Character — Ch12b - The Discipline of Experience, cont.

The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.

It is usually the best stimulus and discipline of character.

It often evokes powers of action that, but for it, would have remained dormant.

As comets are sometimes revealed by eclipses, so heroes are brought to light by sudden calamity.

It seems as if, in certain cases, genius, like iron struck by the flint, needed the sharp and sudden blow of adversity to bring out the divine spark.

There are natures which blossom and ripen amidst trials, which would only wither and decay in an atmosphere of ease and comfort.

Thus it is good for men to be roused into action and stiffened into self-reliance by difficulty, rather than to slumber away their lives in useless apathy and indolence.

[213] It is the struggle that is the condition of victory.

If there were no difficulties, there would be no need of efforts; if there were no temptations, there would be no training in self-control, and but little merit in virtue; if there were no trial and suffering, there would be no education in patience and resignation.

Thus difficulty, adversity, and suffering are not all evil, but often the best source of strength, discipline, and virtue.

For the same reason, it is often of advantage for a man to be under the necessity of having to struggle with poverty and conquer it.

"He who has battled," says Carlyle, "were it only with poverty and hard toil, will be found stronger and more expert than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the provision waggons, or even rest unwatchfully 'abiding by the stuff.'

" Scholars have found poverty tolerable compared with the privation of intellectual food.

Riches weigh much more heavily upon the mind.

"I cannot but choose say to Poverty," said Richter, "Be welcome!

so that thou come not too late in life."

Poverty, Horace tells us, drove him to poetry, and poetry introduced him to Varus and Virgil and Maecenas.

"Obstacles," says Michelet, "are great incentives.

I lived for whole years upon a Virgil, and found myself well off.

An odd volume of Racine, purchased by chance at a stall on the quay, created the poet of Toulon."

The Spaniards are even said to have meanly rejoiced the poverty of Cervantes, but for which they supposed the production of his great works might have been prevented.

When the Archbishop of Toledo visited the French ambassador at Madrid, the gentlemen in the suite of the latter expressed their high admiration of the writings of the author of 'Don Quixote,' and intimated their desire of becoming acquainted with one who had given them so much pleasure.

The answer they received was, that Cervantes had borne arms in the service of his country, and was now old and poor.

"What!"

exclaimed one of the Frenchmen, "is not Senor Cervantes in good circumstances?

Why is he not maintained, then, out of the public treasury?"

"Heaven forbid!"

was the reply, "that his necessities should be ever relieved, if it is those which make him write; since it is his poverty that makes the world rich!"

[214] It is not prosperity so much as adversity, not wealth so much as poverty, that stimulates the perseverance of strong and healthy natures, rouses their energy and developes their character.

Burke said of himself: "I was not rocked, and swaddled, and dandled into a legislator.

'NITOR IN ADVERSUM' is the motto for a man like you."

Some men only require a great difficulty set in their way to exhibit the force of their character and genius; and that difficulty once conquered becomes one of the greatest incentives to their further progress.

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failure.

By far the best experience of men is made up of their remembered failures in dealing with others in the affairs of life.

Such failures, in sensible men, incite to better self-management, and greater tact and self-control, as a means of avoiding them in the future.

Ask the diplomatist, and he will tell you that he has learned his art through being baffled, defeated, thwarted, and circumvented, far more than from having succeeded.

Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

It has disciplined them experimentally, and taught them what to do as well as what NOT to do--which is often still more important in diplomacy.

Many have to make up their minds to encounter failure again and again before they succeed; but if they have pluck, the failure will only serve to rouse their courage, and stimulate them to renewed efforts.

Talma, the greatest of actors, was hissed off the stage when he first appeared on it.

Lacordaire, one of the greatest preachers of modern times, only acquired celebrity after repeated failures.

Montalembert said of his first public appearance in the Church of St. Roch: "He failed completely, and on coming out every one said, 'Though he may be a man of talent, he will never be a preacher.'

" Again and again he tried until he succeeded; and only two years after his DEBUT, Lacordaire was preaching in Notre Dame to audiences such as few French orators have addressed since the time of Bossuet and Massillon.

When Mr. Cobden first appeared as a speaker, at a public meeting in Manchester, he completely broke down, and the chairman apologized for his failure.

Sir James Graham and Mr. Disraeli failed and were derided at first, and only succeeded by dint of great labour and application.

At one time Sir James Graham had almost given up public speaking in despair.

He said to his friend Sir Francis Baring: "I have tried it every way--extempore, from notes, and committing all to memory--and I can't do it.

I don't know why it is, but I am afraid I shall never succeed."

Yet, by dint of perseverance, Graham, like Disraeli, lived to become one of the most effective and impressive of parliamentary speakers.

Failures in one direction have sometimes had the effect of forcing the farseeing student to apply himself in another.

Thus Prideaux's failure as a candidate for the post of parish-clerk of Ugboro, in Devon, led to his applying himself to learning, and to his eventual elevation to the bishopric of Worcester.

When Boileau, educated for the bar, pleaded his first cause, he broke down amidst shouts of laughter.

He next tried the pulpit, and failed there too.

And then he tried poetry, and succeeded.

Fontenelle and Voltaire both failed at the bar.

So Cowper, through his diffidence and shyness, broke down when pleading his first cause, though he lived to revive the poetic art in England.

Montesquieu and Bentham both failed as lawyers, and forsook the bar for more congenial pursuits--the latter leaving behind him a treasury of legislative procedure for all time.

Goldsmith failed in passing as a surgeon; but he wrote the 'Deserted Village' and the 'Vicar of Wakefield;' whilst Addison failed as a speaker, but succeeded in writing 'Sir Roger de Coverley,' and his many famous papers in the 'Spectator.'

Even the privation of some important bodily sense, such as sight or hearing, has not been sufficient to deter courageous men from zealously pursuing the struggle of life.

Milton, when struck by blindness, "still bore up and steered right onward."

His greatest works were produced during that period of his life in which he suffered most--when he was poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, and persecuted.

The lives of some of the greatest men have been a continuous struggle with difficulty and apparent defeat.

Dante produced his greatest work in penury and exile.

Banished from his native city by the local faction to which he was opposed, his house was given up to plunder, and he was sentenced in his absence to be burnt alive.

When informed by a friend that he might return to Florence, if he would consent to ask for pardon and absolution, he replied: "No!

This is not the way that shall lead me back to my country.

I will return with hasty steps if you, or any other, can open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame or the honour of Dante; but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then to Florence I shall never return."

His enemies remaining implacable, Dante, after a banishment of twenty years, died in exile.

They even pursued him after death, when his book, 'De Monarchia,' was publicly burnt at Bologna by order of the Papal Legate.

Camoens also wrote his great poems mostly in banishment.

Tired of solitude at Santarem, he joined an expedition against the Moors, in which he distinguished himself by his bravery.

He lost an eye when boarding an enemy's ship in a sea-fight.

At Goa, in the East Indies, he witnessed with indignation the cruelty practised by the Portuguese on the natives, and expostulated with the governor against it.

He was in consequence banished from the settlement, and sent to China.

In the course of his subsequent adventures and misfortunes, Camoens suffered shipwreck, escaping only with his life and the manuscript of his 'Lusiad.'

Persecution and hardship seemed everywhere to pursue him.

At Macao he was thrown into prison.

Escaping from it, he set sail for Lisbon, where he arrived, after sixteen years' absence, poor and friendless.

His 'Lusiad,' which was shortly after published, brought him much fame, but no money.

But for his old Indian slave Antonio, who begged for his master in the streets, Camoens must have perished.

[215] As it was, he died in a public almshouse, worn out by disease and hardship.

An inscription was placed over his grave:--"Here lies Luis de Camoens: he excelled all the poets of his time: he lived poor and miserable; and he died so, MDLXXIX."

This record, disgraceful but truthful, has since been removed; and a lying and pompous epitaph, in honour of the great national poet of Portugal, has been substituted in its stead.

Even Michael Angelo was exposed, during the greater part of his life, to the persecutions of the envious--vulgar nobles, vulgar priests, and sordid men of every degree, who could neither sympathise with him, nor comprehend his genius.

When Paul IV.

condemned some of his work in 'The Last Judgment,' the artist observed that "The Pope would do better to occupy himself with correcting the disorders and indecencies which disgrace the world, than with any such hypercriticisms upon his art."

Tasso also was the victim of almost continual persecution and calumny.

After lying in a madhouse for seven years, he became a wanderer over Italy; and when on his deathbed, he wrote: "I will not complain of the malignity of fortune, because I do not choose to speak of the ingratitude of men who have succeeded in dragging me to the tomb of a mendicant."

But Time brings about strange revenges.

The persecutors and the persecuted often change places; it is the latter who are great--the former who are infamous.

Even the names of the persecutors would probably long ago have been forgotten, but for their connection with the history of the men whom they have persecuted.

Thus, who would now have known of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, but for his imprisonment of Tasso?

Or, who would have heard of the existence of the Grand Duke of Wurtemburg of some ninety years back, but for his petty persecution of Schiller?

Science also has had its martyrs, who have fought their way to light through difficulty, persecution, and suffering.

We need not refer again to the cases of Bruno, Galileo, and others, [216] persecuted because of the supposed heterodoxy of their views.

But there have been other unfortunates amongst men of science, whose genius has been unable to save them from the fury of their enemies.

Thus Bailly, the celebrated French astronomer [21who had been mayor of Paris], and Lavoisier, the great chemist, were both guillotined in the first French Revolution.

When the latter, after being sentenced to death by the Commune, asked for a few days' respite, to enable him to ascertain the result of some experiments he had made during his confinement, the tribunal refused his appeal, and ordered him for immediate execution--one of the judges saying, that "the Republic had no need of philosophers."

In England also, about the same time, Dr. Priestley, the father of modern chemistry, had his house burnt over his head, and his library destroyed, amidst shouts of "No philosophers!"

and he fled from his native country to lay his bones in a foreign land.

The work of some of the greatest discoverers has been done in the midst of persecution, difficulty, and suffering.

Columbus, who discovered the New World and gave it as a heritage to the Old, was in his lifetime persecuted, maligned, and plundered by those whom he had enriched.

Mungo Park's drowning agony in the African river he had discovered, but which he was not to live to describe; Clapperton's perishing of fever on the banks of the great lake, in the heart of the same continent, which was afterwards to be rediscovered and described by other explorers;

Franklin's perishing in the snow--it might be after he had solved the long-sought problem of the North-west Passage--are among the most melancholy events in the history of enterprise and genius.