Lay Morals and Other Essays E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 415

Beschreibung

A collection of essays, beginning with ruminations on ethics. The book starts: "The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself..."

Leseprobe

LAY MORALS AND OTHER ESSAYS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

feedback welcome: [email protected]

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LAY MORALS CHAPTER 1

LAY MORALS CHAPTER II

LAY MORALS CHAPTER III

LAY MORALS CHAPTER IV

FATHER DAMIEN AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU

THE PENTLAND RISING A PAGE OF HISTORY 1666

THE PENTLAND RISING CHAPTER I - THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT

THE PENTLAND RISING  CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNING

THE PENTLAND RISING  CHAPTER III - THE MARCH OF THE REBELS

THE PENTLAND RISING  CHAPTER IV - RULLION GREEN

THE PENTLAND RISING  CHAPTER V - A RECORD OF BLOOD

THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW

COLLEGE PAPERS CHAPTER I - EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824

COLLEGE PAPERS CHAPTER II - THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY

COLLEGE PAPERS CHAPTER III - DEBATING SOCIETIES

COLLEGE PAPERS CHAPTER IV - THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS (1)

COLLEGE PAPERS CHAPTER V - THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE

CRITICISMS CHAPTER I - LORD LYTTON'S 'FABLES IN SONG'

CRITICISMS CHAPTER II - SALVINI'S MACBETH

CRITICISMS CHAPTER III - BAGSTER'S 'PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'

SKETCHES CHAPTER I - THE SATIRIST

SKETCHES CHAPTER II - NUITS BLANCHES

SKETCHES CHAPTER III - THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES

SKETCHES CHAPTER IV - NURSES

SKETCHES CHAPTER V - A CHARACTER

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER I - NANCE AT THE 'GREEN DRAGON'

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER II - IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER III -  JONATHAN HOLDAWAY

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER IV - MINGLING THREADS

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER V - LIFE IN THE CASTLE

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER VI - THE BAD HALF-CROWN

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER VII - THE BLEACHING-GREEN

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD CHAPTER VIII - THE MAIL GUARD

THE YOUNG CHEVALIER PROLOGUE - THE WINE-SELLER'S WIFE

THE YOUNG CHEVALIER CHAPTER I - THE PRINCE

HEATHERCAT CHAPTER I - TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT

HEATHERCAT CHAPTER II - FRANCIE

HEATHERCAT CHAPTER III - THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE

LAY MORALS CHAPTER 1

THE problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then  to utter.  Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life  thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best  of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which  they perceive.  Speech which goes from one to another between  two natures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is  doubly relative.  The speaker buries his meaning; it is for  the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or  spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and  prepared hearer.  Such, moreover, is the complexity of life,  that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be  sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to  throw out some magnanimous hints.  No man was ever so poor  that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or  actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for  it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to  him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self- dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its  dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.

A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and  contempt for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as  they can grasp of this inner law; but the vast majority, when  they come to advise the young, must be content to retail  certain doctrines which have been already retailed to them in  their own youth.  Every generation has to educate another  which it has brought upon the stage.  People who readily  accept the responsibility of parentship, having very  different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when  that responsibility falls due.  What are they to tell the  child about life and conduct, subjects on which they have  themselves so few and such confused opinions?  Indeed, I do  not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and  yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some  words to say in his own defence.  Where does he find them?  and what are they when found?

As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety- nine cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide- eyed brat three bad things: the terror of public opinion,  and, flowing from that as a fountain, the desire of wealth  and applause.  Besides these, or what might be deduced as  corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any  effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and  book-keeping, and how to walk through a quadrille.

But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be  Christians.  It may be want of penetration, but I have not  yet been able to perceive it.  As an honest man, whatever we  teach, and be it good or evil, it is not the doctrine of  Christ.  What he taught (and in this he is like all other  teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a  ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views,  but a view.  What he showed us was an attitude of mind.   Towards the many considerations on which conduct is built,  each man stands in a certain relation.  He takes life on a  certain principle.  He has a compass in his spirit which  points in a certain direction.  It is the attitude, the  relation, the point of the compass, that is the whole body  and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the details are  comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by  this, and this only, can they be explained and applied.  And  thus, to learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all,  like a historical artist, think ourselves into sympathy with  his position and, in the technical phrase, create his  character.  A historian confronted with some ambiguous  politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one  pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every  side, and grope for some central conception which is to  explain and justify the most extreme details; until that is  found, the politician is an enigma, or perhaps a quack, and  the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big words; but  once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature  appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from  point to point, from end to end.  This is a degree of trouble  which will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not  even the terror of eternal fire can teach a business man to  bend his imagination to such athletic efforts.  Yet without  this, all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall  understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more  than broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains  buried; and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is  a dead language in our ears.

Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our  current doctrines.

'Ye cannot,' he says, 'SERVE GOD AND MAMMON.'  Cannot?  And  our whole system is to teach us how we can!

'THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE WISER IN THEIR GENERATION  THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT.'  Are they?  I had been led to  understand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for  example, prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty  was the best policy; that an author of repute had written a  conclusive treatise 'How to make the best of both worlds.'   Of both worlds indeed!  Which am I to believe then - Christ  or the author of repute?

'TAKE NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW.'  Ask the Successful  Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to  admit that this is not only a silly but an immoral position.   All we believe, all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or  our contemporaries, stands condemned in this one sentence,  or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as  unwise and inhumane.  We are not then of the 'same mind that  was in Christ.'  We disagree with Christ.  Either Christ  meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.  Well  says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament,  and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader  may recognise: 'Let but one of these sentences be rightly  read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left  one stone of that meeting-house upon another.'

It may be objected that these are what are called 'hard  sayings'; and that a man, or an education, may be very  sufficiently Christian although it leave some of these  sayings upon one side.  But this is a very gross delusion.   Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and  agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere  the phrase be done.  The universe, in relation to what any  man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly  comprehensible.  In itself, it is a great and travailing  ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man;  or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain,  one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we  can dimly study with these mortal eyes.  But what any man can  say of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation  to this little and plain corner, which is no less visible to  us than to him.  We are looking on the same map; it will go  hard if we cannot follow the demonstration.  The longest and  most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and  shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive  the aspect and drift of his intention.  The longest argument  is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly  parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new  star or an old street-lamp.  And briefly, if a saying is hard  to understand, it is because we are thinking of something  else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as  our prophet, and to think of different things in the same  order.  To be of the same mind with another is to see all  things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few  indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it is  to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of  his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his  vision that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at  once on the original, that whatever he may see to declare,  your mind will at once accept.  You do not belong to the  school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that  theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is  overhead at noon.  It is by the hard sayings that  discipleship is tested.  We are all agreed about the middling  and indifferent parts of knowledge and morality; even the  most soaring spirits too often take them tamely upon trust.   But the man, the philosopher or the moralist, does not stand  upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose of any system  looks towards those extreme points where it steps valiantly  beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint of things  outside.  Then only can you be certain that the words are not  words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only are  you sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a  star and not a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart  of the mystery, since it was for these that the author wrote  his book.

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often,  Christ finds a word that transcends all common-place  morality; every now and then he quits the beaten track to  pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and  magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of  thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday  conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept  some higher principle of conduct.  To a man who is of the  same mind that was in Christ, who stands at some centre not  too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct from  some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude - or,  shortly, to a man who is of Christ's philosophy - every such  saying should come home with a thrill of joy and  corroboration; he should feel each one below his feet as  another sure foundation in the flux of time and chance; each  should be another proof that in the torrent of the years and  generations, where doctrines and great armaments and empires  are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable, holding by  the eternal stars.  But alas! at this juncture of the ages it  is not so with us; on each and every such occasion our whole  fellowship of Christians falls back in disapproving wonder  and implicitly denies the saying.  Christians! the farce is  impudently broad.  Let us stand up in the sight of heaven and  confess.  The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin  Franklin.  HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY, is perhaps a hard  saying; it is certainly one by which a wise man of these days  will not too curiously direct his steps; but I think it shows  a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences; I  think we perceive a principle behind it; I think, without  hyperbole, we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin  Franklin.

CHAPTER II

BUT, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a  world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of  all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts  engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some  conscience and Christianity of method.  A man cannot go very  far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor kills, nor  commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness; for  these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of  duty.

Alas! what is a precept?  It is at best an illustration; it  is case law at the best which can be learned by precept.  The  letter is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which  underlies, and cannot be uttered, alone is true and helpful.   This is trite to sickness; but familiarity has a cunning  disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty from  the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall  dead upon the ear after several repetitions.  If you see a  thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing  too often, you no longer hear it.  Our attention requires to  be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a  thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of  about an equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar  means.  The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the  common run of hearers; it has become mere words of course;  and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit  like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod;  they are strangely at peace, they know all he has to say;  ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell and  it cannot startle their composure.  And so with this byword  about the letter and the spirit.  It is quite true, no doubt;  but it has no meaning in the world to any man of us.  Alas!  it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less: that  while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at  noon, perfect, clear, and stable like the earth.  But let a  man set himself to mark out the boundary with cords and pegs,  and were he never so nimble and never so exact, what with the  multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of the shadow  as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made  the circuit the whole figure will have changed.  Life may be  compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and  complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing  than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools of a  surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the  very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of  leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.   Look now for your shadows.  O man of formulae, is this a  place for you?  Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?   Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be  proposed for the judgment of man?  Now when the sun shines  and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable  multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and  at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new.  Can  you or your heart say more?

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of  life; and although you lived it feelingly in your own person,  and had every step of conduct burned in by pains and joys  upon your memory, tell me what definite lesson does  experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from both to  age?  The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but  the shadow of a delusion.  This is gone; that never truly  was; and you yourself are altered beyond recognition.  Times  and men and circumstances change about your changing  character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane affords  an image.  What was the best yesterday, is it still the best  in this changed theatre of a tomorrow?  Will your own Past  truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future?   And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what  hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside  us on their unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes,  impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another  sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of  scene, do you offer me these two score words? these five bald  prohibitions?  For the moral precepts are no more than five;  the first four deal rather with matters of observance than of  conduct; the tenth, THOU SHALT NOT COVET, stands upon another  basis, and shall be spoken of ere long.  The Jews, to whom  they were first given, in the course of years began to find  these precepts insufficient; and made an addition of no less  than six hundred and fifty others!  They hoped to make a  pocket-book of reference on morals, which should stand to  life in some such relation, say, as Hoyle stands in to the  scientific game of whist.  The comparison is just, and  condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never be  more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to play  our game in life to the noblest and the most divine  advantage.  Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view  of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously  leave youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of  spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete than  is afforded by these five precepts?

HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.  Yes, but does that mean to  obey? and if so, how long and how far?  THOU SHALL NOT KILL.   Yet the very intention and purport of the prohibition may be  best fulfilled by killing.  THOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.   But some of the ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed  of marriage and under the sanction of religion and law.  THOU  SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS.  How? by speech or by silence  also? or even by a smile?  THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.  Ah, that  indeed!  But what is TO STEAL?

To steal?  It is another word to be construed; and who is to  be our guide?  The police will give us one construction,  leaving the word only that least minimum of meaning without  which society would fall in pieces; but surely we must take  some higher sense than this; surely we hope more than a bare  subsistence for mankind; surely we wish mankind to prosper  and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves to live  rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a  policeman.  The approval or the disapproval of the police  must be eternally indifferent to a man who is both valorous  and good.  There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in the  condemnation of the law.  The law represents that modicum of  morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind;  but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own  more stringent judge?  I observe with pleasure that no brave  man has ever given a rush for such considerations.  The  Japanese have a nobler and more sentimental feeling for this  social bond into which we all are born when we come into the  world, and whose comforts and protection we all indifferently  share throughout our lives:- but even to them, no more than  to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state  supersede the higher law of duty.  Without hesitation and  without remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments  rather than abstain from doing right.  But the accidental  superior duty being thus fulfilled, they at once return in  allegiance to the common duty of all citizens; and hasten to  denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate their just  crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.

The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active  conscience or a thoughtful head.  But to show you how one or  the other may trouble a man, and what a vast extent of  frontier is left unridden by this invaluable eighth  commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man's  life.

He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous,  flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some  high motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life.   I should tell you at once that he thoroughly agrees with the  eighth commandment.  But he got hold of some unsettling  works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his  views of life and led him into many perplexities.  As he was  the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my  friend had enjoyed from the first the advantages of  education, nay, he had been kept alive through a sickly  childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of  air; for all of which he was indebted to his father's wealth.

At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who  followed the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees  in winter; and this inequality struck him with some force.   He was at that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably  curious in the aspects of life; and he spent much of his time  scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman- kind.  In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and  many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this  also struck him.  He began to perceive that life was a  handicap upon strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he  had been told, a fair and equal race.  He began to tremble  that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all  the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against  so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly  open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being  as himself.  There sat a youth beside him on the college  benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at  intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have  it washed.  It was my friend's principle to stay away as  often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.   But there was something that came home to him sharply, in  this fellow who had to give over study till his shirt was  washed, and the scores of others who had never an opportunity  at all.  IF ONE OF THESE COULD TAKE HIS PLACE, he thought;  and the thought tore away a bandage from his eyes.  He was  eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and despised himself  as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs of  Fortune.  He could no longer see without confusion one of  these brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity.   Had he not filched that fellow's birthright?  At best was he  not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and  greedily devouring stolen goods?  The money, indeed, belonged  to his father, who had worked, and thought, and given up his  liberty to earn it; but by what justice could the money  belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing but help  to squander it?  A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more even  and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these  considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal  position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end,  and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation  of expense.  It was not so with my friend, who was only  unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting  anger with which young men regard injustices in the first  blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely  acquiesce in their existence, and knowingly profit by their  complications.  Yet all this while he suffered many indignant  pangs.  And once, when he put on his boots, like any other  unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his best  consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free  himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not  his, and do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare  of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at  great expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think  his perplexities were thickest.  When he thought of all the  other young men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop  of families, who must remain at home to die, and with all  their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and how he,  by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these  others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no  labour, no devotion of soul and body, that could repay and  justify these partialities.  A religious lady, to whom he  communicated these reflections, could see no force in them  whatever.  'It was God's will,' said she.  But he knew it was  by God's will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which  cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by  God's will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which  excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity  of Pilate.  He knew, moreover, that although the possibility  of this favour he was now enjoying issued from his  circumstances, its acceptance was the act of his own will;  and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest and  sunshine.  And hence this allegation of God's providence did  little to relieve his scruples.  I promise you he had a very  troubled mind.  And I would not laugh if I were you, though  while he was thus making mountains out of what you think  molehills, he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly  practising many other things that to you seem black as hell.   Every man is his own judge and mountain-guide through life.   There is an old story of a mote and a beam, apparently not  true, but worthy perhaps of some consideration.  I should, if  I were you, give some consideration to these scruples of his,  and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it is  not unlikely that there may be something under both.  In the  meantime you must hear how my friend acted.  Like many  invalids, he supposed that he would die.  Now, should he die,  he saw no means of repaying this huge loan which, by the  hands of his father, mankind had advanced him for his  sickness.  In that case it would be lost money.  So he  determined that the advance should be as small as possible;  and, so long as he continued to doubt his recovery, lived in  an upper room, and grudged himself all but necessaries.  But  so soon as he began to perceive a change for the better, he  felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and brighten  his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a  help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a  help to him.

I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and  partial in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too  little of his parents; but I do say that here are some  scruples which tormented my friend in his youth, and still,  perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the midst of his  enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in  justice, and point, in their confused way, to some more  honourable honesty within the reach of man.  And at least, is  not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth commandment?  And  what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did that  precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?  'Thou  shalt not steal.'  With all my heart!  But AM I stealing?

The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us  from pursuing any transaction to an end.  You can make no one  understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain,  whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of  mankind, and either a good or an evil to the world.  We have  a sort of blindness which prevents us from seeing anything  but sovereigns.  If one man agrees to give another so many  shillings for so many hours' work, and then wilfully gives  him a certain proportion of the price in bad money and only  the remainder in good, we can see with half an eye that this  man is a thief.  But if the other spends a certain proportion  of the hours in smoking a pipe of tobacco, and a certain  other proportion in looking at the sky, or the clock, or  trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his own past  adventures, and only the remainder in downright work such as  he is paid to do, is he, because the theft is one of time and  not of money, - is he any the less a thief?  The one gave a  bad shilling, the other an imperfect hour; but both broke the  bargain, and each is a thief.  In piecework, which is what  most of us do, the case is none the less plain for being even  less material.  If you forge a bad knife, you have wasted  some of mankind's iron, and then, with unrivalled cynicism,  you pocket some of mankind's money for your trouble.  Is  there any man so blind who cannot see that this is theft?   Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have been  playing fast and loose with mankind's resources against  hunger; there will be less bread in consequence, and for lack  of that bread somebody will die next winter: a grim  consideration.  And you must not hope to shuffle out of blame  because you got less money for your less quantity of bread;  for although a theft be partly punished, it is none the less  a theft for that.  You took the farm against competitors;  there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility and be  answerable for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took  it.  By the act you came under a tacit bargain with mankind  to cultivate that farm with your best endeavour; you were  under no superintendence, you were on parole; and you have  broke your bargain, and to all who look closely, and yourself  among the rest if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.   Or take the case of men of letters.  Every piece of work  which is not as good as you can make it, which you have  palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in  execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on parole and  in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue  performance, should rise up against you in the court of your  own heart and condemn you for a thief.  Have you a salary?   If you trifle with your health, and so render yourself less  capable for duty, and still touch, and still greedily pocket  the emolument - what are you but a thief?  Have you double  accounts? do you by any time-honoured juggle, deceit, or  ambiguous process, gain more from those who deal with you  than it you were bargaining and dealing face to face in front  of God? - What are you but a thief?  Lastly, if you fill an  office, or produce an article, which, in your heart of  hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and  still draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of  this office, or still book your profits and keep on flooding  the world with these injurious goods? - though you were old,  and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are  you but a thief?  These may seem hard words and mere  curiosities of the intellect, in an age when the spirit of  honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all business is  conducted upon lies and so-called customs of the trade, that  not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or  honourableness of his pursuit.  I would say less if I thought  less.  But looking to my own reason and the right of things,  I can only avow that I am a thief myself, and that I  passionately suspect my neighbours of the same guilt.

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest?  Do you  find that in your Bible?  Easy!  It is easy to be an ass and  follow the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a  stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs.  Grundy mean by being honest.  But it will not bear the stress  of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.  Even before the  lowest of all tribunals, - before a court of law, whose  business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand  miles of right, but to withhold them from going so tragically  wrong that they will pull down the whole jointed fabric of  society by their misdeeds - even before a court of law, as we  begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following  at each other's tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning  to be reproved and punished, and declared no honesty at all,  but open theft and swindling; and simpletons who have gone on  through life with a quiet conscience may learn suddenly, from  the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade may be a  custom of the devil.  You thought it was easy to be honest.   Did you think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful?   Did you think the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as  a horn-pipe? and you could walk through life like a gentleman  and a hero, with no more concern than it takes to go to  church or to address a circular?  And yet all this time you  had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer, you  would not have broken it for the world!

The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of  little use in private judgment.  If compression is what you  want, you have their whole spirit compressed into the golden  rule; and yet there expressed with more significance, since  the law is there spiritually and not materially stated.  And  in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the sixth to  the ninth, are rather legal than ethical.  The police-court  is their proper home.  A magistrate cannot tell whether you  love your neighbour as yourself, but he can tell more or less  whether you have murdered, or stolen, or committed adultery,  or held up your hand and testified to that which was not; and  these things, for rough practical tests, are as good as can  be found.  And perhaps, therefore, the best condensation of  the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests,  'neminem laedere' and 'suum cuique tribuere.'  But all this  granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are  inadequate in the sphere of personal morality; that while  they tell the magistrate roughly when to punish, they can  never direct an anxious sinner what to do.

Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a  succinct proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing  in our faces.  We grant them one and all and for all that  they are worth; it is something above and beyond that we  desire.  Christ was in general a great enemy to such a way of  teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any of these plump  commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers  from the letter to the spirit.  For morals are a personal  affair; in the war of righteousness every man fights for his  own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna cannot  shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an  indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time  and case.  The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an  advocate who pleads at my tribunal.  He has to show not the  law, but that the law applies.  Can he convince me? then he  gains the cause.  And thus you find Christ giving various  counsels to varying people, and often jealously careful to  avoid definite precept.  Is he asked, for example, to divide  a heritage?  He refuses: and the best advice that he will  offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth commandment which  figures so strangely among the rest.  TAKE HEED, AND BEWARE  OF COVETOUSNESS.  If you complain that this is vague, I have  failed to carry you along with me in my argument.  For no  definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its  truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced  from heaven by the voice of God.  And life is so intricate  and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not  twice in the ages, shall we find that nice consent of  circumstances to which alone it can apply.

CHAPTER III

ALTHOUGH the world and life have in a sense become  commonplace to our experience, it is but in an external  torpor; the true sentiment slumbers within us; and we have  but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to rekindle  our astonishment.  No length of habit can blunt our first  surprise.  Of the world I have but little to say in this  connection; a few strokes shall suffice.  We inhabit a dead  ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning  as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away  by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the  theological imagination.  Yet the dead ember is a green,  commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this  hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on  summer eves upon the lawn.  Far off on all hands other dead  embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent  void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that  the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.   Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the  truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with  mankind on its bullet.  Even to us who have known no other,  it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.

But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of  wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful  to himself.  He inhabits a body which he is continually  outliving, discarding and renewing.  Food and sleep, by an  unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and the freshness of his  countenance.  Hair grows on him like grass; his eyes, his  brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and  touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and  intently ponder on his astonishing attributes and situation,  to rise up and run, to perform the strange and revolting  round of physical functions.  The sight of a flower, the note  of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he looks  unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous  bonfires of the universe.  He comprehends, he designs, he  tames nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a  balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins interminable labours,  joins himself into federations and populous cities, spends  his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit  unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of  unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days.  His  sight, which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest  stars, which is miraculous in every way and a thing defying  explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and  can be extinguished with a touch.  His heart, which all  through life so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but  a capsule, and may be stopped with a pin.  His whole body,  for all its savage energies, its leaping and its winged  desires, may yet be tamed and conquered by a draught of air  or a sprinkling of cold dew.  What he calls death, which is  the seeming arrest of everything, and the ruin and hateful  transformation of the visible body, lies in wait for him  outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret  diseases from within.  He is still learning to be a man when  his faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not  yet understood himself or his position before he inevitably  dies.  And yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no  thought of his last end, lives as though he were eternal,  plunges with his vulnerable body into the shock of war, and  daily affronts death with unconcern.  He cannot take a step  without pain or pleasure.  His life is a tissue of  sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more  directly from himself or his surroundings.  He is conscious  of himself as a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves,  chooses, and is satisfied; conscious of his surroundings as  it were of an inexhaustible purveyor, the source of aspects,  inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting  caresses.  Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights  and agonies.

Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a  root in man.  To him everything is important in the degree to  which it moves him.  The telegraph wires and posts, the  electricity speeding from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the  glad or sorrowful import of the message, and the paper on  which it is finally brought to him at home, are all equally  facts, all equally exist for man.  A word or a thought can  wound him as acutely as a knife of steel.  If he thinks he is  loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although he be  in a distant land and short of necessary bread.  Does he  think he is not loved? - he may have the woman at his beck,  and there is not a joy for him in all the world.  Indeed, if  we are to make any account of this figment of reason, the  distinction between material and immaterial, we shall  conclude that the life of each man as an individual is  immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of  mankind as a race turn upon material conditions.  The  physical business of each man's body is transacted for him;  like a sybarite, he has attentive valets in his own viscera;  he breathes, he sweats, he digests without an effort, or so  much as a consenting volition; for the most part he even  eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were  between two thoughts.  His life is centred among other and  more important considerations; touch him in his honour or his  love, creatures of the imagination which attach him to  mankind or to an individual man or woman; cross him in his  piety which connects his soul with heaven; and he turns from  his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous  emotion cuts the knots of his existence and frees himself at  a blow from the web of pains and pleasures.

It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a  rounded and autonomous empire; but that in the same body with  him there dwell other powers tributary but independent.  If I  now behold one walking in a garden, curiously coloured and  illuminated by the sun, digesting his food with elaborate  chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing himself by  the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand  delicate balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the  path, and all the time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about  America, or the dog-star, or the attributes of God - what am  I to say, or how am I to describe the thing I see?  Is that  truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is it  not a man and something else?  What, then, are we to count  the centre-bit and axle of a being so variously compounded?   It is a question much debated.  Some read his history in a  certain intricacy of nerve and the success of successive  digestions; others find him an exiled piece of heaven blown  upon and determined by the breath of God; and both schools of  theorists will scream like scalded children at a word of  doubt.  Yet either of these views, however plausible, is  beside the question; either may be right; and I care not; I  ask a more particular answer, and to a more immediate point.   What is the man?  There is Something that was before hunger  and that remains behind after a meal.  It may or may not be  engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it  changes, heightens, and sanctifies.  Thus it is not engaged  in lust, where satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is  engaged in love, where no satisfaction can blunt the edge of  the desire, and where age, sickness, or alienation may deface  what was desirable without diminishing the sentiment.  This  something, which is the man, is a permanence which abides  through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now  triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate  distress of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.   So, to the man, his own central self fades and grows clear  again amid the tumult of the senses, like a revolving Pharos  in the night.  It is forgotten; it is hid, it seems, for  ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall behold himself  once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.

Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and  eats, that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the  outer and lower sides of man.  This inner consciousness, this  lantern alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the  individual exists and must order his conduct, is something  special to himself and not common to the race.  His joys  delight, his sorrows wound him, according as THIS is  interested or indifferent in the affair; according as they  arise in an imperial war or in a broil conducted by the  tributary chieftains of the mind.  He may lose all, and THIS  not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle, and THIS  leap in his bosom with a cruel pang.  I do not speak of it to  hardened theorists: the living man knows keenly what it is I  mean.