Part 21 (1/2)
”The empty bags do not stand up,” he said.
”Well, what do you infer from that?” asked Jamie.
Silence Dogood did not answer, but the thought in his mind was evident.
It was simply this: that, come what would in life, he would not fail. He put his hand on Uncle Benjamin's shoulder, for who does not long to reach out his hand toward the fire in the cold, and to touch the form that entemples the most sympathetic heart? He dreamed there on the sea wall, where the loons seemed to laugh, and his dreams came true. Every attainment in life is first a dream.
Silence Dogood, dream on! Add intelligence to intelligence, virtue to virtue, benevolence to benevolence, faith to faith, for so ascends the ladder of life.
Uncle Benjamin was right. Let no man be laughed out of ideals that are true, because they do not reach their development at once.
Many young people stand in the situation in which we find young Franklin now. Many older people do in their early work. England laughed at Boswell, but he came to be held as the prince of biographers, and his methods as the true manner of picturing life and making the past live in letters.
People with a purpose who have been laughed at are many in the history of the world. From Romulus and the builders of the walls of Jerusalem to Columbus, ridicule makes a long record, and the world does not seem to grow wiser by its mistakes. Even Edison, in our own day, was ridiculed, when a youth, for his abstractions, and his efforts were ignored by scientists.
Two generations ago a jeering company of people, uttering comical jests under the cover of their hands, went down to a place on the banks of the Hudson to see, as they said, ”a crazy man attempt to move a boat by steam.” They returned with large eyes and free lips. _That boat moved._
In the early part of the century a young Scotchman named Carlyle laid before the greatest of English scholars and critics a ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled Sartor Resartus. The great critic read the ma.n.u.script and p.r.o.nounced it ”the stupidest stuff that he ever set eyes on.” He laughed at a ma.n.u.script that became one of the literary masterpieces of the century. A like experience had Milton, when he once said that he would write a poem that should be the glory of his country.
A young graduate named Longfellow wrote poems that came to him amid the woods and fields, and published them in newspapers and magazines, and gathered them into a book. The book fell into the hands of one then held to be supreme as a literary judge--Edgar Allen Poe. It was laughed at in ink that made the literary world laugh. The poet Longfellow's bust now holds an ideal place in Westminster Abbey, between the memorials of Dryden and Chaucer, and at the foot of the tombs of England's kings.
Keats was laughed at; Wordsworth was deemed a fool.
A number of disdainful doctors met on October 16, 1846, in the amphitheater of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital in Boston, to see a young medical student try to demonstrate that a patient upon whom a surgical operation was to be performed could be rendered insensible to pain. The sufferer was brought into the clear light. The young student touched his face with an unknown liquid whose strange odor filled the room. He was in oblivion. The knives cut and the blood flowed, and he knew it not. Pain was thus banished from the room of surgery. That young medical student and dentist was Dr. W. T. G. Morton, whose monument may be seen in the Boston Public Garden, and in whose honor the semicentennial of the discovery of anaesthesia has but recently been celebrated.
”So, with a few romantic boys and crazy girls you expect to see the world converted,” said a wise New York journal less than a century ago, as the first missionaries began to sail away. But the song still arose over the sea--
”In the desert let me labor, On the mountain let me till”--
until there came a missionary jubilee, whose anthems were repeated from land to land until they encircled the earth.
When Browning first published Sordello, the poem met with common ridicule. Even Alfred Tennyson is said to have remarked that ”there were but two lines in it that he could understand, and they were both untrue.” The first line of the poem was, ”Who will, _may_ hear Sordello's story told”; and the last line of the poem was, ”Who would, _has_ heard Sordello's story told.” Yet the poem is ranked now among the intellectual achievements of the century in the a.n.a.lysis of one of the deeper problems of life.
Samuel F. B. Morse was laughed at. McCormick, whose invention reaps the fields of the world, was ridiculed by the London Times, ”the Thunderer.”
”If that crazy Wheelwright calls again, do not admit him,” said a British consul to his servant, of one who wished to make new ports and a new commerce for South America, and whose plans are about to harness the Andes with railways. William Wheelwright's memory lives in grateful statues now.
Columbus was not only laughed at by the Council of Salamanca, but was jeered at by the children in the streets, as he journeyed from town to town holding his orphan boy by the hand. He wandered in the visions of G.o.d and the stars, and he came to say, after the shouts of homage that greeted him as the viceroy of isles, ”G.o.d made me the messenger of the new heavens and new earth, and told me where to find them!”
Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, presents a picture of the unfortunate condition of many lives of whom the world expected nothing, and for whom it had only the smile of incredulity when in them the G.o.dlike purpose appeared. He says:
”Hannibal had but one eye; Appius Claudius and Timoleon were blind, as were John, King of Bohemia, and Tiresais the prophet. Homer was blind; yet who, saith Tully, made more accurate, lively, or better descriptions with both his eyes! Democritus was blind, yet, as Laertius writes of him, he saw more than all Greece besides. . . . aesop was crooked, Socrates purblind, Democritus withered, Seneca lean and harsh, ugly to behold; yet show me so many flouris.h.i.+ng wits, such divine spirits.
Horace, a little, blear-eyed, contemptible fellow, yet who so sententious and wise? Marcilius Ficinus, Faber Stapulensis, a couple of dwarfs; Melanchthon, a short, hard-favored man, yet of incomparable parts of all three; Galba the emperor was crook-backed; Epictetus, lame; the great Alexander a little man of stature; Augustus Caesar, of the same pitch; Agesilaus, _despicabili forma_, one of the most deformed princes that Egypt ever had, was yet, in wisdom and knowledge, far beyond his predecessors.”
Why do I call your attention to these struggles in this place in a.s.sociation of an incident of a failure in life that was ridiculed?
It has been my lot, in a somewhat active life in the city of Boston for twenty-five years, to meet every day an inspiring name that all the world knows, and that stands for what right resolution, the overcoming of besetting sins in youth, and persevering energy may accomplish against the ridicule of the world. There have been many books written having that name as a t.i.tle--FRANKLIN.
I have almost daily pa.s.sed the solemn, pyramidal monument in the old Granary Burying Ground, between the Tremont Building and Park Street Church, that bears the names of the Franklin family, in which the parents have found eternal honor by the achievements of their son.