The Lantern Bearers: Response

Perhaps it's not a response to the metaphor itself, but more what he was trying to say. I love a message in stories that I read, especially in non-fiction, but not so overt as this. There is a difference between trying to convey something that you've learned and trying to show it through writing and trying to tell people what they feel and how they should act. The essay makes quite a few generalizations (not to mention saying that all poets are men, which I understand is a product of the time, but makes me much less likely to take the rest of his advice, as misguided as that may be.

Rather than just telling a personal story and showing the readers what he has learned, Stevenson seems to be trying to make a rather large statement about what all people are like, what all people feel. "In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;..." I disagree, but he's stating this opinion as though it's fact. And 'nobler' is vague enough that I can't fully get what he means. Does he mean that they comply to his moral standards? That they write well? And the emotions that people feel are only 'like the emotions of life'? Does this emotion somehow differ from actually feeling something? No. A book, not even particularly well written, can make us feel emotions as if we were going through something to provoke it. It's the wonder of human sympathy.

I understand that a lot of this is time and the differing of societies, but this essay is so far from a personal essay to me. It's a man preaching to people how they should act and feel, and trying to shove his personal life in there almost as an afterthought. It's not particularly well done, and the story isn't compelling. I could barely force myself to read up to the point where he actually mentioned his life, let alone to the part where he finally started forcing this metaphor on us. It's cheesy, overdone, and not well executed. I don't think that the motive for writing this seems to be that he wanted to talk about an event in his life and see how it could help others, it was that he wanted to impose his own ideals on others. It's okay if it's done well, if it's presented as an option, as a revelation of the author's rather than an explicit order on how to behave.

The metaphor, then, wasn't something that seemed to come naturally. It was a way for him to go about this, it was a way that he was trying to disguise this as something other than what it was.