You drive out, let us suppose, upon a certain day. To your surprise and
mortification, your horse, usually lively and frisky, is quite dull
and sluggish. He does not get over the ground as he is wont to do. The
slightest touch of whip-cord, on other days, suffices to make him dart
forward with redoubled speed; but upon this day, after two or three
miles, he needs positive whipping, and he runs very sulkily with it
all. By-and-by his coat, usually smooth and glossy and dry through all
reasonable work, begins to stream like a water-cart. This will not do.
There is something wrong. You investigate; and you discover that your
horse's work, though seemingly the same as usual, is in fact immensely
greater. The blockheads who oiled your wheels yesterday have screwed up
your patent axles too tightly; the friction is enormous; the hotter
the metal gets, the greater grows the friction; your horse's work is
quadrupled. You drive slowly home, and severely upbraid the blockheads.
There are many people who have to go through life at an analogous
disadvantage. There is something in their constitution of body or mind,
there is something in their circumstances, which adds incalculably to
the exertion they must go through to attain their ends, and which holds
them back from doing what they might otherwise have done. Very probably
that malign something exerted its influence unperceived by those around
them. They did not get credit for the struggle they were going through.
No one knew what a brave fight they were making with a broken right arm;
no one remarked that they were running the race, and keeping a fair
place in it, too, with their legs tied together. All they do, they do at
a disadvantage. It is as when a noble race-horse is beaten by a sorry
hack; because the race-horse, as you might see, if you look at the list,
is carrying twelve pounds additional. But such men, by a desperate
effort, often made silently and sorrowfully, may (so to speak) run in
the race, and do well in it, though you little think with how heavy a
foot and how heavy a heart. There are others who have no chance at all.
_They_ are like a horse set to run a race, tied by a strong rope to a
tree, or weighted with ten tons of extra burden. _That_ horse cannot run
even poorly. The difference between their case and that of the men who
are placed at a disadvantage is like the difference between setting a
very near-sighted man to keep a sharp look-out and setting a man who is
quite blind to keep that sharp look-out. Many can do the work of life
with difficulty; some cannot do it at all. In short, there are PEOPLE
WHO CARRY WEIGHT IN LIFE, and there are some WHO NEVER HAVE A CHANCE.
And you, my friend, who are doing the work of life well and
creditably,--you who are running in the front rank, and likely to do so
to the end, think kindly and charitably of those who have broken down
in the race. Think kindly of him who, sadly overweighted, is struggling
onwards away half a mile behind you; think more kindly yet, if that be
possible, of him who, tethered to a ton of granite, is struggling hard
and making no way at all, or who has even sat down and given up the
struggle in dumb despair. You feel, I know, the weakness in yourself
which would have made you break down, if sorely tried like others. You
know there is in your armor the unprotected place at which a well-aimed
or a random blow would have gone home and brought you down. Yes, you are
nearing the winning-post, and you are among the first; but six pounds
more on your back, and you might have been nowhere. You feel, by your
weak heart and weary frame, that, if you had been sent to the Crimea in
that dreadful first winter, you would certainly have died. And you feel,
too, by your lack of moral stamina, by your feebleness of resolution,
that it has been your preservation from you know not what depths of
shame and misery, that you never were pressed very hard by temptation.
Do not range yourself with those who found fault with a certain great
and good Teacher of former days, because he went to be guest with a man
that was a sinner. As if He could have gone to be guest with any man who
was not!
* * * * *
There is no reckoning up the manifold _impedimenta_ by which human
beings are weighted for the race of life; but all may be classified
under the two heads of unfavorable influences arising out of the mental
or physical nature of the human beings themselves, and unfavorable
influences arising out of the circumstances in which the human beings
are placed. You have known men who, setting out from a very humble
position, have attained to a respectable standing, but who would have
reached a very much higher place but for their being weighted with a
vulgar, violent, wrong-headed, and rude-spoken wife. You have known men
of lowly origin who had in them the makings of gentlemen, but whom this
single malign influence has condemned to coarse manners and a frowzy,
repulsive home for life. You have known many men whose powers are
crippled and their nature soured by poverty, by the heavy necessity
for calculating how far each shilling will go, by a certain sense of
degradation that comes of sordid shifts. How can a poor parson write an
eloquent or spirited sermon when his mind all the while is running upon
the thought how he is to pay the baker or how he is to get shoes for his
children? It will be but a dull discourse which, under that weight, will
be produced even by a man who, favorably placed, could have done very
considerable things. It is only a great genius here and there who can do
great things, who can do his best, no matter at what disadvantage he may
be placed; the great mass of ordinary men can make little headway with
wind and tide dead against them. Not many trees would grow well, if
watered daily (let us say) with vitriol. Yet a tree which would
speedily die under that nurture might do very fairly, might even do
magnificently, if it had fair play, if it got its chance of common
sunshine and shower. Some men, indeed, though always hampered by
circumstances, have accomplished much; but then you cannot help thinking
how much more they might have accomplished, had they been placed more
happily. Pugin, the great Gothic architect, designed various noble
buildings; but I believe he complained that he never had fair play with
his finest,--that he was always weighted by considerations of expense,
or by the nature of the ground he had to build on, or by the number
of people it was essential the building should accommodate. And so he
regarded his noblest edifices as no more than hints of what he could
have done. He made grand running in the race; but, oh, what running he
could have made, if you had taken off those twelve additional pounds! I
dare say you have known men who labored to make a pretty country-house
on a site which had some one great drawback. They were always battling
with that drawback, and trying to conquer it; but they never could quite
succeed. And it remained a real worry and vexation. Their house was on
the north side of a high hill, and never could have its due share of
sunshine. Or you could not reach it but by climbing a very steep ascent;
or you could not in any way get water into the landscape. When Sir
Walter was at length able to call his own a little estate on the banks
of the Tweed he loved so well, it was the ugliest, bleakest, and least
interesting spot upon the course of that beautiful river; and the public
road ran within a few yards of his door. The noble-hearted man made a
charming dwelling at last; but he was fighting against Nature in the
matter of the landscape round it; and you can see yet, many a year after
he left it, the poor little trees of his beloved plantations contrasting
with the magnificent timber of various grand old places above and below
Abbotsford. There is something sadder in the sight of men who carried
weight within themselves, and who, in aiming at usefulness or at
happiness, were hampered and held back by their own nature. There are
many men who are weighted with a hasty temper; weighted with a nervous,
anxious constitution; weighted with an envious, jealous disposition;
weighted with a strong tendency to evil speaking, lying, and slandering;
weighted with a grumbling, sour, discontented spirit; weighted with a
disposition to vaporing and boasting; weighted with a great want of
common sense; weighted with an undue regard to what other people may be
thinking or saying of them; weighted with many like things, of which
more will be said by-and-by. When that good missionary, Henry Martyn,
was in India, he was weighted with an irresistible drowsiness. He could
hardly keep himself awake. And it must have been a burning earnestness
that impelled him to ceaseless labor, in the presence of such a
drag-weight as that. I am not thinking or saying, my friend, that it is
wholly bad for us to carry weight,--that great good may not come of the
abatement of our power and spirit which may be made by that weight. I
remember a greater missionary than even the sainted Martyn, to whom the
Wisest and Kindest appointed that he should carry weight, and that he
should fight at a sad disadvantage. And the greater missionary tells us
that he knew why that weight was appointed him to carry; and that he
felt he needed it all to save him from a strong tendency to undue
self-conceit. No one knows, now, what the burden was which he bore; but
it was heavy and painful; it was "a thorn in the flesh." Three times
he earnestly asked that it might be taken away; but the answer he got
implied that he needed it yet, and that his Master thought it a better
plan to strengthen the back than to lighten the burden. Yes, the blessed
Redeemer appointed that St. Paul should carry weight in life; and I
think, friendly reader, that we shall believe that it is wisely and
kindly meant, if the like should come to you and me.
We all understand what is meant, when we hear it said that a man is
doing very well, or has done very well, _considering_. I do not know
whether it is a Scotticism to stop short at that point of the sentence.
We do it, constantly, in this country. The sentence would be completed
by saying, _considering the weight he has to carry_, or _the
disadvantage at which he works_. And things which are _very good,
considering_, may range very far up and down the scale of actual merit.
A thing which is _very good, considering_, may be very bad, or may be
tolerably good. It never can be absolutely very good; for, if it
were, you would cease to use the word _considering_. A thing which is
absolutely very good, if it have been done under extremely unfavorable
circumstances, would not be described as _very good, considering_; it
would be described as _quite wonderful, considering_, or as _miraculous,
considering_. And it is curious how people take a pride in accumulating
unfavorable circumstances, that they may overcome them, and gain the
glory of having overcome them. Thus, if a man wishes to sign his name,
he might write the letters with his right hand; and though he write them
very clearly and well and rapidly, nobody would think of giving him any
credit. But if he write his name rather badly with his left hand, people
would say it was a remarkable signature, considering; and if he write
his name very ill indeed with his foot, people would say the writing was
quite wonderful, considering. If a man desire to walk from one end of a
long building to the other, he might do so by walking along the floor;
and though he did so steadily, swiftly, and gracefully, no one would
remark that he had done anything worth notice. But if he choose for his
path a thick rope, extended from one end of the building to the other,
at a height of a hundred feet, and if he walk rather slowly and
awkwardly along it, he will be esteemed as having done something very
extraordinary: while if, in addition to this, he is blindfolded, and has
his feet placed in large baskets instead of shoes, he will, if in any
way he can get over the distance between the ends of the building, be
held as one of the most remarkable men of the age. Yes, load yourself
with weight which no one asks you to carry; accumulate disadvantages
which you need not face, unless you choose; then carry the weight in any
fashion, and overcome the disadvantages in any fashion; and you are a
great man, considering: that is, considering the disadvantages and the
weight. Let this be remembered: if a man is so placed that he cannot do
his work, except in the face of special difficulties, then let him be
praised, if he vanquish these in some decent measure, and if he do his
work tolerably well. But a man deserves no praise at all for work which
he has done tolerably or done rather badly, because he chose to do it
under disadvantageous circumstances, under which there was no earthly
call upon him to do it. In this case he probably is a self-conceited
man, or a man of wrong-headed independence of disposition; and in this
case, if his work be bad absolutely, don't tell him that it is good,
considering. Refuse to consider. He has no right to expect that you
should. There was a man who built a house entirely with his own hands.
He had never learned either mason-work or carpentry: he could quite well
have afforded to pay skilled workmen to do the work he wanted; but he
did not choose to do so. He did the whole work himself. The house was
finished; its aspect was peculiar. The walls were off the perpendicular
considerably, and the windows were singular in shape; the doors fitted
badly, and the floors were far from level. In short, it was a very bad
and awkward-looking house: but it was a wonderful house, considering.
And people said that it was so, who saw nothing wonderful in the
beautiful house next it, perfect in symmetry and finish and comfort, but
built by men whose business it was to build. Now I should have declined
to admire that odd house, or to express the least sympathy with its
builder. He chose to run with a needless hundred-weight on his back: he
chose to walk in baskets instead of in shoes. And if, in consequence
of his own perversity, he did his work badly, I should have refused
to recognize it as anything but bad work. It was quite different with
Robinson Crusoe, who made his dwelling and his furniture for himself,
because there was no one else to make them for him. I dare say his cave
was anything but exactly square; and his chairs and table were cumbrous
enough; but they were wonderful, considering certain facts which he was
quite entitled to expect us to consider. Southey's _Cottonian Library_
was all quite right; and you would have said that the books were very
nicely bound, considering; for Southey could not afford to pay the
regular binder's charges; and it was better that his books should be
done up in cotton of various hues by the members of his own family than
that they should remain not bound at all. You will think, too, of the
poor old parson who wrote a book which he thought of great value, but
which no publisher would bring out. He was determined that all his
labor should not be lost to posterity. So he bought types and a
printing-press, and printed his precious work, poor man: he and his
man-servant did it all. It made a great many volumes; and the task
took up many years. Then he bound the volumes with his own hands; and
carrying them to London, he placed a copy of his work in each of the
public libraries. I dare say he might have saved himself his labor. How
many of my readers could tell what was the title of the work, or what
was the name of its author? Still, _there_ was a man who accomplished
his design, in the face of every disadvantage.
There is a great point of difference between our feeling towards the
human being who runs his race much overweighted and our feeling towards
the inferior animal that does the like. If you saw a poor horse gamely
struggling in a race, with a weight of a ton extra, you would pity it.
Your sympathies would all be with the creature that was making the best
of unfavorable circumstances. But it is a sorrowful fact, that the
drag-weight of human beings not unfrequently consists of things which
make us angry rather than sympathetic. You have seen a man carrying
heavy weight in life, perhaps in the form of inveterate wrong-headedness
and suspiciousness; but instead of pitying him, our impulse would rather
be to beat him upon that perverted head. We pity physical malformation
or unhealthiness; but our bent is to be angry with intellectual and
moral malformation or unhealthiness. We feel for the deformed man, who
must struggle on at that sad disadvantage; feeling it, too, much more
acutely than you would readily believe. But we have only indignation for
the man weighted with far worse things, and things which, in some cases
at least, he can just as little help. You have known men whose extra
pounds, or even extra ton, was a hasty temper, flying out of a sudden
into ungovernable bursts: or a moral cowardice leading to trickery and
falsehood: or a special disposition to envy and evil-speaking: or a
very strong tendency to morbid complaining about their misfortunes and
troubles: or an invincible bent to be always talking of their sufferings
through the derangement of their digestive organs. Now, you grow angry
at these things. You cannot stand them. And there is a substratum of
truth to that angry feeling. A man _can_ form his mind more than he can
form his body. If a man be well-made, physically, he will, in ordinary
cases, remain so: but he may, in a moral sense, raise a great hunchback
where Nature made none. He may foster a malignant temper, a grumbling,
fretful spirit, which by manful resistance might be much abated, if not
quite put down. But still, there should often be pity, where we are
prone only to blame. We find a person in whom a truly disgusting
character has been formed: well, if you knew all, you would know that
the person had hardly a chance of being otherwise: the man could not
help it. You have known people who were awfully unamiable and repulsive:
you may have been told how very different they once were,--sweet-tempered
and cheerful. And surely the change is a far sadder one than
that which has passed upon the wrinkled old woman who was once (as you
are told) the loveliest girl of her time. Yet many a one who will look
with interest upon the withered face and the dimmed eyes, and try to
trace in them the vestiges of radiant beauty gone, will never think of
puzzling out in violent spurts of petulance the perversion of a quick
and kind heart; or in curious oddities and pettinesses the result of
long and lonely years of toil in which no one sympathized; or in cynical
bitterness and misanthropy an old disappointment never got over. There
is a hard knot in the wood, where a green young branch was lopped away.
I have a great pity for old bachelors. Those I have known have for the
most part been old fools. But the more foolish and absurd they are, the
more pity is due them. I believe there is something to be said for even
the most unamiable creatures. The shark is an unamiable creature. It
is voracious. It will snap a man in two. Yet it is not unworthy of
sympathy. Its organization is such that it is always suffering the most
ravenous hunger. You can hardly imagine the state of intolerable famine
in which that unhappy animal roams the ocean. People talk of its awful
teeth and its vindictive eye. I suppose it is well ascertained that the
extremity of physical want, as reached on rafts at sea, has driven human
beings to deeds as barbarous as ever shark was accused of. The worse a
human being is, the more he deserves our pity. Hang him, if _that_ be
needful for the welfare of society; but pity him even as you hang. Many
a poor creature has gradually become hardened and inveterate in guilt
who would have shuddered at first, had the excess of it ultimately
reached been at first presented to view. But the precipice was sloped
off: the descent was made step by step. And there is many a human being
who never had a chance of being good: many who have been trained, and
even compelled, to evil from very infancy. Who that knows anything of
our great cities, but knows how the poor little child, the toddling
innocent, is sometimes sent out day by day to steal, and received in his
wretched home with blows and curses, if he fail to bring back enough?
Who has not heard of such poor little things, unsuccessful in their
sorry work, sleeping all night in some wintry stair, because they durst
not venture back to their drunken, miserable, desperate parents? I could
tell things at which angels might shed tears, with much better reason
for doing so than seems to me to exist in some of those more imposing
occasions on which bombastic writers are wont to describe them as
weeping. Ah, there is One who knows where the responsibility for all
this rests! Not wholly with the wretched parents: far from _that_.
_They_, too, have gone through the like: they had as little chance as
their children. _They_ deserve our deepest pity, too. Perhaps the deeper
pity is not due to the shivering, starving child, with the bitter wind
cutting through its thin rags, and its blue feet on the frozen pavement,
holding out a hand that is like the claw of some beast; but rather to
the brutalized mother who could thus send out the infant she bore.
Surely the mother's condition, if we look at the case aright, is the
more deplorable. Would not you, my reader, rather endure any degree of
cold and hunger than come to this? Doubtless, there is blame somewhere,
that such things should be: but we all know that the blame of the
most miserable practical evils and failures can hardly be traced to
particular individuals. It is through the incapacity of scores of public
servants that an army is starved. It is through the fault of millions of
people that our great towns are what they are: and it must be confessed
that the actual responsibility is spread so thinly over so great a
surface that it is hard to say it rests very blackly upon any one spot.
Oh that we could but know whom to hang, when we find some flagrant,
crying evil! Unluckily, hasty people are ready to be content, if they
can but hang anybody, without minding much whether that individual be
more to blame than many beside. Laws and kings have something to do
here: but management and foresight on the part of the poorer classes
have a great deal more to do. And no laws can make many persons managing
or provident. I do not hesitate to say, from what I have myself seen
of the poor, that the same short-sighted extravagance, the same
recklessness of consequences, which are frequently found in them, would
cause quite as much misery, if they prevailed in a like degree among
people with a thousand a year. But it seems as if only the tolerably
well-to-do have the heart to be provident and self-denying. A man with a
few hundreds annually does not marry, unless he thinks he can afford it:
but the workman with fifteen shillings a week is profoundly indifferent
to any such calculation. I firmly believe that the sternest of all
self-denial is that practised by those who, when we divide mankind into
rich and poor, must be classed (I suppose) with the rich. But I turn
away from a miserable subject, through which I cannot see my way
clearly, and on which I cannot think but with unutterable pain. It is an
easy way of cutting the knot, to declare that the rich are the cause of
all the sufferings of the poor; but when we look at the case in all its
bearings, we shall see that that is rank nonsense. And on the other
hand, it is unquestionable that the rich are bound to do something. But
what? I should feel deeply indebted to any one who would write out, in
a few short and intelligible sentences, the practical results that are
aimed at in the "Song of the Shirt." The misery and evil are manifest:
but tell us whom to hang; tell us what to do!
One heavy burden with which many men are weighted for the race of life
is depression of spirits. I wonder whether this used to be as common in
former days as it is now. There was, indeed, the man in Homer who walked
by the seashore in a very gloomy mood; but his case seems to have been
thought remarkable. What is it in our modern mode of life and our
infinity of cares, what little thing is it about the matter of the brain
or the flow of the blood, that makes the difference between buoyant
cheerfulness and deep depression? I begin to think that almost all
educated people, and especially all whose work is mental rather than
physical, suffer more or less from this indescribable gloom. And
although a certain amount of sentimental sadness may possibly help the
poet, or the imaginative writer, to produce material which may be very
attractive to the young and inexperienced, I suppose it will be admitted
by all that cheerfulness and hopefulness are noble and healthful
stimulants to worthy effort, and that depression of spirits does (so to
speak) cut the sinews with which the average man must do the work of
life. You know how lightly the buoyant heart carries people through
entanglements and labors under which the desponding would break down,
or which they never would face. Yet, in thinking of the commonness of
depressed spirits, even where the mind is otherwise very free from
anything morbid, we should remember that there is a strong temptation to
believe that this depression is more common and more prevalent than it
truly is. Sometimes there is a gloom which overcasts all life, like
that in which James Watt lived and worked, and served his race so
nobly,--like that from which the gentle, amiable poet, James Montgomery,
suffered through his whole career. But in ordinary cases the gloom is
temporary and transient. Even the most depressed are not always so.
Like, we know, suggests like powerfully. If you are placed in some
peculiar conjuncture of circumstances, or if you pass through some
remarkable scene, the present scene or conjuncture will call up before
you, in a way that startles you, something like itself which you had
long forgotten, and which you would never have remembered but for this
touch of some mysterious spring. And accordingly, a man depressed in
spirits thinks that he is always so, or at least fancies that such
depression has given the color to his life in a very much greater
degree than it actually has done so. For this dark season wakens up the
remembrance of many similar dark seasons which in more cheerful days are
quite forgot; and these cheerful days drop out of memory for the time.
Hearing such a man speak, if he speak out his heart to you, you think
him inconsistent, perhaps you think him insincere. You think he is
saying more than he truly feels. It is not so; he feels and believes
it all at the time. But he is taking a one-sided view of things; he is
undergoing the misery of it acutely for the time, but by-and-by he will
see things from quite a different point. A very eminent man (there can
be no harm in referring to a case which he himself made so public)
wrote and published something about his _miserable home_. He was quite
sincere, I do not doubt. He thought so at the time. He _was_ miserable
just then; and so, looking back on past years, he could see nothing but
misery. But the case was not really so, one could feel sure. There
had been a vast deal of enjoyment about his home and his lot; it was
forgotten then. A man in very low spirits, reading over his diary,
somehow lights upon and dwells upon all the sad and wounding things; he
involuntarily skips the rest, or reads them with but faint perception
of their meaning. In reading the very Bible, he does the like thing.
He chances upon that which is in unison with his present mood. I think
there is no respect in which this great law of the association of ideas
holds more strictly true than in the power of a present state of mind,
or a present state of outward circumstances, to bring up vividly before
us all such states in our past history. We are depressed, we are
worried; and when we look back, all our departed days of worry and
depression appear to start up and press themselves upon our view to the
exclusion of anything else; so that we are ready to think that we have
never been otherwise than depressed and worried all our life. But when
more cheerful times come, they suggest only such times of cheerfulness,
and no effort will bring back the depression vividly as when we felt
it. It is not selfishness or heartlessness, it is the result of an
inevitable law of mind, that people in happy circumstances should
resolutely believe that it is a happy world after all; for, looking
back, and looking around, the mind refuses to take distinct note of
anything that is not somewhat akin to its present state. And so, if any
ordinary man, who is not a distempered genius or a great fool, tells you
that he is always miserable, don't believe him. He feels so now, but he
does not always feel so. There are periods of brightening in the darkest
lot. Very, very few live in unvarying gloom. Not but that there is
something very pitiful (by which I mean deserving of pity) in what
may be termed the Micawber style of mind,--in the stage of hysteric
oscillations between joy and misery. Thoughtless readers of "David
Copperfield" laugh at Mr. Micawber, and his rapid passages from the
depth of despair to the summit of happiness, and back again. But if you
have seen or experienced that morbid condition, you would know that
there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it. There
is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading,
never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth. It is but
a very few degrees better than "moody madness, laughing wild, amid
severest woe." By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without
any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in a healthy mind
would produce no such degree of dejection. No doubt, many men can
remember seasons of dejection which was not imaginary, and of anxiety
and misery whose causes were only too real. You can remember, perhaps,
the dark time in which you knew quite well what it was that made it so
dark. Well, better days have come. That sorrowful, wearing time, which
exhausted the springs of life faster than ordinary living would have
done, which aged you in heart and frame before your day, dragged over,
and it is gone. You carried heavy weight, indeed, while it lasted. It
was but poor running you made, poor work you did, with that feeble,
anxious, disappointed, miserable heart. And you would many a time have
been thankful to creep into a quiet grave. Perhaps that season did you
good. Perhaps it was the discipline you needed. Perhaps it took out your
self-conceit, and made you humble. Perhaps it disposed you to feel for
the griefs and cares of others, and made you sympathetic. Perhaps,
looking back now, you can discern the end it served. And now that it has
done its work, and that it only stings you when you look back, let that
time be quite forgotten!
* * * * *
There are men, and very clever men, who do the work of life at a
disadvantage, through _this_, that their mind is a machine fitted for
doing well only one kind of work,--or that their mind is a machine
which, though doing many things well, does some one thing, perhaps a
conspicuous thing, very poorly. You find it hard to give a man credit
for being possessed of sense and talent, if you hear him make a speech
at a public dinner, which speech approaches the idiotic for its
silliness and confusion. And the vulgar mind readily concludes that he
who does one thing extremely ill can do nothing well, and that he who is
ignorant on one point is ignorant on all. A friend of mine, a country
parson, on first going to his parish, resolved to farm his glebe for
himself. A neighboring farmer kindly offered the parson to plough one
of his fields. The farmer said that he would send his man John with a
plough and a pair of horses, on a certain day. "If ye're goin' about,"
said the farmer to the clergyman, "John will be unco' weel pleased, if
you speak to him, and say it's a fine day, or the like o' that; but
dinna," said the farmer, with much solemnity, "dinna say onything to him
aboot ploughin' and sawin'; for John," he added, "is a stupid body, but
he has been ploughin' and sawin' all his life, and he'll see in a minute
that _ye_ ken naething aboot ploughin' and sawin'. And then," said the
sagacious old farmer, with extreme earnestness, "if he comes to think
that ye ken naething aboot ploughin' and sawin', he'll think that ye ken
naething aboot onything!" Yes, it is natural to us all to think, that,
if the machine breaks down at that work in which we are competent to
test it, then the machine cannot do any work at all.
If you have a strong current of water, you may turn it into any channel
you please, and make it do any work you please. With equal energy and
success it will flow north or south; it will turn a corn-mill, or a
threshing-machine, or a grindstone. Many people live under a vague
impression that the human mind is like that. They think,--Here is so
much ability, so much energy, which may be turned in any direction, and
made to do any work; and they are surprised to find that the power,
available and great for one kind of work, is worth nothing for another.
A man very clever at one thing is positively weak and stupid at another
thing. A very good judge may be a wretchedly bad joker; and he must go
through his career at this disadvantage, that people, finding him silly
at the thing they are able to estimate, find it hard to believe that he
is not silly at everything. I know, for myself, that it would not be
right that the Premier should request me to look out for a suitable
Chancellor. I am not competent to appreciate the depth of a man's
knowledge of equity; by which I do not mean justice, but chancery law.
But, though quite unable to understand how great a Chancellor Lord Eldon
was, I am quite able to estimate how great a poet he was, also how great
a wit. Here is a poem by that eminent person. Doubtless he regarded it
as a wonder of happy versification, as well as instinct with the most
convulsing fun. It is intended to set out in a metrical form the career
of a certain judge, who went up as a poor lad from Scotland to England,
but did well at the bar, and ultimately found his place upon the bench.
Here is Lord Chancellor Eldon's humorous poem:--
"James Allan Parke
Came naked stark
From Scotland:
But he got clothes,
Like other beaux,
In England!"
Now the fact that Lord Eldon wrote that poem, and valued it highly,
would lead some folk to suppose that Lord Eldon was next door to an
idiot. And a good many other things which that Chancellor did, such as
his quotations from Scripture in the House of Commons, and his attempts
to convince that assemblage (when Attorney-General) that Napoleon I. was
the Apocalyptic Beast or the Little Horn, certainly point towards the
same conclusion. But the conclusion, as a general one, would be
wrong. No doubt, Lord Eldon was a wise and sagacious man as judge and
statesman, though as wit and poet he was almost an idiot. So with other
great men. It is easy to remember occasions on which great men have
done very foolish things. There never was a truer hero nor a greater
commander than Lord Nelson; but in some things he was merely an awkward,
overgrown midshipman. But then, let us remember that a locomotive
engine, though excellent at running, would be a poor hand at flying.
_That_ is not its vocation. The engine will draw fifteen heavy carriages
fifty miles in an hour; and _that_ remains as a noble feat, even though
it be ascertained that the engine could not jump over a brook which
would be cleared easily by the veriest screw. We all see this.
But many of us have a confused idea that a great and clever man is (so
to speak) a locomotive that can fly; and when it is proved that he
cannot fly, then we begin to doubt whether he can even run. We think he
should be good at everything, whether in his own line or not. And he is
set at a disadvantage, particularly in the judgment of vulgar and stupid
people, when it is clearly ascertained that at some things he is very
inferior. I have heard of a very eminent preacher who sunk considerably
(even as regards his preaching) in the estimation of a certain family,
because it appeared that he played very badly at bowls. And we all know
that occasionally the Premier already mentioned reverses the vulgar
error, and in appointing men to great places is guided by an axiom which
amounts to just this: this locomotive can run well, therefore it will
fly well. This man has filled a certain position well, therefore let us
appoint him to a position entirely different; no doubt, he will do
well there too. Here is a clergyman who has edited certain Greek plays
admirably; let us make him a bishop.
It may be remarked here, that the men who have attained the greatest
success in the race of life have generally carried weight. _Nitor in
adversum_ might be the motto of many a man besides Burke. It seems to
be almost a general rule, that the raw material out of which the finest
fabrics are made should look very little like these, to start with. It
was a stammerer, of uncommanding mien, who became the greatest orator
of graceful Greece. I believe it is admitted that Chalmers was the most
effective preacher, perhaps the most telling speaker, that Britain has
seen for at least a century; yet his aspect was not commanding, his
gestures were awkward, his voice was bad, and his accent frightful. He
talked of an _oppning_ when be meant an _opening_, and he read out the
text of one of his noblest sermons, "He that is fulthy, let him be
fulthy stall." Yet who ever thought of these things after hearing the
good man for ten minutes? Ay, load Eclipse with what extra pounds you
might, Eclipse would always be first! And, to descend to the race-horse,
_he_ had four white legs, white to the knees; and he ran more awkwardly
than racer ever did, with his head between his forelegs, close to the
ground, like a pig. Alexander, Napoleon, and Wellington were all little
men, in places where a commanding presence would have been of no small
value. A most disagreeably affected manner has not prevented a barrister
with no special advantages from rising with general approval to the
highest places which a barrister can fill. A hideous little wretch has
appeared for trial in a criminal court, having succeeded in marrying
seven wives at once. A painful hesitation has not hindered a certain
eminent person from being one of the principal speakers in the British
Parliament for many years. Yes, even disadvantages never overcome
have not sufficed to hold in obscurity men who were at once able and
fortunate. But sometimes the disadvantage was thoroughly overcome.
Sometimes it served no other end than to draw to one point the attention
and the efforts of a determined will; and that matter in regard to which
Nature seemed to have said that a man should fall short became the thing
in which he attained unrivalled perfection.
A heavy drag-weight upon the powers of some men is the uncertainty of
their powers. The man has not his powers at command. His mind is a
capricious thing, that works when it pleases, and will not work except
when it pleases. I am not thinking now of what to many is a sad
disadvantage: that nervous trepidation which cannot be reasoned away,
and which often deprives them of the full use of their mental abilities
just when they are most needed. It is a vast thing in a man's favor,
that whatever he can do he should be able to do at any time, and to
do at once. For want of coolness of mind, and that readiness which
generally goes with it, many a man cannot do himself justice; and in a
deliberative assembly he may be entirely beaten by some flippant person
who has all his money (so to speak) in his pocket, while the other must
send to the bank for his. How many people can think next day, or even
a few minutes after, of the precise thing they ought to have said, but
which would not come at the time! But very frequently the thing is of no
value, unless it come at the time when it is wanted. Coming next day, it
is like the offer of a thick fur great-coat on a sweltering day in July.
You look at the wrap, and say, "Oh, if I could but have had you on the
December night when I went to London by the limited mail, and was nearly
starved to death!" But it seems as if the mind must be, to a certain
extent, capricious in its action. Caprice, or what looks like it,
appears of necessity to go with complicated machinery, even material.
The more complicated a machine is, the liker it grows to mind, in the
matter of uncertainty and apparent caprice of action. The simplest
machine--say a pipe for conveying water--will always act in precisely
the same way. And two such pipes, if of the same dimensions, and
subjected to the same pressure, will always convey the self-same
quantities. But go to more advanced machines. Take two clocks or two
locomotive engines, and though these are made in all respects exactly
alike, they will act (I can answer at least for the locomotive engines)
quite differently. One locomotive will swallow a vast quantity of water
at once; another must be fed by driblets; no one can say why. One engine
is a _fac-simile_ of the other; yet each has its character and its
peculiarities as truly as a man has. You need to know your engine's
temper before driving it, just as much as you need to know that of your
horse, or that of your friend. I know, of course, there is a mechanical
reason for this seeming caprice, if you could trace the reason. But not
one man in a thousand could trace out the reason. And the phenomenon, as
it presses itself upon us, really amounts to this: that very complicated
machinery appears to have a will of its own,--appears to exercise
something of the nature of choice. But there is no machine so capricious
as the human mind. The great poet who wrote those beautiful verses could
not do _that_ every day. A good deal more of what he writes is poor
enough; and many days he could not write at all. By long habit the mind
may be made capable of being put in harness daily for the humbler task
of producing prose; but you cannot say, when you harness it in the
morning, how far or at what rate it will run that day.
Go and see a great organ of which you have been told. Touch it, and you
hear the noble tones at once. The organ can produce them at any time.
But go and see a great man; touch _him_,--that is, get him to begin to
talk. You will be much disappointed, if you expect, certainly, to hear
anything like his book or his poem. A great man is not a man who is
always saying great things, or who is always able to say great things.
He is a man who on a few occasions has said great things; who on the
coming of a sufficient occasion may possibly say great things again;
but the staple of his talk is commonplace enough. Here is a point of
difference from machinery, with all machinery's apparent caprice. You
could not say, as you pointed to a steam-engine, "The usual power of
that engine is two hundred horses; but once or twice it has surprised us
all by working up to two thousand." No; the engine is always of nearly
the power of two thousand horses, if it ever is. But what we have been
supposing as to the engine is just what many men have done. Poe wrote
"The Raven"; he was working then up to two thousand horse power. But
he wrote abundance of poor stuff, working at about twenty-five. Read
straight through the volumes of Wordsworth, and I think you will find
traces of the engine having worked at many different powers, varying
from twenty-five horses or less up two thousand or more. Go and hear a
really great preacher, when he is preaching in his own church upon a
common Sunday, and possibly you may hear a very ordinary sermon. I have
heard Mr. Melvill preach very poorly. You must not expect to find people
always at their best. It is a very unusual thing that even the ablest
men should be like Burke, who could not talk with an intelligent
stranger for five minutes without convincing the stranger that he had
talked for five minutes with a great man. And it is an awful thing, when
some clever youth is introduced to some local poet who has been told how
greatly the clever youth admires him, and what vast expectations
the clever youth has formed of his conversation, and when the local
celebrity makes a desperate effort to talk up to the expectations formed
of him. I have witnessed such a scene; and I can sincerely say that I
could not previously have believed that the local celebrity could have
made such a fool of himself. He was resolved to show that he deserved
his fame, and to show that the mind which had produced those lovely
verses in the country newspaper could not stoop to commonplace things.
* * * * *
Undue sensitiveness, and a too lowly estimate of their own powers, hang
heavily upon some men,--probably upon more men than one would imagine.
I believe that many a man whom you would take to be ambitious,
pushing, and self-complacent, is ever pressed with a sad conviction of
inferiority, and wishes nothing more than quietly to slip through life.
It would please and satisfy him, if he could but be assured that he is
just like other people. You may remember a touch of nature (that is, of
some people's nature) in Burns; you remember the simple exultation of
the peasant mother, when her daughter gets a sweetheart: she is "well
pleased to see _her_ bairn respeckit _like the lave_," that is, like the
other girls round. And undue humility, perhaps even befitting humility,
holds back sadly in the race of life. It is recorded that a weaver in a
certain village in Scotland was wont daily to offer a singular petition;
he prayed daily and fervently for a better opinion of himself. Yes, a
firm conviction of one's own importance is a great help in life. It
gives dignity of bearing; it does (so to speak) lift the horse over many
a fence at which one with a less confident heart would have broken down.
But the man who estimates himself and his place humbly and justly will
be ready to shrink aside, and let men of greater impudence and not
greater desert step before him. I have often seen, with a sad heart, in
the case of working people that manner, difficult to describe, which
comes of being what we in Scotland sometimes call _sair hadden down_. I
have seen the like in educated people, too. And not very many will take
the trouble to seek out and to draw out the modest merit that keeps
itself in the shade. The energetic, successful people of this world are
too busy in pushing each for himself to have time to do _that_. You will
find that people with abundant confidence, people who assume a good
deal, are not unfrequently taken at their own estimate of themselves. I
have seen a Queen's Counsel walk into court, after the case in which he
was engaged had been conducted so far by his junior, and conducted
as well as mortal could conduct it. But it was easy to see that the
complacent air of superior strength with which the Queen's Counsel took
the management out of his junior's hands conveyed to the jury, (a common
jury,) the belief that things were now to be managed in quite different
and vastly better style. And have you not known such a thing as that a
family, not a whit better, wealthier, or more respectable than all
the rest in the little country town or the country parish, do yet, by
carrying their heads higher, (no mortal could say why,) gradually elbow
themselves into a place of admitted social superiority? Everybody knows
exactly what they are, and from what they have sprung; but somehow,
by resolute assumption, by a quiet air of being better than their
neighbors, they draw ahead of them, and attain the glorious advantage
of one step higher on the delicately graduated social ladder of the
district. Now it is manifest, that, if such people had sense to see
their true position, and the absurdity of their pretensions, they would
assuredly not have gained that advantage, whatever it may be worth.
But sense and feeling are sometimes burdens in the race of life; that
is, they sometimes hold a man back from grasping material advantages
which he might have grasped, had he not been prevented by the possession
of a certain measure of common sense and right feeling. I doubt not, my
friend, that you have acquaintances who can do things which you could
not do for your life, and who by doing these things push their way in
life. They ask for what they want, and never let a chance go by them.
And though they may meet many rebuffs, they sometimes make a successful
venture. Impudence sometimes attains to a pitch of sublimity; and at
that point it has produced a very great impression upon many men. The
incapable person who started for a professorship has sometimes got it.
The man who, amid the derision of the county, published his address to
the electors, has occasionally got into the House of Commons. The vulgar
half-educated preacher, who without any introduction asked a patron for
a vacant living in the Church, has now and then got the living. And
however unfit you may be for a place, and however discreditable may have
been the means by which you got it, once you have actually held it for
two or three years people come to acquiesce in your holding it. They
accept the fact that you are there, just as we accept the fact that any
other evil exists in this world, without asking why, except on very
special occasions. I believe, too, that, in the matter of worldly
preferment, there is too much fatalism in many good men. They have a
vague trust that Providence will do more than it has promised. They are
ready to think, that, if it is God's will that they are to gain such a
prize, it will be sure to come their way without their pushing. That is
a mistake. Suppose you apply the same reasoning to your dinner. Suppose
you sit still in your study and say, "If I am to have dinner to-day, it
will come without effort of mine; and if I am not to have dinner to-day,
it will not come by any effort of mine; so here I sit still and do
nothing." Is not _that_ absurd? Yet that is what many a wise and good
man practically says about the place in life which would suit him, and
which would make him happy. Not Turks and Hindoos alone have a tendency
to believe in their _Kismet_. It is human to believe in that. And we
grasp at every event that seems to favor the belief. The other evening,
in the twilight, I passed two respectable-looking women who seemed like
domestic servants; and I caught one sentence which one said to the other
with great apparent faith. "You see," she said, "if a thing's to come
your way, it'll no gang by ye!" It was in a crowded street; but if
it had been in my country parish, where everyone knew me, I should
certainly have stopped the women, and told them, that, though what they
said was quite true, I feared they were understanding it wrongly, and
that the firm belief we all hold in God's Providence which reaches to
all events, and in His sovereignty which orders all things, should be
used to help us to be resigned, after we have done our best and failed,
but should never be used as an excuse for not doing our best. When we
have set our mind on any honest end, let us seek to compass it by every
honest means; and if we fail after having used every honest means,
_then_ let us fall back on the comfortable belief that things are
ordered by the Wisest and Kindest; _then_ is the time for the _Fiat
Voluntas Tua_.
You would not wish, my friend, to be deprived of common sense and of
delicate feeling, even though you could be quite sure that once _that_
drag-weight was taken off, you would spring forward to the van, and make
such running in the race of life as you never made before. Still, you
cannot help looking with a certain interest upon those people who, by
the want of these hindering influences, are enabled to do things and
say things which you never could. I have sometimes looked with no small
curiosity upon the kind of man who will come uninvited, and without
warning of his approach, to stay at another man's house: who will stay
on, quite comfortable and unmoved, though seeing plainly he is not
wanted: who will announce, on arriving, that his visit is to be for
three days, and who will then, without farther remark, and without
invitation of any kind, remain for a month or six weeks: and all
the while sit down to dinner every day with a perfectly easy and
unembarrassed manner. You and I, my reader, would rather live on much
less than sixpence a day than do all this. We _could not_ do it. But
some people not merely can do it, but can do it without any appearance
of effort. Oh, if the people who are victimized by these horse-leeches
of society could but gain a little of the thickness of skin which
characterizes the horse-leeches, and bid them be off, and not return
again till they are invited! To the same pachydermatous class belong
those individuals who will put all sorts of questions as to the private
affairs of other people, but carefully shy off from any similar
confidence as to their own affairs: also those individuals who borrow
small sums of money and never repay them, but go on borrowing till the
small sums amount to a good deal. To the same class may be referred
the persona who lay themselves out for saying disagreeable things, the
"candid friends" of Canning, the "people who speak their mind," who form
such pests of society. To find fault is to right-feeling men a very
painful thing; but some take to the work with avidity and delight. And
while people of cultivation shrink, with a delicate intuition, from
saying any thing which may give pain or cause uneasiness to others,
there are others who are ever painfully treading upon the moral corns of
all around them. Sometimes this is done designedly: as by Mr. Snarling,
who by long practice has attained the power of hinting and insinuating,
in the course of a forenoon call, as many unpleasant things as may
germinate into a crop of ill-tempers and worries which shall make the
house at which he called uncomfortable all that day. Sometimes it
is done unawares, as by Mr. Boor, who, through pure ignorance and
coarseness, is always bellowing out things which it is disagreeable
to some one, or to several, to hear. Which was it, I wonder, Boor or
Snarling, who once reached the dignity of the mitre, and who at prayers
in his house uttered this supplication on behalf of a lady visitor who
was kneeling beside him: "Bless our friend, Mrs. ----: give her a little
more common sense; and teach her to dress a little less like a tragedy
queen than she does at present"?
* * * * *
But who shall reckon up the countless circumstances which lie like a
depressing burden on the energies of men, and make them work at that
disadvantage which we have thought of under the figure of _carrying
weight in life?_ There are men who carry weight in a damp, marshy
neighborhood, who, amid bracing mountain air might have done things
which now they will never do. There are men who carry weight in an
uncomfortable house: in smoky chimneys: in a study with a dismal
look-out: in distance from a railway-station: in ten miles between them
and a bookseller's shop. Give another hundred a year of income, and the
poor struggling parson who preaches dull sermons will astonish you
by the talent he will exhibit when his mind is freed from the dismal
depressing influence of ceaseless scheming to keep the wolf from the
door. Let the poor little sick child grow strong and well, and with
how much better heart will its father face the work of life! Let the
clergyman who preached, in a spiritless enough way, to a handful of
uneducated rustics, be placed in a charge where weekly he has to address
a large cultivated congregation, and, with the new stimulus, latent
powers may manifest themselves which no one fancied he possessed, and he
may prove quite an eloquent and attractive preacher. A dull, quiet
man, whom you esteemed as a blockhead, may suddenly be valued very
differently when circumstances unexpectedly call out the solid qualities
he possesses, unsuspected before. A man devoid of brilliancy may on
occasion show that he possesses great good sense, or that he has the
power of sticking to his task in spite of discouragement. Let a man be
placed where dogged perseverance will stand him in stead, and you may
see what he can do when he has but a chance. The especial weight which
has held some men back, the thing which kept them from doing great
things and attaining great fame, has been just this: that they were not
able to say or to write what they have thought and felt. And, indeed,
a great poet is nothing more than the one man in a million who has the
gift to express that which has been in the mind and heart of multitudes.
If even the most commonplace of human beings could write all the poetry
he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the
hearts of many.
It is touching to witness the indications and vestiges of sweet and
admirable things which have been subjected to a weight which has
entirely crushed them down,--things which would have come out into
beauty and excellence, if they had been allowed a chance. You may
witness one of the saddest of all the losses of Nature in various old
maids. What kind hearts are there running to waste! What pure and gentle
affections blossom to be blighted! I dare say you have heard a young
lady of more than forty sing, and you have seen her eyes fill with tears
at the pathos of a very commonplace verse. Have you not thought that
there was the indication of a tender heart which might have made some
good man happy, and, in doing so, made herself happy, too? But it was
not to be. Still, it is sad to think that sometimes upon cats and dogs
there should be wasted the affection of a kindly human being! And you
know, too, how often the fairest promise of human excellence is never
suffered to come to fruit. You must look upon gravestones to find the
names of those who promised to be the best and noblest specimens of
the race. They died in early youth,--perhaps in early childhood. Their
pleasant faces, their singular words and ways, remain, not often talked
of, in the memories of subdued parents, or of brothers and sisters now
grown old, but never forgetting how _that_ one of the family, that
was as the flower of the flock, was the first to fade. It has been a
proverbial saying, you know, even from heathen ages, that those whom the
gods love die young. It is but an inferior order of human beings that
makes the living succession to carry on the human race.
* * * * *