Robert Louis Stevenson was asked what lack in life caused him the keenest pain, he answered, "The feeling that I'm not strong enough to resent an insult properly,—not strong enough to knock a man down."
With civilization at a point where the resort to elemental weapons is practically obsolete, it might seem that there was something antiquated and unreal, more imaginary than genuine, in this complaint of the frail-bodied Stevenson; probably in all his life, as in the lives of most gentlemen nowadays, he was never confronted with the alternative of knocking a man down or accepting a wound to his pride. If the occasion ever arose and he had to charge to the feebleness of his body his failure to sustain his dignity, the recollection might indeed tinge him with bitterness; but it is difficult to believe that the gentle and lovable Stevenson argued from an actual experience of humiliation.
Yet it is not alone the painful memories or the logical apprehensions of ill which awaken the most sensitive realization of defenselessness and fill the soul with the haunting dread of incompetence. From a clouded childhood such a distrust is usually derived, rather than from the isolated blunders or failures, however monumental, of later years. Stevenson, the petted and fragile child at home, went finally to school; and it hardly needs a biographer to tell us how the high-spirited, imaginative boy, who liked to shine, met with repression from the stalwart, obstinate young Scots. In their rough sports he was never a leader; that was mortification enough to one of his spirit; and it was not the full measure of his mortification. With his imperious outbursts, his flashing temper, his physical weakness, he afforded some of them rare sport. His school days were miserable to him, and miserable school days are likely to affect permanently a man's outlook. Perhaps not any one bullying episode of which he may have been an impotent victim, not any one instance where he stood solitary to one side, while the school acclaimed their champion, remained to give a special vengefulness to that longing of his mature years: "If I were only strong enough to knock a man down!" But the feeling of inferiority lingered in him after he had passed the period when inferiority of that particular kind ceases to be reckoned important; in this one respect his standard remained that of the immature boy.
Weaker than his fellows and high-spirited, he came to be reckless of such strength as he had; with bravado and imagination he recompensed himself for the niggardliness of nature. The weak who are poor-spirited and without bravado do not disguise that they are timorous or furtive, subservient or cringing; and weakness does very often impose poverty of spirit. In its attenuation there may be a sharpening of wits and hence a success in life—of a kind—achieved by craft or duplicity or deviousness, and guarded by a suspicious vigilance; the man of spirit scorns a success so won and so preserved. If, like Stevenson, he was born a weakling, his path is indeed laborious and must be hewn out of the very rock of adversity.
But the man of great bodily vigor, who in his boyhood was of conspicuous strength among his fellows,—how does he ever fail of leadership and eminence in whatever career he chooses? The early self-confidence that he has developed must be tremendous,—the discovery that in all the affairs of boyhood which are truly accounted of moment he is without a peer,—able to overthrow any one in wrestling, to swim longer, to run faster, to bat a ball farther than any of his comrades,—this gradual unfolding of his powers must cause such a youth to tread the earth with a conscious greatness. Why should he ever be afraid? and what is it but fear that withholds any of us from large achievement? His imagination does not implant in him doubt and distrust, his mediocre rank at school and his dullness at his books cause him no misgivings, for at his time of life excellence in these matters is esteemed parrotlike, and distinction in them is contemptuously awarded to the weak. It might be expected that the self-confidence acquired in early years through a mastery of all one's contemporaries could never quite forsake the most unlucky; that a man with such a history would rise from each overthrow stronger like Antæus for having touched the earth,—with courage undiminished and some gain in wisdom. Yet for every Antæus there is perhaps also a Goliath. Whence to these unhappy giants come their Davids?