nixville, Pa." 11 Owego, N. Y. " 27 Kennett, Pa.
" 12 Patchogue, LI.,N.Y. " 28 Oxford, Pa.
" 13 Port Jervis, N. Y. " 29 *Oxford, Pa.
* Preach on Sunday.
And all these hardships, all this traveling and lecturing, which would test the endurance of the youngest and strongest, this man of over seventy a.s.sumes without receiving a particle of personal gain, for every dollar that he makes by it is given away in helping those who need helping.
That Dr. Conwell is intensely modest is one of the curious features of his character. He sincerely believes that to write his life would be, in the main, just to tell what people have done for him. He knows and admits that he works unweariedly, but in profound sincerity he ascribes the success of his plans to those who have seconded and a.s.sisted him. It is in just this way that he looks upon every phase of his life. When he is reminded of the devotion of his old soldiers, he remembers it only with a sort of pleased wonder that they gave the devotion to him, and he quite forgets that they loved him because he was always ready to sacrifice ease or risk his own life for them.
He deprecates praise; if any one likes him, the liking need not be shown in words, but in helping along a good work. That his church has succeeded has been because of the devotion of the people; that the university has succeeded is because of the splendid work of the teachers and pupils; that the hospitals have done so much has been because of the n.o.ble services of physicians and nurses. To him, as he himself expresses it, realizing that success has come to his plans, it seems as if the realities are but dreams. He is astonished by his own success. He thinks mainly of his own shortcomings. "G.o.d and man have ever been very patient with me." His depression is at times profound when he compares the actual results with what he would like them to be, for always his hopes have gone soaring far in advance of achievement. It is the "Hitch your chariot to a star" idea.
His modesty goes hand-in-hand with kindliness, and I have seen him let himself be introduced in his own church to his congregation, when he is going to deliver a lecture there, just because a former pupil of the university was present who, Conwell knew, was ambitious to say something inside of the Temple walls, and this seemed to be the only opportunity.
I have noticed, when he travels, that the face of the newsboy brightens as he buys a paper from him, that the porter is all happiness, that conductor and brakeman are devotedly anxious to be of aid. Everywhere the man wins love. He loves humanity and humanity responds to the love.
He has always won the affection of those who knew him, and Bayard Taylor was one of the many; he and Bayard Taylor loved each other for long acquaintance and fellow experiences as world-wide travelers, back in the years when comparatively few Americans visited the Nile and the Orient, or even Europe.
When Taylor died there was a memorial service in Boston at which Conwell was asked to preside, and, as he wished for something more than addresses, he went to Longfellow and asked him to write and read a poem for the occasion. Longfellow had not thought of writing anything, and he was too ill to be present at the services, but, there always being something contagiously inspiring about Russell Conwell when he wishes something to be done, the poet promised to do what he could. And he wrote and sent the beautiful lines beginning:
_Dead he lay among his books, The peace of G.o.d was in his looks_.
Many men of letters, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, were present at the services, and Dr. Conwell induced Oliver Wendell Holmes to read the lines, and they were listened to amid profound silence, to their fine ending.
Conwell, in spite of his widespread hold on millions of people, has never won fame, recognition, general renown, compared with many men of minor achievements. This seems like an impossibility. Yet it is not an impossibility, but a fact. Great numbers of men of education and culture are entirely ignorant of him and his work in the world--men, these, who deem themselves in touch with world-affairs and with the ones who make and move the world. It is inexplicable, this, except that never was there a man more devoid of the faculty of self-exploitation, self-advertising, than Russell Conwell. Nor, in the mere reading of them, do his words appeal with anything like the force of the same words uttered by himself, for always, with his spoken words, is his personality. Those who have heard Russell Conwell, or have known him personally, recognize the charm of the man and his immense forcefulness; but there are many, and among them those who control publicity through books and newspapers, who, though they ought to be the warmest in their enthusiasm, have never felt drawn to hear him, and, if they know of him at all, think of him as one who pleases in a simple way the commoner folk, forgetting in their pride that every really great man pleases the common ones, and that simplicity and directness are attributes of real greatness.
But Russell Conwell has always won the admiration of the really great, as well as of the humbler millions. It is only a supposedly cultured cla.s.s in between that is not thoroughly acquainted with what he has done.
Perhaps, too, this is owing to his having cast in his lot with the city, of all cities, which, consciously or unconsciously, looks most closely to family and place of residence as criterions of merit--a city with which it is almost impossible for a stranger to become affiliated--or aphiladelphiated, as it might be expressed--and Philadelphia, in spite of all that Dr. Conwell has done, has been under the thrall of the fact that he went north of Market Street--that fatal fact understood by all who know Philadelphia--and that he made no effort to make friends in Rittenhouse Square. Such considerations seem absurd in this twentieth century, but in Philadelphia they are still potent. Tens of thousands of Philadelphians love him, and he is honored by its greatest men, but there is a cla.s.s of the pseudo-cultured who do not know him or appreciate him. And it needs also to be understood that, outside of his own beloved Temple, he would prefer to go to a little church or a little hall and to speak to the forgotten people, in the hope of encouraging and inspiring them and filling them with hopeful glow, rather than to speak to the rich and comfortable.
His dearest hope, so one of the few who are close to him told me, is that no one shall come into his life without being benefited. He does not say this publicly, nor does he for a moment believe that such a hope could be fully realized, but it is very dear to his heart; and no man spurred by such a hope, and thus bending all his thoughts toward the poor, the hard-working, the unsuccessful, is in a way to win honor from the Scribes; for we have Scribes now quite as much as when they were cla.s.sed with Pharisees. It is not the first time in the world"s history that Scribes have failed to give their recognition to one whose work was not among the great and wealthy.
That Conwell himself has seldom taken any part whatever in politics except as a good citizen standing for good government; that, as he expresses it, he never held any political office except that he was once on a school committee, and also that he does not identify himself with the so-called "movements" that from time to time catch public attention, but aims only and constantly at the quiet betterment of mankind, may be mentioned as additional reasons why his name and fame have not been steadily blazoned.
He knows and will admit that he works hard and has all his life worked hard. "Things keep turning my way because I"m on the job," as he whimsically expressed it one day; but that is about all, so it seems to him.
And he sincerely believes that his life has in itself been without interest; that it has been an essentially commonplace life with nothing of the interesting or the eventful to tell. He is frankly surprised that there has ever been the desire to write about him. He really has no idea of how fascinating are the things he has done. His entire life has been of positive interest from the variety of things accomplished and the unexpectedness with which he has accomplished them.
Never, for example, was there such an organizer. In fact, organization and leadership have always been as the breath of life to him. As a youth he organized debating societies and, before the war, a local military company. While on garrison duty in the Civil War he organized what is believed to have been the first free school for colored children in the South. One day Minneapolis happened to be spoken of, and Conwell happened to remember that he organized, when he was a lawyer in that city, what became the first Y.M.C.A. branch there. Once he even started a newspaper. And it was natural that the organizing instinct, as years advanced, should lead him to greater and greater things, such as his church, with the numerous a.s.sociations formed within itself through his influence, and the university--the organizing of the university being in itself an achievement of positive romance.
"A life without interest!" Why, when I happened to ask, one day, how many Presidents he had known since Lincoln, he replied, quite casually, that he had "written the lives of most of them in their own homes"; and by this he meant either personally or in collaboration with the American biographer Abbott.
The many-sidedness of Conwell is one of the things that is always fascinating. After you have quite got the feeling that he is peculiarly a man of to-day, lecturing on to-day"s possibilities to the people of to-day, you happen upon some such fact as that he attracted the attention of the London _Times_ through a lecture on Italian history at Cambridge in England; or that on the evening of the day on which he was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of the United States he gave a lecture in Washington on "The Curriculum of the Prophets in Ancient Israel." The man"s life is a succession of delightful surprises.
An odd trait of his character is his love for fire. He could easily have been a veritable fire-worshiper instead of an orthodox Christian! He has always loved a blaze, and he says reminiscently that for no single thing was he punished so much when he was a child as for building bonfires.
And after securing possession, as he did in middle age, of the house where he was born and of a great acreage around about, he had one of the most enjoyable times of his life in tearing down old buildings that needed to be destroyed and in heaping up fallen trees and rubbish and in piling great heaps of wood and setting the great piles ablaze. You see, there is one of the secrets of his strength--he has never lost the capacity for fiery enthusiasm!
Always, too, in these later years he is showing his strength and enthusiasm in a positively n.o.ble way. He has for years been a keen sufferer from rheumatism and neuritis, but he has never permitted this to interfere with his work or plans. He makes little of his sufferings, and when he slowly makes his way, bent and twisted, downstairs, he does not want to be noticed. "I"m all right," he will say if any one offers to help, and at such a time comes his nearest approach to impatience. He wants his suffering ignored. Strength has always been to him so precious a belonging that he will not relinquish it while he lives. "I"m all right!" And he makes himself believe that he is all right even though the pain becomes so severe as to demand ma.s.sage. And he will still, even when suffering, talk calmly, or write his letters, or attend to whatever matters come before him. It is the Spartan boy hiding the pain of the gnawing fox. And he never has let pain interfere with his presence on the pulpit or the platform. He has once in a while gone to a meeting on crutches and then, by the force of will, and inspired by what he is to do, has stood before his audience or congregation, a man full of strength and fire and life.
VII. HOW A UNIVERSITY WAS FOUNDED
THE story of the foundation and rise of Temple University is an extraordinary story; it is not only extraordinary, but inspiring; it is not only inspiring, but full of romance.
For the university came out of nothing!--nothing but the need of a young man and the fact that he told the need to one who, throughout his life, has felt the impulse to help any one in need and has always obeyed the impulse.
I asked Dr. Conwell, up at his home in the Berkshires, to tell me himself just how the university began, and he said that it began because it was needed and succeeded because of the loyal work of the teachers.
And when I asked for details he was silent for a while, looking off into the brooding twilight as it lay over the waters and the trees and the hills, and then he said:
"It was all so simple; it all came about so naturally. One evening, after a service, a young man of the congregation came to me and I saw that he was disturbed about something. I had him sit down by me, and I knew that in a few moments he would tell me what was troubling him.
""Dr. Conwell," he said, abruptly, "I earn but little money, and I see no immediate chance of earning more. I have to support not only myself, but my mother. It leaves nothing at all. Yet my longing is to be a minister. It is the one ambition of my life. Is there anything that I can do?"
""Any man," I said to him, "with the proper determination and ambition can study sufficiently at night to win his desire."
""I have tried to think so," said he, "but I have not been able to see anything clearly. I want to study, and am ready to give every spare minute to it, but I don"t know how to get at it."
"I thought a few minutes, as I looked at him. He was strong in his desire and in his ambition to fulfil it--strong enough, physically and mentally, for work of the body and of the mind--and he needed something more than generalizations of sympathy.
""Come to me one evening a week and I will begin teaching you myself," I said, "and at least you will in that way make a beginning"; and I named the evening.
"His face brightened and he eagerly said that he would come, and left me; but in a little while he came hurrying back again. "May I bring a friend with me?" he said.
"I told him to bring as many as he wanted to, for more than one would be an advantage, and when the evening came there were six friends with him.
And that first evening I began to teach them the foundations of Latin."
He stopped as if the story was over. He was looking out thoughtfully into the waning light, and I knew that his mind was busy with those days of the beginning of the inst.i.tution he so loves, and whose continued success means so much to him. In a little while he went on:
"That was the beginning of it, and there is little more to tell. By the third evening the number of pupils had increased to forty; others joined in helping me, and a room was hired; then a little house, then a second house. From a few students and teachers we became a college. After a while our buildings went up on Broad Street alongside the Temple Church, and after another while we became a university. From the first our aim"--(I noticed how quickly it had become "our" instead of "my")--"our aim was to give education to those who were unable to get it through the usual channels. And so that was really all there was to it."
That was typical of Russell Conwell--to tell with brevity of what he has done, to point out the beginnings of something, and quite omit to elaborate as to the results. And that, when you come to know him, is precisely what he means you to understand--that it is the beginning of anything that is important, and that if a thing is but earnestly begun and set going in the right way it may just as easily develop big results as little results.
But his story was very far indeed from being "all there was to it," for he had quite omitted to state the extraordinary fact that, beginning with those seven pupils, coming to his library on an evening in 1884, the Temple University has numbered, up to Commencement-time in 1915, 88,821 students! Nearly one hundred thousand students, and in the lifetime of the founder! Really, the magnitude of such a work cannot be exaggerated, nor the vast importance of it when it is considered that most of these eighty-eight thousand students would not have received their education had it not been for Temple University. And it all came from the instant response of Russell Conwell to the immediate need presented by a young man without money!
"And there is something else I want to say," said Dr. Conwell, unexpectedly. "I want to say, more fully than a mere casual word, how n.o.bly the work was taken up by volunteer helpers; professors from the University of Pennsylvania and teachers from the public schools and other local inst.i.tutions gave freely of what time they could until the new venture was firmly on its way. I honor those who came so devotedly to help. And it should be remembered that in those early days the need was even greater than it would now appear, for there were then no night schools or manual-training schools. Since then the city of Philadelphia has gone into such work, and as fast as it has taken up certain branches the Temple University has put its energy into the branches just higher.
And there seems no lessening of the need of it," he added, ponderingly.