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

made the

remark, “It was there that the battle of Waterloo was won!”

 

Daniel Malthus urged his son when at college to be most diligent in

the cultivation of knowledge, but he also enjoined him to pursue

manly sports as the best means of keeping up the full working power

of his mind, as well as of enjoying the pleasures of intellect.

“Every kind of knowledge,” said he, “every acquaintance with nature

and art, will amuse and strengthen your mind, and I am perfectly

pleased that cricket should do the same by your arms and legs; I

love to see you excel in exercises of the body, and I think myself

that the better half, and much the most agreeable part, of the

pleasures of the mind is best enjoyed while one is upon one’s

legs.” But a still more important use of active employment is that

referred to by the great divine, Jeremy Taylor. “Avoid idleness,”

he says, “and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and

useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses

where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy,

healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but

of all employments bodily labour is the most useful, and of the

greatest benefit for driving away the devil.”

 

Practical success in life depends more upon physical health than is

generally imagined. Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, writing home to a

friend in England, said, “I believe, if I get on well in India, it

will be owing, physically speaking, to a sound digestion.” The

capacity for continuous working in any calling must necessarily

depend in a great measure upon this; and hence the necessity for

attending to health, even as a means of intellectual labour. It is

perhaps to the neglect of physical exercise that we find amongst

students so frequent a tendency towards discontent, unhappiness,

inaction, and reverie,—displaying itself in contempt for real life

and disgust at the beaten tracks of men,—a tendency which in

England has been called Byronism, and in Germany Wertherism. Dr.

Channing noted the same growth in America, which led him to make

the remark, that “too many of our young men grow up in a school of

despair.” The only remedy for this green-sickness in youth is

physical exercise—action, work, and bodily occupation.

 

The use of early labour in self-imposed mechanical employments may

be illustrated by the boyhood of Sir Isaac Newton. Though a

comparatively dull scholar, he was very assiduous in the use of his

saw, hammer, and hatchet—“knocking and hammering in his lodging

room”—making models of windmills, carriages, and machines of all

sorts; and as he grew older, he took delight in making little

tables and cupboards for his friends. Smeaton, Watt, and

Stephenson, were equally handy with tools when mere boys; and but

for such kind of self-culture in their youth, it is doubtful

whether they would have accomplished so much in their manhood.

Such was also the early training of the great inventors and

mechanics described in the preceding pages, whose contrivance and

intelligence were practically trained by the constant use of their

hands in early life. Even where men belonging to the manual labour

class have risen above it, and become more purely intellectual

labourers, they have found the advantages of their early training

in their later pursuits. Elihu Burritt says he found hard labour

NECESSARY to enable him to study with effect; and more than once he

gave up school-teaching and study, and, taking to his leather-apron

again, went back to his blacksmith’s forge and anvil for his health

of body and mind’s sake.

 

The training of young men in the use of tools would, at the same

time that it educated them in “common things,” teach them the use

of their hands and arms, familiarize them with healthy work,

exercise their faculties upon things tangible and actual, give them

some practical acquaintance with mechanics, impart to them the

ability of being useful, and implant in them the habit of

persevering physical effort. This is an advantage which the

working classes, strictly so called, certainly possess over the

leisure classes,—that they are in early life under the necessity

of applying themselves laboriously to some mechanical pursuit or

other,—thus acquiring manual dexterity and the use of their

physical powers. The chief disadvantage attached to the calling of

the laborious classes is, not that they are employed in physical

work, but that they are too exclusively so employed, often to the

neglect of their moral and intellectual faculties. While the

youths of the leisure classes, having been taught to associate

labour with servility, have shunned it, and been allowed to grow up

practically ignorant, the poorer classes, confining themselves

within the circle of their laborious callings, have been allowed to

grow up in a large proportion of cases absolutely illiterate. It

seems possible, however, to avoid both these evils by combining

physical training or physical work with intellectual culture: and

there are various signs abroad which seem to mark the gradual

adoption of this healthier system of education.

 

The success of even professional men depends in no slight degree on

their physical health; and a public writer has gone so far as to

say that “the greatness of our great men is quite as much a bodily

affair as a mental one.” {28} A healthy breathing apparatus is as

indispensable to the successful lawyer or politician as a well-cultured intellect. The thorough aeration of the blood by free

exposure to a large breathing surface in the lungs, is necessary to

maintain that full vital power on which the vigorous working of the

brain in so large a measure depends. The lawyer has to climb the

heights of his profession through close and heated courts, and the

political leader has to bear the fatigue and excitement of long and

anxious debates in a crowded House. Hence the lawyer in full

practice and the parliamentary leader in full work are called upon

to display powers of physical endurance and activity even more

extraordinary than those of the intellect,—such powers as have

been exhibited in so remarkable a degree by Brougham, Lyndhurst,

and Campbell; by Peel, Graham, and Palmerston—all full-chested

men.

 

Though Sir Walter Scott, when at Edinburgh College, went by the

name of “The Greek Blockhead,” he was, notwithstanding his

lameness, a remarkably healthy youth: he could spear a salmon with

the best fisher on the Tweed, and ride a wild horse with any hunter

in Yarrow. When devoting himself in after life to literary

pursuits, Sir Walter never lost his taste for field sports; but

while writing ‘Waverley’ in the morning, he would in the afternoon

course hares. Professor Wilson was a very athlete, as great at

throwing the hammer as in his flights of eloquence and poetry; and

Burns, when a youth, was remarkable chiefly for his leaping,

putting, and wrestling. Some of our greatest divines were

distinguished in their youth for their physical energies. Isaac

Barrow, when at the Charterhouse School, was notorious for his

pugilistic encounters, in which he got many a bloody nose; Andrew

Fuller, when working as a farmer’s lad at Soham, was chiefly famous

for his skill in boxing; and Adam Clarke, when a boy, was only

remarkable for the strength displayed by him in “rolling large

stones about,”—the secret, possibly, of some of the power which he

subsequently displayed in rolling forth large thoughts in his

manhood.

 

While it is necessary, then, in the first place to secure this

solid foundation of physical health, it must also be observed that

the cultivation of the habit of mental application is quite

indispensable for the education of the student. The maxim that

“Labour conquers all things” holds especially true in the case of

the conquest of knowledge. The road into learning is alike free to

all who will give the labour and the study requisite to gather it;

nor are there any difficulties so great that the student of

resolute purpose may not surmount and overcome them. It was one of

the characteristic expressions of Chatterton, that God had sent his

creatures into the world with arms long enough to reach anything if

they chose to be at the trouble. In study, as in business, energy

is the great thing. There must be the “fervet opus”: we must not

only strike the iron while it is hot, but strike it till it is made

hot. It is astonishing how much may be accomplished in self-culture by the energetic and the persevering, who are careful to

avail themselves of opportunities, and use up the fragments of

spare time which the idle permit to run to waste. Thus Ferguson

learnt astronomy from the heavens, while wrapt in a sheep-skin on

the highland hills. Thus Stone learnt mathematics while working as

a journeyman gardener; thus Drew studied the highest philosophy in

the intervals of cobbling shoes; and thus Miller taught himself

geology while working as a day labourer in a quarry.

 

Sir Joshua Reynolds, as we have already observed, was so earnest a

believer in the force of industry that he held that all men might

achieve excellence if they would but exercise the power of

assiduous and patient working. He held that drudgery lay on the

road to genius, and that there was no limit to the proficiency of

an artist except the limit of his own painstaking. He would not

believe in what is called inspiration, but only in study and

labour. “Excellence,” he said, “is never granted to man but as the

reward of labour.” “If you have great talents, industry will

improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will

supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed

labour; nothing is to be obtained without it.” Sir Fowell Buxton

was an equal believer in the power of study; and he entertained the

modest idea that he could do as well as other men if he devoted to

the pursuit double the time and labour that they did. He placed

his great confidence in ordinary means and extraordinary

application.

 

“I have known several men in my life,” says Dr. Ross, “who may be

recognized in days to come as men of genius, and they were all

plodders, hardworking, INTENT men. Genius is known by its works;

genius without works is a blind faith, a dumb oracle. But

meritorious works are the result of time and labour, and cannot be

accomplished by intention or by a wish… . Every great work is

the result of vast preparatory training. Facility comes by labour.

Nothing seems easy, not even walking, that was not difficult at

first. The orator whose eye flashes instantaneous fire, and whose

lips pour out a flood of noble thoughts, startling by their

unexpectedness, and elevating by their wisdom and truth, has

learned his secret by patient repetition, and after many bitter

disappointments.” {29}

 

Thoroughness and accuracy are two principal points to be aimed at

in study. Francis Horner, in laying down rules for the cultivation

of his mind, placed great stress upon the habit of continuous

application to one subject for the sake of mastering it thoroughly;

he confined himself, with this object, to only a few books, and

resisted with the greatest firmness “every approach to a habit of

desultory reading.” The value of knowledge to any man consists not

in its quantity, but mainly in the good uses to which he can apply

it. Hence a little knowledge, of an exact and perfect character,

is always found more valuable for practical purposes than any

extent of superficial learning.

 

One of Ignatius Loyola’s maxims was, “He who does well one work at

a time, does more than all.” By spreading our efforts over too

large a surface we inevitably weaken our force, hinder our

progress, and acquire a habit of fitfulness and ineffective

working. Lord