For shame! dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? Three treasures, love, and light,
And calm thoughts regular as infants' breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death?
But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to Fortune,
distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from
that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according
to my favorite proverb, "extremes meet") the fool not seldom obtains
in as great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by the highest
energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real existence in
human affairs, from the infinite number of powers that are in action
at the same time, and from the coexistence of things contingent and
accidental (such as to us at least are accidental) with the regular
appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make
these words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a
necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the manifold appearances
connected with them, are governed by certain laws no less than the
phases of the moon. But the laws which determine the latter are known
and calculable, while those of the former are hidden from us.
At all events, the number and variety of their effects baffle our
powers of calculation; and that the sky is clear or obscured at any
particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of
accident. Well! at the time of the full moon, but when the sky is
completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark,
aware of no particular danger; a sudden gust of wind rends the clouds
for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or
precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is
what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood
or habit of our mind, we exclaim, how lucky, or how providential! The
copresence of numberless phenomena, which from the complexity or
subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the
coexistence of these with any regular or necessary phenomenon (as the
clouds with the moon, for instance) occasion coincidences, which, when
they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time
incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good
or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and
spoiled the farmer's hay; and this is called ill luck. We will suppose
the same event to take place when meteorology shall have been
perfected into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but
which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck,
but imprudence.
Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have
greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what possibly
from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good
luck will excite less attention and the instances be less remembered.
That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we
neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of
themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we
dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when the same
happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, tho the latter should fail
in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the
wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been
expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our
attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in
which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us and is forgotten. Had
it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing
discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of
chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive
law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy;
if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were,
preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had
occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and
founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir
Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a
particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was
concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact
it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the
testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down
material nature under the inquisition of reason, and forced from her
as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived
questions--yet still they would not have been talked of or described
as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted
genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar
discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man
should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his
neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man
below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh what a
lucky fellow! Well, Fortune does favor fools--that's certain! It is
always so!"--and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar
instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never
collecting the other, we do, as poets in their diction and quacks of
all denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and
at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvelous, by the
sweeping proverb, "Fortune favors fools."