THE REWARD OF PERSISTENCE
Every noble work is at first impossible.--CARLYLE.
Victory belongs to the most persevering.--NAPOLEON.
Success in most things depends on knowing how long it takes to
succeed.--MONTESQUIEU.
Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance,
and make a seeming impossibility give way.--JEREMY COLLIER.
"Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."
The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought
that never wanders,--these are the masters of victory.--BURKE.
"The pit rose at me!" exclaimed Edmund Kean in a wild tumult of
emotion, as he rushed home to his trembling wife. "Mary, you shall
ride in your carriage yet, and Charles shall go to Eton!" He had been
so terribly in earnest with the study of his profession that he had at
length made a mark on his generation. He was a little dark man with a
voice naturally harsh, but he determined, when young, to play the
character of Sir Giles Overreach, in Massinger's drama, as no other man
had ever played it. By a persistency that nothing seemed able to
daunt, he so trained himself to play the character that his success,
when it did come, was overwhelming, and all London was at his feet.
"I am sorry to say that I don't think this is in your line," said
Woodfall the reporter, after Sheridan had made his first speech in
Parliament. "You would better have stuck to your former pursuits."
With head on his hand Sheridan mused for a time, then looked up and
said, "It is in me, and it shall come out of me." From the same man
came that harangue against Warren Hastings which the orator Fox called
the best speech ever made in the House of Commons.
"I had no other books than heaven and earth, which are open to all,"
said Bernard Palissy, who left his home in the south of France in 1828,
at the age of eighteen. Though only a glass-painter, he had the soul
of an artist. The sight of an elegant Italian cup disturbed his whole
existence and from that moment the determination to discover the enamel
with which it was glazed possessed him like a passion. For months and
years he tried all kinds of experiments to learn the materials of which
the enamel was compounded. He built a furnace, which was a failure,
and then a second, burning so much wood, spoiling so many drugs and
pots of common earthenware, and losing so much time, that poverty
stared him in the face, and he was forced, from lack of ability to buy
fuel, to try his experiments in a common furnace. Flat failure was the
result, but he decided on the spot to begin all over again, and soon
had three hundred pieces baking, one of which came out covered with
beautiful enamel.
To perfect his invention he next built a glass-furnace, carrying the
bricks on his back. At length the time came for a trial; but, though
he kept the heat up six days, his enamel would not melt. His money was
all gone, but he borrowed some, and bought more pots and wood, and
tried to get a better flux. When next he lighted his fire, he attained
no result until his fuel was gone. Tearing off the palings of his
garden fence, he fed them to the flames, but in vain. His furniture
followed to no purpose. The shelves of his pantry were then broken up
and thrown into the furnace; and the great burst of heat melted the
enamel. The grand secret was learned. Persistence had triumphed again.
"If you work hard two weeks without selling a book," wrote a publisher
to an agent, "you will make a success of it."
"Know thy work and do it," said Carlyle; "and work at it like a
Hercules."
"Whoever is resolved to excel in painting, or, indeed, in any other
art," said Reynolds, "must bring all his mind to bear upon that one
object from the moment that he rises till he goes to bed."
"I have no secret but hard work," said Turner, the painter.
"The man who is perpetually hesitating which of two things he will do
first," said William Wirt, "will do neither. The man who resolves, but
suffers his resolution to be changed by the first counter-suggestion of
a friend--who fluctuates from opinion to opinion, from plan to plan,
and veers like a weather-cock to every point of the compass, with every
breath of caprice that blows,--can never accomplish anything great or
useful. Instead of being progressive in anything, he will be at best
stationary, and, more probably, retrograde in all."
Perseverance built the pyramids on Egypt's plains, erected the gorgeous
temple at Jerusalem, inclosed in adamant the Chinese Empire, scaled the
stormy, cloud-capped Alps, opened a highway through the watery
wilderness of the Atlantic, leveled the forests of the new world, and
reared in its stead a community of states and nations. Perseverance
has wrought from the marble block the exquisite creations of genius,
painted on canvas the gorgeous mimicry of nature, and engraved on a
metallic surface the viewless substance of the shadow. Perseverance
has put in motion millions of spindles, winged as many flying shuttles,
harnessed thousands of iron steeds to as many freighted cars, and set
them flying from town to town and nation to nation, tunneled mountains
of granite, and annihilated space with the lightning's speed. It has
whitened the waters of the world with the sails of a hundred nations,
navigated every sea and explored every land. It has reduced nature in
her thousand forms to as many sciences, taught her laws, prophesied her
future movements, measured her untrodden spaces, counted her myriad
hosts of worlds, and computed their distances, dimensions, and
velocities.
The slow penny is surer than the quick dollar. The slow trotter will
out-travel the fleet racer. Genius darts, flutters, and tires; but
perseverance wears and wins. The all-day horse wins the race. The
afternoon-man wears off the laurels. The last blow drives home the
nail.
"Are your discoveries often brilliant intuitions?" asked a reporter of
Thomas A. Edison. "Do they come to you while you are lying awake
nights?"
"I never did anything worth doing by accident," was the reply, "nor did
any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the
phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth
getting I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes. I
have always kept strictly within the lines of commercially useful
inventions. I have never had any time to put on electrical wonders,
valuable simply as novelties to catch the popular fancy. _I like it_,"
continued the great inventor. "I don't know any other reason.
Anything I have begun is always on my mind, and I am not easy while
away from it until it is finished."
[Illustration: Thomas Alva Edison]
A man who thus gives himself wholly to his work is certain to
accomplish something; and if he have ability and common sense, his
success will be great.
How Bulwer wrestled with the fates to change his apparent destiny! His
first novel was a failure; his early poems were failures; and his
youthful speeches provoked the ridicule of his opponents. But he
fought his way to eminence through ridicule and defeat.
Gibbon worked twenty years on his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire." Noah Webster spent thirty-six years on his dictionary. What
a sublime patience he showed in devoting a life to the collection and
definition of words! George Bancroft spent twenty-six years on his
"History of the United States." Newton rewrote his "Chronology of
Ancient Nations" fifteen times. Titian wrote to Charles V.: "I send
your majesty the Last Supper, after working on it almost daily for
seven years." He worked on his Pietro Martyn eight years. George
Stephenson was fifteen years perfecting his locomotive; Watt, twenty
years on his condensing engine. Harvey labored eight long years before
he published his discovery of the circulation of the blood. He was
then called a crack-brained impostor by his fellow physicians. Amid
abuse and ridicule he waited twenty-five years before his great
discovery was recognized by the profession.
Newton discovered the law of gravitation before he was twenty-one, but
one slight error in a measurement of the earth's circumference
interfered with a demonstration of the correctness of his theory.
Twenty years later he corrected the error, and showed that the planets
roll in their orbits as a result of the same law which brings an apple
to the ground.
Sothern, the great actor, said that the early part of his theatrical
career was spent in getting dismissed for incompetency.
"Never depend upon your genius," said John Ruskin, in the words of
Joshua Reynolds; "if you have talent, industry will improve it; if you
have none, industry will supply the deficiency."
Savages believe that when they conquer an enemy, his spirit enters into
them, and fights for them ever afterwards. So the spirit of our
conquests enters us, and helps us to win the next victory.
Blücher may have been routed at Ligny yesterday, but to-day you hear
the thunder of his guns at Waterloo hurling dismay and death among his
former conquerors.
Opposing circumstances create strength. Opposition gives us greater
power of resistance. To overcome one barrier gives us greater ability
to overcome the next.
In February, 1492, a poor gray-haired man, his head bowed with
discouragement almost to the back of his mule, rode slowly out through
the beautiful gateway of the Alhambra. From boyhood he had been
haunted with the idea that the earth is round. He believed that the
piece of carved wood picked up four hundred miles at sea and the bodies
of two men unlike any other human beings known, found on the shores of
Portugal, had drifted from unknown lands in the west. But his last
hope of obtaining aid for a voyage of discovery had failed. King John
of Portugal, while pretending to think of helping him, had sent out
secretly an expedition of his own.
He had begged bread, drawn maps and charts to keep from starving; he
had lost his wife; his friends had called him crazy, and forsaken him.
The council of wise men called by Ferdinand and Isabella ridiculed his
theory of reaching the east by sailing west.
"But the sun and moon are round," said Columbus, "why not the earth?"
"If the earth is a ball, what holds it up?" asked the wise men.
"What holds the sun and moon up?" inquired Columbus.
"But how can men walk with their heads hanging down, and their feet up,
like flies on a ceiling?" asked a learned doctor; "how can trees grow
with their roots in the air?"
"The water would run out of the ponds and we should fall off," said
another philosopher.
"This doctrine is contrary to the Bible, which says, 'The heavens are
stretched out like a tent:'--of course it is flat; it is rank heresy to
say it is round," said a priest.
Columbus left the Alhambra in despair, intending to offer his services
to Charles VII., but he heard a voice calling his name. An old friend
had told Isabella that it would add great renown to her reign at a
trifling expense if what the sailor believed should prove true. "It
shall be done," said Isabella, "I will pledge my jewels to raise the
money. Call him back."
Columbus turned and with him turned the world. Not a sailor would go
voluntarily; so the king and queen compelled them. Three days out, in
his vessels scarcely larger than fishing-schooners, the _Pinta_ floated
a signal of distress for a broken rudder. Terror seized the sailors,
but Columbus calmed their fears with pictures of gold and precious
stones from India. Two hundred miles west of the Canaries, the compass
ceased to point to the North Star. The sailors are ready to mutiny,
but he tells them the North Star is not exactly north. Twenty-three
hundred miles from home, though he tells them it is but seventeen
hundred, a bush with berries floats by, land birds fly near, and they
pick up a piece of wood curiously carved. On October 12, Columbus
raised the banner of Castile over the western world.
"How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement
appertaining to it," said Dickens. "I will only add to what I have
already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a
patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured."
Cyrus W. Field had retired from business with a large fortune when he
became possessed with the idea that by means of a cable laid upon the
bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, telegraphic communication could be
established between Europe and America. He plunged into the
undertaking with all the force of his being. The preliminary work
included the construction of a telegraph line one thousand miles long,
from New York to St. John's, Newfoundland. Through four hundred miles
of almost unbroken forest they had to build a road as well as a
telegraph line across Newfoundland. Another stretch of one hundred and
forty miles across the island of Cape Breton involved a great deal of
labor, as did the laying of a cable across the St. Lawrence.
By hard work he secured aid for his company from the British
government, but in Congress he encountered such bitter opposition from
a powerful lobby that his measure only had a majority of one in the
Senate. The cable was loaded upon the _Agamemnon_, the flag ship of
the British fleet at Sebastopol, and upon the _Niagara_, a magnificent
new frigate of the United States Navy; but, when five miles of cable
had been paid out, it caught in the machinery and parted. On the
second trial, when two hundred miles at sea, the electric current was
suddenly lost, and men paced the decks nervously and sadly, as if in
the presence of death. Just as Mr. Field was about to give the order
to cut the cable, the current returned as quickly and mysteriously as
it had disappeared. The following night, when the ship was moving but
four miles an hour and the cable running out at the rate of six miles,
the brakes were applied too suddenly just as the steamer gave a heavy
lurch, breaking the cable.
Field was not the man to give up. Seven hundred miles more of cable
were ordered, and a man of great skill was set to work to devise a
better machine for paying out the long line. American and British
inventors united in making a machine. At length in mid-ocean the two
halves of the cable were spliced and the steamers began to separate,
the one headed for Ireland, the other for Newfoundland, each running
out the precious thread, which, it was hoped, would bind two continents
together. Before the vessels were three miles apart, the cable parted.
Again it was spliced, but when the ships were eighty miles apart, the
current was lost. A third time the cable was spliced and about two
hundred miles paid out, when it parted some twenty feet from the
_Agamemnon_, and the vessels returned to the coast of Ireland.
Directors were disheartened, the public skeptical, capitalists were
shy, and but for the indomitable energy and persuasiveness of Mr.
Field, who worked day and night almost without food or sleep, the whole
project would have been abandoned. Finally a third attempt was made,
with such success that the whole cable was laid without a break, and
several messages were flashed through nearly seven hundred leagues of
ocean, when suddenly the current ceased.
Faith now seemed dead except in the breast of Cyrus W. Field, and one
or two friends, yet with such persistence did they work that they
persuaded men to furnish capital for yet another trial even against
what seemed their better judgment. A new and superior cable was loaded
upon the _Great Eastern_, which steamed slowly out to sea, paying out
as she advanced. Everything worked to a charm until within six hundred
miles of Newfoundland, when the cable snapped and sank. After several
attempts to raise it, the enterprise was abandoned for a year.
Not discouraged by all these difficulties, Mr. Field went to work with
a will, organized a new company, and made a new cable far superior to
anything before used, and on July 13, 1866, was begun the trial which
ended with the following message sent to New York:--
"HEART'S CONTENT, July 27.
"We arrived here at nine o'clock this morning. All well. Thank God!
the cable is laid and is in perfect working order.
"CYRUS W. FIELD."
The old cable was picked up, spliced, and continued to Newfoundland,
and the two are still working, with good prospects for usefulness for
many years.
In Revelation we read: "He that overcometh, I will give him to sit down
with me on my throne."
Successful men, it is said, owe more to their perseverance than to
their natural powers, their friends, or the favorable circumstances
around them. Genius will falter by the side of labor, great powers
will yield to great industry. Talent is desirable, but perseverance is
more so.
"How long did it take you to learn to play?" asked a young man of
Geradini. "Twelve hours a day for twenty years," replied the great
violinist. Lyman Beecher when asked how long it took him to write his
celebrated sermon on the "Government of God," replied, "About forty
years."
A Chinese student, discouraged by repeated failures, had thrown away
his book in despair, when he saw a poor woman rubbing an iron bar on a
stone to make a needle. This example of patience sent him back to his
studies with a new determination, and he became one of the three
greatest scholars of China.
Malibran said: "If I neglect my practice a day, I see the difference in
my execution; if for two days, my friends see it; and if for a week,
all the world knows my failure." Constant, persistent struggle she
found to be the price of her marvelous power.
When an East India boy is learning archery, he is compelled to practise
three months drawing the string to his ear before he is allowed to
touch an arrow.
Benjamin Franklin had this tenacity of purpose in a wonderful degree.
When he started in the printing business in Philadelphia, he carried
his material through the streets on a wheelbarrow. He hired one room
for his office, work-room, and sleeping-room. He found a formidable
rival in the city and invited him to his room. Pointing to a piece of
bread from which he had just eaten his dinner, he said: "Unless you can
live cheaper than I can you can not starve me out."
All are familiar with the misfortune of Carlyle while writing his
"History of the French Revolution." After the first volume was ready
for the press, he loaned the manuscript to a neighbor who left it lying
on the floor, and the servant girl took it to kindle the fire. It was
a bitter disappointment, but Carlyle was not the man to give up. After
many months of poring over hundreds of volumes of authorities and
scores of manuscripts, he reproduced that which had burned in a few
minutes.
Audubon, the naturalist, had spent two years with his gun and note-book
in the forests of America, making drawings of birds. He nailed them
all up securely in a box and went off on a vacation. When he returned
he opened the box only to find a nest of Norwegian rats in his
beautiful drawings. Every one was ruined. It was a terrible
disappointment, but Audubon took his gun and note-book and started for
the forest. He reproduced his drawings, and they were even better than
the first.
When Dickens was asked to read one of his selections in public he
replied that he had not time, for he was in the habit of reading the
same piece every day for six months before reading it in public. "My
own invention," he says, "such as it is, I assure you, would never have
served me as it has but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient,
toiling attention."
Addison amassed three volumes of manuscript before he began the
"Spectator."
Everyone admires a determined, persistent man. Marcus Morton ran
sixteen times for governor of Massachusetts. At last his opponents
voted for him from admiration of his pluck, and he was elected by a
majority of one! Such persistence always triumphs.
Webster declared that when a pupil at Phillips Exeter Academy he never
could declaim before the school. He said he committed piece after
piece and rehearsed them in his room, but when he heard his name called
in the academy and all eyes turned towards him the room became dark and
everything he ever knew fled from his brain; but he became the great
orator of America. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Demosthenes himself
surpassed his great reply to Hayne in the United States Senate.
Webster's tenacity was illustrated by a circumstance which occurred in
the academy. The principal punished him for shooting pigeons by
compelling him to commit one hundred lines of Vergil. He knew the
principal was to take a certain train that afternoon, so he went to his
room and learned seven hundred lines. He went to recite them to the
principal just before train time. After repeating the hundred lines he
continued until he had recited two hundred. The principal anxiously
looked at his watch and grew nervous, but Webster kept right on. The
principal finally stopped him and asked him how many more he had
learned. "About five hundred more," said Webster, continuing to recite.
"You can have the rest of the day for pigeon-shooting," said the
principal.
Great writers have ever been noted for their tenacity of purpose.
Their works have not been flung off from minds aglow with genius, but
have been elaborated and elaborated into grace and beauty, until every
trace of their efforts has been obliterated.
Bishop Butler worked twenty years incessantly on his "Analogy," and
even then was so dissatisfied that he wanted to burn it. Rousseau says
he obtained the ease and grace of his style only by ceaseless
inquietude, by endless blotches and erasures. Vergil worked eleven
years on the Aeneid. The note-books of great men like Hawthorne and
Emerson are tell-tales of the enormous drudgery, of the years put into
a book which may be read in an hour. Montesquieu was twenty-five years
writing his "Esprit des Lois," yet you can read it in sixty minutes.
Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival
playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three
lines, when he had written five hundred lines. "But your five hundred
lines in three days will be dead and forgotten, while my three lines
will live forever," he replied.
Ariosto wrote his "Description of a Tempest" in sixteen different ways.
He spent ten years on his "Orlando Furioso," and only sold one hundred
copies at fifteen pence each. The proof of Burke's "Letters to a Noble
Lord" (one of the sublimest things in all literature) went back to the
publisher so changed and blotted with corrections that the printer
absolutely refused to correct it, and it was entirely reset. Adam
Tucker spent eighteen years on the "Light of Nature." Thoreau's New
England pastoral, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," was an
entire failure. Seven hundred of the one thousand copies printed were
returned from the publishers. Thoreau wrote in his diary: "I have some
nine hundred volumes in my library, seven hundred of which I wrote
myself." Yet he took up his pen with as much determination as ever.
The rolling stone gathers no moss. The persistent tortoise outruns the
swift but fickle hare. An hour a day for twelve years more than equals
the time given to study in a four years' course at a high school. The
reading and re-reading of a single volume has been the making of many a
man. "Patience," says Bulwer "is the courage of the conqueror; it is
the virtue _par excellence_, of Man against Destiny--of the One against
the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore, this is the
courage of the Gospel; and its importance in a social view--its
importance to races and institutions--cannot be too earnestly
inculcated."
Want of constancy is the cause of many a failure, making the
millionaire of to-day a beggar to-morrow. Show me a really great
triumph that is not the reward of persistence. One of the paintings
which made Titian famous was on his easel eight years; another, seven.
How came popular writers famous? By writing for years without any pay
at all; by writing hundreds of pages as mere practise-work; by working
like galley-slaves at literature for half a lifetime with no other
compensation than--fame.
"Never despair," says Burke; "but if you do, work on in despair."
The head of the god Hercules is represented as covered with a lion's
skin with claws joined under the chin, to show that when we have
conquered our misfortunes, they become our helpers. Oh, the glory of
an unconquerable will!