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

in fictitious feelings so much, that there is great

risk of sound and healthy feeling becoming perverted or benumbed.

“I never go to hear a tragedy,” said a gay man once to the

Archbishop of York, “it wears my heart out.” The literary pity

evoked by fiction leads to no corresponding action; the

susceptibilities which it excites involve neither inconvenience nor

self-sacrifice; so that the heart that is touched too often by the

fiction may at length become insensible to the reality. The steel

is gradually rubbed out of the character, and it insensibly loses

its vital spring. “Drawing fine pictures of virtue in one’s mind,”

said Bishop Butler, “is so far from necessarily or certainly

conducive to form a HABIT of it in him who thus employs himself,

that it may even harden the mind in a contrary course, and render

it gradually more insensible.”

 

Amusement in moderation is wholesome, and to be commended; but

amusement in excess vitiates the whole nature, and is a thing to be

carefully guarded against. The maxim is often quoted of “All work

and no play makes Jack a dull boy;” but all play and no work makes

him something greatly worse. Nothing can be more hurtful to a

youth than to have his soul sodden with pleasure. The best

qualities of his mind are impaired; common enjoyments become

tasteless; his appetite for the higher kind of pleasures is

vitiated; and when he comes to face the work and the duties of

life, the result is usually aversion and disgust. “Fast” men waste

and exhaust the powers of life, and dry up the sources of true

happiness. Having forestalled their spring, they can produce no

healthy growth of either character or intellect. A child without

simplicity, a maiden without innocence, a boy without truthfulness,

are not more piteous sights than the man who has wasted and thrown

away his youth in self-indulgence. Mirabeau said of himself, “My

early years have already in a great measure disinherited the

succeeding ones, and dissipated a great part of my vital powers.”

As the wrong done to another to-day returns upon ourselves to-morrow, so the sins of our youth rise up in our age to scourge us.

When Lord Bacon says that “strength of nature in youth passeth over

many excesses which are owing a man until he is old,” he exposes a

physical as well as a moral fact which cannot be too well weighed

in the conduct of life. “I assure you,” wrote Giusti the Italian

to a friend, “I pay a heavy price for existence. It is true that

our lives are not at our own disposal. Nature pretends to give

them gratis at the beginning, and then sends in her account.” The

worst of youthful indiscretions is, not that they destroy health,

so much as that they sully manhood. The dissipated youth becomes a

tainted man; and often he cannot be pure, even if he would. If

cure there be, it is only to be found in inoculating the mind with

a fervent spirit of duty, and in energetic application to useful

work.

 

One of the most gifted of Frenchmen, in point of great intellectual

endowments, was Benjamin Constant; but, blase at twenty, his life

was only a prolonged wail, instead of a harvest of the great deeds

which he was capable of accomplishing with ordinary diligence and

self-control. He resolved upon doing so many things, which he

never did, that people came to speak of him as Constant the

Inconstant. He was a fluent and brilliant writer, and cherished

the ambition of writing works, “which the world would not willingly

let die.” But whilst Constant affected the highest thinking,

unhappily he practised the lowest living; nor did the

transcendentalism of his books atone for the meanness of his life.

He frequented the gaming-tables while engaged in preparing his work

upon religion, and carried on a disreputable intrigue while writing

his ‘Adolphe.’ With all his powers of intellect, he was powerless,

because he had no faith in virtue. “Bah!” said he, “what are

honour and dignity? The longer I live, the more clearly I see

there is nothing in them.” It was the howl of a miserable man. He

described himself as but “ashes and dust.” “I pass,” said he,

“like a shadow over the earth, accompanied by misery and ennui.”

He wished for Voltaire’s energy, which he would rather have

possessed than his genius. But he had no strength of purpose—

nothing but wishes: his life, prematurely exhausted, had become

but a heap of broken links. He spoke of himself as a person with

one foot in the air. He admitted that he had no principles, and no

moral consistency. Hence, with his splendid talents, he contrived

to do nothing; and, after living many years miserable, he died worn

out and wretched.

 

The career of Augustin Thierry, the author of the ‘History of the

Norman Conquest,’ affords an admirable contrast to that of

Constant. His entire life presented a striking example of

perseverance, diligence, self culture, and untiring devotion to

knowledge. In the pursuit he lost his eyesight, lost his health,

but never lost his love of truth. When so feeble that he was

carried from room to room, like a helpless infant, in the arms of a

nurse, his brave spirit never failed him; and blind and helpless

though he was, he concluded his literary career in the following

noble words:- “If, as I think, the interest of science is counted

in the number of great national interests, I have given my country

all that the soldier, mutilated on the field of battle, gives her.

Whatever may be the fate of my labours, this example, I hope, will

not be lost. I would wish it to serve to combat the species of

moral weakness which is THE DISEASE of our present generation; to

bring back into the straight road of life some of those enervated

souls that complain of wanting faith, that know not what to do, and

seek everywhere, without finding it, an object of worship and

admiration. Why say, with so much bitterness, that in the world,

constituted as it is, there is no air for all lungs—no employment

for all minds? Is not calm and serious study there? and is not

that a refuge, a hope, a field within the reach of all of us? With

it, evil days are passed over without their weight being felt.

Every one can make his own destiny—every one employ his life

nobly. This is what I have done, and would do again if I had to

recommence my career; I would choose that which has brought me

where I am. Blind, and suffering without hope, and almost without

intermission, I may give this testimony, which from me will not

appear suspicious. There is something in the world better than

sensual enjoyments, better than fortune, better than health itself-

-it is devotion to knowledge.”

 

Coleridge, in many respects, resembled Constant. He possessed

equally brilliant powers, but was similarly infirm of purpose.

With all his great intellectual gifts, he wanted the gift of

industry, and was averse to continuous labour. He wanted also the

sense of independence, and thought it no degradation to leave his

wife and children to be maintained by the brain-work of the noble

Southey, while he himself retired to Highgate Grove to discourse

transcendentalism to his disciples, looking down contemptuously

upon the honest work going forward beneath him amidst the din and

smoke of London. With remunerative employment at his command he

stooped to accept the charity of friends; and, notwithstanding his

lofty ideas of philosophy, he condescended to humiliations from

which many a day-labourer would have shrunk. How different in

spirit was Southey! labouring not merely at work of his own choice,

and at taskwork often tedious and distasteful, but also

unremittingly and with the utmost eagerness seeking and storing

knowledge purely for the love of it. Every day, every hour had its

allotted employment: engagements to publishers requiring punctual

fulfilment; the current expenses of a large household duty to

provide: for Southey had no crop growing while his pen was idle.

“My ways,” he used to say, “are as broad as the king’s high-road,

and my means lie in an inkstand.”

 

Robert Nicoll wrote to a friend, after reading the ‘Recollections

of Coleridge,’ “What a mighty intellect was lost in that man for

want of a little energy—a little determination!” Nicoll himself

was a true and brave spirit, who died young, but not before he had

encountered and overcome great difficulties in life. At his

outset, while carrying on a small business as a bookseller, he

found himself weighed down with a debt of only twenty pounds, which

he said he felt “weighing like a millstone round his neck,” and

that, “if he had it paid he never would borrow again from mortal

man.” Writing to his mother at the time he said, “Fear not for me,

dear mother, for I feel myself daily growing firmer and more

hopeful in spirit. The more I think and reflect—and thinking, not

reading, is now my occupation—I feel that, whether I be growing

richer or not, I am growing a wiser man, which is far better.

Pain, poverty, and all the other wild beasts of life which so

affrighten others, I am so bold as to think I could look in the

face without shrinking, without losing respect for myself, faith in

man’s high destinies, or trust in God. There is a point which it

costs much mental toil and struggling to gain, but which, when once

gained, a man can look down from, as a traveller from a lofty

mountain, on storms raging below, while he is walking in sunshine.

That I have yet gained this point in life I will not say, but I

feel myself daily nearer to it.”

 

It is not ease, but effort—not facility, but difficulty, that

makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life, in which

difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any

decided measure of success can be achieved. Those difficulties

are, however, our best instructors, as our mistakes often form our

best experience. Charles James Fox was accustomed to say that he

hoped more from a man who failed, and yet went on in spite of his

failure, than from the buoyant career of the successful. “It is

all very well,” said he, “to tell me that a young man has

distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech. He may go on,

or he may be satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young

man who has NOT succeeded at first, and nevertheless has gone on,

and I will back that young man to do better than most of those who

have succeeded at the first trial.”

 

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often

discover what WILL do, by finding out what will not do; and

probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. It

was the failure in the attempt to make a sucking-pump act, when the

working bucket was more than thirty-three feet above the surface of

the water to be raised, that led observant men to study the law of

atmospheric pressure, and opened a new field of research to the

genius of Galileo, Torrecelli, and Boyle. John Hunter used to

remark that the art of surgery would not advance until professional

men had the courage to publish their failures as well as their

successes. Watt the engineer said, of all things most wanted in

mechanical engineering was a history of failures: “We want,” he

said, “a book of blots.” When Sir Humphry Davy was once shown a

dexterously manipulated experiment, he said—“I thank God I was not

made a dexterous manipulator, for the most important of my

discoveries have been suggested to me by failures.” Another

distinguished