Pushing to the Front Part 36

"If there were no difficulties there would be no success. In this necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human advancement,--the advancement of individuals as of nations. It has led to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."

"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when entering the Birmingham orchestra. "Don't tell me what you like, but what you don't like."

John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as their successes.

"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.

"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem discouragements. But if they are properly met, they are not what they seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances. There is no more helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."

It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote." He was so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his writing, and had to write on sc.r.a.ps of leather. A rich Spaniard was asked to help him, but replied: "Heaven forbid that his necessities should be relieved; it is his poverty that makes the world rich."

"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is spoiled by the ease with which he composes."

We do our best while fighting desperately to attain what the heart covets.

Waters says that the struggle to obtain knowledge and to advance one's self in the world strengthens the mind, disciplines the faculties, matures the judgment, promotes self-reliance, and gives one independence of thought and force of character.

Kossuth called himself "a tempest-tossed soul, whose eyes have been sharpened by affliction."

As soon as young eagles can fly the old birds tumble them out and tear the down and feathers from their nest. The rude and rough experience of the eaglet fits him to become the bold king of birds, fierce and expert in pursuing his prey.

Boys who are bound out, crowded out, kicked out, usually "turn out,"

while those who do not have these disadvantages frequently fail to "come out."

"It was not the victories but the defeats of my life which have strengthened me," said the aged Sidenham Poyntz.

Almost from the dawn of history, oppression has been the lot of the Hebrews, yet they have given the world its n.o.blest songs, its wisest proverbs, its sweetest music. With them persecution seems to bring prosperity. They thrive where others would starve. They hold the purse-strings of many nations. To them hards.h.i.+p has been "like spring mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin, but will let the plant live."

In one of the battles of the Crimea a cannon-ball struck inside the fort, cras.h.i.+ng through a beautiful garden. But from the ugly chasm there burst forth a spring of water which ever afterward flowed a living fountain. From the ugly gashes which misfortunes and sorrows make in our hearts, perennial fountains of rich experience and new joys often spring.

Don't lament and grieve over lost wealth. The Creator may see something grand and mighty which even He can not bring out as long as your wealth stands in the way. You must throw away the crutches of riches and stand upon your own feet, and develop the long unused muscles of manhood. G.o.d may see a rough diamond in you which only the hard hits of poverty can polish.

G.o.d knows where the richest melodies of our lives are, and what drill and what discipline are necessary to bring them out. The frost, the snows, the tempests, the lightnings are the rough teachers that bring the tiny acorn to the st.u.r.dy oak. Fierce winters are as necessary to it as long summers. It is its half-century's struggle with the elements for existence, wrestling with the storm, fighting for its life from the moment that it leaves the acorn until it goes into the s.h.i.+p, that gives it value. Without this struggle it would have been characterless, staminaless, nerveless, and its grain would have never been susceptible of high polish. The most beautiful as well as the strongest woods are found not in tropical climates, but in severe climates, where they have to fight the frosts and the winter's cold.

Many a man has never found himself until he has lost his all.

Adversity stripped him only to discover him. Obstacles, hards.h.i.+ps, are the chisel and mallet which shape the strong life into beauty. The rough ledge on the hillside complains of the drill, of the blasting which disturbs its peace of centuries: it is not pleasant to be rent with powder, to be hammered and squared by the quarryman. But look again: behold the magnificent statue, the monument, chiseled into grace and beauty, telling its grand story of valor in the public square for centuries.

The statue would have slept in the marble forever but for the blasting, the chiseling, and the polis.h.i.+ng. The angel of our higher and n.o.bler selves would remain forever unknown in the rough quarries of our lives but for the blastings of affliction, the chiseling of obstacles, and the sand-papering of a thousand annoyances.

Who has not observed the patience, the calm endurance, the sweet loveliness chiseled out of some rough life by the reversal of fortune or by some terrible affliction?

How many business men have made their greatest strides toward manhood, and developed their greatest virtues when reverses of fortune have swept away everything they had in the world; when disease had robbed them of all they held dear in life! Often we can not see the angel in the quarry of our lives, the statue of manhood, until the blasts of misfortune have rent the ledge, and difficulties and obstacles have squared and chiseled the granite blocks into grace and beauty.

Many a man has been ruined into salvation. The lightning which smote his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen. The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered in his nature possibilities of patience, endurance, and hope which he never before dreamed he possessed.

"Adversity is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial."

Men who have the right kind of material in them will a.s.sert their personality and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circ.u.mstances. You can not keep them down. Every obstacle seems only to add to their ability to get on.

The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks. It is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.

Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, but draws out the faculties of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fort.i.tude of the voyager. A man upon whom continuous suns.h.i.+ne falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry and hard and close-grained.

Men have drawn from adversity the elements of greatness.

Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he produced his greatest works. Schiller wrote his best books in great bodily suffering. He was not free from pain for fifteen years. Milton wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick. "Who best can suffer," said he, "best can do." Bunyan said that, if it were lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort's sake.

Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London, did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and mighty city.

True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.

Many of our best poets

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong, And learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was but nineteen years of age. Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott, Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to genius. Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"

as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and abuse.

This is the crutch age. "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.

We have inst.i.tutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries, newspapers, magazines. Our thinking is done for us. Our problems are all worked out in "explanations" and "keys." Our boys are too often tutored through college with very little study. "Short roads" and "abridged methods" are characteristic of the century. Ingenious methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college course. Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.

Self-help and self-reliance are getting old-fas.h.i.+oned. Nature, as if conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and emanc.i.p.ate him from Eden's curse.

But do not misinterpret her edict. She emanc.i.p.ates from the lower only to call to the higher. She does not bid the world go and play while she does the work. She emanc.i.p.ates the muscles only to employ the brain and heart.

The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying climate and on a stubborn soil. It is not chance that returns to the Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England with its granite and ice rich. It is rugged necessity, it is the struggle to obtain; it is poverty, the priceless spur, that develops the stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism.

Intelligent labor found the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.

As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human being. The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay. The sculptor will chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways, if she can develop a little character. Everything must give way to that.

"The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails."

Then welcome each rebuff, That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand but go.

BROWNING.

CHAPTER XXVIII

DECISION

Resolve, and thou art free.--LONGFELLOW.

The heaviest charged words in our language are those briefest ones, "yes" and "no." One stands for the surrender of the will, the other for denial; one stands for gratification, the other for character. A stout "no" means a stout character, the ready "yes" a weak one, gild it as we may.--T. T. MUNGER.

The world is a market where everything is marked at a set price, and whatever we buy with our time, labor, or ingenuity, whether riches, ease, fame, integrity, or knowledge, we must stand by our decision, and not like children, when we have purchased one thing, repine that we do not possess another we did not buy.--MATHEWS.

A man must master his undertaking and not let it master him. He must have the power to decide instantly on which side he is going to make his mistakes.--P. D. ARMOUR.