Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson: On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places

On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places

It is a difficult matter[1] to make the most of any given place, and
we have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one
side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.
A few months ago some words were said in the _Portfolio_ as to an
"austere regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then
recommended as "healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the
text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in
scenery,[2] it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk
before breakfast to whet the appetite. For when we are put down in
some unsightly neighborhood, and especially if we have come to be more
or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out
beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after
a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing
nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to
live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is
good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We
learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller,
as Brant�me quaintly tells us, "_fait des discours en soi pour se
soutenir en chemin_";[3] and into these discourses he weaves something
out of all that he sees and suffers by the way; they take their tone
greatly from the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings
different thoughts from a level road; and the man's fancies grow
lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. Nor does the
scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the
scenery. We see places through our humours as though differently
colored glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation, a note of
the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is no
fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently to
the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever
thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of
story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we
are provocative of beauty,[4] much as a gentle and sincere character
is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others. And even where
there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most obedient
of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction of
romance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and handle
them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes an old print comes to
our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque
imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul
Brill.[5] Dick Turpin[6] has been my lay figure for many an English
lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs[7] for
most tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled
it for them with harmonious figures, and brought them thither their
minds rightly prepared for the impression. There is half the battle in
this preparation. For instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in
the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our own
Highlands. I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily
pleased without trees.[8] I understand that there are some phases of
mental trouble that harmonise well with such surroundings, and that
some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back
several centuries in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the
hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon
these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out
of my sadness, like David before Saul;[9] and the thought of these
past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can
never hit on the right humour for this sort of landscape, and lose
much pleasure in consequence. Still, even here, if I were only let
alone, and time enough were given, I should have all manner of
pleasure, and take many clear and beautiful images away with me when I
left. When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy with the great
features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among
the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times together, over the
changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in
stones,[10] when we are shut out from any poem in the spread
landscape. We begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds
and insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader
will recollect the little summer scene in _Wuthering Heights_[11]--the
one warm scene, perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel--and
the great feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a
little sunshine: this is in the spirit of which I now speak. And,
lastly, we can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often
more picturesque, than the shows of the open air, and they have that
quality of shelter of which I shall presently have more to say.

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the
neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior
loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic
spirit which is its own reward and justification. Looking back the
other day on some recollections of my own, I was astonished to find
how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant
country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my
sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more nearly with
my inclination.

The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau, over
which the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A
river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but
the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I
had the heart to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads
that had no beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but
little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you
from the beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to
expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an
unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled
stone-breaker;[12] and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly
forward by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires
in the keen sea-wind. To one who has learned to know their song in
warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the
country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the
waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to
put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation.
Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a
certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like
a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this
was of another description--this was the nakedness of the North; the
earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold.[13]

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were
of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have
their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them
brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the
colour of the world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their
passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There
is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods,
with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some
painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of
their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a
gale.[14] There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a
country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the
passive shadows and clouds or those of rigid houses and walls. But the
wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you
taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of
opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean; he must remember how,
when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a hill-side, he
delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his
back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn
upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the country was
beautiful, the heather purple, and the faraway hills all marbled with
sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage[15] of the
"Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by
the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great
thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with as
good effect:

"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy we turn,
Abruptly into some sequestered nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!"

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape.
He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great
cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the
great unfinished marvel by the Rhine;[16] and after a long while in
dark stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform
high above the town. At that elevation it was quite still and warm;
the gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten
it in the quiet interior of the church and during his long ascent; and
so you may judge of his surprise when, resting his arms on the sunlit
balustrade and looking over into the _Place_ far below him, he saw the
good people holding on their hats and leaning hard against the wind as
they walked. There is something, to my fancy, quite perfect in this
little experience of my fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem
always very trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a
church-top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, and see far
below us the steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent
activity of the city streets; but how much more must they not have
seemed so to him as he stood, not only above other men's business, but
above other men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's![17]

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all
the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea
that any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black
worm-eaten headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened
from the wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand
and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil
water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined
crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has
impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the
water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double
castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet
feud had run so high between their owners, that one, from out of a
window, shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There is
something in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic
irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking
hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at night,[18] when
the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was
loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct for
ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are
there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a
contrary impression, and association is turned against itself.[19] I
remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy,"[20] was
seemingly quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from
such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two
castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about them, were still
distinguishable from these by something more insecure and fantastic in
the outline, something that the last storm had left imminent and the
next would demolish entirely. It would be difficult to render in words
the sense of peace that took possession of me on these three
afternoons. It was helped out, as I have said, by the contrast. The
shore was battered and bemauled by previous tempests; I had the memory
at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies who had erected these two
castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I
had only to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the
hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great tracts
of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and
apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of the
precarious past. There is ever something transitory and fretful in the
impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to have no
root in the constitution of things; it must speedily begin to faint
and wither away like a cut flower. And on those days the thought of
the wind and the thought of human life came very near together in my
mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments[21] in the being of the
eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that great field of
stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity
of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks of
the sea as "hungering for calm,"[22] and in this place one learned to
understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the
broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it
seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when
now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the
quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.

On shore, too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so
subdued and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable
surprise. The desultory crackling of the whin-pods[23] in the
afternoon sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that
had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into
my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I
was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed
to fit my surroundings and give expression to the contentment that was
in me, and I kept repeating to myself--

  "Mon coeur est un luth suspendu,[24]
  Sit�t qu'on le touche, il r�sonne."

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to
complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.

And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out
of the strong came forth sweetness."[25] There, in the bleak and gusty
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw
the sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner,
was all alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find
something to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant
faces of men and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear
a cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the
country, there is no country without some amenity--let him only look
for it in the right spirit, and he will surely find.

NOTES

This article first appeared in the _Portfolio_, for November 1874, and
was not reprinted until two years after Stevenson's death, in 1896,
when it was included in the _Miscellanies_ (Edinburgh Edition,
_Miscellanies_, Vol. IV, pp. 131-142). The editor of the _Portfolio_
was the well-known art critic, Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-1894),
author of the _Intellectual Life_ (1873). Just one year before,
Stevenson had had printed in the _Portfolio_ his first contribution to
any periodical, _Roads_. Although _The Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places_
attracted scarcely any attention on its first appearance, and has
since become practically forgotten, there is perhaps no better essay
among his earlier works with which to begin a study of his
personality, temperament, and style. In its cheerful optimism this
article is particularly characteristic of its author. It should be
remembered that when this essay was first printed, Stevenson was only
twenty-four years old.

[Note 1: _It is a difficult matter_, etc. The appreciation of nature
is a quite modern taste, for although people have always loved the
scenery which reminds them of home, it was not at all fashionable in
England to love nature for its own sake before 1740. Thomas Gray was
the first person in Europe who seems to have exhibited a real love of
mountains (see his _Letters_). A study of the development of the
appreciation of nature before and after Wordsworth (England's greatest
nature poet) is exceedingly interesting. See Myra Reynolds, _The
Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and Wordsworth_
(1896).]

[Note 2: _This discipline in scenery._ Note what is said on this
subject in Browning's extraordinary poem, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, vs.
300-302.

  "For, don't you mark? We're made so that we love
  First when we see them painted, things we have passed
  Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see."]

[Note 3: _Brant�me quaintly tells us, "fait des discours en soi pour
se soutenir en chemin."_ Freely translated, "the traveller talks to
himself to keep up his courage on the road." Pierre de Bourdeille,
Abb� de Brant�me, (cir. 1534-1614), travelled all over Europe. His
works were not published till long after his death, in 1665. Several
complete editions of his writings in numerous volumes have appeared in
the nineteenth century, one edited by the famous writer, Prosper
M�rim�e.]

[Note 4: _We are provocative of beauty._ Compare again, _Fra Lippo
Lippi_, vs. 215 et seq.

  "Or say there's beauty with no soul at all--
  (I never saw it--put the case the same--)
  If you get simple beauty and nought else,
  You get about the best thing God invents:
  That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed,
  Within yourself, when you return him thanks."]

[Note 5: _Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill._ Jacques Callot was an
eminent French artist of the XVII century, born at Nancy in 1592, died
1635. Matthaeus and Paul Brill were two celebrated Dutch painters.
Paul, the younger brother of Matthaeus, was born about 1555, and died
in 1626. His development in landscape-painting was remarkable. Gilles
Sadeler, born at Antwerp 1570, died at Prague 1629, a famous artist,
and nephew of two well-known engravers. He was called the "Phoenix of
Engraving."]

[Note 6: _Dick Turpin_. Dick Turpin was born in Essex, England, and
was originally a butcher. Afterwards he became a notorious highwayman,
and was finally executed for horse-stealing, 10 April 1739. He and his
steed Black Bess are well described in W. H. Ainsworth's _Rookwood_,
and in his _Ballads_.]

[Note 7: _The Trossachs_. The word means literally, "bristling
country." A beautifully romantic tract, beginning immediately to the
east of Loch Katrine in Perth, Scotland. Stevenson's statement, "if a
man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
harmonious figures," refers to Walter Scott, and more particularly to
the _Lady of the Lake_ (1810).]

[Note 8: _I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily
pleased without trees_. Notice the kind of country he begins to
describe in the next paragraph. Is there really any contradiction in
his statements?]

[Note 9: _Like David before Saul_. David charmed Saul out of his
sadness, according to the Biblical story, not with nature, but with
music. See I _Samuel_ XVI. 14-23. But in Browning's splendid poem,
_Saul_ (1845), nature and music are combined in David's inspired
playing.

"And I first played the tune all our sheep know," etc.]

[Note 10: _The sermon in stones_. See the beginning of the second act
of _As You Like It_, where the exiled Duke says,

  "And this our life exempt from public haunt
  Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
  Sermons in stones and good in everything."

It is not at all certain that Shakspere used the word "sermons" here
in the modern sense; he very likely meant merely discourses,
conversations.]

[Note 11: _Wuthering Heights_. The well-known novel (1847) by Emily
Bronte (1818-1848) sister of the more famous Charlotte Bronte. The
"little summer scene" Stevenson mentions, is in Chapter XXIV.]

[Note 12: _A solitary, spectacled stone-breaker_. To the pedestrian or
cyclist, no difference between Europe and America is more striking
than the comparative excellence of the country roads. The roads in
Europe, even in lonely and remote districts, where one may travel for
hours without seeing a house, are usually in perfect condition, hard,
white and absolutely smooth. The slightest defect or abrasion is
immediately repaired by one of these stone-breakers Stevenson
mentions, a solitary individual, his eyes concealed behind large green
goggles, to protect them from the glare and the flying bits of stone.]

[Note 13: _Ashamed and cold_. An excellent example of what Ruskin
called "the pathetic fallacy."]

[Note 14: _The foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale_. Cf.
Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, LXXII:--

  "With blasts that blow the poplar white."]

[Note 15: _Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage_. The passage Stevenson
quotes is in Book VII of _The Prelude_, called _Residence in London_.]

[Note 16: _Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel by the
Rhine_. This great cathedral, generally regarded as the most perfect
Gothic church in the world, was begun in 1248, and was not completed
until 1880, seven years after Stevenson wrote this essay.]

[Note 17: _In a golden zone like Apollo's._ The Greek God Apollo,
later identified with Helios, the Sun-god. The twin towers of Cologne
Cathedral are over 500 feet high, so that the experience described
here is quite possible.]

[Note 18: _The two hall-fires at night_. In mediaeval castles, the
hall was the general living-room, used regularly for meals, for
assemblies, and for all social requirements. The modern word
"dining-hall" preserves the old significance of the word. The familiar
expression, "bower and hall," is simply, in plain prose, bedroom and
sitting-room.]

[Note 19: _Association is turned against itself_. It is seldom that
Stevenson uses an expression that is not instantly transparently
clear. Exactly what does he mean by this phrase?]

[Note 20: "_As from an enemy_." Alluding to the passage Stevenson has
quoted above, from Wordsworth's _Prelude_.]

[Note 21: _Our noisy years did indeed seem moments_. A favorite
reflection of Stevenson's, occurring in nearly all his serious
essays.]

[Note 22: _Shelley speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm."_ This
passage occurs in the poem _Prometheus Unbound_, Act III, end of Scene
2.

  "Behold the Nereids under the green sea--
  Their wavering limbs borne on the wind like stream,
  Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair,
  With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns,--
  Hastening to grace their mighty Sister's joy.
  It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm."]

[Note 23: _Whin-pods._ "Whin" is from the Welsh _�wyn_, meaning
"weed." Whin is gorse or furze, and the sound Stevenson alludes to is
frequently heard in Scotland.]

[Note 24: "_Mon coeur est un luth suspendu_." These beautiful words
are from the poet B�ranger (1780-1857). It is probable that Stevenson
found them first not in the original, but in reading the tales of Poe,
for the "two lines of French verse" that "haunted" Stevenson are
quoted by Poe at the beginning of one of his most famous pieces, _The
Fall of the House of Usher_, where, however, the third, and not the
first person is used:--

  "_Son_ coeur est un luth suspendu;
  Sit�t qu'on le touche il r�sonne."]

[Note 25: "_Out of the strong came forth sweetness_." Alluding to the
riddle propounded by Samson. See the book of _Judges_, Chapter XIV.]

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