Lay Morals, and Other Papers

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Роберт Стивенсон. Lay Morals, and Other Papers

PREFACE. BY MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1

LAY MORALS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

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

THE PENTLAND RISING

CHAPTER I – THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT

CHAPTER II – THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER III – THE MARCH OF THE REBELS

CHAPTER IV – RULLION GREEN

CHAPTER V – A RECORD OF BLOOD

THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW

COLLEGE PAPERS

CHAPTER I – EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824

CHAPTER II – THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY

CHAPTER III – DEBATING SOCIETIES

CHAPTER IV – THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS 35

CHAPTER V – THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE

CRITICISMS

CHAPTER I – LORD LYTTON’S ‘FABLES IN SONG’

CHAPTER II – SALVINI’S MACBETH

CHAPTER III – BAGSTER’S ‘PILGRIM’S PROGRESS’

SKETCHES

I. THE SATIRIST

II. NUITS BLANCHES

III. THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES

IV. NURSES

V. A CHARACTER

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

CHAPTER I – NANCE AT THE ‘GREEN DRAGON’

CHAPTER II – IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED

CHAPTER III – JONATHAN HOLDAWAY

CHAPTER IV – MINGLING THREADS

CHAPTER V – LIFE IN THE CASTLE

CHAPTER VI – THE BAD HALF-CROWN

CHAPTER VII – THE BLEACHING-GREEN

CHAPTER VIII – THE MAIL GUARD

THE YOUNG CHEVALIER

PROLOGUE – THE WINE-SELLER’S WIFE

CHAPTER I – THE PRINCE

HEATHERCAT

CHAPTER I – TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT

CHAPTER II – FRANCIE

CHAPTER III – THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE

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The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were drafted at Edinburgh in the spring of 1879. They are unrevised, and must not be taken as representing, either as to matter or form, their author’s final thoughts; but they contain much that is essentially characteristic of his mind.

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.

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‘Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it were, pull thee by the strings. What is that now in thy mind? is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?’ Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any book. Here is a question worthy to be answered. What is in thy mind? What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard intelligibly? It is something beyond the compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect above all base considerations? This soul seems hardly touched with our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no fear, suspicion, or desire; we are only conscious – and that as though we read it in the eyes of some one else – of a great and unqualified readiness. A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond the objects of desire and fear, for something else. And this something else? this something which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are alike indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards conduct – by what name are we to call it? It may be the love of God; or it may be an inherited (and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and propagate the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory; but it will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I intend no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing, to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word righteousness. What is right is that for which a man’s central self is ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed design of righteousness.

To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition. That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each man by himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and never, above all, imposed upon another. The conscience has, then, a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the most part illuminates none but its possessor. When many people perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol; and hence we have such words as tree, star, love, honour, or death; hence also we have this word right, which, like the others, we all understand, most of us understand differently, and none can express succinctly otherwise. Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our own superior thoughts. For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that a man, through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again with joy. As we said before, his inner self or soul appears to him by successive revelations, and is frequently obscured. It is from a study of these alternations that we can alone hope to discover, even dimly, what seems right and what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself.

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