Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology

by Kevin MacNeil

  III

  Yet the notion is general and not confined to Jacobins, that all mores may be overthrown, and morality survive; that the soul of the matter will not merely be unharmed but really embellished by the brutal murder of the body. And the elegant superstition stands (like all the rest) on some foundation. The most amazing fact in man—his indestructible willingness to do what he thinks right instead of what he thinks agreeable—alike precedes and outlasts the creeds in which it looks for sanction.

  It is not wonderful if he think highly of this moral instinct, and, in one sense, too highly. For as a guide, it is stone blind, and as a teacher, it is dumb. Incurable courtier of the day, it curtseys to all fashions; dull soldier of fortune, it will still serve under the nearest captain. Yet here we seem to go too far; for the conscience often revolts from the contemporary doctrine, and the reformer and the martyr (of whom we are going to have plenty to say further on) make a noble mark on the pages of man’s history. It is true our inheritance is twofold, tribal or national on the one hand, individual on the other. The race or nation inherits from millions of ascendents a body of rigid laws and a general and fluid sense of what is fitting. The individual man inherits no law, but a special sense of what is fitting. The law is always lagging in the rear; the individual and the general sense are always at some odds. It is a three-cornered duel; a triangular conflict of authorities in which man’s soul, being in the midst, receives the mauling. Leave law aside, for that is a question by itself; and which of the other two, supposing them to differ, shall a man obey? On the one side, the manners, eminently respectable of his race and period; on the other, the instinct τò καλóν of himself. On the one his inherited voice; on the other, his inherited and instilled gregariousness and love of approbation. To the thoughtful man, his special sense will appear to speak with more authority; it takes him on his bed at night and poisons solitude when his life truly passes. With the man of words, the good sleeper, the good fellow, the grasper of hands, the general sense will usually triumph; for such a one lives in the light of the camp-fire and by the countenance of admiring comrades. And in either case, the conscience having come through tribulation, will clap its wings and crow for victory: equally pleased, being indeed a buzzard of an attribute.

  ‘What is truth?’ It was Pilate’s momentous question: the conservative’s eternal question to the reformer. What is truth? And what is your truth, the little cranny, the little flaw in the coincidence between your personal, and the tribal, sense of right? Is it worth dying for? Is it worth proclaiming? Are you sure it will repay mankind for the bursting of ties, the disconsecration of catch-words, the enfranchisement of appetites? Lord Bacon, whom asses suppose to be the author of the plays of Shakespeare, had so little weighed the bearing of the question, had so imperfectly conceived the drama of the scene, that he must write of ‘jesting Pilate’. It was tragic jesting; Pilate was straining every nerve to save his prisoner; pleading with him like the sceptical eclectic that the Roman was, and pleading in vain as he must always do with perfect faith. The martyr and the reformer, types of the individual conscience in revolt from the collective, answer quite unshaken by the question. They think it worth while to die for an egg on the antipodes; and for that we honour them without reserve. They think it worth while to crack the mortar of society and loose the bonds of habitual assent; and here we sometimes wonder. What a man does with his life is largely his own affair; and we know the best he can do with it is to lay it down. What he does to that weak fabric of manners in which we live is a more serious matter. Ancient consent, inherited propensities, the fear of disaffected countenances on the street, these are fragile business. So long as we suppose manners to be the shadow of an eternal something else, they are no more sacred than the morning papers. So soon as we understand them for the ground and bond of man’s association, the terms of his surrender to society, the best that he has yet agreed to recognise, the spoken word (not always pertinent) in which his aspirations after righteousness take voice—even the reformer will begin to hesitate. ‘All things are lawful to me,’ said Paul waxing exceeding bold, but even that revolutionary thinker allowed that all were not expedient. Man stands between his two guides the authoritative choice in his own bosom, the external consent or compromise of his age and nation, both inherited, both stark irrational, both (if we reflect upon it) sacred. If he cross his conscience, certain intimate dishonour, possible personal degradation: if he defy the sense of his contemporaries, certain outward disrepute and possible public hurt. And if the public hurt is to be considered the more tenderly, yet we must not minimise the disrepute. It is good to bear unpopularity; but the sense that suffers is the probable root of all our virtues. And the man who has no sensitive need of public countenance, the man who offends his neighbours without pain, is of the blood of criminals. And there is nothing (it is worth while to observe) on which the New Testament blows so directly hot and cold as on this difficulty. Christ with his sweeping ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ Paul with his timid concern for the weak brother.

  The Ethics of Crime

  A crime properly is any act which shocks the popular conscience.

  THERE IS no subject on which public opinion seems more lax and self-destructive. Crime is originally a legal term; already in Latin it has lost its legal strictness, but the base of the idea remained as it still remains today in English. Today what we have to complain of is a certain vagueness, the direct legacy of the eighteenth century and its reductio ad absurdum, the French Revolution. The word has been Jacobinised; the idea had also been in this way: A crime properly is any act which shocks the popular conscience. It is not simply an infringement of the law, many of whose provisions are explicitly municipal, lack an emotional sanction, and may be broken without offending public sentiment, as today by the poacher and yesterday by the smuggler. Crime (to reach the full meaning of the word) should at once break the letter of the law and offend against the sanctities of life; as matricide, or rape; acts which the law forbids and by which the public conscience is revolted. There are days when it will seem a virtue to be finding at least these. The corrupt management of a bank is committing a worse act to the enlightened mind than any single murder. All sinful acts run to murder. Murder is a distinction without a difference. Two strands are in the word as we use it today: a legal or emotional, and it is from this circumstance that sometimes the emotional element is present, and not the legal. A sin is not a crime, because the law regards it not: and the mass of men (all indeed but the puritans) have retained wit enough to perceive that the law should not regard it. Yet the sin may awaken as much public horror as the crime. To many of us the desertion of the Soudan appeared an act of monstrous iniquity; it shocked us; above all, when the people of that country came to be personified for English immigrants in the beloved figure of Gordon, it spoke more to our hearts and consciences than any dozens of murders. But it was not a crime, for it broke no positive enactment. This is a case from yesterday; today there are some others who are shocked by Mr Balfour’s rule in Ireland; it stirs them to the very seat of generous indignation. But Mr Balfour is administering, not breaking, the law; and his worst acts (supposing any of them to be bad) are not crimes.

  And, sometimes again, the legal element is present and not the emotional. Suppose that during those long months while Gordon waited in Soudan, a thought had occurred to some zealot in that part of the nation, which felt as I confess I did, that there was an offence against loyalty. Suppose that it had occurred to him, that on the death of some conspicuous minister, the ministry would be apt to fall, and that which succeeded it was certain to move with greater vigour in the business of the rescue; and suppose him led on (as men so easily are) by this course of reasoning; suppose him to play the part of the free justice; and suppose (true to his premises) the ministry had fallen and Gordon and the immigrants were saved. The zealot act had thus (on our hypothesis) the happiest consequence; a life fallen, but how many had been spared! the sanctity of human life had bee
n broken, but the sanctity of human pledge corroborated by a declaratory act. Many people in England had thrown up their caps at such a consummation; and for the fortunate deed had lacked the emotional element of a crime. For all that, the law would have been broken, and it would have been a sad day for England, if judge, jury, and hangman had not done their part. Equally today, there is no lack of Irish patriots (unless fame belies them) who think of Mr Balfour as an imaginary personage was supposed to think of Gladstone; indeed, fame belies them, if they do not pass from thought to action; and if their hopes for Ireland be justified, the death of the Irish secretary would be a gain to that section of the human race. Let us suppose him killed, and let us suppose as we did in the other case, that all the hopes of the assassin are instantly realised, and Ireland becomes at once happy, virtuous, and free. For the Irish and the party, this deed will lack the emotional element of a crime; it will seem instead a providential disposition. But as the law will have been broken; and if the judge, the jury, and the hangman fail of their offices, it will be an ill day for Ireland, and England, and the world.

  The emotional element is the personal; the legal is the national. The first represents my feeling; the second is the best means I can collect as to the feeling of mankind at large. If there be a majority against a law, it can be instantly repealed. Until it is repealed, I am bound to regard it as the voice of my fellow-citizens. Am I bound to prefer it? Here law and religion, the sanctity of the human conscience and the sanctity of human ties, come into direct collision. I believe it to be right; the law, the mouthpiece of generations of mankind, declares it to be wrong. It is an act of some presumption to back my own opinion against that of so many, but presumption is not uncommon nor always wrong. Ipsi dixi; but perhaps after all it is I who am in the right. It may be proper to commit murder; it may be proper (for aught I can see) to commit rape, circumstances vary so infinitely, consciences read them in such varying lights. And we have all (except the puritans and, to some extent, the Jacobins) agreed that a man’s conscience is autonomous; we have but reserved the right to interfere and (what we somewhat uprighteously call) to punish him; we tell him, little Mr Chucks, in the most gentlemanly manner in the world: ‘My dear little fellow, you have done one person quite right; and your conscience is, no doubt, an admirable conscience; but as its dictates render you a public nuisance in our community, one must seclude or make an end of you.’ The man, in short, is quite right emotionally, to have murdered Mr Balfour; and we are legally quite right to hang him.

  Pulvis Et Umbra

  We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation.

  WE LOOK for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still.

  I

  Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3, and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.

  But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.

  In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

  Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.

  II

  What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with
cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought:— Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little:—But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child’s; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.