Do not get it into your head that you are out of step with the times.
That in itself will paralyze both intellect and will. It is an admission of permanent failure. No matter whether you think the changed conditions and methods of business, society, and affairs, which almost each day brings, are inferior or superior to the old conditions and methods or not, you must keep abreast of them; take in the spirit of them.
An att.i.tude of protest against the progressive order of things may be heroic, but it is not practical or effective. These conditions and methods which make you feel like a "back number" may not be the best; if they are not, try to make them the best, if you will, but do not attempt to perfect them backward by returning to yesterday. The world is very impatient of _apparent_ retrogression; it hurts its egotism.
"What! Go back to old conditions?" says the World. "Never! never!
Progress, alone, for me!"
But sometimes it means motion, not progress; for true progress might possibly be a return to old and superior methods. No matter, I am speaking of _your_ practical, personal, and material success now. I am not speaking to you as a reformer or as a teacher of the elemental truths. _You_ are a searcher, past fifty years of age, after the flesh-pots. Very well, then. Do not run amuck of the world. Join in its progress, even if that progress seems to you to be unreal.
At the risk of iteration, I again urge constant mingling with people.
It is from them that you must draw your success, after all. A man over fifty who feels that his life is a failure is apt to emphasize the outward manners and inward habits of thought of his earlier days, as he would, if he could, stick to the old styles and fashions of apparel of the days of his youth. To do the latter would be to call attention at once to his antiquity; but to retain his old mental att.i.tude is antiquity indeed.
People are quick to see, feel, and know that you are in deed and in truth not of the present day. When they think that, you are discredited and at an unnecessary disadvantage. Therefore mingle with men. Don"t withdraw into yourself. Don"t be a turtle. Be an active and present part of society, not only that your whole mind and whole conscious being may be kept fresh and growing, but that people may not perceive the contrary.
Growing! Growth! It is only a question of that, after all. No man can ultimately fail who has kept himself alive, and therefore kept himself growing. If you find that you have ceased to grow, start up the process again. Make yourself take an interest in large and constructive things of the present moment in your city, county, state, and country, and in the world.
The mind and character of man are the two great exceptions to the entire const.i.tution of the universe. Decay is the law that controls everything else except these; but thought and character need never decay. They may be kept growing as long as life endures. Who shall deny that the philosophers of India are right, and that mind and character may continue to grow throughout illimitable series of existences?
Only two cla.s.ses of men are hopeless: those who think to prevail by fraud and the contrivances of indirection, and those whose minds and characters have begun to disintegrate, or degenerate, if you like the latter word better. There is every reason why character should each day get a truer bearing, why the mind each day should become more luminous, elevated, and accurate.
The Stoics said that even temperament might be given steadiness and poise by an exercise of philosophy and will, and the lives of many of them seemed to prove it. And if all this is true, your fifty years have given you an a.r.s.enal of power that is a considerable advantage over younger men, if you will but use it; and it is to point out some of the methods for its use, and some of the mistakes which I have observed men in your condition make, that this paper is written.
A great and natural desire of men such as those to whom this paper is addressed is to move from the places in which they have achieved no success to new locations, where, as they put it, they "can start life afresh." Do not do it. Such a course is, ordinarily, as fatal as it is alluring.
If you have been an upright man--and without this there can be no permanent success of any kind--your long residence in your community has put you to no disadvantage, but precisely the contrary. You have, during these years, secured the confidence of your community. They know you to be loyal, truthful, sober, steadfast, industrious. This popular faith in the elemental qualities of your character is the foundation of success, and usually it requires years to establish that.
You are at no disadvantage because the people do not have for you that admiration which the doing of things compels. The fact that your neighbors do not suspect your potentialities is really an advantage.
If you have that righteous and permissible craft which every man should have, and if you take advantage of it, you can begin the work which will bring you success without that envy and compet.i.tion, that friction of jealousy, which every man of acknowledged power arouses.
But if you, a man of fifty or over, go into a new environment, you carry with you that heaviest of all burdens, the necessity of making explanations.
"Why have you come among us at your age?" the people ask. "What is the story of your past?" they very properly inquire. "It must be that you are not a man of integrity which commanded the respect and support of your old home," they will not unnaturally conclude; "either this, or else you were a failure there."
These are the two necessary and inevitable deductions, and either horn of that cruel dilemma of logic is enough to impale you. If you escape them, you do it because you do not attract notice, and this, in itself, is failure. And in any event, to gain the substantial confidence of the people you must spend several years of right living among them. And you have no time to waste in building up confidence at your period of life. That is an a.s.set which your whole career of unsuccessful probity should have acc.u.mulated for you; and it is dissipated if you remove from among those in whose minds that belief in you exists.
I have seen this serious error made so many times, and nearly always with such destroying results, that I give it more s.p.a.ce than its relative proportion deserves. I have in mind now two men who did precisely this thing. Their success in the two country towns where they had lived had been reasonable, but not considerable. It did not appear to be success at all to them, though.
They were quite sure that they were bigger than their opportunities--yes, that was what was the matter--they needed larger opportunities, "larger fields," more "scope" for their powers. Each man was about fifty years of age. Each was a man of far more than ordinary talent. Each removed to a city. And in the city which each chose, each miserably, utterly, hopelessly failed.
Had they remained where for years they had been planting the seeds of confidence, respect, and achievement, and had they awaited the slow processes of the harvest, each man would soon have become the leading man in his town, county, and district, and would have remained so until the end of his days; for the harvest was nearly theirs. They did not understand that while it takes a long time to prepare the soil and sow the seed, and let it grow to maturity, the ripening of the harvest comes in a few golden days.
It is true that there are exceptions to the above rule--the rule of abiding, of standing fast. But the exception is justified only when you have made so many definite, tangible, and public failures in your old home that there is absolutely no possibility of further hope. Of course, if you are a man of lion heart and lion power, this is another matter. Any place on earth is a fit field for achievement by these savages of enterprise.
I know one of these who won a fortune, and lost it; won another, and again lost; and who, finally, with judgments and executions showering upon him, set his face to a new land and resolved again to conquer fortune or die. He conquered--of course he conquered--and is now worth many millions. But if you look into his kindly but deadly blue eye, and consider the tragic and premature whiteness of his hair, and take in the whole resistless and compelling personality of the man, you will see why _he_ succeeded.
We are all familiar with the stirring history of a certain great American master of millions who is now about sixty-five years of age, and has ama.s.sed his wealth since he was fifty. He had failed, and failed often, before that time--failed once humiliatingly and irretrievably, so the ordinary man would say. So the ordinary man did say, and say hard and often.
The details of his early catastrophes are not worth while here. The point is that they did not affect him except to make him stronger.
They were the Thor-like blows with which Fate forged the unconquerableness of this man. For unconquerable he has become.
He has carried through daring plans; he has brought great financial inst.i.tutions that opposed him to their knees; from the throne of his audacity he has dictated terms to boards of trade, and made the princes of the houses of commercial royalty his servants.
But if you look at his brow of power, at the merciless and yet delicate and sensitive lips, you will become conscious of why he succeeded--why he must eventually have succeeded anywhere. But such a man is no example for you unless you are such a man yourself--and in that case, you need no examples of any kind. You are your own example.
I read with keen interest, the other day, a feature article in one of our great daily newspapers, giving incidents in the careers of fifteen American millionaires who made their fortunes after they were fifty.
But all these had the luck of the never-say-die men. They were all of the cla.s.s that Emerson describes as having an excess of arterial circulation.
Every failure to them was simply an access of information. They regarded each loss as another piece of instruction in the game.
Fortune always gives the winnings to such as these at last. Fortune loves a daring player; and while she may rebuff him for a while, it is only to gild the refined gold of his ultimate achievings.
Another thing. Go you to church. Use clean linen. Wear good and well-fitting clothing. Take care of your shoes. Look after all the details of your personal grooming. In short, observe all the methods which human experience has devised to keep men from degenerating.
There is an unalterable connection between the physical and mental and moral.
The old saying that "cleanliness is next to G.o.dliness" has beneath it all the philosophy of civilization.
It is an easy process that produces tramps. A few days" growth of beard, the tolerance of certain personal habits of indolence, and your tramp begins, vaguely, but none the less surely, to appear. This is accompanied by a falling off in clear-cut thought, a blurring of the moralities, and a cessation of definite and effective energy. This is itself, of course, an interminable subject upon which several papers might be written; but perhaps I have said enough to make apparent to you its practical application.
The stages of degeneration are as easy as they are fatal, and since to resist them requires courage, force, and alertness, it is only too probable that the man past fifty, who feels that he has failed, is beginning to submit to them. Do not do it. Resort to every possible device to prevent it; for degeneration, in itself, is failure; more, it is death. It is exactly the same force which rots out the heart of the oak, manifesting itself in human character.
Your problem is not to give way to your weaknesses. That is the problem of all of us. "I see two men looking from your eyes," said the Norse seeress, "a young man and an old man. Do not let the old man in you conquer the young man in you." Very well! Barring the loss of health, you can always make the young man in you the victor.
Do not conclude that things are fixed, that conditions are permanent, and that, as there is no apparent place for you as circ.u.mstances now exist, there never will be. Fix in your mind this dreadful and glorious paradox, that even the most permanent things are transient.
Study the clouds, those visible emblems of human experience and inst.i.tutions. A twist, a curve, a change in the shape and outline, and final disappearance into the universal blue--such is their destiny; and yet each instant they are permanent, apparently, so far as that instant is concerned.
"The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem And solid Nature to a dream."
It will be useful, also, to consider the political machine. There is nothing which, in its day, is apparently more permanent or powerful; yet it dissolves in obedience to the very laws on which it is built.
So, my friend, there is never a time that you can truthfully say that there is not, and never will be, any place for you in the order of society and affairs.
No, indeed; things are not fixed. Recall the story of the Oriental monarch. His wise men with all their wisdom could not produce a single truth that stood the test of time. As the tale runs, the ruler, weary of the falsehoods of so-called learning, called his wise men together and said to them:
"I sicken of your daily sagacities which the next day prove to be follies. Tell me one truth--only one. I ask but a single sentence. But let it be a sentence that will be as true next year as this year--a sentence which always has been true and always will be true. I give you one year to formulate one such sentence. If at the end of that time you cannot state an absolute verity, your lives will be forfeited."
At the end of the year the wise men came to their dread lord and said that they had found one universal truth. "State it," said their sovereign. They answered: "Here is the only sentence our wisdom can construct which is absolutely true: "_And this, too, shall pa.s.s away._"" And so shall your misfortunes, my friend past fifty, pa.s.s away. "It is a long road that has no turning," declares the maxim of the people. Your road is no exception.
The historic instances of great success past fifty are numerous and inspiring. They begin with Moses, who was forty years of age when "he slew the Egyptian," and they come down to our present day; to Bismarck, who, while so brilliant as a young man that he attracted the attention of Europe, was not great till he was past forty-five; to Disraeli, who, though so dazzling in his youth and early prime that he astounded Parliament and filled the press with comment, was not constructive or permanent in his success till comparatively late in life.
Think, too, of those historic successes of which there was not the faintest sign until far past middle life--they are not many, to be sure, but they are inspiring. Some of the great headlands that shoulder out into history--Washington, Lincoln, and the like--became visible to the world after forty-five.
Of course, it is true that the immense majority of the world"s great achievers--generals, statesmen, poets, philosophers, inventors, builders--have been young men. But the n.o.ble exceptions contain sufficient encouragement for you if you still have the heart of purpose.
I like to think of a man fighting his best fight just at the end of life. There has always been something attractive to me about the expression of Western hardihood, "Dying with his boots on," and the att.i.tude of character that it describes.
From my infancy the story of the _Bon Homme Richard_ has been like wine to my blood. Be you like that ship, my dear friend past fifty!
She had, apparently, failed, but she kept in service. She had reached the age of decay, and her timbers scarcely held together; yet she did not go out of commission.
She attacked the _Serapis_, one of the youngest and stanchest and best equipped of the matchless navy of England. She was blown full of holes; still she fought. She was on fire; still she fought. The water poured into her hold and she was sinking; still she fought. Fought, fought, fought, and in the grim, the terrible, and the sublime end she won.
The _Serapis_ was captured by the _Bon Homme Richard_, and the victorious old ship"s crew established themselves on the decks of the conquered Englishman. The gallant veteran of the waves was kept afloat that night, but at sunrise the next day they ran to her masthead her glorious, shot-torn battle-flag, and she went to her home in the abysses of the deep with that banner of battle and ultimate triumph flying as she sank beneath the waves.