No doubt there is something inspiring in the spectacle of the young
warrior standing there, chafing at the lists, eagerly pulling on his
gauntlets, fitting on his helmet, and longing to be in the thick of the
fight. No doubt, as I have already said, there is something in your
early days which makes such buoyant hopes and anticipations of success
natural, and which gives you, as a great gift, that expectation of
victory. I do not wish to shatter any of your enthusiasms or ideals,
but I do wish to suggest a consideration or two that may calm and sober
them.
So I ask, have you ever estimated, are you now estimating rightly, what
it is that you have to fight for? To make yourselves pure, wise,
strong, self-governing, Christlike men, such as God would have you to
be. That is not a small thing for a man to set himself to do. You may
go into the struggle for lower purposes, for bread and cheese, or
wealth or fame, or love, or the like, with a comparatively light heart;
but if there once has dawned upon a young soul the whole majestic sweep
of possibilities in its opening life, then the battle assumes an aspect
of solemnity and greatness that silences all boasting. Have you
considered what it is that you have to fight for?
Have you considered the forces that are arrayed against you? 'What act
is all its thought had been?' Hand and brain are never paired. There is
always a gap between the conception and its realisation. The painter
stands before his canvas, and, while others may see beauty in it, he
only sees what a small fragment of the radiant vision that floated
before his eye his hand has been able to preserve. The author looks on
his book and thinks what a poor, wretched transcript of the thoughts
that inspired his pen it is. There is ever this same disproportion
between the conception and accomplishment. Therefore, all we old people
feel, more or less, that our lives have been failures. We set out as
you do, thinking that we were going to build a tower whose top should
reach to heaven, and we are contented if, at the last, we have
scrambled together some little wooden shanty in which we can live. We
thought as you do; you will come to think as we do. So you had better
begin now, and not go into the fight boasting, or you will come out of
it conscious of being beaten.
Have you realised how different it is to dream things and to do them?
In our dreams we are, as it were, working _in vacuo_. When we come to
acts, the atmosphere offers resistance. It is easy to imagine ourselves
victorious in circumstances where things are all going rightly and are
bending according to our own desires, but when we come to the grim
world, where there are things that resist and people are not plastic,
it is a very different matter. You do not yet understand, as you will
some day, the fatal limitations of power that hem us all round and the
obstinate way that circumstances have of not falling in with our
wishes. And you have not yet learned how completely and constantly
failure accompanies success, like its shadow. The old Egyptians had no
need to put a skeleton at their tables, nor the Romans to set a mocker
behind the hero as he rode in triumph up to the Capitol. The world
provides the skeleton at the banquet, and circumstances supply the
mocker to add a dash of failure to all our triumphs.
Have you ever realised how certainly, into the brightest and most
buoyant and successful lives, there will come crushing sorrows, blows
as from an unseen hand in the dark, that fell a man? O friend! when one
thinks of the miseries and the misfortunes, the sorrows and the losses,
the broken and bleeding hearts that began life buoyant, elastic,
hopeful, perhaps boasting, like you, there ought to be a sobering tint
cast over our brightest visions.
I suppose that our colleges are full of students who are going, to far
outstrip their professors, that every life-school has a dozen lads who
have just begun to handle brush and easel, and are going to put
Raffaelle in the shade. I suppose that every lawyer's office has a
budding Lord Chancellor or two in it. And I suppose that that sharp
criticism of us fumblers in the field, and half-expressed thought, 'How
much better I could do it!' belong to youth by virtue of its youth. It
is a crude form of undeveloped power, but it wants a great deal of
sobering down, and I am trying now to let out a little of the blood,
and to bring you to a clear conception of the very limited success
which is likely to attend you. All we old people, whose deficiencies
and limitations you see so clearly, had the same dreams, impossible as
it may appear to you, fifty years ago. We were going to be the men, and
wisdom was going to die with us, and you see what we have made of it.
You will not do much better.
Have you ever taken stock honestly of your own resources? 'What king,
going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and
counteth the cost, whether with his ten thousand he can meet him that
cometh against him with twenty thousand?' Boast if you like, but
calculate first, and boast after that, if you can.
Your worst enemy is yourself. When you are counting your resources and
saying, 'I have this, that, and the other thing,' do not forget to say,
'I have a part of me, that takes all the rest of me all its time to
keep it down and prevent it from becoming master.' You have traitors in
the fortress who are in communication with the enemy outside, and may
go over to him openly in the very crisis of the fight. You have to take
that fact into account, and it ought to suppress boasting whilst you
are putting on the harness.
You are not old enough to remember, as some of us do, the delirious
enthusiasm with which, in the last Franco-German war, the Emperor and
the troops left Paris, and how, as the train steamed out of the
station, shouts were raised, 'A. Berlin!' Ay! and they never got
farther than Sedan, and there an Emperor and an army were captured. Go
into the fight bragging, and you will come out of it beaten.