Chapter 15
On Thursday I started. The nearer I got to England, the cheaper goods were. As soon as I got to Manchester, I laid out all my money, things were so cheap, and I made a good profit."
"I hope," said a listener, "that your children are not too fond of money and business to the exclusion of more important things. I am sure you would not wish that."
"I am sure I would wish that," said Rothschild; "I wish them to give mind, and soul, and heart, and body, and everything to business; that is the way to be happy." "Stick to one business, young man," he added, addressing a young brewer; "stick to your brewery, and you may be the great brewer of London. But be a brewer, and a banker, and a merchant, and a manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette."
Not many things indifferently, but one thing supremely, is the demand of the hour. He who scatters his efforts in this intense, concentrated age, cannot hope to succeed.
"Goods removed, messages taken, carpets beaten, and poetry composed on any subject," was the sign of a man in London who was not very successful at any of these lines of work, and reminds one of Monsieur Kenard, of Paris, "a public scribe, who digests accounts, explains the language of flowers, and sells fried potatoes."
The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each, but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success; but they labor at haphazard, building up with one hand only to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circ.u.mstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty of turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough, and time in abundance,--the warp and woof of success,--they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle, and the real web of life is never woven.
If you ask one of them to state his aim and purpose in life, he will say: "I hardly know yet for what I am best adapted, but I am a thorough believer in genuine hard work, and I am determined to dig early and late all my life, and I know I shall come across something--either gold, silver, or at least iron." I say most emphatically, no. Would an intelligent man dig up a whole continent to find its veins of silver and gold? The man who is forever looking about to see what he can find never finds anything. If we look for nothing in particular, we find just that and no more. We find what we seek with all our heart. The bee is not the only insect that visits the flower, but it is the only one that carries honey away. It matters not how rich the materials we have gleaned from the years of our study and toil in youth, if we go out into life with no well-defined idea of our future work, there is no happy conjunction of circ.u.mstances that will arrange them into an imposing structure, and give it magnificent proportions.
"What a immense power over the life," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, "is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motions of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason. I fancy that I can select, in a crowded street, the busy, blessed women who support themselves. They carry themselves with an air of conscious self-respect and self-content, which a shabby alpaca cannot hide, nor a bonnet of silk enhance, nor even sickness nor exhaustion quite drag out."
It is said that the wind never blows fair for that sailor who knows not to what port he is bound.
"The weakest living creature," says Carlyle, "by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something; whereas the strongest, by dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its pa.s.sage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar and leaves no trace behind."
"When I was young I used to think it was thunder that killed men," said a shrewd preacher; "but as I grew older, I found it was lightning. So I resolved to thunder less, and lighten more."
The man who knows one thing, and can do it better than anybody else, even if it only be the art of raising turnips, receives the crown he merits. If he raises the best turnips by reason of concentrating all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor to the race, and is recognized as such.
If a salamander be cut in two, the front part will run forward and the other backward. Such is the progress of him who divides his purpose.
Success is jealous of scattered energies.
No one can pursue a worthy object steadily and persistently with all the powers of his mind, and yet make his life a failure. You can't throw a tallow candle through the side of a tent, but you can shoot it through an oak board. Melt a charge of shot into a bullet, and it can be fired through the bodies of four men. Focus the rays of the sun in winter, and you can kindle a fire with ease.
The giants of the race have been men of concentration, who have struck sledgehammer blows in one place until they have accomplished their purpose. The successful men of to-day are men of one overmastering idea, one unwavering aim, men of single and intense purpose.
"Scatteration" is the curse of American business life. Too many are like Douglas Jerrold's friend, who could converse in twenty-four languages, but had no ideas to express in any one of them.
"The only valuable kind of study," said Sydney Smith, "is to read so heartily that dinner-time comes two hours before you expected it; to sit with your Livy before you and hear the geese cackling that saved the Capitol, and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannae, and heaping them into bushels, and to be so
"The one serviceable, safe, certain, remunerative, attainable quality in every study and pursuit is the quality of attention," said Charles d.i.c.kens. "My own invention, or imagination, such as it is, I can most truthfully a.s.sure you, would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention." When asked on another occasion the secret of his success, he said: "I never put one hand to anything on which I could throw my whole self." "Be a whole man at everything," wrote Joseph Gurney to his son, "a whole man at study, in work, and in play."
_Don't dally with your purpose_.
"I go at what I am about," said Charles Kingsley, "as if there was nothing else in the world for the time being. That's the secret of all hard-working men; but most of them can't carry it into their amus.e.m.e.nts."
Many a man fails to become a great man by splitting into several small ones, choosing to be a tolerable Jack-of-all-trades rather than to be an unrivaled specialist.
"Many persons seeing me so much engaged in active life," said Edward Bulwer Lytton, "and as much about the world as if I had never been a student, have said to me, 'When do you get time to write all your books? How on earth do you contrive to do so much work?' I shall surprise you by the answer I made. The answer is this--'I contrive to do so much by never doing too much at a time. A man to get through work well must not overwork himself; or, if he do too much to-day, the reaction of fatigue will come, and he will be obliged to do too little to-morrow. Now, since I began really and earnestly to study, which was not till I had left college and was actually in the world, I may perhaps say that I have gone through as large a course of general reading as most men of my time. I have traveled much and I have seen much; I have mixed much in politics, and in the various business of life; and in addition to all this, I have published somewhere about sixty volumes, some upon subjects requiring much special research. And what time do you think, as a general rule, I have devoted to study, to reading and writing? Not more than three hours a day; and, when Parliament is sitting, not always that. But then, during these three hours, I have given my whole attention to what I was about.'"
S. T. Coleridge possessed marvelous powers of mind, but he had no definite purpose; he lived in an atmosphere of mental dissipation which consumed his energy, exhausted his stamina, and his life was in many respects a miserable failure. He lived in dreams and died in reverie.
He was continually forming plans and resolutions, but to the day of his death they remained simply resolutions and plans.
He was always just going to do something, but never did it. "Coleridge is dead," wrote Charles Lamb to a friend, "and is said to have left behind him above forty thousand treatises on metaphysics and divinity--not one of them complete!"
Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded, in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.
Hogarth would rivet his attention upon a face and study it until it was photographed upon his memory, when he could reproduce it at will. He studied and examined each object as eagerly as though he would never have a chance to see it again, and this habit of close observation enabled him to develop his work with marvelous detail. The very modes of thought of the time in which he lived were reflected from his works.
He was not a man of great education or culture, except in his power of observation.
With an immense procession pa.s.sing up Broadway, the streets lined with people, and bands playing l.u.s.tily, Horace Greeley would sit upon the steps of the Astor House, use the top of his hat for a desk, and write an editorial for the "New York Tribune" which would be quoted far and wide.
Offended by a pungent article, a gentleman called at the "Tribune"
office and inquired for the editor. He was shown into a little seven-by-nine sanctum, where Greeley, with his head close down to his paper, sat scribbling away at a two-forty rate. The angry man began by asking if this was Mr. Greeley. "Yes, sir; what do you want?" said the editor quickly, without once looking up from his paper. The irate visitor then began using his tongue, with no regard for the rules of propriety, good breeding, or reason. Meantime Mr. Greeley continued to write. Page after page was dashed off in the most impetuous style, with no change of features and without his paying the slightest attention to the visitor. Finally, after about twenty minutes of the most impa.s.sioned abuse ever poured out in an editor's office, the angry man became disgusted, and abruptly turned to walk out of the room.
Then, for the first time, Mr. Greeley quickly looked up, rose from his chair, and slapping the gentleman familiarly on his shoulder, in a pleasant tone of voice said: "Don't go, friend; sit down, sit down, and free your mind; it will do you good,--you will feel better for it.
Besides, it helps me to think what I am to write about. Don't go."
One unwavering aim has ever characterized successful men.
"Daniel Webster," said Sydney Smith, "struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers."
As Adams suggests, Lord Brougham, like Canning, had too many talents; and, though as a lawyer he gained the most splendid prize of his profession, the Lord Chancellors.h.i.+p of England, and merited the applause of scientific men for his investigations in science, yet his life on the whole was a failure. He was "everything by turns and nothing long." With all his magnificent abilities he left no permanent mark on history or literature, and actually outlived his own fame.
Miss Martineau says, "Lord Brougham was at his chateau at Cannes when the daguerreotype process first came into vogue. An artist undertook to take a view of the chateau with a group of guests on the balcony.
His Lords.h.i.+p was, asked to keep perfectly still for five seconds, and he promised that he would not stir, but alas,--he moved. The consequence was that there was a blur where Lord Brougham should have been.
"There is something," continued Miss Martineau, "very typical in this.
In the picture of our century, as taken from the life by history, this very man should have been the central figure. But, owing to his want of steadfastness, there will be forever a blur where Lord Brougham should have been. How many lives are blurs for want of concentration and steadfastness of purpose!"
Fowell Buxton attributed his success to ordinary means and extraordinary application, and being a whole man to one thing at a time. It is ever the unwavering pursuit of a single aim that wins.
"_Non multa, sed multum_"--not many things, but much, was c.o.ke's motto.
It is the almost invisible point of a needle, the keen, slender edge of a razor or an ax, that opens the way for the bulk that follows.
Without point or edge the bulk would be useless. It is the man of one line of work, the sharp-edged man, who cuts his way through obstacles and achieves brilliant success. While we should shun that narrow devotion to one idea which prevents the harmonious development of our powers, we should avoid on the other hand the extreme versatility of one of whom W. M. Praed says:--
His talk is like a stream which runs With rapid change from rocks to roses, It slips from politics to puns, It glides from Mahomet to Moses: Beginning with the laws that keep The planets in their radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep For skinning eels or shoeing horses.
If you can get a child learning to walk to fix his eyes on any object, he will generally navigate to that point without capsizing, but distract his attention and down he goes.
The young man seeking a position to-day is not asked what college he came from or who his ancestors were. "_What can you do?_" is the great question. It is special training that is wanted. Most of the men at the head of great firms and great enterprises have been promoted step by step from the bottom.
"I know that he can toil terribly," said Cecil of Walter Raleigh, in explanation of the latter's success.
As a rule, what the heart longs for the head and the hands may attain.
The currents of knowledge, of wealth, of success, are as certain and fixed as the tides of the sea. In all great successes we can trace the power of concentration, riveting every faculty upon one unwavering aim; perseverance in the pursuit of an undertaking in spite of every difficulty; and courage which enables one to bear up under all trials, disappointments, and temptations.
Chemists tell us that there is power enough in a single acre of gra.s.s to drive all the mills and steam-cars in the world, could we but concentrate it upon the piston-rod of a steam-engine. But it is at rest, and so, in the light of science, it is comparatively valueless.
Dr. Mathews says that the man who scatters himself upon many objects soon loses his energy, and with his energy his enthusiasm.
"Never study on speculation," says Waters; "all such study is vain.
Form a plan; have an object; then work for it, learn all you can about it, and you will be sure to succeed. What I mean by studying on speculation is that aimless learning of things because they may be useful some day; which is like the conduct of the woman who bought at auction a bra.s.s door-plate with the name of Thompson on it, thinking it might be useful some day!"
Definiteness of aim is characteristic of all true art. He is not the greatest painter who crowds the greatest number of ideas upon a single canvas, giving all the figures equal prominence. He is the genuine artist who makes the greatest variety express the greatest unity, who develops the leading idea in the central figure, and makes all the subordinate figures, lights, and shades point to that center and find expression there. So in every well-balanced life, no matter how versatile in endowments or how broad in culture, there is one grand central purpose, in which all the subordinate powers of the soul are brought to a focus, and where they will find fit expression. In nature we see no waste of energy, nothing left to chance. Since the shuttle of creation shot for the first time through chaos, design has marked the course of every golden thread. Every leaf, every flower, every crystal, every atom even, has a purpose stamped upon it which unmistakably points to the crowning summit of all creation--man.