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Robert Louis Stevenson by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
page 10 of 39 (25%)
literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices
in his sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them
feel at ease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice.
'Once when I was groaning aloud with physical pain,' he says in the
essay on CHILD'S PLAY, 'a young gentleman came into the room and
nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and arrow. He made no
account of my groans, which he accepted, as he had to accept so
much else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders;
and, like a wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the
subject.' Was there ever a passage like this? The sympathy of the
writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute
indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been safely
predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be
free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the hired sentimentalist.

And so also with what Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical
distresses.' It is striking enough to observe how differently the
quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods
affected Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-
known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold likens his own state to that
of the monks:


'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride -
I come to shed them at their side.'

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