In his illuminating essay on The Lantern-Bearers, Stevenson complains of the vacuity of that view of life which he finds expressed in the pages of most realistic writers. “This harping on life’s dulness and man’s meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry of the blind eye, I cannot see, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, I cannot utter.” And then, with a fine flourish, he declares:—“If I had no better hope than to continue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.”
“If it were spent waiting at a railway junction” … Here, with his instinct for the perfect phrase, Stevenson has pointed a finger at the one experience which is commonly accepted as the acme of imaginable dulness. This man, who could be happy at a railway junction, could not have found a prouder way of boasting to posterity that he had never “faltered more or less in his great task of happiness.”
It is because railway junctions are the most unpopular places in the world that they have been singled out for praise in The Unpopular Review. Poor places, lonely and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so few,—surely they have waited over-long for an apologist…. But first of all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of these points of punctuation in the text of travel.
[pg 92]Far up in Vermont, at a point vaguely to the east of Burlington, there is a place called Essex Junction. It consists of a dismal shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of the United States to the court of St. James’s. He was allotted several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent meditations moved him to the composition of a poem, in four stanzas, which is a little classic of its kind. Space is lacking for a quotation of more than the initial stanza; but the taste of a poem, as of a pie, may conveniently be judged from a quadrant of the whole.—
With saddened face and battered hat
And eye that told of blank despair,
On wooden bench the traveller sat,
Cursing the fate that brought him there.
“Nine hours,” he cried, “we’ve lingered here
With thoughts intent on distant homes,