Study Edition · Essay 70
Æs Triplex
Source: First published in the Cornhill Magazine (1878); collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881). Text from Project Gutenberg #386. Abridged: omitted passages are marked “…”. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was ill with lung disease for most of his life and knew he might die young. The title is Latin for “triple bronze,” from the Roman poet Horace, who said the first sailor to brave the sea must have had a heart bound in triple bronze. Stevenson argues that we all live beside a volcano, that nobody really fears “death” in the abstract, and that it is better to live boldly and die in mid-career than to hoard our health. Notice his comic images (old men in bed, ginger-beer, tin shoes) and how the essay rises to a final, soaring sentence.
69 sentences: 16 simple, 35 moderate, 18 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- melancholysad and gloomy
- havocgreat destruction or disorder
- pageanta showy public ceremony
- ludicrousabsurd; ridiculous
- debaucha bout of wild, excessive pleasure
- macerationhere, starving the body for religious reasons
- petarda small bomb
- incongruousout of place; not fitting
- metaphysicalabout abstract ideas such as being and existence
- sophistryclever but false argument
- viandsfood
- precariousuncertain; insecure
- abashedembarrassed; put off
- ossifyto turn to bone; to become rigid
- spendthrifta person who spends money wastefully
- folioa large book
- impetusdriving force; momentum
The Essay
The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man’s experience, and has no parallel upon earth.1 It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them.2 Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years.3 And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people’s lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together.4 There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night.5 … The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door.6
As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances.7 We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England.8 There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust.9 It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain.10 It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse.11
And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind.12 This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib.13 And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards?14 … What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea?15 For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.16 By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.17 Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?18 Why, no.19 They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some one else.20 It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.21
Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.22 The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin.23 And yet we go spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby.24
We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant.25 Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?26 The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more we think about them.27
We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness.28 We have no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others.29 … Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.30 Truly a fine result!31 A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation!32 He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker’s man; but not certainly of abstract death.33 We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true throughout—that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living.34 … For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.35
There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away.36 Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question.37 When a man’s heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation.38 Death may be knocking at the door, like the Commander’s statue; we have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock.39 Passing bells are ringing all the world over.40 All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies.41 For us also the trap is laid.42 But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death.43 It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest.44
… In each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.45 No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life.46 Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.47 As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact.48
And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good citizen to boot.49 We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.50 That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own digestion.51 So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.52 To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.53 Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he is running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end.54 … “A peerage or Westminster Abbey!” cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.55 Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end!56 Who would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course?57 Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?58
… It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.59 It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom.60 By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.61 All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.62 Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.63 … Does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?64 When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye.65 For surely, at whatever age it overtakes the man, this is to die young.66 Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart.67 In the hot-fit of life, a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side.68 The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.69
Sentence Notes
In plain English: Death changes things so sharply and finally, with such terrible and sad results, that it is unique in human experience; nothing on earth compares with it.
In plain English: It beats every other misfortune because it is the final one.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A grim joke in perfectly plain words.
In plain English: Sometimes death jumps on its victims suddenly, like a robber; sometimes it lays siege and slowly creeps up on their fortress over twenty years.
Reference & context: The Thugs were bands of robbers in India who strangled travellers; the English word “thug” comes from them.
In plain English: And when it's over, other people's lives are badly damaged, and a pin has been knocked out that held together many smaller friendships.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The dead person is a pin holding a whole structure of friendships.
In plain English: There are empty chairs, lonely walks, and beds slept in alone.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Three plain, concrete images of grief, more moving than any abstract word.
In plain English: Even the poorest people get a little procession to the grave; memorial stones are put up for the least memorable people; and to show respect for the bodies of those we loved, we put on a lot of grimly ridiculous ceremony, while the hired undertaker marches outside the house.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: “Memorial stones … over the least memorable”: a quiet pun.
Reference & context: Some sentences about the customs of death are omitted here.
In plain English: In fact, although few things are talked about in more frightened whispers than death, few have less effect on how healthy people actually behave.
In plain English: We've all heard of South American cities built on the slopes of volcanoes, whose people, even in such a dangerous place, are no more worried about death than if they were digging gardens in the greenest corner of England.
Reference & context: Cities such as Arequipa in Peru and Quito in Ecuador lie beneath active volcanoes.
In plain English: Up above, there are love songs, suppers and flirting among the myrtle bushes; meanwhile the ground shakes underneath, the inside of the mountain rumbles, and at any moment a living disaster could shoot sky-high into the moonlight and throw people and their parties into the dust.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Romantic moonlight and volcanic eruption in a single sentence.
In plain English: It seems unbelievable that respectable married couples, carrying umbrellas, could feel like eating supper anywhere near a volcano.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: “With umbrellas” is a perfect comic detail of cautious respectability.
In plain English: It ought to be a place only for hermits who pray and starve themselves, or for wicked people drowning their worries in a never-ending drinking party.
In plain English: And yet, when you think about it calmly, these South Americans are only a faint picture of everyone's situation.
In plain English: The earth itself, rushing blindly through crowded space among a million other worlds rushing the opposite way, could easily get a knock that would make it explode like a cheap firework.
Reference & context: A squib is a small firework that fizzes and bangs.
In plain English: And, from a medical point of view, what is the human body with all its organs but a bag full of little bombs?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A startling, funny image of our fragile insides.
In plain English: What woman would ever be tempted into marriage, which is far more dangerous than the wildest sea?
Reference & context: Childbirth killed many women in the 1800s. Some sentences about soldiers and sailors are omitted before this.
In plain English: After a certain age, with every step we take in life the ice under our feet gets thinner, and all around us we see people our own age falling through.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Life as a walk across a frozen lake: a chilling and exact metaphor for ageing.
In plain English: By the time a man is well into his seventies, it's a miracle he's still alive; and when he goes to bed at night, there's a very good chance he won't see the morning.
In plain English: Do old men actually worry about it?
In plain English: Not at all.
In plain English: They've never been happier; they have their rum and water at night and tell the naughtiest stories; when they hear of the death of people their own age or even younger, they don't take it as a grim warning, but feel a simple, childish pleasure at having outlived someone else.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A sharply observed, comic truth about old age.
Reference & context: Grog is rum mixed with water.
In plain English: Judging only by the danger, you could fairly ask whether it was much braver for Curtius to leap into the chasm than for any ninety-year-old to take off his clothes and climb into bed.
Reference & context: In Roman legend, Marcus Curtius rode his horse into a chasm that had opened in the Forum, sacrificing himself to save the city.
In plain English: It really is remarkable how carelessly and cheerfully people ride on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Reference & context: Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” “Pricks on” means spurs a horse forward.
In plain English: The whole route is full of traps, and for those who fear the final squeeze, the end is ruin that can never be undone.
In plain English: And yet we go whirling along like a group of friends heading to the races.
Reference & context: The Derby is England's most famous horse race, a great holiday outing in Victorian times.
In plain English: Our lives last as long as a match flame; we open a bottle of ginger beer, and the earthquake swallows us immediately.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Life shrunk to a match flame and a fizzy drink.
In plain English: Isn't it strange, isn't it absurd, isn't it truly unbelievable, that we care so much about the ginger beer and so little about the earthquake that will swallow us?
In plain English: “The love of Life” and “the fear of Death” are two famous phrases that become harder to understand the more we think about them.
In plain English: We confuse ourselves with abstract philosophical phrases that we grandly and wrongly bring into everyday conversation.
In plain English: We have no idea what death is, apart from how it happens and some of its effects on other people.
In plain English: Philosophy, strictly speaking, has worked on the same question for centuries; and after countless bald heads have shaken over it and piles of words have filled endless dry, cloudy books, philosophy proudly offers us its answer: life is a “Permanent Possibility of Sensation.”
Reference & context: Mocks John Stuart Mill, who defined matter as “a Permanent Possibility of Sensation” (1865). Stevenson applies it to life for comic effect.
In plain English: What a wonderful result! (He is being sarcastic.)
In plain English: A man may well love beef, hunting or a woman, but surely not a “Permanent Possibility of Sensation”!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Concrete loves set against a dead abstraction; the repeated “surely” is mock-pleading.
In plain English: He may be afraid of a cliff edge, a dentist, a big enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's assistant; but certainly not of death in the abstract.
In plain English: We can play with the many meanings of “life” until we are tired of it, and argue using every philosophy there is, but one thing stays true: we don't love life in the sense of worrying much about preserving it; properly speaking, we don't love life at all, but living.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay's key distinction: not the abstract noun “life” but the activity of “living.”
In plain English: Surely the love of living is stronger in a mountain climber roping across a dangerous drop, or a rider cheerfully jumping a tall fence, than in someone who eats a special diet and walks a measured distance for his health.
In plain English: Plenty of nasty nonsense is talked on both sides: ranting preachers who make life seem no more than a funeral procession, too short even to be respectable; and gloomy atheists longing for the grave as if it were a distant paradise.
Reference & context: “Divines” are clergymen; “tearing” here means violently passionate.
In plain English: In fact, a good meal and a bottle of wine answer most of the serious books on the subject.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A deliberately cheeky put-down of learned pessimism.
In plain English: When a man starts to enjoy his food, he forgets a lot of clever but false reasoning and rises into a cheerful frame of mind.
In plain English: Death may be knocking at the door like the statue in Don Giovanni; thank God, we're busy with something else, so let him knock.
Reference & context: In the Don Juan story (Mozart's Don Giovanni), the statue of a murdered Commander comes to supper and drags Don Juan to hell.
In plain English: Funeral bells are ringing all over the world.
Reference & context: A passing bell was rung in a church when someone in the parish died.
In plain English: Everywhere, every hour, someone is leaving behind all his pains and joys.
In plain English: The trap is set for us too.
In plain English: But we love life so much that we have no spare time to think about the terror of death.
In plain English: Life is a honeymoon for us from start to finish, and not a very long one.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Life as a short, passionate honeymoon: joy and brevity in one image.
In plain English: Whatever our views or situation, only one conclusion is possible: a person should block out paralysing fear and run the race in front of him with total focus.
Reference & context: Hebrews 12:1: “let us run with patience the race that is set before us.” Some lines listing different views of life are omitted before this.
In plain English: Surely no one shrank from the thought of death with more pain and terror than our respected dictionary-maker; yet we know how little it affected his behaviour, how wisely and boldly he lived, and how freshly and cheerfully he talked about life.
Reference & context: Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), author of the great Dictionary of the English Language, was famously terrified of death.
In plain English: Although already old, he set off on his tour of the Scottish Highlands; and his heart, wrapped in triple bronze, did not flinch at twenty-seven separate cups of tea.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The heroic title phrase applied to a comic feat of tea-drinking.
Reference & context: Johnson toured Scotland with Boswell in 1773, aged 63. He was a famous tea-drinker. “Triple brass” translates Horace's “aes triplex” (Odes I.3), the essay's title.
In plain English: Courage and intelligence are the two qualities most worth developing; and the first step in intelligence is to recognize how insecure our life is, and the first step in courage is not to be daunted by that fact.
In plain English: Such a person is not only well protected himself, but also a good friend and good citizen as well.
In plain English: We don't go to cowards for kindness; nothing is as cruel as panic; the man who worries least about his own body has the most time to think of other people.
In plain English: That famous chemist who went out walking in tin shoes and lived entirely on lukewarm milk was kept fully busy just being considerate to his own stomach.
Reference & context: Probably a joke about an over-cautious scientist; the exact person, if any, is uncertain.
In plain English: As soon as caution starts to grow in the brain, like a gloomy fungus, the first thing it does is stop us from doing generous things.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Prudence, usually a virtue, becomes a mushroom of the mind.
In plain English: Being too wise makes you rigid as bone; and the person who worries over every small doubt ends up not moving at all.
In plain English: But the man who shows his feelings openly, with a lively, spinning mind, who thinks of his life as something to use boldly and risk cheerfully, knows the world very differently; his pulse stays strong and quick, he gains speed as he runs, and if he's aiming at anything better than a flash in the pan, he may rise and become a constellation in the end.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The sentence itself gathers speed, like the man it describes.
Modernized: be → is
In plain English: “A peerage or Westminster Abbey!” Nelson shouted in his bright, boyish, heroic way.
Reference & context: Admiral Horatio Nelson, before a battle: he would win either a noble title or a hero's burial in Westminster Abbey.
In plain English: Think of Johnson's heroism, his magnificent disregard of human limits that made him start his dictionary and carried him through to the triumphant end!
Reference & context: Johnson wrote his Dictionary (1755) almost single-handed over nine years.
In plain English: Who would plan a novel published in instalments, after both Thackeray and Dickens died halfway through one?
Reference & context: Thackeray died in 1863 leaving Denis Duval unfinished; Dickens died in 1870 halfway through The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
In plain English: Who would have the courage even to begin living, if he spent his time thinking about death?
In plain English: It's better to spend your health freely like a big spender than to hoard it uselessly like a miser.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A perfectly balanced epigram; it surprises because we expect the miser to be wiser.
Reference & context: Some sentences about living “in a parlour with a regulated temperature” are omitted before this.
In plain English: It's better to live fully and be finished, than to die a little each day in a sickroom.
In plain English: Go ahead and start your big book; even if the doctor doesn't give you a year, even if he's unsure you'll last a month, make one brave effort and see what you can do in a week.
Reference & context: Stevenson, often seriously ill himself, wrote most of his books under exactly this threat.
In plain English: Everyone who has wholeheartedly intended to do good work has done good work, even if they die before they have time to put their name to it.
In plain English: Every heart that has beaten strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful push behind in the world and improved humanity's inheritance.
In plain English: Doesn't life end more gracefully plunging in full flood over a waterfall than trickling out miserably in a sandy river mouth?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Life as a river: the waterfall versus the delta.
In plain English: When the Greeks coined their fine saying that those the gods love die young, I can't help believing they also had this kind of death in mind.
Reference & context: From the Greek comic poet Menander, quoted by many later writers.
In plain English: Because surely, whatever age a man is when it happens, this is dying young.
Modernized: overtake → overtakes
In plain English: Death has not been allowed to take even one illusion from his heart.
In plain English: In the fever of life, on tiptoe on the highest peak of existence, he leaps over to the other side in a single bound.
In plain English: The sound of his tools has hardly stopped, the trumpets have barely finished, when, trailing clouds of glory, this lucky, full-blooded spirit shoots into the next world.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay ends at full speed, in the very manner it recommends.
Reference & context: Borrows from Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality”: “trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.” Wordsworth used it of birth; Stevenson uses it of death.
Fun Fact
Stevenson lived out his own advice. Despite years of lung haemorrhages, he sailed the Pacific and settled in Samoa, where the people called him “Tusitala,” teller of tales. He died suddenly in 1894, aged 44, while cheerfully making mayonnaise for dinner, leaving his novel Weir of Hermiston unfinished in mid-career.