The Investment of Influence Part 8

"But while I believe that not a stone or a handful of mud gravitates into its place without the will of G.o.d; that it was ordained, ages since, into what particular spot each grain of gold should be washed down from an Australian quartz reef, that a certain man might find it at a certain moment and crisis of his life--if I be superst.i.tious enough (as thank G.o.d I am) to hold that Creed, shall I not believe that though this great war had no general upon earth, it may have had a general in Heaven; and that in spite of all their sins the hosts of our forefathers were the hosts of G.o.d?"--_Charles Kingsley_.

CHAPTER XI.

INFLUENCE, AND THE STRATEGIC ELEMENT IN OPPORTUNITY.

The history of a Jewish battle includes a dramatic incident. In the thick of the fight an officer brought to one of his soldiers an important prisoner. "Keep thou this man," said he, "with the utmost vigilance. Upon his person hang the issues of this campaign. His skill in leading the enemy, his courage and treachery have cost our side many lives. If by any means thou shalt suffer him to escape thy life shall be for his life."

Then, straining more tightly the cords knotted around the prisoner's hands and feet, the officer turned and plunged again into the thick of the fight. From that moment the soldier's one duty was to guard the prisoner whose escape would work such havoc.

Strangely enough, he became negligent. Careless, he leaned his bow and spear against the tent. Hungry, he busied himself with baking a few small cakes. Weary, he cast himself upon the ground, dozing upon his elbow. Suddenly a noise startled his nap. He sprang up just in time to see his prisoner make one leap, then disappear into the thicket.

A concealed knife had cut the thongs. Negligence had let "slip the dogs of war." That night when the general returned to his tent he found the prisoner had escaped.

Fronting his master the terror-stricken soldier had no excuse to offer save this; "While thy servant was busy here and there the man was gone." Gone opportunity!--and lightning could not equal its swift flight. Gone forever opportunity!--and the wings of seraphim could not overtake and bring it back. Gone honor, gone fidelity, gone good name!--all lost irretrievably. For though dying be long delayed, coming at last death would find the soldier's task unfulfilled. From "It might have been," and "It is too late," G.o.d save us all! For not Infinity himself can reverse the wheel of events and bring back lost opportunities.

The genius of opportunity lies in its strategic element. In every opportunity two or more forces meet in such a way that the one force so lends itself to the other as momentarily to yield plasticity. Nature is full of these strategic times. Iron pa.s.ses into the furnace cold and unyielding; coming out it quickly cools and refuses the mold; but midway is a moment when fire so lends itself to iron, and iron so yields its force to flame as that the metal flows like water.

This brief plastic moment is the inventor's opportunity, when the metal will take on any shape for use or beauty. Similarly the fields offer a strategic time to the husbandman. In February the soil refuses the plow, the sun refuses heat, the sky refuses rain, the seed refuses growth. In May comes an opportune time when all forces conspire toward harvests; then the sun lends warmth, the clouds lend rain, the air lends ardor, the soil lends juices. Then must the sower go forth and sow, for nature whispers that if he neglects June he will starve in January.

The planets also lend interpretation to this principle. Years ago our nation sent astronomers to Africa to witness the transit of Venus.

Preparations began months beforehand. A ship was fitted up, instruments packed, the ocean crossed, a site selected and the telescopes mounted. Scientists made all things ready for that opportune time when the sun and Venus and earth should all be in line.

That critical moment was very brief. Instinctively each astronomer knew that his eye must be at the small end of the gla.s.s when the planet went scudding by the large end. Once the period of conjunction had pa.s.sed no machinery would offer itself for turning the planet back upon her axis. Not for astronomers only are the opportune times brief. For all men alike, failure is blindness to the strategic element in events; success is readiness for instant action when the opportune moment arrives. When nature has fully ripened an opportunity man must stretch out his hand and pluck it. Inventions may be defined as great minds detecting the strategic moment in nature; Galileo finding a lens in the ox's eye; Watt witnessing steam lift an iron lid; Columbus observing an unknown wood drifting upon the sh.o.r.e. To untold mult.i.tudes nature offered these opportune moments for discovery, but only Galileo, Watt and Columbus were ready to seize them. As for the rest, this is our only answer to nature: "While thy servant was busy here and there, the strategic moment was gone."

This majestic principle often appears in history. There is a strategy in Providence. Nations, like individuals, have their crisis hours.

Through events G.o.d makes all society plastic, and then raises up some great man to stamp his image and superscription upon the nation's hot and glowing heart. As scholars move back along the pathway of history, they discern in each great epoch these strategic conditions. How opportune the moment when Jesus Christ appeared!

Alexander's march had scattered every whither the seeds of learning; the Greek language had turned the whole world into one great whispering gallery, in which the nations were a.s.sembled; all the provinces around the Mediterranean were linked together by the newly completed system of roads; the Roman judge was in every town to set forth the rights of citizens of the empire; the Roman soldier was there to protect all who brought messages of peace; the long-expected hour had struck. Then Christianity set forth from Bethlehem upon its errand of love. Along every highway ran the eager feet of the messengers of peace and good-will. Events were fully ripe, and soon Christianity was upon the throne of the Caesars.

How strategic that epoch called the fourth century! He who sat in Caesar's palace looked out upon a dying empire. The old race was worn out with war and wine and wealth and luxury. Civilization seemed about to perish, and society was fast sinking back into barbarism. To the north of the Alps were the forest children, ruddy and robust, with their glorious youth full upon them. These young giants needed the dying language and literature and religion, and these great inst.i.tutions needed their young, fresh blood. But between lay the granite walls builded from sea to sea. Now mark what Charles Kingsley called "the strategy of Providence." Suddenly a blind impulse fell upon the forest children. Two columns started southward. The one rested upon the North Sea and marched southeast; the other rested upon the Ural Mountains and marched southwest; the two met and converged upon Trieste. Without maps or military tactics or plans, wholly ignorant that Napoleon's favorite method of attack was being carried out by them, these two columns converged toward the Alpine pa.s.s, and for ten years pounded and pounded against the Roman walls until these yielded and fell. Then the forest children poured down into the vineyards and villages and cities of the dying empire. Mult.i.tudes remained to intermarry and preserve the dying race. Other mult.i.tudes returned to their old home to sow the northern forests with those great ideas that were to carry civilization through the long night of the dark ages.

Another strategic hour came in the thirteenth century. Then all Europe was stirred with new and awakening life. It was dawn after darkness.

Constantinople had fallen and scholars laden with ma.n.u.scripts went forth to sow Europe with the new learning. The times were fully ripe for another great forward movement for society. Only one thing was lacking--great men for leaders. In that strategic crisis six leaders appeared. G.o.d gave each wing of the army of civilization a genius for its general. Copernicus overthrew superst.i.tion and brought in science; Luther gave religion, Gutenberg the printing-press, Calvin individualism, Michael Angelo art and the beautiful, Erasmus critical scholarship; and because the old world was filled with debris, and the new ideas needed room, Columbus gave the new world, offering what Emerson calls "the last opportunity of Providence for the human race."

Surely this was a strategic moment in history, giving each citizen unique opportunity.

The strategic element enters into the individual career. Destiny is determined by our use of our critical hours. It is as if life's great issues were staked upon a single throw. Not but that the forces we neglect are permanent. It is that the strategic condition has pa.s.sed out of them. The sluggard driving his plow into the field in July has sun, soil and seed, but the torrid summer refuses to perform the gentle processes of April. The man who in youth's strategic days denied to memory the great facts of nature and history, in maturer years still has his memory, but the plasticity has gone. It now refuses to hold the facts he gives it. The Latin poet interprets our principle by the story of the maiden in the boat, holding her hand in the water while she toyed with a string of pearls until the string snapped and the treasure sank into the abyss. The miner interprets opportunity lost through him who, for a rifle and a blanket, traded a rich copper mine that has since paid its owner millions. The historian interprets it by Napoleon's bitter signal to his General, tardy at Waterloo, "Too late!

the critical hour has pa.s.sed." Froude interprets it through the old hero bitterly condemning himself over his wife's grave, knowing that his wild love and fierce outburst of affection were impotent now to warm the heart that froze to death in a home.

Ruskin interprets it through a nation that allowed her n.o.blest to descend into the grave, garlanding the tombstone when they refused to crown the brow; paying honors to ashes that were denied to spirit; wreathing immortelles only when they had no use save for laying on a grave where was one dead of a broken heart through a nation's ingrat.i.tude. Above all, Jesus Christ interprets it at midnight in Gethsemane, when he saw the torches fluttering in the darkness, heard the clanking of sabers and soldiers' armor, and in sad, reproachful irony wakened his disciples with these words: "Sleep on, now; sleep forever if you will! Henceforth no stress of your vigilance can help me; no negligence of your duty can harm me beyond the harm you have already wrought. Take your ease now. Sleep; the opportunity has gone." Then was the disciples' joy turned into mourning, and for garments of praise did they put on ashes and sackcloth. An irreparable loss was theirs. Yet for all of us each neglected duty means a tragedy. It is always now or never. The treasure wrapped up in each strategic opportunity is of infinite value. To-morrow can hold no joy when yesterday holds this memory: "While I was busy here and there my opportunity was gone."

How strategic the period of youth! Then the chiefest forces of life flow together in sensitive conjunction. Then four great gifts like four great rivers unite in one majestic current to bear up the young man's enterprises, and sweep him on to fame and fortune. Opportune are all the days when health spills over at the eye and ear and laughs through the lips. Men worn out are like overshot wheels--the life trickles and the buckets are filled slowly by long rests and frequent vacations. Young men are like undershot wheels--always, by day and night, the water overflows the banks.

Each morning the young soul wakens to the supreme luxury of living.

The world is a great beaker brimmed with wine of the G.o.ds. The truth and beauty of field and forest and river give a pleasure that is exquisite to a keenly sensitive and perfectly healthy youth. Like an Aeolian harp, the slightest breath avails for wakening melody midst its strings. But years multiply cares. Age increases heaviness. Time destroys its own children. The poet says: "In youth we carry the world like Atlas; in maturity we stoop and bend beneath it; in age it crushes us to the ground." For the overtaxed and invalided, the dew-drops do not sparkle as diamonds; the wet gra.s.s suggests red flannels and cough sirups. For the nervous the bird's song is a meaningless chatter. For the sickly the clouds are big black water-bottles, though time was when they were chariots for G.o.d's angels, curtains for hiding ministering spirits trooping homeward at night, leaving all the air sweetly perfumed. It is the body that grants the soul permission to be happy.

To the opportunity offered by health may be added the years lying in front of the young heart like a great estate, as yet uninc.u.mbered.

Powerful enthusiasms, too, are the inheritance of youth. n.o.ble feelings, fine aspirations then pa.s.s through the mind, as in May the perfumed winds from the South pa.s.s over the fields. These motives beat upon the mind as steam upon the iron piston. Workmen excavating at Pompeii threw up soil that had been covered for 1,800 years. Exposed to the sun, young trees sprang up. Without the force of light and heat and dew and rain these seeds were dormant or dead. Thus each mind is a dead mind until the full warmth of great impulses quickens the dormant energies. The hopes, the ambitions, the aspirations of youth all conspire to make this a most strategic period. Then all the forces of life unite in a great gulf stream for bearing the soul up and sweeping it forward to new climes and richer sh.o.r.es.

Strategic the hour of prosperity. Men discount the speech of poverty, but the rich man's words weigh a ton each. It has been said that the poor man's dollar is just as good as the rich man's only when both are anonymous, for the dollar with a million behind it will go further than the dollar with a thousand behind it. This is a proverb: "A bid from Rothschild electrifies the market." Each new achievement and success builds higher the tower of observation that lifts the great man into the presence of the nation. All eyes are upon the prospered individual, all ears are alert to his whisper. Prosperity's voice is the voice of an oracle, all her words are winged. Every successful venture in the world of commerce or statecraft quadruples influence over the nation's youth. This principle interprets the curiosity of the boy in store or bank, asking a thousand questions about his successful employer. It explains why the eager aspirant for political influence searches all the journals for some word from Gladstone or Castelar or Bismarck. A sentence from these great champions hath sufficed for reversing the policy of a government. The memory of many triumphs lies back of the great leader's words and lends them weight.

Success is an orator; it charms mult.i.tudes. Full oft one who is a veritable genius for making homely truths beautiful has accomplished less for his age than some prosperous man whose few stumbling words have sufficed for shaping national policies and guiding his generation.

All the young are drawn into the wake of the successful. Wealth fulfills the story of Orpheus, whose sweet voice made the very stones and trees follow after him. Truly wealth is an evangelist, the almoner of bounty toward college and library and art gallery and liberty and religion. But its chief use is in this: It enables its possessor to repeat his industry, integrity and thrift in the children of a nation.

All youthful hearts do well to covet wealth, wisdom and leverage power!

But man should remember that the chief value of prosperity is in its capitalization of personality, and the rendering of others sensitive to example and precept. Should man forget this, earth will hear no sadder cry than his when, closing the life career, he exclaims: "While thy servant was busy here and there the opportune moment was gone."

Friendship yields these plastic moments and unique opportunities. For the most part the soul dwells in a castle locked and barred against outsiders. No man can keep open-house for every pa.s.ser-by. But friendship is an open sesame, drawing every bar and bolt. How the heart leaps when the friend crosses the threshold! His shadow always falls behind him. His coming is summer in the soul; his presence is peace. Friendship glorifies everything it touches. When on a stormy night our friend comes in he seems to warm the very fire upon the hearth; he sweetens the sweet singer's voice; lends new meaning to the wise man's words; gives reminiscence an added charm; makes old stories new; makes the laughter and smiles come twice as often and stay twice as long. Friendship lies upon the heart like a warm fire upon the hearth. By reason of friendship history exhibits every great man as leaving his school of thought and a group of disciples behind him. His spirit lingers with men long after his form has disappeared from the streets, as the sun lingers in the clouds after the day is done, as the melody lingers in the ear long after the song is sung. Longfellow, after a day and a night with Emerson, literally emitted poems and plays. He was stimulated by friendship as bees by rose liquor and the sweet pea wine. Friendship always makes the heart plastic. Then the mental furrows are all open and mellow; sympathy falls like dew and rain; then the heart saith to its friend: "Here am I, all plastic to your touch; work upon me your will; for good or ill--I am thine."

Therefore, friendship imposes frightful responsibilities; in asking and receiving it we a.s.sume charge of another's destiny. This is the very genius of the teacher's influence over his pupil, the parent's over his child, the general's over his soldier, the patriot's over his people.

Better a thousand times never open the furrow than to leave it unfertilized.

How strategic life's better hours! One of G.o.d's precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at its best. Full oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a maze without a clew and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is uneasy, confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large profits by them. Responsibility to G.o.d seems like the faint shadow of a vaguely remembered dream. The voice of conscience is in the ear like the far-off murmuring of the sea. The soul is sordid and the finer senses indurated. The angel of the better nature is bondslave to the worst. Then enters some element that nurtures the n.o.bler impulse.

Some misfortune, earthquake-like, cleaves through the hard crust. Or some gentle event, like the coming of an old friend or the returning to the old homestead, stirs old memories and kindles new thoughts.

Slowly the heart pa.s.ses out of the penumbra. The mind, too long obscured like a sun eclipsed by clouds, searches out some rift.

Suddenly reason comes into the clear. G.o.d rises like an untroubled sun upon the soul's horizon. How crystalline life looks! The mind literally exhales fancies and pictures, and each stick and stone is as full of suggestions and ideas as the forest is full of birds. Old problems become clear as noonday. Difficult questions lie clearly revealed before the mind like landscapes from which the fogs are lifted. Once the mind crawled tortoise-like through its work. Now it soars like an eagle. The soul seems a sweet-spiced shrub, and every leaf is perfumed. If in dull, obscure hours the soul was like a wooden beehive drifted o'er with snow, in its vision-hours the soul is like a gla.s.s hive out of which the bees go singing into sweet clover-fields.

In these hours how unworthy the material life! How insubstantial the things of iron, wood and stone! Bodily things seem evanescent, as frost pictures on the window on a winter's morn. Then honor, integrity, kindness, generosity alone seem permanent and worth one's while. How easy then to do right. All habits that fettered the faculties like iron cuffs are now felt to be but ice fetters, quickly melting. Then the n.o.bler self, using no whip of cords, looks upon meanness and selfishness, and by a look drives them from the heart and life.

Then years are fulfilled in a single hour. Then from its judgment-seat the soul reviews its past career, searches out secret sins and scorns them. How unworthy are vanity and pride and selfishness. In what garments of beauty and attraction are truth and purity clothed. The soul looks longingly unto the heavenly heights, as desert pilgrims long for oases and springs of water. Unspeakably precious are these strategic hours of opportunity. G.o.d sends them; divineness is in them; they cleanse and fertilize the soul; they are like the overflowing Nile. Men should watch for them and lay out the life-course by them, as captains ignore the clouds and headlands and steer by the stars for a long voyage and a distant harbor.

INFLUENCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF REACTION IN LIFE AND CHARACTER.

"So each man gets out of the world of men the rebound, the increase and development of what he brings there. Three men stand in the same field and look around them, and then they all cry out together. One of them exclaims, 'How rich!' another cries, 'How strange!' another cries, 'How beautiful!' And then the three divide the field between them, and they build their houses there, and in a year you come back and see what answer the same earth has made to each of her three questioners. They have all talked with the ground on which they lived, and heard its answers. They have all held out their several hands, and the same ground has put its own gift into each of them. What have they got to show you? One cries, 'Come here and see my barn,' another cries, 'Come here and see my museum;' the other says, 'Let me read you my poem.'

That is a picture of the way in which a generation, or the race, takes the great earth and makes it different things to all its children.

With what measure we mete to it, it measures to us again. This is the rebound of the hard earth--sensitive and soft, although we call it hard, and feeling with an instant keen discrimination the different touch of each different human nature which is laid upon it. Reaction is equal to action."--_Phillips Brooks_.

CHAPTER XII.

INFLUENCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF REACTION IN LIFE AND CHARACTER.

To the mystery of life and death must be added the mystery of growth.

When Demosthenes exclaimed: "Yesterday I was not here; I shall not be here to-morrow; to-day I am here," he suggested a hard problem. Having solved the enigma, what went before life, and answered that mystery, what follows after death, there still remains this question: "How can a babe in twenty years take on the proportions of the great orator and reformer?" Rocks do not grow, nor diamonds, nor dirt, but a shrunken bulb does become a lily, and a tiny seed a mustard tree. In vain does the scientist struggle with this problem--how an acorn can expand into an oak; how in a single summer a grain of corn can ripen a thousand grains, like that from which the cornstalk sprang.

Men are indeed familiar with the bursting of buds, the cracking of eggs and the growth of children; yet familiarity robs these facts of no whit of their mystery. No jeweler ever goes into the field with a basket of watches to plant them in rows, expecting when autumn hath come to pick two or three wagon-loads of stem-winders from iron branches; yet, were this possible, it would be no more strange than that in the autumn the husbandman should stand under the branches to fill his basket with peaches or bunches of figs. For wise men it is no more difficult to think of a growing engine than of a growing oak. What if to-morrow an engineer should plant a cannon ball. Having watered it well and kept the ground loose through hoe or spade, suppose that when a few weeks have pa.s.sed the outline of a smokestack should push through the soil, to be followed a little later by a rudimentary steam whistle, the outlines of a boiler, and, rising through the sod, rude drive-wheels, piston-rods and cylinders, until after six months the great engine should stand forth in full completion. This phenomenon would be no more wonderful than that which actually goes on before man's blind eyes, when a tiny seed enlarges into the big tree of California and constructs a vegetable engine that lifts thousands of hogsheads of water up to the topmost boughs without any rattle of chains or the din of machinery.

With difficulty man constructs that musical instrument called a mouthharp, but nature, in six weeks, out of a little blue or brown egg constructs a feathered music-box that automatically conveys itself from tree to tree. But the mystery that has gone on in that tiny blue egg lying in the nest is just as great as if some housewife had planted an old spinning-wheel in the full expectation of reaping a Jacquard loom, or had buried a jew's-harp in the garden expecting in the fall to pick a grand piano. To the mystery that is involved in enlargement by growth must be added the mystery of intelligence. It is not an easy thing for an expert housewife, using the same formula, always to achieve the same happy results in the white loaf. He who plants a strawberry seed will find that the tiny seed will construct a plant, lay in the red tints according to rule and mix the flavor of the berry to a nicety that is the despair of the chef. In the tropic forests there is a flower with a deep cup and the pollen at the bottom. This pollen lies upon a little platter, and underneath the platter is that form of trap known as a figure four, much loved by boys. When the bee, creeping down into the flower, touches that platter, it springs the trap that throws the fertilizing pollen upon the legs of the bee, to be conveyed to the next flower. Wise men can, indeed, imitate this device, but a single seed will in a few months construct many scores of these mechanical devices. To-morrow morning the embryologist in his laboratory will place an egg under a gla.s.s cylinder in an atmosphere of 98 degrees. Four hours pa.s.s and suddenly the scientist perceives an atom in the heart of that egg give a quick lashing movement. Another moment witnesses two quick throbs. Growth has begun and in four months' time the young eagle with firm strokes will lift itself into the soft air. From the chamber of life and the chamber of death G.o.d hath never drawn the curtains. The chamber of growth is another most holy place in which G.o.d alone doth stand.

Deeply impressed by the fact of growth, scientists have also marveled at the principle that controls the harvest. Rocks enlarge by accretion, but from what a rock is at the beginning, the geologists cannot tell what will be the shape of that rock when all deposits are finally made. As to growth in seed and shrub, like produces like. He who sows wheat reaps wheat, not tares. He who plants a grape receives a purple cl.u.s.ter, not a bunch of thorns or thistles. He who sows honor shall reap confidence. He who sows frankness shall reap openness. No Peabody sowing industry and thrift reaps the harvest of indolence and idleness. Theodore Parker, loving knowledge and for it denying himself sleep and exercise, reaped wisdom, and also wan and hollow cheeks, while the iron frame and ruddy cheek are for the child of the woods who loves exercise in the open air. He who aspires to leadership and would have the mult.i.tude cheer his name, he who longs for the day when his appearance upon the street shall mean an ovation from the people, must make himself the people's slave, defy all demagogues, brave the fury of party strife, oft be execrated by politicians and sometimes be hated by the mult.i.tude. Having sown self-sacrifice and love, he shall reap fame and adulation. For nature's law is universal and inexorable--like produces like. The sheaf is simply the seed enlarged and multiplied.

The sowing contains the germ of all the harvests to be reaped.