) in one of the prettiest recorded acts of military fencing, the campaign of Salamanca: it was a brilliant business on both sides, just what Count Tolstoi ought to study before he writes again upon the inutility of generals; indeed, it was so very brilliant on the Marshal’s part that on the last day, in one of those extremes of cleverness that come so near stupidity, he fairly overreached himself, was taken ‘in flagrant delict’, was beaten like a sack, and had his own arm shot off as a reminder not to be so clever the next time. It appears he was incurable; a more distinguished example of the same precipitate, ingenious blundering will be present to the minds of all—his treachery in 1814; and even the tale I am now telling shows, on a lilliputian scale, the man’s besetting weakness. Years after Salamanca, the two generals met, and the Marshal (willing to be agreeable) asked the Duke his opinion of the battle. With that promptitude, wit, and willingness to spare pain which make so large a part of the armoury of the gentleman, Wellington had his answer ready, impossible to surpass on its own ground: ‘I early perceived your excellency had been wounded.’ And you see what a pleasant position he had created for the Marshal, who had no more to do than just to bow and smile and take the stage at his leisure. But here we come to our problem. The Duke’s answer (whether true or false) created a pleasant position for the Marshal. But what sort of position had the Marshal’s question created for the Duke? and had not Marmont the manoeuvrer once more manoeuvred himself into a false position? I conceive so. It is the man who has gained the victory, not the man who has suffered the defeat, who finds his ground embarrassing. The vanquished has an easy part, it is easy for him to make a handsome reference; but how hard for the victor to make a handsome reply! An unanswerable compliment is the social bludgeon; and Marmont (with the most graceful intentions in the world) had propounded one of the most desperate. Wellington escaped from his embarrassment by a happy and courtly inspiration. Grant, I imagine, since he had a genius for silence, would have found some means
to hold his peace. Lincoln, with his half-tact and unhappy readiness, might have placed an appropriate anecdote and raised a laugh; not an unkindly laugh, for he was a kindly man; but under the circumstances the best-natured laugh would have been death to Marmont. Shelley (if we can conceive him to have gained a battle at all) would have blushed and stammered, feeling the Marshal’s false position like some grossness of his own; and when the blush had communicated itself to the cheeks of his unlucky questioner, some stupid, generous word (such as I cannot invent for him) would have found its way to his lips and set them both at ease. Byron? well, he would have managed to do wrong; I have too little sympathy for that unmatched vulgarian to create his part. Napoleon? that would have depended: had he been angry, he would have left all competitors behind in cruel coarseness: had he been in a good humour, it might have been the other way. For this man, the very model of a cad, was so well served with truths by the clear insight of his mind, and with words by his great though shallow gift of literature, that he has left behind him one of the most gentlemanly utterances on record: ‘Madame, respectez le fardeau.’ And he could do the right thing too, as well as say it; and any character in history might envy him that moment when he gave his sword, the sword of the world-subduer, to his old, loyal enemy, Macdonald. A strange thing to consider two generations of a Skye family, and two generations of the same virtue, fidelity to the defeated: the father braving the rains of the Hebrides with the tattered beggar-lad that was his rightful sovereign; the son, in that princely house of Fontainebleau, himself a marshal of the Empire, receiving from the gratitude of one whom he had never feared and who had never loved him, the tool and symbol of the world’s most splendid domination. I am glad, since I deal with the name of gentlemen, to touch for one moment on its nobler sense, embodied, on the historic scale and with epic circumstance, in the lives of these Macdonalds. Nor is there any man but must be conscious of a thrill of gratitude to Napoleon, for his worthy recognition of the worthiest virtue. Yes, that was done like a gentleman; and yet in our hearts we must think that it was done by a performer. For to feel precisely what it is to be a gentleman and what it is to be a cad, we have but to study Napoleon’s attitude after Trafalgar, and compare it with that beautiful letter of Louis the Fourteenth’s in which he acknowledges the news of Blenheim. We hear much about the Sun-king nowadays, and Michelet is very sad reading about his government, and Thackeray was very droll about his wig; but when we read this letter from the vainest king in Europe smarting under the deadliest reverse, we know that at least he was a gentleman. In the battle, Tallard had lost his son, Louis the primacy of Europe; it is only with the son the letter deals. Poor Louis! if his wig had been twice as great, and his sins twice as numerous, here is a letter to throw wide the gates of Heaven for his entrance. I wonder what would Louis have said to Marshal Marmont? Something infinitely condescending; for he was too much of a king to be quite a gentleman. And Marcus Aurelius, how would he have met the question? With some reference to the gods no doubt, uttered not quite without a twang; for the good emperor and great gentleman of Rome was of the Methodists of his day and race.