My friend Tzvi put up a video in which he gave a reading of the Robert Louis Stevenson essay, The Lantern Bearers. You can watch it on his substack.

It’s an interesting essay and Tzvi reads it well. I especially like the part where Stevenson discusses the interior life of the miser, though it’s only next to the main point of the essay. The main point, or at least what I take to be the main point, is that the makers of art are too apt to think themselves full, because they know themselves, and to think other men empty because they do not know them. (Admittedly, Part 1 of the essay is a little slow, though it was appropriate to the style of the day, which was necessary to make the point it made in the time in which it was written. It very much rewards bearing with it.)

This is a bit of a tangent, but the essay calls to mind this section out of G.K. Chesterton’s book The Well and the Shallows:

It is not an idle contradiction to say that Mr. Shaw is flippant because he is serious.  A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing.  A man who is only amusing himself need not be amusing.  Generally, when he is a perfect and polished stylist, he is not.  And there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the relative moral attitude of the two types; especially in connection with the old morality of modesty.  Most persons, listening to these loud flippancies would say that Mr. Bernard Shaw is egotistical.  Mr. Bernard Shaw himself would emphatically and violently assert that he is egotistical; and I should emphatically and violently assert that he is not.  It is not the first time we have somewhat tartly disagreed.  And perhaps I could not more effectively perform the just and necessary public duty of annoying Mr. Shaw than by saying (as I do say) that in this matter he really inherits an unconscious tradition of Christian humility.  The preaching friar puts his sermon into popular language, the missionary fills his sermon with anecdotes and even jokes, because he is thinking of his mission and not of himself It does not matter that Mr. Shaw’s sentences so often begin with the pronoun “I.” The Apostles Creed begins with the pronoun “I”; but it goes on to rather more important nouns and names.

Father Ronald Knox, in his satire on Modernism, has described the courteous vagueness of the Oxford manner which

….  tempering pious zeal
Corrected, “I believe” to “One does feel.”

And though I have much of such courtesy to be thankful for, both in conversation and criticism, I must do justice to the more dogmatic type, where I feel it to be right.  And I will say firmly that it is the author who says, “One does feel,” who is really an egoist; and the author who says, “I believe,” who is not an egoist.  We all know what is meant by a truly beautiful essay; and how it is generally written in the light or delicate tone of, “One does feel.” I am perfectly well aware that all my articles are articles, and that none of my articles are essays.  An essay is often written in a really graceful and exquisitely balanced style, which I doubt if I could imitate, though I might try.  Anyhow, it generally deals with experiences of a certain unprovocative sort in a certain unattached fashion; it begins with something like.  .  .  .

“The pond in my garden shows, under the change of morning, an apprehension of the moving air, hardly to be called a wave; and so little clouding its lucidity as to seem rather vacuity in motion.  Here at least is nothing to stain the bright negation of water; none of those suburban gold-fish that look like carrots and do but nose after their tails in a circle of frustration, to give some sulky gardener cause to cry ‘stinking fish’.  The mind is altogether carried away upon the faint curve of wind over water; the movement is something less solid than anything that we can call liquid; the smoke of my light Virginian cigarette does not mount more unsubstantially towards the sky.  Nor indeed inaptly:  it needs some such haven of patriarchal mildness to accent sharply the tang of mild tobacco; alone perhaps, of all the attributes of Raleigh’s red-haired mistress, rightly to be called virginal.”

I think I might learn to do it some day; though not by a commercial correspondence course; but the truth is that I am very much occupied.  I confess to thinking that the things which occupy me are more important; but I am disposed to deny that the thing I think important is myself.  And in justice not only to myself but to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Belloc and Mr. Mencken and many another man in the same line of business, I am moved to protest that the other literary method, the method of, “One does feel,” is much more really arrogant than ours.  The man in Mr. Shaw’s play remarks that who says artist says duellist.  Perhaps, nevertheless, Mr. Shaw is too much of a duellist to be quite an artist.  But anyhow, I will affirm, on the same model, that who says essayist says egoist.  I am sorry if it is an alliteration, almost a rhyme and something approaching to a pun.  Like a great many such things, it is also a fact.

Even in the fancy example I have given, and in a hundred far better and more beautiful extracts from the real essayists, the point could be shown.  If I go out of my way to tell the reader that I smoke Virginian cigarettes, it can only be because I assume the reader to be interested in me.  Nobody can be interested in Virginian cigarettes.  But if I shout at the reader that I believe in the Virginian cause in the American Civil War, as does the author of The American Heresy, if I thunder as he does that all America is now a ruin and an anarchy because in that great battle the good cause went down — then I am not an egoist.  I am only a dogmatist; which seems to be much more generally disliked.  The fact that I believe in God may be, in all modesty, of some human interest; because any man believing in God may affect any other man believing in God.  But the fact that I do not believe in gold-fish, as ornaments in a garden pond, cannot be of the slightest interest to anybody on earth, unless I assume that some people are interested in anything whatever that is connected with me.  And that is exactly what the true elegant essayist does assume.  I do not say he is wrong; I do not deny that he also in another way represents humanity and uses a sort of artistic fiction or symbol in order to do so.  I only say that, if it comes to a quarrel about being conceited, he is far the more conceited of the two.  The one sort of man deals with big things noisily and the other with small things quietly.  But there is much more of the note of superiority in the man who always treats of things smaller than himself than the man who always treats of things greater than himself.

Dogmatists, being fallen creatures, have faults. But I think it worth saying that among their faults, one does not find that they assume other men’s interior lives to be empty merely because they do not know them. Dogmatists are the great democrats of life, in the Chestertonian sense of the word “democrat”—they believe all men equal before the Law. Quite annoyingly to their neighbors, they also have a tendency to believe that all men are equally interested in the law. This may annoy their neighbors, but at least it does not insult them.