Part 4 (1/2)
Footprints which perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and s.h.i.+p-wrecked brother, Seeing, may take heart again.”
At the head of all biographies stands the Great Biography--the Book of Books. And what is the Bible, the most sacred and impressive of all books--the educator of youth, the guide of manhood, and the consoler of age--but a series of biographies of great heroes and patriarchs, prophets, kings and judges, culminating in the greatest biography of all--the Life embodied in the New Testament? How much have the great examples there set forth done for mankind! How many have drawn from them their best strength, their highest wisdom, their best nurture and admonition! Truly does a great and deeply pious writer describe the Bible as a book whose words ”live in the ear like a music that never can be forgotten--like the sound of church-bells which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead pa.s.ses into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not an individual with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.”
History itself is best studied in biography. Indeed, history is biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by individual men. ”What is all history,” says Emerson, ”but the work of ideas, a record of the incomparable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man? In its pages it is always persons we see more than principles. Historical events are interesting to us mainly in connection with the feelings, the sufferings, and interests of those by whom they are accomplished. In history we are surrounded by men long dead, but whose speech and whose deeds survive. We almost catch the sound of their voices; and what they did const.i.tutes the interest of history. We never feel personally interested in ma.s.ses of men; but we feel and sympathize with the individual actors, whose biographies afford the finest and most real touches in all great historical dramas.”
As in portraiture, so in biography--there must be light and shade.
The portrait-painter does not pose his sitter so as to bring out his deformities; nor does the biographer give undue prominence to the defects of the character he portrays. Not many men are so outspoken as Cromwell was when he sat to Cooper for his miniature: ”Paint me as I am,” said he, ”wart and all.” Yet, if we would have a faithful likeness of faces and characters, they must be painted as they are.
”Biography,” said Sir Walter Scott, ”the most interesting of every species of composition, loses all its interest with me when the shades and lights of the princ.i.p.al characters are not accurately and faithfully detailed. I can no more sympathize with a mere eulogist than I can with a ranting hero on the stage.”
It is to be regretted that in this day the country is flooded with cheap, trashy fiction, the general tendency of which is not only not educational, but is positively destructive. The desire to read this stuff is as demoralizing as the opium habit.
There are works of fiction, cheap and available, too, whose influence is elevating, and some knowledge of which is essential to the young man who is using his spare hours for the purpose of self-education.
There is no room for doubt that the surpa.s.sing interest which fiction, whether in poetry or prose, possesses for most minds arises mainly from the biographic element which it contains. Homer's ”Iliad ”owes its marvelous popularity to the genius which its author displayed in the portrayal of heroic character. Yet he does not so much describe his personages in detail as make them develop themselves by their actions. ”There are in Homer,” said Dr. Johnson, ”such characters of heroes and combination of qualities of heroes, that the united powers of mankind ever since have not produced any but what are to be found there.”
The genius of Shakespeare, also, was displayed in the powerful delineation of character, and the dramatic evolution of human pa.s.sions. His personages seem to be real--living and breathing before us. So, too, with Cervantes, whose Sancho Panza, though homely and vulgar, is intensely human. The characters in Le Sage's ”Gil Bias,” in Goldsmith's ”Vicar of Wakefield,” and in Scott's marvelous muster-roll, seem to us almost as real as persons whom we have actually known; and De Foe's greatest works are but so many biographies, painted in minute detail, with reality so apparently stamped upon every page that it is difficult to believe his Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack to have been fict.i.tious persons instead of real ones.
Then we have a fine American literature, which should be read after the history of the country is mastered, the stories of Cooper are fresh and invigorating, and those of Hawthorne are life studies and prose poems. Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, Bayard Taylor, and scores of other American writers, whose pens have added l.u.s.tre to the country, will well repay the reader.
Good books are among the best of companions; and, by elevating the thoughts and aspirations, they act as preservatives against low a.s.sociations. ”A natural turn for reading and intellectual pursuits,” says Thomas Hood, ”probably preserved me from the moral s.h.i.+p-wreck so apt to befall those who are deprived in early life of their parental pilotage. My books kept me from the ring, the dogpit, the tavern, the saloon. The closet a.s.sociate of Pope and Addison, the mind accustomed to the n.o.ble though silent discourse of Shakespeare and Milton, will hardly seek or put up with low company and slaves.”
It has been truly said that the best books are those which most resemble good actions. They are purifying, elevating, and sustaining; they enlarge and liberalize the mind; they preserve it against vulgar worldliness; they tend to produce high-minded cheerfulness and equanimity of character; they fas.h.i.+on, and shape, and humanize the mind. In the Northern universities, the schools in which the ancient cla.s.sics are studied are appropriately styled ”The Humanity Cla.s.ses.”
Erasmus, the great scholar, was even of opinion that books were the necessaries of life, and clothes the luxuries; and he frequently postponed buying the latter until he had supplied himself with the former. His greatest favorites were the writings of Cicero, which he says he always felt himself the better for reading. ”I can never,”
he says, ”read the works of Cicero on 'Old Age,' or 'Friends.h.i.+p,' or his 'Tusculan Disputations,' without fervently pressing them to my lips, without being penetrated with veneration for a mind little short of inspired by G.o.d himself.”
It is unnecessary to speak of the enormous moral influence which books have exercised upon the general civilization of mankind, from the Bible downward. They contain the treasured knowledge of the human race. They are the record of all labors, achievements, speculations, successes, and failures, in science, philosophy, religion, and morals. They have been the greatest motive-powers in all times. ”From the Gospel to the Contrat Social,” says De Bonald, ”it is books that have made revolutions.” Indeed, a great book is often a greater thing than a great battle. Even works of fiction have occasionally exercised immense power on society.
Bear in mind that it is not all we eat that nourishes, but what we digest. The learned man is a glutton as to books, but the educated man knows that, no matter how much is read, benefit is only derived from the thoughts that develop our own thoughts and strengthen our own minds.
CHAPTER IX
THE VALUE OF EXPERIENCE.
”What experience have you had?” This is apt to be the first question put by an employer to the applicant for a place, be he mechanic, clerk, or laborer. If you need a doctor, you would prefer to trust your case to a man of experience, rather than to one fresh from a medical college. Apart from the established reputation, that comes only with time, and natural abilities which count for much, the princ.i.p.al difference between men in every calling is the difference in their experiences.
If this experience is so essential, we must regard as wanting in judgment the young man, who, after a short service, imagines he is as well qualified to conduct the business as his superior in place.
No amount of natural ability, and no effort of energy can compensate for the training that comes from experience. Indeed, it is only after we have studied and tested ourselves, and overestimated our talents to our injury, more than once, that experience gives us a proper estimate of our own strength and weakness.
Contact with others is requisite to enable a man to know himself. It is only by mixing freely in the world that one can form a proper estimate of his own capacity. Without such experience, one is apt to become conceited, puffed up, and arrogant; at all events, he will remain ignorant of himself, though he may heretofore have enjoyed no other company.
Swift once said: ”It is an uncontroverted truth, that no man ever made an ill-figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.” Many persons, however, are readier to take measure of the capacity of others than of themselves. ”Bring him to me,” said a certain Dr. Tronchin, of Geneva, speaking of Rousseau-- ”bring him to me that I may see whether he has got anything in him!”--the probability being that Rousseau, who knew himself better, was much more likely to take measure of Tronchin than Tronchin was to take measure of him.
A due amount of self-knowledge is, therefore, necessary for those who would _be_ anything or _do_ anything in the world. It is also one of the first essentials to the formation of distinct personal convictions. Frederick Perthes once said to a young friend, ”You know only too well what you _can_ do; but till you have learned what you _can not_ do, you will neither accomplish anything of moment nor know inward peace.”
Any one who would profit by experience will never be above asking help. He who thinks himself already too wise to learn of others, will never succeed in doing anything either good or great. We have to keep our minds and hearts open, and never be ashamed to learn, with the a.s.sistance of those who are wiser and more experienced than ourselves.
The man made wise by experience endeavors to judge correctly of the things which come under his observation and form the subject of his daily life. What we call common sense is, for the most part, but the result of common experience wisely improved. Nor is great ability necessary to acquire it, so much as patience, accuracy, and watchfulness.
The results of experience are, of course, only to be achieved by living; and living is a question of time. The man of experience learns to rely upon time as his helper. ”Time and I against any two,” was a maxim of Cardinal Mazarin. Time has been described as a beautifier and as a consoler; but it is also a teacher. It is the food of experience, the soil of wisdom. It may be the friend or the enemy of youth; and time will sit beside the old as a consoler or as a tormentor, according as it has been used or misused, and the past life has been well or ill spent.