Self Help, Samuel Smiles [good romance books to read .txt] 📗
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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
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