108 EVERY Failure IS A STEP TO SUCCESS. them before the fruit was ripe. They have acted like thoughtless plotters, who rush into the streets with swords drawn and banners flying, only to discover that the people are not prepared to join them. Their ambition is as abortive as a Perkin Warbeck's. But self-control moves with deliberation though with promptitude. It waits until the train is laid before it kindles the match. And if the match will not burn, or the powder ignite, it tries again, like Salkeld and Home before the gates of Delhi. There can scarcely be named any great man who has not failed the first time. In such defeat no shame lies; the shame consists in one's not retrieving it. Lord Beaconsfield made, as everybody knows, a signal failure in his maiden speech in the House of Commons. But he was not cowed by the derisive laughter which greeted him. With astonishing self-control, and no less astonishing self-knowledge, he exclaimed, "I have begun several times many things, and have succeeded in them at last. I shall sit down now; but the time will come when you will hear me." The command of temper, the mastery over self, which these words displayed, is almost sublime. The late Lord Lytton made many failures. His first novel was a failure; so was his first play; so was his first poem. But he would not yield to disappointment. He subdued his mortification, and resumed his pen, to earn the eventual distinction of a foremost place among our foremost novelists, and to contribute to the modern stage two of its most popular dramas. We should be disposed to define genius as the capacity of surviving failure; in self-control, at all events, it finds a powerful auxiliary and agent. Self-control is like armour which helps us most when the struggle is sharpest. Life cannot fail to bring with it its contrary gales and storms of thunder and lightning, but these will never do us hurt if we meet them bravely, and calmly, and hopefully. Sorrow never withstands us long if we eye it unflinchingly. It is only the craven who hears the feet of the pursuer. No doubt it is not always easy to detect "the uses of adversity;" but if there were no trial there would be no honour. How do we know that we possess any power of selfcommand until we have been proved? One thing experience teaches, that life brings no benediction for those who take it easily. The harvest cannot be reaped until the soil has been deeply ploughed and freely harrowed. "Learn to suffer and THE TRUE PROOF OF MEN." 109 be strong," says the poet; and certain it is that without suffering there can be no strength. Not, indeed, that suffering is or makes strength, but that it evokes the latent power, and rouses into action the energies that would have otherwise lain ingloriously supine. The discipline of life is a necessary prelude to the victory of life; and all that is finest, purest, and noblest in human nature is called forth by the presence of want, disappointment, pain, opposition, and injustice. Difficulties can be conquered only by decision; obstacles can be removed only by arduous effort. These test our manhood, and at the same time confirm our self-control. "In the reproof of chance Lies the true proof of men. The sea being smooth, Upon her patient breast, making their way With those of nobler bulk! But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage The gentle Thetis, and, anon, behold The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut, Like Perseus' horse; where's then the saucy boat -Shakespeare. One important business quality is the clearness of judgment which discerns and seizes the happy moment. Success in life depends largely on what fools call "good luck;" that is, on opportunities promptly utilised. When a man complains of his ill luck, be sure that he is involuntarily bearing witness to his carelessness of mind, his habits of indolence, apathy, and indifference. A French writer attributes the victory of Salamanca to Wellington's good fortune; but military critics will tell you that it was due to the vigilance which detected, and the ready resource which profited by, a false movement of the enemy. We have no confidence in young men who talk of good luck and bad luck, and seek to throw upon chance the burden of their own errors. There may be, as our great poet tells us, a tide in the affairs of men, but it rests with men themselves to take in at the flood, and so be wafted on to fortune. We will not discuss here the exact weight which attaches to circumstance as a factor in human affairs, but we believe that it TO EVERY MAN, THE OPPORTUNITY. rarely conquers a strong man. It is only the weak, the idle, the profligate, the thoughtless, who are beaten by it; and throwing themselves before the wheels of the Juggernaut, expect us to pity them as victims. In one of Richard Cumberland's comedies, a character is made to say, "It is not upon slight grounds that I despair. I have tried each walk, and am likely to starve at last. There is not a point to which the art and faculty of man can turn that I have not set mine to, but in vain. I am beat through every quarter of the compass. I have blustered for prerogative; I have bellowed for freedom ; I have offered to serve my country; I have engaged to betray it. Why, I have talked treason, writ treason; and if a man can't live by that, he can't live by anything. Then I set up as a bookseller, and people immediately leave off reading. If I were to turn butcher, I believe, on my conscience, they'd leave off eating." This last quip reminds us of the humorous exaggeration of Graves in Lord Lytton's play of "Money," when he declares that if he had been bred a hatter, children would have come into the world without heads! But such successive failures as the dramatist's creation records can spring only from the mistakes and follies of the individual; from the choice of a wrong calling; from want of assiduous effort; from deficiency in self-control. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible fact, that to every man, sooner or later, comes his opportunity; and the successful man is he who knows how to turn it to advantage. We know that this is not the general teaching. We know that Erskine, for example, asserted that success more frequently depended upon accident than upon the most brilliant gifts and the soundest scholarship. Another great lawyer said, "When I look round upon my competitors, and consider my own qualifications, the wonder to me is how I ever got the place I now occupy. I can only account for it by comparing the forensic career to one of the crossings in our great thoroughfares. You arrive just when it is clear and get over at once; another finds it blocked up, is kept waiting, and arrives too late at his destination, though the better pedestrian of the two." But this theory seems to us utterly untenable. In the case of Erskine himself, was it "luck," or ability and application, that carried him upward to the woolsack? Of what advantage would it be to a man who could not walk that THE FICTION OF Hidden gENIUS. III the thoroughfare was clear? Did Eldon owe his earldom and his high office to "luck"? The brilliant French litterateur, M. Taine, remarks, that Nature, being a sower of corn, and constantly putting her hand in the same sack, distributes over the soil regularly and in turn about the same proportionate quantity and quality of seed. But not all of the handfuls dropped from her hand as she strides over space germinate. A certain moral temperature is necessary, adds M. Taine, to develop certain talents; if such be wanting, the talents prove abortive. Consequently, as the temperature changes, so will the species of talent change; if it turn in an opposite direction, talent follows; so that, in general, we may conceive moral temperature as making a selection among different species of talent, allowing only this or that species to develop itself to the more or less complete exclusion of others. This is very philosophical, but very vague. It is difficult to understand what M. Taine means by "moral temperature;" but, at all events, we object to the theory of selection which he seems to put forward. Our. contention is, that the mass of men meet in this world with exactly the amount of success they deserve. No rule is without its exceptions; and we will allow that cases may at rare intervals occur of unrewarded genius and oppressed virtue; that the records of biography preserve the names of some (to use Shelley's phrase)" inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Still we adhere to our general proposition. In Gray's well-known lines— "Some mute inglorious Milton here may lie, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood,”— apart from the injustice done to the great Puritan leader, we see a gross and transparent fallacy. Does the reader, however wide his experience, know of such instances of neglected ability? Does he know of any peasant rhymester who, in more propitious circumstances, would develop into a Milton? of any village politician who, favoured by "good luck," would ripen into a Cromwell? Where are these dormant geniuses, these great men repressed and silenced by despotic circumstances? We may allow a Pliny to formulate the Pagan sentiment, "Some people refer their successes to virtue and ability, but it is all fate." We know, however, that the 112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUCK. history of life proves it to be untrue. It may very well have been that Alexander trusted to his "good luck;" and that Sulla, as Plutarch tells us, enjoyed to such an extent the smiles of circumstance as to receive the surname of "Fortunate;" but both Alexander and Sulla were men of genius, courage, and decision of character. We shall not yield even though against us be brought the dictum of Cicero, who, commenting upon the victories of Fabius, Maximus, Marcellus, Scipio, and Marius, says, "It was not only their courage but their fortune which induced the people to intrust them with the command of their armies. There can be little doubt but that, besides their abilities, there was a certain fortune appointed to attend them, to conduct them to honour and renown, and to unrivalled success in the management of important affairs." There speaks Cicero the augur and not Cicero the philosopher. In his sager moments he would have acknowledged that the good fortune of the heroes he names was won by consummate prudence and extraordinary intellectual power. It is true that so sagacious a mind as Bacon could assert that "outward accidents conduce much to fortune;" but he would have admitted, we suspect, that it is the privilege of genius to command and make use of these "outward accidents." The difference between the wise man and the fool is this, that the former seizes his opportunities, and the latter misses them. When we see Mohammed flying from his enemies, and saved by a spider's web; when we think that a Whig Ministry was hurled from power in England by the spilling of some water on a lady's gown; when we find a Franklin ascribing his turn of thought and conduct to the accident of a tattered copy of Cotton Mather's "Essays to do Good" falling into his hands; and Jeremy Bentham attributing similar effects to a single phrase, "The greatest good of the greatest number," which caught his eye at the end of a pamphlet ; when we see a Bruce passing through a series of perils greater than any which the most daring romance writer or melodramatist ever imagined for his hero, and then perishing from a fall in handing a lady downstairs after dinner; or a Speke accidentally shooting himself in crossing an English hedge, after escaping innumerable dangers in his journey to the remote and undiscovered fountains of the Nile; when we find that one man may suck an orange and be |