Lay Morals, and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
Philosophy
Lay Morals, and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays; Short stories
possible to answer these questions without a trial; and there is nothing
more obvious to my mind, than that a man who has not experienced some ups
and downs, and been forced to live more cheaply than in his father’s
house, has still his education to begin. Let the experiment be made, and
he will find to his surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite
up to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough
country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his
spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the
dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous
and somnambulous submission to wealth.
The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians
of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life. The
Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and prefers
anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most part a
respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living for the
outside, and an adventurer. But the man I mean lives wholly to himself,
does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys what he wants
for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he
can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You may be
the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian. And the test is
this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed to his
friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can do without it,
a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had less, and continued to
live in some contentment; and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares
his sovereign or his shilling with a friend. The poor, if they are
generous, are Bohemian in virtue of their birth. Do you know where
beggars go? Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their
thousands, but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it
was the widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the
treasury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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