no Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
he starts as when he paused, but the impatience to be about
his business is stronger than deterring fear. Fear may make
us hesitate, but it will not make us stop.
Stevenson cites proverbial examples of healthy people’s
recklessness of death—very old people, men living at the
foot of a volcano, the whole human race swimming giddily
through space on a planet which may at any time meet an
obstruction and finish its course.
Seeing that the only thing we are absolutely sure of is that
we must die, and seeing that there is always a fair possibility
that we may die before the sun has run its next twenty-four-
hour circuit, we might well spend our lives shivering with
apprehension were there not in us something stronger than
fear—the instinct to live. It is not ambition that keeps us
going, but “the plain satisfaction of living, of being about
[our] business in some sort or other.” “As courage and
intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s
cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognize
our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to
be not at all abashed before the fact,” to reckon “life as a
thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded.”
He remembers that Dickens and Thackeray each died
with an uncompleted novel in his desk, and he surmises that
if it were not for this reckless scorn of death, no man would
ever commence a full-length piece of work. “By all means
begin your folio,” he says; “even if the doctor does not give
you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one
brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.
. . . All who have meant good work with their whole
hearts, have done good work, although they died before
they have had time to sign it. Every heart that has beat
strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in
the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.”