Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

Moorish leader, that, when lying ill, almost worn

out by an incurable disease, a battle took place between his troops

and the Portuguese; when, starting from his litter at the great

crisis of the fight, he rallied his army, led them to victory, and

instantly afterwards sank exhausted and expired.

 

It is will,—force of purpose,—that enables a man to do or be

whatever he sets his mind on being or doing. A holy man was

accustomed to say, “Whatever you wish, that you are: for such is

the force of our will, joined to the Divine, that whatever we wish

to be, seriously, and with a true intention, that we become. No

one ardently wishes to be submissive, patient, modest, or liberal,

who does not become what he wishes.” The story is told of a

working carpenter, who was observed one day planing a magistrate’s

bench which he was repairing, with more than usual carefulness; and

when asked the reason, he replied, “Because I wish to make it easy

against the time when I come to sit upon it myself.” And

singularly enough, the man actually lived to sit upon that very

bench as a magistrate.

 

Whatever theoretical conclusions logicians may have formed as to

the freedom of the will, each individual feels that practically he

is free to choose between good and evil—that he is not as a mere

straw thrown upon the water to mark the direction of the current,

but that he has within him the power of a strong swimmer, and is

capable of striking out for himself, of buffeting with the waves,

and directing to a great extent his own independent course. There

is no absolute constraint upon our volitions, and we feel and know

that we are not bound, as by a spell, with reference to our

actions. It would paralyze all desire of excellence were we to

think otherwise. The entire business and conduct of life, with its

domestic rules, its social arrangements, and its public

institutions, proceed upon the practical conviction that the will

is free. Without this where would be responsibility?—and what the

advantage of teaching, advising, preaching, reproof, and

correction? What were the use of laws, were it not the universal

belief, as it is the universal fact, that men obey them or not,

very much as they individually determine? In every moment of our

life, conscience is proclaiming that our will is free. It is the

only thing that is wholly ours, and it rests solely with ourselves

individually, whether we give it the right or the wrong direction.

Our habits or our temptations are not our masters, but we of them.

Even in yielding, conscience tells us we might resist; and that

were we determined to master them, there would not be required for

that purpose a stronger resolution than we know ourselves to be

capable of exercising.

 

“You are now at the age,” said Lamennais once, addressing a gay

youth, “at which a decision must be formed by you; a little later,

and you may have to groan within the tomb which you yourself have

dug, without the power of rolling away the stone. That which the

easiest becomes a habit in us is the will. Learn then to will

strongly and decisively; thus fix your floating life, and leave it

no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf,

by every wind that blows.”

 

Buxton held the conviction that a young man might be very much what

he pleased, provided he formed a strong resolution and held to it.

Writing to one of his sons, he said to him, “You are now at that

period of life, in which you must make a turn to the right or the

left. You must now give proofs of principle, determination, and

strength of mind; or you must sink into idleness, and acquire the

habits and character of a desultory, ineffective young man; and if

once you fall to that point, you will find it no easy matter to

rise again. I am sure that a young man may be very much what he

pleases. In my own case it was so… . Much of my happiness, and

all my prosperity in life, have resulted from the change I made at

your age. If you seriously resolve to be energetic and

industrious, depend upon it that you will for your whole life have

reason to rejoice that you were wise enough to form and to act upon

that determination.” As will, considered without regard to

direction, is simply constancy, firmness, perseverance, it will be

obvious that everything depends upon right direction and motives.

Directed towards the enjoyment of the senses, the strong will may

be a demon, and the intellect merely its debased slave; but

directed towards good, the strong will is a king, and the intellect

the minister of man’s highest well-being.

 

“Where there is a will there is a way,” is an old and true saying.

He who resolves upon doing a thing, by that very resolution often

scales the barriers to it, and secures its achievement. To think

we are able, is almost to be so—to determine upon attainment is

frequently attainment itself. Thus, earnest resolution has often

seemed to have about it almost a savour of omnipotence. The

strength of Suwarrow’s character lay in his power of willing, and,

like most resolute persons, he preached it up as a system. “You

can only half will,” he would say to people who failed. Like

Richelieu and Napoleon, he would have the word “impossible”

banished from the dictionary. “I don’t know,” “I can’t,” and

“impossible,” were words which he detested above all others.

“Learn! Do! Try!” he would exclaim. His biographer has said of

him, that he furnished a remarkable illustration of what may be

effected by the energetic development and exercise of faculties,

the germs of which at least are in every human heart.

 

One of Napoleon’s favourite maxims was, “The truest wisdom is a

resolute determination.” His life, beyond most others, vividly

showed what a powerful and unscrupulous will could accomplish. He

threw his whole force of body and mind direct upon his work.

Imbecile rulers and the nations they governed went down before him

in succession. He was told that the Alps stood in the way of his

armies—“There shall be no Alps,” he said, and the road across the

Simplon was constructed, through a district formerly almost

inaccessible. “Impossible,” said he, “is a word only to be found

in the dictionary of fools.” He was a man who toiled terribly;

sometimes employing and exhausting four secretaries at a time. He

spared no one, not even himself. His influence inspired other men,

and put a new life into them. “I made my generals out of mud,” he

said. But all was of no avail; for Napoleon’s intense selfishness

was his ruin, and the ruin of France, which he left a prey to

anarchy. His life taught the lesson that power, however

energetically wielded, without beneficence, is fatal to its

possessor and its subjects; and that knowledge, or knowingness,

without goodness, is but the incarnate principle of Evil.

 

Our own Wellington was a far greater man. Not less resolute, firm,

and persistent, but more self-denying, conscientious, and truly

patriotic. Napoleon’s aim was “Glory;” Wellington’s watchword,

like Nelson’s, was “Duty.” The former word, it is said, does not

once occur in his despatches; the latter often, but never

accompanied by any high-sounding professions. The greatest

difficulties could neither embarrass nor intimidate Wellington; his

energy invariably rising in proportion to the obstacles to be

surmounted. The patience, the firmness, the resolution, with which

he bore through the maddening vexations and gigantic difficulties

of the Peninsular campaigns, is, perhaps, one of the sublimest

things to be found in history. In Spain, Wellington not only

exhibited the genius of the general, but the comprehensive wisdom

of the statesman. Though his natural temper was irritable in the

extreme, his high sense of duty enabled him to restrain it; and to

those about him his patience seemed absolutely inexhaustible. His

great character stands untarnished by ambition, by avarice, or any

low passion. Though a man of powerful individuality, he yet

displayed a great variety of endowment. The equal of Napoleon in

generalship, he was as prompt, vigorous, and daring as Clive; as

wise a statesman as Cromwell; and as pure and high-minded as

Washington. The great Wellington left behind him an enduring

reputation, founded on toilsome campaigns won by skilful

combination, by fortitude which nothing could exhaust, by sublime

daring, and perhaps by still sublimer patience.

 

Energy usually displays itself in promptitude and decision. When

Ledyard the traveller was asked by the African Association when he

would be ready to set out for Africa, he immediately answered, “To-morrow morning.” Blucher’s promptitude obtained for him the

cognomen of “Marshal Forwards” throughout the Prussian army. When

John Jervis, afterwards Earl St. Vincent, was asked when he would

be ready to join his ship, he replied, “Directly.” And when Sir

Colin Campbell, appointed to the command of the Indian army, was

asked when he could set out, his answer was, “To-morrow,”—an

earnest of his subsequent success. For it is rapid decision, and a

similar promptitude in action, such as taking instant advantage of

an enemy’s mistakes, that so often wins battles. “At Arcola,” said

Napoleon, “I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized a

moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day

with this handful. Two armies are two bodies which meet and

endeavour to frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, and

THAT MOMENT must be turned to advantage.” “Every moment lost,”

said he at another time, “gives an opportunity for misfortune;” and

he declared that he beat the Austrians because they never knew the

value of time: while they dawdled, he overthrew them.

 

India has, during the last century, been a great field for the

display of British energy. From Clive to Havelock and Clyde there

is a long and honourable roll of distinguished names in Indian

legislation and warfare,—such as Wellesley, Metcalfe, Outram,

Edwardes, and the Lawrences. Another great but sullied name is

that of Warren Hastings—a man of dauntless will and indefatigable

industry. His family was ancient and illustrious; but their

vicissitudes of fortune and ill-requited loyalty in the cause of

the Stuarts, brought them to poverty, and the family estate at

Daylesford, of which they had been lords of the manor for hundreds

of years, at length passed from their hands. The last Hastings of

Daylesford had, however, presented the parish living to his second

son; and it was in his house, many years later, that Warren

Hastings, his grandson, was born. The boy learnt his letters at

the village school, on the same bench with the children of the

peasantry. He played in the fields which his fathers had owned;

and what the loyal and brave Hastings of Daylesford HAD been, was

ever in the boy’s thoughts. His young ambition was fired, and it

is said that one summer’s day, when only seven years old, as he

laid him down on the bank of the stream which flowed through the

domain, he formed in his mind the resolution that he would yet

recover possession of the family lands. It was the romantic vision

of a boy; yet he lived to realize it. The dream became a passion,

rooted in his very life; and he pursued his determination through

youth up to manhood, with that calm but indomitable force of will

which was the most striking peculiarity of his character. The

orphan boy became one of the most powerful men of his time; he

retrieved the fortunes of his line; bought back the old estate, and

rebuilt the family mansion. “When, under a tropical sun,” says

Macaulay, “he ruled fifty millions of Asiatics, his hopes, amidst

all the cares of war,