Robert Louis Stevenson: Too simple to be profound?

It often happens that while reading a story or a novel or an essay, which is moderately interesting, the author will say something that stops me immediately.  I go back, read it again, meditate a bit, and move on. Yet, even as I move on, that statement or comment will remain in the background.  And it will remain with me for several days or even longer.  Such is the following brief comment or analogy by Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his essays:

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child .  .  .


Robert Louis Stevenson
"A Gossip on Romance"
from The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays


There are innumerable essays, theses, books on the nature of fiction and its popularity or the reason for its existence.  I think a collection could easily take up several very large bookcases.  I have read a number of essays and have several books gathering dust in my TBR bookcase which I will get to, probably, one of these days. But, Stevenson's brief comment--Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child .  .  .  so resonates with me that I may never get to those dusty books awaiting me.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."  We read this in the King James Version of Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, and it seems to fit.  Many adults put away those childish things, one of which is play, and they become very serious and solemn; life becomes a grim struggle.

But, this isn't true of all, for some (and that includes me), have exchanged that childish play for fiction.  A child at play is lost somewhere in there, and that child is thoroughly wrapped up in the game, whatever it may be.  The child is now on a different plane of existence.    How different is this from when I settle down with a book and travel off to far planets or to the future?  or work out how someone managed to murder a thoroughly nasty character and escape from a locked room?  or follow the destinies of a young man or a young woman who struggles to become a mature adult and not just a carbon copy of the neighbors? 

As a child, the call to "come out and play" was an invitation to another world; as adults, some of us have substituted "Once upon a time.  .  ."
 

Robert Louis Stevenson: "The Philosophy of Umbrellas"

Robert Louis Stevenson
"The Philosophy of Umbrellas"
from The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays

I stumbled across an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson some time ago which surprised me.  I was most familiar with his fiction and wasn't aware that he had also written a number of essays.  I searched around and found a collection of a number of his essays, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays.  "The Lantern-Bearers" was the essay that I had encountered, so I decided to invest some money and, now, some time in the book.  My tentative plan is to work my way slowly through the book and occasionally report on an essay that strikes me fancy.  It turns out that this, the very first essay in the collection, is one that does so.  The following is the first paragraph of the essay.

"It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius, -- that our climate is essentially wet.  A mere arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues.  A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability.  The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of social position."

While reading this I couldn't help but think of the Avenger's John Steed, the epitome of respectability, even though he is a secret agent.   The leather-clad Mrs. Peel presents a somewhat different image.

The remainder of the essay follows along the course set by the  first paragraph--a mock solemnity with tongue firmly planted in cheek.  Stevenson tells us that Robinson Crusoe, instead of rigging up a belfry and "a mimicry of church-bells," shows that "Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with."

However, Stevenson also warns us that the umbrella isn't an infallible sign of one's civilized or respectable status for "...alas! even the umbrella is no certain criterion.  The falsity  and the folly of the human race  have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty.  .  .(some umbrellas) from certain prudential motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person's disposition.  A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation . . . Might it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets 'with a lie in their right hand?'

All in all, "The Philosophy of Umbrellas" is a fine, worthy, and instructive effort with which to begin this assemblage of reflections on the human condition.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Langston Hughes: Two points of view

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
   And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
     And the hunter home from the hill.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson --




Death of an Old Seaman

We buried him high on a windy hill,
But his soul went out to sea.
I know, for I heard, when all was still,
His sea-soul say to me:

Put no tombstone at my head,
For here I do not make my bed.
Strew no flowers on my grave,
I've gone back to the wind and wave.
Do not, do not weep for me,
For I am happy with my sea.

-- Langston Hughes --
from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Arnold Rampersad, Editor


It almost seems as though Hughes' poem is a response to Stevenson's.  Some days I'm with Stevenson, but on other days, well, Hughes seems right for me.  Actually I'm of two minds here: both seem right and fitting when I read them.