The faith of Stevenson, like
that of a great number of very sane men, was founded on what is called a
paradox—the paradox that existence was splendid because it was, to all
outward appearance, desperate. Paradox, so far from being a modern and
fanciful matter, is inherent in all the great hypotheses of humanity. The
Athanasian Creed, for example, the supreme testimony of Catholic Christianity,
sparkles with paradox like a modern society comedy. Thus, in the same manner,
scientific philosophy tells us that finite space is unthinkable and infinite
space is unthinkable. Thus the most influential modern metaphysician, Hegel,
declares without hesitation, when the last rag of theology is abandoned, and
the last point of philosophy passed, that existence is the same as non-existence.
Thus the brilliant author of
"Lady Windermere's Fan," in the electric glare of modernity, finds
that life is much too important to be taken seriously. Thus Tertullian, in the
first ages of faith, said "Credo quia impossibile."
We must not, therefore, be
immediately repelled by this paradoxical character of Stevenson's optimism, or
imagine for a moment that it was merely a part of that artistic foppery or
"fuddling hedonism" with which he has been ridiculously credited.
His optimism was one which, so far from dwelling upon those flowers and
sunbeams which form the stock-in-trade of conventional optimism, took a
peculiar pleasure in the contemplation of skulls, and cudgels, and gallows.
It is one thing to be the
kind of optimist who can divert his mind from personal suffering by dreaming of
the face of an angel, and quite another thing to be the kind of optimist who
can divert it by dreaming of the foul fat face of Long John Silver. And this
faith of his had a very definite and a very original philosophical purport.
Other men have justified existence because it was a harmony.
He justified it because it
was a battle, because it was an inspiring and melodious discord. He appealed to
a certain set of facts which lie far deeper than any logic—the great paradoxes
of the soul. For the singular fact is that the spirit of man is in reality
depressed by all the things which, logically speaking, should encourage it, and
encouraged by all the things which, logically speaking, should depress it.
Nothing, for example, can be
conceived more really dispiriting than that rationalistic explanation of pain
which conceives it as a thing laid by Providence upon the worst people.
Nothing, on the other hand, can be conceived as more exalting and reassuring
than that great mystical doctrine which teaches that pain is a thing laid by
Providence upon the best. We can accept the agony of heroes, while we revolt
against the agony of culprits. We can all endure to regard pain when it is
mysterious; our deepest nature protests against it the moment that it is
rational.
This doctrine that the best
man suffers most is, of course, the supreme doctrine of Christianity; millions
have found not merely an elevating but a soothing story in the undeserved
sufferings of Christ; had the sufferings been deserved we should all have been
pessimists.
Stevenson's great ethical
and philosophical value lies in the fact that he realised this great paradox
that life becomes more fascinating the darker it grows, that life is worth
living only so far as it is difficult to live. The more steadfastly and
gloomily men clung to their sinister visions of duty, the more, in his eyes,
they swelled the chorus of the praise of things. He was an optimist because to
him everything was heroic, and nothing more heroic than the pessimist.
To Stevenson, the optimist,
belong the most frightful epigrams of pessimism. It was he who said that this
planet on which we live was more drenched with blood, animal and vegetable,
than a pirate ship. It was he who said that man was a disease of the
agglutinated dust. And his supreme position and his supreme difference from all
common optimists is merely this, that all common optimists say that life is
glorious in spite of these things, but he said that all life was glorious
because of them. He discovered that a battle is more comforting than a
truce. - GK Chesterton
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