significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it. . . The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man;16 it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organizations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way: but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them 10. til we all come, etc. See Ephesians 4:13.

for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, nourished, and not bound by them.

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard17 in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder18 in Germany, at the end of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. And why? Because they humanized knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint Augustine19 they said: "Let us not leave thee alone to make in the secret of thy knowledge,

17. Abelard. A French theologian and professor (1079-1142). 18. Lessing and Herder. German critics of the late eighteenth century.

19. Saint Augustine. A church father of the fourth and fifth centuries. The quotation is from his famous Confessions.

as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth laborers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new laborers to new seedtimes, whereof the harvest shall be not yet."

1

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850, and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. While still in college he devoted much attention to writing, and some of his early essays were first written for the University Magazine. In 1876 and 1878 he went on camping trips in France and Belgium for the sake of his health, and his earliest booksAn Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey-were among the results. His first fame as a writer of fiction was won with Treasure Island, a story written primarily for boys. Always forced to seek climates favorable to his health, Stevenson lived successively in Switzerland, France, America (spending some time in California, and some in the Adirondacks), and the South Seas; eventually (in 1889) he settled at Samoa, where he died in 1894. Meantime he had published two or three volumes of essays and many more of stories, such as New Arabian Nights, The Black Arrow, and Kidnapped. Stevenson's personality was among the best beloved of his time, and is perpetuated attractively in his published letters and other more or less personal writings.]

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES1 IT IS a difficult matter 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

1. This essay was written in 1874, for a periodical called The Portfolio. It will be noticed that all three of Stevenson's essays here included were written when he was still a young man. They represent not only his personality in that period, but his interest in the art of style, which he studied with great care, not merely with a view to clearness and force but to beauty of imagery and sound akin to that of poetry (for example, see the sentence on page 338f.: "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"). In particular, he studied the art of previous essayists, notably Hazlitt (on whom see his remarks in the following essay).

"healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery, 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 ardor and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favorably. 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 traveler, as Brantôme2 quaintly tells us, "fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin"; 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 humors as through differently colored glasses. We are ourselves a turn 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 -center of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, 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 2. Brantôme. An old French chronicler (died 1614). The sentence reads: "The traveler holds discourse within himself in order to bear up on his road."