Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The foe is found, beats or is beaten,

  And either how, the wage is eaten.

  And after all your pully-hauly

  Your proceeds look uncommon small-ly.

  You had done better here to tarry

  Apprentice to the Apothecary.

  The silent pirates of the shore

  Eat and sleep soft, and pocket more

  Than any red, robustious ranger

  Who picks his farthings hot from danger.

  You clank your guineas on the board;

  Mine are with several bankers stored.

  You reckon riches on your digits,

  You dash in chase of Sals and Bridgets,

  You drink and risk delirium tremens,

  Your whole estate a common seaman’s!

  Regard your friend and school companion,

  Soon to be wed to Miss Trevanion

  (Smooth, honourable, fat and flowery,

  With Heaven knows how much land in dowry)

  Look at me — am I in good case?

  Look at my hands, look at my face;

  Look at the cloth of my apparel;

  Try me and test me, lock and barrel;

  And own, to give the devil his due,

  I have made more of life than you.

  Yet I nor sought nor risked a life;

  I shudder at an open knife;

  The perilous seas I still avoided

  And stuck to land whate’er betided.

  I had no gold, no marble quarry,

  I was a poor apothecary,

  Yet here I stand, at thirty-eight,

  A man of an assured estate.’

  ‘Well,’ answered Robin— ‘well, and how?’

  The smiling chemist tapped his brow.

  ‘Rob,’ he replied,’this throbbing brain

  Still worked and hankered after gain.

  By day and night, to work my will,

  It pounded like a powder mill;

  And marking how the world went round

  A theory of theft it found.

  Here is the key to right and wrong:

  Steal little but steal all day long;

  And this invaluable plan

  Marks what is called the Honest Man.

  When first I served with Doctor Pill,

  My hand was ever in the till.

  Now that I am myself a master

  My gains come softer still and faster.

  As thus: on Wednesday, a maid

  Came to me in the way of trade.

  Her mother, an old farmer’s wife,

  Required a drug to save her life.

  ‘At once, my dear, at once,’ I said,

  Patted the child upon the head,

  Bade her be still a loving daughter,

  And filled the bottle up with water.

  ‘Well, and the mother?’ Robin cried.

  ‘O she!’ said Ben, ‘I think she died.’

  ‘Battle and blood, death and disease,

  Upon the tainted Tropic seas —

  The attendant sharks that chew the cud —

  The abhorred scuppers spouting blood —

  The untended dead, the Tropic sun —

  The thunder of the murderous gun —

  The cut-throat crew — the Captain’s curse —

  The tempest blustering worse and worse —

  These have I known and these can stand,

  But you, I settle out of hand!’

  Out flashed the cutlass, down went

  Dead and rotten, there and then.

  THE BUILDER’S DOOM

  In eighteen twenty Deacon Thin

  Feu’d the land and fenced it in,

  And laid his broad foundations down

  About a furlong out of town.

  Early and late the work went on.

  The carts were toiling ere the dawn;

  The mason whistled, the hodman sang;

  Early and late the trowels rang;

  And Thin himself came day by day

  To push the work in every way.

  An artful builder, patent king

  Of all the local building ring,

  Who was there like him in the quarter

  For mortifying brick and mortar,

  Or pocketing the odd piastre

  By substituting lath and plaster?

  With plan and two-foot rule in hand,

  He by the foreman took his stand,

  With boisterous voice, with eagle glance

  To stamp upon extravagance.

  Far thrift of bricks and greed of guilders,

  He was the Buonaparte of Builders.

  The foreman, a desponding creature,

  Demurred to here and there a feature:

  ‘For surely, sir — with your permeession —

  Bricks here, sir, in the main parteetion...’

  The builder goggled, gulped and stared,

  The foreman’s services were spared.

  Thin would not count among his minions

  A man of Wesleyan opinions.

  ‘Money is money,’ so he said.

  ‘Crescents are crescents, trade is trade.

  Pharaohs and emperors in their seasons

  Built, I believe, for different reasons —

  Charity, glory, piety, pride —

  To pay the men, to please a bride,

  To use their stone, to spite their neighbours,

  Not for a profit on their labours.

  They built to edify or bewilder;

  I build because I am a builder.

  Crescent and street and square I build,

  Plaster and paint and carve and gild.

  Around the city see them stand,

  These triumphs of my shaping hand,

  With bulging walls, with sinking floors,

  With shut, impracticable doors,

  Fickle and frail in every part,

  And rotten to their inmost heart.

  There shall the simple tenant find

  Death in the falling window-blind,

  Death in the pipe, death in the faucit,

  Death in the deadly water-closet!

  A day is set for all to die:

  Caveat emptor! what care I?’

  As to Amphion’s tuneful kit

  Troy rose, with towers encircling it;

  As to the Mage’s brandished wand

  A spiry palace clove the sand;

  To Thin’s indomitable financing,

  That phantom crescent kept advancing.

  When first the brazen bells of churches

  Called clerk and parson to their perches,

  The worshippers of every sect

  Already viewed it with respect;

  A second Sunday had not gone

  Before the roof was rattled on:

  And when the fourth was there, behold

  The crescent finished, painted, sold!

  The stars proceeded in their courses,

  Nature with her subversive forces,

  Time, too, the iron-toothed and sinewed;

  And the edacious years continued.

  Thrones rose and fell; and still the crescent,

  Unsanative and now senescent,

  A plastered skeleton of lath,

  Looked forward to a day of wrath.

  In the dead night, the groaning timber

  Would jar upon the ear of slumber,

  And, like Dodona’s talking oak,

  Of oracles and judgments spoke.

  When to the music fingered well

  The feet of children lightly fell,

  The sire, who dozed by the decanters,

  Started, and dreamed of misadventures.

  The rotten brick decayed to dust;

  The iron was consumed by rust;

  Each tabid and perverted mansion

  Hung in the article of declension.

  So forty, fifty, sixty passed;

  Until, when seventy came at last,

  The occupant of number three

  Called friends to hold a jubilee.
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br />   Wild was the night; the charging rack

  Had forced the moon upon her back;

  The wind piped up a naval ditty;

  And the lamps winked through all the city.

  Before that house, where lights were shining,

  Corpulent feeders, grossly dining,

  And jolly clamour, hum and rattle,

  Fairly outvoiced the tempest’s battle.

  As still his moistened lip he fingered,

  The envious policeman lingered;

  While far the infernal tempest sped,

  And shook the country folks in bed,

  And tore the trees and tossed the ships,

  He lingered and he licked his lips.

  Lo, from within, a hush! the host

  Briefly expressed the evening’s toast;

  And lo, before the lips were dry,

  The Deacon rising to reply!

  ‘Here in this house which once I built,

  Papered and painted, carved and gilt,

  And out of which, to my content,

  I netted seventy-five per cent.;

  Here at this board of jolly neighbours,

  I reap the credit of my labours.

  These were the days — I will say more —

  These were the grand old days of yore!

  The builder laboured day and night;

  He watched that every brick was right;

  The decent men their utmost did;

  And the house rose — a pyramid!

  These were the days, our provost knows,

  When forty streets and crescents rose,

  The fruits of my creative noddle,

  All more or less upon a model,

  Neat and commodious, cheap and dry,

  A perfect pleasure to the eye!

  I found this quite a country quarter;

  I leave it solid lath and mortar.

  In all, I was the single actor —

  And am this city’s benefactor!

  Since then, alas! both thing and name,

  Shoddy across the ocean came —

  Shoddy that can the eye bewilder

  And makes me blush to meet a builder!

  Had this good house, in frame or fixture,

  Been tempered by the least admixture

  Of that discreditable shoddy,

  Should we to-day compound our toddy,

  Or gaily marry song and laughter

  Below its sempiternal rafter?

  Not so!’ the Deacon cried.

  The mansion

  Had marked his fatuous expansion.

  The years were full, the house was fated,

  The rotten structure crepitated!

  A moment, and the silent guests

  Sat pallid as their dinner vests.

  A moment more, and root and branch,

  That mansion fell in avalanche,

  Story on story, floor on floor,

  Roof, wall and window, joist and door,

  Dead weight of damnable disaster,

  A cataclysm of lath and plaster.

  Siloam did not choose a sinner —

  All were not builders at the dinner.

  LORD NELSON AND HIS TAR.

  PIERRE JEAN DE BÉRANGER ARTICLE

  FOR THE NINTH EDITION OF THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

  (1875–89)

  BÉRANGER, PIERRE JEAN DE (1780-1857), French song-writer, was born in Paris on the 19th of August 1780. The aristocratic de was a piece of groundless VANITY ON THE PART OF HIS father, who had assumed the name of Béranger de Mersix. He was descended in truth from a country innkeeper on the one side, and, on the other, from a tailor in the rue Montorgueil. Of education, in the narrower sense, he had but little. From the roof of his first school he beheld the capture of the Bastille, and this stirring memory was all that he acquired. Later on he passed some time in a school at Péronne, founded by one Bellenglise on the principles of Rousseau, where the boys were formed into clubs and regiments, and taught to play solemnly at politics and war. Béranger was president of the club, made speeches before such members of Convention as passed through Péronne, and drew up addresses to Tallien or Robespierre at Paris. In the meanwhile he learned neither Greek nor Latin — not even French, it would appear; for it was after he left school, from the printer Laisney, that he acquired the elements of grammar. His true education was of another sort. In his childhood, shy, sickly and skilful with his hands, as he sat at home alone to carve cherry stones, he was already forming for himself those habits of retirement and patient elaboration which influenced the whole tenor of his life and the character of all that he wrote. At Péronne he learned of his good aunt to be a stout republican; and from the doorstep of her inn, on quiet evenings, he would listen to the thunder of the guns before Valenciennes, and fortify himself in his passionate love of France and distaste for all things foreign. Although he could never read Horace save in a translation, he had been educated on Télémaque, Racine and the dramas of Voltaire, and taught, from a child, in the tradition of all that is highest and most correct in French.

  After serving his aunt for some time in the capacity of waiter, and passing some time also in the printing-office of one Laisney, he was taken to Paris by his father. Here he saw much low speculation, and many low royalist intrigues. In 1802, in consequence of a distressing quarrel, he left his father and began life for himself in the garret of his ever memorable song. For two years he did literary hackwork, when he could get it, and wrote pastorals, epics and all manner of ambitious failures. At the end of that period (1804) he wrote to Lucien Bonaparte, enclosing some of these attempts. He was then in bad health, and in the last state of misery. His watch was pledged. His wardrobe consisted of one pair of boots, one greatcoat, one pair of trousers with a hole in the knee, and “three bad shirts which a friendly hand wearied itself in endeavouring to mend.” The friendly hand was that of Judith Frère, with whom he had been already more or less acquainted since 1796, and who continued to be his faithful companion until her death, three months before his own, in 1857. She must not be confounded with the Lisette of the songs; the pieces addressed to her (La Bonne Vieille, Maudit printemps, &c.) are in a very different vein. Lucien Bonaparte interested himself in the young poet, transferred to him his own pension of 1000 francs from the Institute, and set him to work on a Death of Nero. Five years later, through the same patronage, although indirectly, Béranger became a clerk in the university at a salary of another thousand.

  Meanwhile he had written many songs for convivial occasions, and “to console himself under all misfortunes”; some, according to M. Boiteau, had been already published by his father, but he set no great store on them himself; and it was only in 1812, while watching by the sick-bed of a friend, that it occurred to him to write down the best he could remember. Next year he was elected to the Caveau Moderne, and his reputation as a song-writer began to spread. Manuscript copies of Les Gueux, Le Sénateur, above all, of Le Roi d’Yvetot, a satire against Napoleon, whom he was to magnify so much in the sequel, passed from hand to hand with acclamation. It was thus that all his best works went abroad; one man sang them to another over all the land of France. He was the only poet of modern times who could altogether have dispensed with printing.

  His first collection escaped censure. “We must pardon many things to the author of Le Roi d’Yvetot,” said Louis XVIII. The second (1821) was more daring. The apathy of the Liberal camp, he says, had convinced him of the need for some bugle call of awakening. This publication lost him his situation in the university, and subjected him to a trial, a fine of 500 francs and an imprisonment of three months. Imprisonment was a small affair for Béranger. At Sainte Pélagie he occupied a room (it had just been quitted by Paul Louis Courier), warm, well furnished, and preferable in every way to his own poor lodging, where the water froze on winter nights. He adds, on the occasion of his second imprisonment, that he found a certain charm in this quiet, claustral existence, with its regular hours and long evenings alone over the fire. This sec
ond imprisonment of nine months, together with a fine and expenses amounting to 1100 francs, followed on the appearance of his fourth collection. The government proposed through Laffitte that, if he would submit to judgment without appearing or making defences, he should only be condemned in the smallest penalty. But his public spirit made him refuse the proposal; and he would not even ask permission to pass his term of imprisonment in a Maison de santé, although his health was more than usually feeble at the time. “When you have taken your stand in a contest with government, it seems to me,” he wrote, “ridiculous to complain of the blows it inflicts on you, and impolitic to furnish it with any occasion of generosity.” His first thought in La Force was to alleviate the condition of the other prisoners.

  In the revolution of July he took no inconsiderable part. Copies of his song, Le Vieux Drapeau, were served out to the insurgent crowd. He had been for long the intimate friend and adviser of the leading men; and during the decisive week his counsels went a good way towards shaping the ultimate result. “As for the republic, that dream of my whole life,” he wrote in 1831, “I did not wish it should be given to us a second time unripe.” Louis Philippe, hearing how much the song-writer had done towards his elevation, expressed a wish to see and speak with him; but Béranger refused to present himself at court, and used his favour only to ask a place for a friend, and a pension for Rouget de l’Isle, author of the famous Marseillaise, who was now old and poor, and whom he had been already succouring for five years.

  In 1848, in spite of every possible expression of his reluctance, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and that by so large a number of votes (204,471) that he felt himself obliged to accept the seat. Not long afterwards, and with great difficulty, he obtained leave to resign. This was the last public event of Béranger’s life. He continued to polish his songs in retirement, visited by nearly all the famous men of France. He numbered among his friends Chateaubriand, Thiers, Jacques Laffitte, Michelet, Lamennais, Mignet. Nothing could exceed the amiability of his private character; so poor a man has rarely been so rich in good actions; he was always ready to receive help from his friends when he was in need, and always forward to help others. His correspondence is full of wisdom and kindness, with a smack of Montaigne, and now and then a vein of pleasantry that will remind the English reader of Charles Lamb. He occupied some of his leisure in preparing his own memoirs, and a certain treatise on Social and Political Morality, intended for the people, a work he had much at heart, but judged at last to be beyond his strength. He died on the 16th July 1857. It was feared that his funeral would be the signal for some political disturbance; but the government took immediate measures, and all went quietly. The streets of Paris were lined with soldiers and full of townsfolk, silent and uncovered. From time to time cries arose:— “Honneur, honneur à Béranger!”