Architects of Fate Part 7

Were I called upon to express in a word the secret of so many failures among those who started out in life with high hopes, I should say unhesitatingly, they lacked will-power. They could not half will.

What is a man without a will? He is like an engine without steam, a mere sport of chance, to be tossed about hither and thither, always at the mercy of those who have wills. I should call the strength of will the test of a young man's possibilities. Can he will strong enough, and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip? It is the iron grip that takes the strong hold on life. What chance is there in this crowding, pus.h.i.+ng, selfish, greedy world, where everything is pusher or pushed, for a young man with no will, no grip on life? "The truest wisdom," said Napoleon, "is a resolute determination." An iron will without principle might produce a Napoleon; but with character it would make a Wellington or a Grant, untarnished by ambition or avarice.

"The undivided will 'T is that compels the elements and wrings A human music from the indifferent air."

CHAPTER IV.

SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

Victories that are easy are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.--BEECHER.

Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will, that encounter with difficulty, which we call effort; and it is astonis.h.i.+ng to find how often results that seemed impracticable are thus made possible.--EPES SARGENT.

I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that tenacity of purpose which, through all change of companions, or parties, or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.--EMERSON.

Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom stamps it true; He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew.

GOETHE.

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.--WAs.h.i.+NGTON IRVING.

"I have here three teams that I want to get over to Staten Island,"

said a boy of twelve one day in 1806 to the innkeeper at South Amboy, N. J. "If you will put us across, I'll leave with you one of my horses in p.a.w.n, and if I don't send you back six dollars within forty-eight hours you may keep the horse."

The innkeeper asked the reason for this novel proposition, and learned that the lad's father had contracted to get the cargo of a vessel stranded near Sandy Hook, and take it to New York in lighters. The boy had been sent with three wagons, six horses, and three men, to carry the cargo across a sand-spit to the lighters. The work accomplished, he had started with only six dollars to travel a long distance home over the Jersey sands, and reached South Amboy penniless. "I'll do it," said the innkeeper, as he looked into the bright honest eyes of the boy. The horse was soon redeemed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT]

How can you keep a determined man from success: Place stumbling-blocks in his way, and he uses them for stepping-stones. Imprison him, and he produces the "Pilgrim's Progress." Deprive him of eyesight, and he writes the "Conquest of Mexico."

"My son," said this same boy's mother, on the first of May, 1810, when he asked her to lend him one hundred dollars to buy a boat, having imbibed a strong liking for the sea; "on the twenty-seventh of this month you will be sixteen years old. If, by that time, you will plow, harrow, and plant with corn the eight-acre lot, I will advance you the money." The field was rough and stony, but the work was done in time, and well done. From this small beginning Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the foundation of a colossal fortune. He would often work all night; and, as he was never absent from his post by day, he soon had the best business in New York harbor.

In 1813, when it was expected that New York would be attacked by British s.h.i.+ps, all the boatmen except Cornelius put in bids to convey provisions to the military posts around New York, naming extremely low rates, as the contractor would be exempted from military duty. "Why don't you send in a bid?" asked his father. "Of what use?" replied young Vanderbilt; "they are offering to do the work at half price. It can't be done at such rates." "Well," said his father, "it can do no harm to try for it." So, to please his father, but with no hope of success, Cornelius made an offer fair to both sides, but did not go to hear the award. When his companions had all returned with long faces, he went to the commissary's office and asked if the contract had been given. "Oh, yes," was the reply; "that business is settled. Cornelius Vanderbilt is the man. What?" he asked, seeing that the youth was apparently thunderstruck, "is it you?" "My name is Cornelius Vanderbilt," said the boatman. "Well," said the commissary, "don't you know why we have given the contract to you?" "No." "Why, it is because we want this business _done_, and we know you'll do it."

Character gives confidence.

In 1818 he owned two or three of the finest coasting schooners in New York harbor, and had a capital of nine thousand dollars. Seeing that steam-vessels would soon win supremacy over those carrying sails only, he gave up his fine business to become the captain of a steamboat at one thousand dollars a year. For twelve years he ran between New York city and New Brunswick, N. J. In 1829 he began business as a steamboat owner, in the face of opposition so bitter that he lost his last dollar. But the tide turned, and he prospered so rapidly that he at length owned over one hundred steamboats. He early identified himself with the growing railroad interests of the country, and became the richest man of his day in America.

Barnum began the race of business life barefoot, for at the age of fifteen he was obliged to buy on credit the shoes he wore at his father's funeral. He was a remarkable example of success under difficulties. There was no keeping him down; no opposition daunted him, no obstacles were too great for him to overcome. Think of a man being ruined at fifty years of age; yes, worse than ruined, for he was heavily in debt besides. Yet on the very day of his downfall he begins to rise again, wringing victory from defeat by his indomitable persistence.

"Eloquence must have been born with you," said a friend to J. P.

Curran. "Indeed, my dear sir, it was not," replied the orator, "it was born some three and twenty years and some months after me." Speaking of his first attempt at a debating club, he said: "I stood up, trembling through every fibre, but remembering that in this I was but imitating Tully, I took courage and had actually proceeded almost as far as 'Mr. Chairman,' when, to my astonishment and terror, I perceived that every eye was turned on me. There were only six or seven present, and the room could not have contained as many more; yet was it, to my panic-stricken imagination, as if I were the central object in nature, and a.s.sembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation.

I became dismayed and dumb. My friends cried, 'Hear him!' but there was nothing to hear." He was nicknamed "Orator Mum," and well did he deserve the t.i.tle until he ventured to stare in astonishment at a speaker who was "culminating chronology by the most preposterous anachronisms." "I doubt not," said the annoyed speaker, "that 'Orator Mum' possesses wonderful talents for eloquence, but I would recommend him to show it in future by some more popular method than his silence."

Stung by the taunt, Curran rose and gave the man a "piece of his mind,"

speaking quite fluently in his anger. Encouraged by this success, he took great pains to become a good speaker. He corrected his habit of stuttering by reading favorite pa.s.sages aloud every day slowly and distinctly, and spoke at every opportunity.

Bunyan wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress" on the untwisted papers used to cork the bottles of milk brought for his meals. Gifford wrote his first copy of a mathematical work, when a cobbler's apprentice, on small sc.r.a.ps of leather; and Rittenhouse, the astronomer, first calculated eclipses on his plow handle.

A poor Irish lad, so pitted by smallpox that boys made sport of him, earned his living by writing little ballads for street musicians.

Eight cents a day was often all he could earn. He traveled through France and Italy, begging his way by singing and playing the flute at the cottages of the peasantry. At twenty-eight he was penniless in London, and lived in the beggars' quarters in Axe Lane. In his poverty, he set up as a doctor in the suburbs of London. He wore a second-hand coat of rusty velvet, with a patch on the left breast which he adroitly covered with his three-cornered hat during his visits; and we have an amusing anecdote of his contest of courtesy with a patient who persisted in endeavoring to relieve him of his hat, which only made him press it more devoutly to his heart. He often had to p.a.w.n his clothes to keep from starving. He sold his "Life of Voltaire" for twenty dollars. After great hards.h.i.+p he managed to publish his "Polite Learning in Europe," and this brought him to public notice. Next came "The Traveller," and the wretched man in a Fleet Street garret found himself famous. His landlady once arrested him for rent, but Dr.

Johnson came to his relief, took from his desk the ma.n.u.script of the "Vicar of Wakefield," and sold it for three hundred dollars. He spent two years revising "The Deserted Village" after it was first written.

Generous to a fault, vain and improvident, imposed on by others, he was continually in debt; although for his "History of the Earth and Animated Nature" he received four thousand dollars, and some of his works, as, for instance, "She Stoops to Conquer," had a large sale.

But in spite of fortune's frown and his own weakness, he won success and fame. The world, which so often comes too late with its a.s.sistance and laurels, gave to the weak, gentle, loving author of "The Vicar of Wakefield" a monument in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

The poor, scrofulous, and almost blind boy, Samuel Johnson, was taken by his mother to receive the touch of Queen Anne, which was supposed to heal the "King's Evil." He entered Oxford as a servant, copying lectures from a student's notebooks, while the boys made sport of the bare feet showing through great holes in his shoes. Some one left a pair of new shoes at his door, but he was too proud to be helped, and threw them out of the window. He was so poor that he was obliged to leave college, and at twenty-six married a widow of forty-eight. He started a private school with his wife's money; but, getting only three pupils, was obliged to close it. He went to London, where he lived on nine cents a day. In his distress he wrote a poem in which appeared in capital letters the line, "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed,"

which attracted wide attention. He suffered greatly in London for thirteen years, being arrested once for a debt of thirteen dollars. At forty he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," in which were these lines:--

"Then mark what ills the scholar's life a.s.sail; Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail."

When asked how he felt about his failures, he replied:

"Like a monument,"--that is, steadfast, immovable. He was an indefatigable worker. In the evenings of a single week he wrote "Ra.s.selas," a beautiful little story of the search for happiness, to get money to pay the funeral expenses of his mother. With six a.s.sistants he worked seven years on his Dictionary, which made his fortune. His name was then in everybody's mouth, and when he no longer needed help, a.s.sistance, as usual, came from every quarter. The great universities hastened to bestow their degrees, and King George invited him to the palace.

Lord Mansfield raised himself by indefatigable industry from oatmeal porridge and poverty to affluence and the Lord Chief Justice's Bench.

Of five thousand articles sent every year to "Lippincott's Magazine,"

only two hundred were accepted. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? Only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science, the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon: the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died from starvation, driven from his home. It is very clear indeed that G.o.d means all good work and talk to be done for nothing. Shakespeare's "Hamlet" was sold for about twenty-five dollars; but his autograph has sold for five thousand dollars.

During the ten years in which he made his greatest discoveries, Isaac Newton could hardly pay two s.h.i.+llings a week to the Royal Society of which he was a member. Some of his friends wanted to get him excused from this payment, but he would not allow them to act.

There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount (five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.

Linnaeus was so poor when getting his education, that he had to mend his shoes with folded paper, and often had to beg his meals of his friends.

Who in the days of the First Empire cared to recall the fact that Napoleon, Emperor and King, was once forced to borrow a louis from Talma, when he lived in a garret on the Quai Conti?

David Livingstone at ten years of age was put into a cotton factory near Glasgow. Out of his first week's wages he bought a Latin Grammar, and studied in the night schools for years. He would sit up and study till midnight unless his mother drove him to bed, notwithstanding he had to be at the factory at six in the morning. He mastered Virgil and Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany. So eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of machinery would pore over its pages.

George Eliot said of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman." One of Emerson's biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising, correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left. It did not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make clear the possibilities of the orchard, they were unmercifully cast aside." Carlyle's books were literally wrung out of him. The pains he took to satisfy himself of a relatively insignificant fact were incredible. Before writing his essay on Diderot, he read twenty-five volumes at the rate of one per day. He tells Edward Fitzgerald that for the twentieth time he is going over the confused records of the battle of Naseby, that he may be quite sure of the topography.

"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and wonder," says Johnson, "are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with ca.n.a.ls. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings."

The Rev. Eliphalet Nott, a pulpit orator, was especially noted for a sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton, the great statesman, who was shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. Although Nott had managed in some way to get his degree at Brown University, he was at one time so poor after he entered the ministry that he could not buy an overcoat. His wife sheared their only cosset sheep in January, wrapped it in burlap blankets to keep it from freezing, carded and spun and wove the wool, and made it into an overcoat for him.

Great men never wait for opportunities; they make them. Nor do they wait for facilities or favoring circ.u.mstances; they seize upon whatever is at hand, work out their problem, and master the situation. A young man determined and willing will find a way or make one. A Franklin does not require elaborate apparatus; he can bring electricity from the clouds with a common kite. A Watt can make a model of the condensing steam-engine out of an old syringe used to inject the arteries of dead bodies previous to dissection. A Dr. Black can discover latent heat with a pan of water and two thermometers. A Newton can unfold the composition of light and the origin of colors with a prism, a lens, and a piece of pasteboard. A Humphry Davy can experiment with kitchen pots and pans, and a Faraday can experiment on electricity by means of old bottles, in his spare minutes while a book-binder. When science was in its cradle the Marquis of Worcester, an English n.o.bleman, imprisoned in the Tower of London, was certainly not in a very good position to do anything for the world, but would not waste his time. The cover of a vessel of hot water blown on before his eyes led to a series of observations, which he published later in a book called "Century of Inventions." These observations were a sort of text-book on the power of steam, which resulted in Newcomen's steam-engine, which Watt afterward perfected. A Ferguson maps out the heavenly bodies, lying on his back, by means of threads with beads stretched between himself and the stars.

Not in his day of bodily strength and political power, but blind, decrepit, and defeated with his party, Milton composed "Paradise Lost."

Great men have found no royal road to their triumph. It is always the old route, by way of industry and perseverance.

The farmer boy, Elihu B. Washburn, taught school at ten dollars per month, and early learned the lesson that it takes one hundred cents to make a dollar. In after years he fought "steals" in Congress, until he was called the "Watchdog of the Treasury." From his long members.h.i.+p he became known as the "Father of the House." He administered the oath to Schuyler Colfax as Speaker three times. He recommended Grant as colonel of a regiment of volunteers. The latter, when President, appointed him Secretary of State, and, later, Minister to France.

During the reign of the Commune, the representatives of nearly all other foreign nations fled in dismay, but Washburn remained at his post. Sh.e.l.ls exploded close to his office, and fell all around it, but he did not leave even when Paris was in flames. For a time he was really the minister of all foreign countries, in Paris; and represented Prussia for almost a year. The Emperor William conferred upon him the Order of the Red Eagle, and gave him a jeweled star of great value.

How could the poor boy, Elihu Burritt, working nearly all the daylight in a blacksmith's shop, get an education? He had but one book in his library, and carried that in his hat. But this boy with no chance became one of America's wonders.