Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 109
son, this is the manner of literature, to compel men by the
aptness of literary expression to see what it is that they have
been vaguely believing all their lives; and its object is to
show that life, with all its unsatisfactoriness, is a very livable
thing.
Those are the two conditions which he fulfils in this ad-
mirable essay “Æs Triplex.” The theme of the essay is the
constant proximity of death and the average mortal’s indif-
ference to death, which is a sign of mental health, and the
best assurance of getting something accomplished in the
brief years that lie between birth and the grave. If one
really dreaded death as much as our conventional language
implies, he would be paralyzed for all effort. “As a matter
of fact,” says Stevenson, “although few things are spoken
of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of
death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy cir-
cumstances.”
That is a true and far-reaching remark, and concerns the
idea of scaring people into righteousness. A white gentle-
man heard a negro preacher describe to his congregation the
awful cold of hell, telling them, in that vividly illiterate style
of which the negro is so often a master, how they would
freeze and freeze through all eternity. When, after the
sermon, the white man protested that this was contrary to
the orthodox view of hell, the preacher exclaimed, “Lawd!
Boss, you can’t scare dem niggers by tellin’ ’em hell ,s hot.”
Fear, as a motive force, is a very temporary thing. There
is a dash of recklessness in human beings which makes them
“take a chance.” You may see this illustrated any day
where traffic is congested on Fifth Avenue, in New York.
A man will pause just so Long before crossing the street, but
if the traffic does not presently stop, he will dart into the
thick of it, “taking the chance.” The peril is as great when