"If you will study a year I will teach you to sing well," said an Italian music teacher to a pupil who wished to know what can be hoped for with study; "if two years, you may excel. If you will practice the scale constantly for three years, I will make you the best tenor in Italy; if for four years, you may have the world at your feet."
Perceiving that Caffarelli had a fine tenor voice and unusual talent, a teacher offered to give him a thorough musical education free of charge, provided the pupil would promise never to complain of the course of instruction given. The first year the master gave nothing but the scales, compelling the youth to practice them over and over again. The second year it was the same, the third, and the fourth, the conditions of the bargain being the only reply to any question in relation to a change from such monotonous drill. The fifth year the teacher introduced chromatics and thorough ba.s.s, and, at its close, when Caffarelli looked for something more brilliant and interesting, the master said: "Go, my son, I can teach you nothing more. You are the first singer of Italy and of the world." The _mastery_ of scales and diatonics gave him power to sing anything.
"Keep at the helm," said President Porter; "steer your own ship, and remember that the great art of commanding is to take a fair share of the work. Strike out. a.s.sume your own position. Put potatoes in a cart, over a rough road, and the small ones go to the bottom."
"Never depend upon your genius," said John Ruskin, in the words of Joshua Reynolds; "if you have talent, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply the deficiency."
"The only merit to which I lay claim," said Hugh Miller, "is that of patient research--a merit in which whoever wills may rival or surpa.s.s me; and this humble faculty of patience when rightly developed may lead to more extraordinary development of ideas than even genius itself."
t.i.tian, the greatest master of color the world has seen, used to say: "White, red and black, these are all the colors that a painter needs, but he must know how to use them." It took fifty years of constant, hard practice to bring him to his full mastery.
"How much grows everywhere if we do but wait!" exclaims Carlyle. "Not a difficulty but can transfigure itself into a triumph; not even a deformity, but if our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear to us."
Persistency is characteristic of all men who have accomplished anything great. They may lack in some other particular, have many weaknesses, or eccentricities, but the quality of persistence is never absent in a successful man. No matter what opposition he meets or what discouragements overtake him, he is always persistent. Drudgery cannot disgust him, obstacles cannot discourage him, labor cannot weary him. He will persist, no matter what comes or what goes; it is a part of his nature. He could almost as easily stop breathing.
It is not so much brilliancy of intellect or fertility of resource as persistency of effort, constancy of purpose, that makes a great man.
Persistency always gives confidence. Everybody believes in the man who persists. He may meet misfortunes, sorrows and reverses, but everybody believes that he will ultimately triumph because they know there is no keeping him down. "Does he keep at it, is he persistent?" is the question which the world asks of a man.
Even the man with small ability will often succeed if he has the quality of persistence, where a genius without persistence would fail.
"How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement appertaining to it," said d.i.c.kens. "I will only add to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong point of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success."
"I am sorry to say that I don"t think this is in your line," said Woodfall the reporter, after Sheridan had made his first speech in Parliament. "You had better have stuck to your former pursuits." With head on his hand Sheridan mused for a time, then looked up and said, "It is in me, and it shall come out of me." From the same man came that harangue against Warren Hastings which the orator Fox called the best speech ever made in the House of Commons.
"The man who is perpetually hesitating which of two things he will do first," said William Wirt, "will do neither." The man who resolves, but suffers his resolution to be changed by the first counter-suggestion of a friend--who fluctuates from opinion to opinion, from plan to plan, and veers like a weather-c.o.c.k to every point of the compa.s.s, with every breath of caprice that blows, can never accomplish anything great or useful. Instead of being progressive in anything, he will be at best stationary, and, more probably, retrograde in all.
Great writers have ever been noted for their tenacity of purpose. Their works have not been flung off from minds aglow with genius, but have been elaborated and elaborated into grace and beauty, until every trace of their efforts has been obliterated. Bishop Butler worked twenty years incessantly on his "a.n.a.logy," and even then was so dissatisfied that he wanted to burn it. Rousseau says he obtained the ease and grace of his style only by ceaseless inquietude, by endless blotches and erasures.
Virgil worked eleven years on the aeneid. The note-books of great men like Hawthorne and Emerson are tell-tales of enormous drudgery, of the years put into a book which may be read in an hour. Montesquieu was twenty-five years writing his "Esprit de Louis," yet you can read it in sixty minutes. Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three lines, when he had written five hundred lines. "But your five hundred lines in three days will be dead and forgotten, while my three lines will live forever," replied Euripides.
Sir Fowell Buxton thought he could do as well as others, if he devoted twice as much time and labor as they did. Ordinary means and extraordinary application have done most of the great things in the world.
Defoe offered the ma.n.u.script of Robinson Crusoe to many booksellers and all but one refused it. Addison"s first play, Rosamond, was hissed off the stage, but the editor of the Spectator and Tattler was made of stern stuff and was determined that the world should listen to him, and it did.
David Livingstone said: "Those who have never carried a book through the press can form no idea of the amount of toil it involves. The process has increased my respect for authors a thousand-fold. I think I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book."
"For the statistics of the negro population of South America alone,"
says Robert Dale Owen, "I examined more than a hundred and fifty volumes."
Another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs and whole pages of his book as many as fifty times.
It is said of one of Longfellow"s poems that it was written in four weeks, but that he spent six months in correcting and cutting it down.
Bulwer declared that he had rewritten some of his briefer productions as many as eight or nine times before their publication. One of Tennyson"s pieces was rewritten fifty times. John Owen was twenty years on his "Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews;" Gibbon on his "Decline and Fall," twenty years; and Adam Clark, on his "Commentary," twenty-six years. Carlyle spent fifteen years on his "Frederick the Great."
A great deal of time is consumed in reading before some books are prepared. George Eliot read 1000 books before she wrote "Daniel Deronda." Allison read 2000 before he completed his history. It is said of another that he read 20,000 and wrote only two books.
Virgil spent several years on the Georgics, which could be printed in two columns of an ordinary newspaper.
"Generally speaking," said Sydney Smith, "the life of all truly great men has been a life of intense and incessant labor. They have commonly pa.s.sed the first half of life in the gross darkness of indigent humility,--overlooked, mistaken, condemned by weaker men,--thinking while others slept, reading while others rioted, feeling something within them that told them they should not always be kept down among the dregs of the world. And then, when their time has come, and some little accident has given them their first occasion, they have burst out into the light and glory of public life, rich with the spoils of time, and mighty in all the labors and struggles of the mind."
Malibran said: "If I neglect my practice a day, I see the difference in my execution; if for two days, my friends see it; and if for a week, all the world knows my failure." Constant, persistent struggle she found to be the price of her marvelous power.
"If I am building a mountain," said Confucius, "and stop before the last basketful of earth is placed on the summit, I have failed."
"Young gentlemen," said Francis Wayland, "remember that nothing can stand day"s work."
America will never produce any great art until our resources are developed and we get more time. As a people we have not yet learned the art of patience. We do not know how to wait. Think of an American artist spending seven, eight, ten, and even twelve years on a single painting as did t.i.tian, Michael Angelo and many of the other old masters. Think of an American sculptor spending years and years upon a single masterpiece, as did the Greeks and Romans. We have not yet learned the secret of working and waiting.
"The single element in all the progressive movements of my pencil," said the great David Wilkie, "was persevering industry."
The kind of ability which most men rank highest is that which enables its possessor to do what he undertakes, and attain the object of his ambition or desire.
"The reader of a newspaper does not see the first insertion of an ordinary advertis.e.m.e.nt," says a French writer. "The second insertion he sees, but does not read; the third insertion he reads; the fourth insertion he looks at the price; the fifth insertion he speaks of it to his wife; the sixth insertion he is ready to purchase, and the seventh insertion he purchases."
The large fees which make us envy the great lawyer or doctor are not remuneration for the few minutes" labor of giving advice, but for the mental stores gathered during the precious spare moments of many a year while others were sleeping or enjoying holidays. A client will frequently object to paying fifty dollars for an opinion written in five minutes, but such an opinion could be written only by one who has read a hundred law books. If the lawyer had not previously read those books, but should keep a client waiting until he could read them with care, there would be fewer complaints that fees of this kind are not earned.
We are told that perseverance built the pyramids on Egypt"s plains, erected the gorgeous temple at Jerusalem, inclosed in adamant the Chinese Empire, scaled the stormy, cloud-capped Alps, opened a highway through the watery wilderness of the Atlantic, leveled the forests of the new world, and reared in its stead a community of States and nations. Perseverance has wrought from the marble block the exquisite creations of genius, painted on canvas the gorgeous mimicry of nature, and engraved on a metallic surface the viewless substance of the shadow.
Perseverance has put in motion millions of spindles, winged as many flying shuttles, harnessed thousands of iron steeds to as many freighted cars, and sent them flying from town to town and nation to nation; tunneled mountains of granite, and annihilated s.p.a.ce with the lightning"s speed. Perseverance has whitened the waters of the world with the sails of a hundred nations, navigated every sea and explored every land. Perseverance has reduced nature in her thousand forms to as many sciences, taught her laws, prophesied her future movements, measured her untrodden s.p.a.ces, counted her myriad hosts of worlds, and computed their distances, dimensions, and velocities.
"Whoever is resolved to excel in painting, or, indeed, in any other art," said Reynolds, "must bring all his mind to bear upon that one object from the moment that he rises till he goes to bed."
"If you work hard two weeks without selling a book," wrote a publisher to an agent, "you will make a success of it."
"Know thy work and do it," said Carlyle; "and work at it like a Hercules. One monster there is in the world--an idle man."
CHAPTER XVIII.
SAVE.
If you want to test a young man and ascertain whether nature made him for a king or a subject, give him a thousand dollars and see what he will do with it. If he is born to conquer and command, he will put it quietly away till he is ready to use it as opportunity offers. If he is born to serve, he will immediately begin to spend it in gratifying his ruling propensity.
--PARTON.
The man who builds, and lacks wherewith to pay, Provides a home from which to run away.
--YOUNG.
Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries.
For age and want save while you may: No morning sun lasts a whole day.
--FRANKLIN.
Whatever be your talents, whatever be your prospects, never speculate away on a chance of a palace that which you may need as a provision against the workhouse.
--BULWER.
"What do you do with all these books?" "Oh, that library is my "one cigar a day,"" was the response. "What do you mean?" "Mean! Just this: when you bothered me so about being a man, and learning to smoke, I"d just been reading about a young fellow who bought books with money that others would have spent in smoke, and I thought I"d try and do the same. You remember, I said I should allow myself one cigar a day."
"Yes." "Well, I never smoked. I just put by the price of a five-cent cigar every day, and as the money acc.u.mulated I bought books--the books you see there." "Do you mean to say that those books cost no more than that? Why there are dollars" worth of them." "Yes, I know there are. I had six years more of my apprenticeship to serve when you persuaded me to "be a man." I put by the money I have told you of, which of course at five cents a day amounted to $18.25 a year or $109.50 in six years. I keep those books by themselves, as a result of my apprenticeship cigar-money; and if you"d done as I did, you would by this time have saved many, many more dollars than that, and been in business besides."