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

CHAPTER XII—EXAMPLE—MODELS

“Ever their phantoms rise before us,

Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;

By bed and table they lord it o’er us,

With looks of beauty and words of good.”—John Sterling.

 

“Children may be strangled, but Deeds never; they have an

indestructible life, both in and out of our consciousness.”—George

Eliot.

 

“There is no action of man in this life, which is not the beginning

of so long a chain of consequences, as that no human providence is

high enough to give us a prospect to the end.”—Thomas of

Malmesbury.

 

Example is one of the most potent of instructors, though it teaches

without a tongue. It is the practical school of mankind, working

by action, which is always more forcible than words. Precept may

point to us the way, but it is silent continuous example, conveyed

to us by habits, and living with us in fact, that carries us along.

Good advice has its weight: but without the accompaniment of a

good example it is of comparatively small influence; and it will be

found that the common saying of “Do as I say, not as I do,” is

usually reversed in the actual experience of life.

 

All persons are more or less apt to learn through the eye rather

than the ear; and, whatever is seen in fact, makes a far deeper

impression than anything that is merely read or heard. This is

especially the case in early youth, when the eye is the chief inlet

of knowledge. Whatever children see they unconsciously imitate.

They insensibly come to resemble those who are about them—as

insects take the colour of the leaves they feed on. Hence the vast

importance of domestic training. For whatever may be the

efficiency of schools, the examples set in our Homes must always be

of vastly greater influence in forming the characters of our future

men and women. The Home is the crystal of society—the nucleus of

national character; and from that source, be it pure or tainted,

issue the habits, principles and maxims, which govern public as

well as private life. The nation comes from the nursery. Public

opinion itself is for the most part the outgrowth of the home; and

the best philanthropy comes from the fireside. “To love the little

platoon we belong to in society,” says Burke, “is the germ of all

public affections.” From this little central spot, the human

sympathies may extend in an ever widening circle, until the world

is embraced; for, though true philanthropy, like charity, begins at

home, assuredly it does not end there.

 

Example in conduct, therefore, even in apparently trivial matters,

is of no light moment, inasmuch as it is constantly becoming

inwoven with the lives of others, and contributing to form their

natures for better or for worse. The characters of parents are

thus constantly repeated in their children; and the acts of

affection, discipline, industry, and self-control, which they daily

exemplify, live and act when all else which may have been learned

through the ear has long been forgotten. Hence a wise man was

accustomed to speak of his children as his “future state.” Even

the mute action and unconscious look of a parent may give a stamp

to the character which is never effaced; and who can tell how much

evil act has been stayed by the thought of some good parent, whose

memory their children may not sully by the commission of an

unworthy deed, or the indulgence of an impure thought? The veriest

trifles thus become of importance in influencing the characters of

men. “A kiss from my mother,” said West, “made me a painter.” It

is on the direction of such seeming trifles when children that the

future happiness and success of men mainly depend. Fowell Buxton,

when occupying an eminent and influential station in life, wrote to

his mother, “I constantly feel, especially in action and exertion

for others, the effects of principles early implanted by you in my

mind.” Buxton was also accustomed to remember with gratitude the

obligations which he owed to an illiterate man, a gamekeeper, named

Abraham Plastow, with whom he played, and rode, and sported—a man

who could neither read nor write, but was full of natural good

sense and mother-wit. “What made him particularly valuable,” says

Buxton, “were his principles of integrity and honour. He never

said or did a thing in the absence of my mother of which she would

have disapproved. He always held up the highest standard of

integrity, and filled our youthful minds with sentiments as pure

and as generous as could be found in the writings of Seneca or

Cicero. Such was my first instructor, and, I must add, my best.”

 

Lord Langdale, looking back upon the admirable example set him by

his mother, declared, “If the whole world were put into one scale,

and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam.” Mrs.

Schimmel Penninck, in her old age, was accustomed to call to mind

the personal influence exercised by her mother upon the society

amidst which she moved. When she entered a room it had the effect

of immediately raising the tone of the conversation, and as if

purifying the moral atmosphere—all seeming to breathe more freely,

and stand more erectly. “In her presence,” says the daughter, “I

became for the time transformed into another person.” So much does

she moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed,

and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their

children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best

system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two

words: “Improve thyself.”

 

There is something solemn and awful in the thought that there is

not an act done or a word uttered by a human being but carries with

it a train of consequences, the end of which we may never trace.

Not one but, to a certain extent, gives a colour to our life, and

insensibly influences the lives of those about us. The good deed

or word will live, even though we may not see it fructify, but so

will the bad; and no person is so insignificant as to be sure that

his example will not do good on the one hand, or evil on the other.

The spirits of men do not die: they still live and walk abroad

among us. It was a fine and a true thought uttered by Mr. Disraeli

in the House of Commons on the death of Richard Cobden, that “he

was one of those men who, though not present, were still members of

that House, who were independent of dissolutions, of the caprices

of constituencies, and even of the course of time.”

 

There is, indeed, an essence of immortality in the life of man,

even in this world. No individual in the universe stands alone; he

is a component part of a system of mutual dependencies; and by his

several acts he either increases or diminishes the sum of human

good now and for ever. As the present is rooted in the past, and

the lives and examples of our forefathers still to a great extent

influence us, so are we by our daily acts contributing to form the

condition and character of the future. Man is a fruit formed and

ripened by the culture of all the foregoing centuries; and the

living generation continues the magnetic current of action and

example destined to bind the remotest past with the most distant

future. No man’s acts die utterly; and though his body may resolve

into dust and air, his good or his bad deeds will still be bringing

forth fruit after their kind, and influencing future