Personal Power

1912.

Part I

Power in the Making

Chapter I

The Gift of Power

"Man is his own star, and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate."

JOHN FLETCHER.

"B

E not afraid of greatness," says Shakespeare.

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Which are you? I will tell you. You were born great ; you can achieve greatness if you will ; and if you go about it the right way, you will have greatness thrust upon you.

The mistake so many people make is to confuse greatness with riches. The great man can have all he wants, but he need not necessarily become rich. Carlyle was no more intended to be a millionaire than Andrew Carnegie was made to be a Milton. We cannot all be Nelsons, or Pitts, or Shakespeares, or Darwins, or Rockefellers, but we can all be great. If we want money we can get it, if we want power we can get it : the only condition being that we should want it badly enough. Whatever our desire is, we must be prepared to give up all pleasure and all ease to attain it. Fortune is a hard mistress and will brook no rivals, but to the man who is prepared to serve her whole-heartedly she offers the sure promise of his heart’s desire.

When we look back over the pages of history and scan the records of the world’s most successful men, we find that there is not so much wonder when a man rises from penury to supreme heights as when a man with wealth and influence does so. All the experience of the world goes to show that the lower down a man is on the ladder of fortune, the more likely is he to rise. The reason is that the rich man has so many distractions, and, more than this, does not have the same hard experiences which develop character and brain.

As soon as a man makes up his mind that he will do something with his life, he changes over from a state of drift to one of action. It is easy to drift, but it is better to struggle, for the current of life drags men on to the rocks and into shallows unless they map their course along the right channels where the deep waters are that will bear them to their harbor.

Imagine a five-million-dollar battleship, with steam in her boilers, being allowed to drift upon the ocean. What would happen? She would collide with something sooner or later, and be seriously damaged, if not totally wrecked. Some one, however, takes control of her. The huge engines are started, and put forth their strength ; the course is set by the guiding intelligence, and the vessel journeys through calm or tempest wherever the ruling brain directs.

Every man and woman born into the world is like that. We are all capable of setting our course, we are all built to overcome the difficulties we may encounter in following it, and we are free to drift or progress as we choose. If we want to move onward we must first see that our propelling power is in order, then we must set our course, and finally we must stick to that course unswervingly and with unceasing vigilance, for the moment we relax we drift.

In that analogy is the whole secret of success in life ; and the power that is in us, awaiting the command of our brain, will prove either useless or an obedient worker of mighty energy, just according to the manner in which we neglect or develop it.

The force that drives a man to any goal he has before him is personal power. It is the Divine part of the man that gives him dominion over the earth, and over himself. It is something more than intelligence, because it makes a man use his intelligence in the right way. It is something more than character, for it creates character. It is something more than personality, because a man’s personality is but an expression of his mind. It is more than all these things, because it gives a man the eye to see beauty, the mind to appreciate life in its ful­ness, and the strength to grasp what he needs from the hands of Fortune.

If you are discontented, if you are despondent, even if you are despairing, there is still the dor­mant power within you waiting and able to turn discontent to serenity, despondency to happiness, and despair to hope.

The limbs of the body, if unused from year’s end to year’s end, would wither—simply for want of use. It is the same with a man’s personal power, except that it never withers so much that he can­not quicken it into vitality again. It will shrivel and shrink, but as soon as he calls upon it, it will start growing again, and he can develop it into a mighty force which will make his life whatever he wishes it to be.

Your personal power is yours alone. You only can develop it; you alone can use it. More than this, it is fashioned by the Creator to serve your particular needs. Unless you have the inventive genius it will not make an Edison or a Marconi of you, and as soon as you recognize that truth you will realize the fallacy of those writers on success who tell the world that a man can do whatever he will. Unless your brain is Napoleonic you cannot be a Napoleon, and even if by sheer determination you could emulate his achievements, life would not be worth while, for you would get no pleasure out of it. There is, however, this compensating advantage : whatever you are fitted for you can attain by using your power in the right way, and you can be sure that the results you will get will satisfy you completely—that is, as much as the human mind is capable of complete satisfaction. If you honestly desire a fortune more than anything else in the world, you can make one. If you want a competence only, but a supremacy in art or a science, you can succeed in these. Let your actions follow the aspirations of your heart, so long as these are pure and noble, and there is no power outside of you that can withstand the power you hold locked within your breast. Nothing worth having is easy to win, and there is no royal road to success in any department of life. But there is a sure road that all may travel, hard and stony and wearisome, but with flowers springing by the wayside to brighten the path, birds singing in the blue to cheer the journey, and the sure promise of reward waiting at the journey’s end.

Whatever theories we may evolve for the successful conduct of our lives, this shining truth stands forth most obvious—there can be no success without strength of character. Let us go a little farther and probe, so far as we can, some of those deep mysteries concerned with the subconscious forces within us. A man’s character and a man’s intellectual power are subtle, intangible things. The question we have to ponder over is : How shall we so develop our character and our intellect that these shall influence others?

A man comes to see me in business. He puts a proposition before me and makes no impression whatever. Another man comes with a similar proposal and compels my interest. Some men we meet leave a strong impression behind them. We remember them long afterwards. Faces in a crowd interest us. People seen in a drawing-room attract us, and we instinctively like them. Are these things pure accident? I put it to you that they are not, and I go farther, and say that we can all develop our personalities and similarly draw people to ourselves.

In discussing this question, we stand on sacred and solemn ground. There is something more of the divine in the intellect than in the body. The mind’s the measure of the man. The mind is the field the Creator gives us to cultivate and to bring forth its fruit. If the parable of the Ten Talents means anything, it means that we are to culti vate all the gifts which lie dormant within us. If Shakespeare had been content to lead an idle life. the matchless magnificence of his thoughts would never have been set down for the benefit of posterity. If Christ had done His bare work in the carpenter ‘s shop, the most shining example of manly perfection and the splendid prospect of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, culminating in the hope of the life beyond, would not have been handed down to us. Wherever we note the results of a great life we see that they were attained by ceaseless effort, strenuous living, and endless self-culture. Each of us has his gift. If you have a poem in your mind, write it down, however feebly. Perfection is the result only of drudgery, and that is the reason of the saying : Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Consider the evolution of Nature—how slow it is, measured by our standards of time. In the field we see the tillage, then the sowing, then the sprouting of the seed, followed by the shooting of the stem, the bud, and, finally, the full bloom of the flower.

All through Nature there is this same gradual progression. Can we hope to develop our powers more rapidly, and should we not learn from this and be well content to make our gradual progress ?

We cannot see the flowers grow, nor can we see our own intellectual progression. Day by day, as we study and work, we are moving forward. God made the earth of countless atoms ; He covered it with numberless green things and many-hued details of shrub, bloom, and tree. The sea is colorless if you take a little in your hand. But as you look at all these millions and millions of infinitesimal particles you see the earth in all its beauty, and the sea in all its grandeur. So it is with our daily life.

We toil and drudge, we bear the burden and heat of the clay, we are weary and deprest, and when a new day dawns we see the fruits of our labor in some completed and satisfying work. As the Psalmist says : They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him. The only condition for coming again with joy is that you take your seed and go forth.

Tho before the eyes of omnipotent Providence we must seem small and insignificant, we each have our part in the great scheme of the universe, and it is expected of us that we bear our part worthily. The ideal of life is a gradual evolution towards perfection. All our trials and struggles are part of that evolution, and, remembering this, we cannot lose heart. To ourselves, however, our own life is the paramount thing. A French poet said: My life is but a little thing; but it is —My life. Whether our life is big or little de­pends upon ourselves. If we desire to make it big, fruitful, and complete, our desire must result in effort. However small our life may be, it is essen­tial to the scheme of the universe, or we should not be living at all. If we only regard our daily work as necessary (as it surely is) to the whole living race and the races to come, no task can be ignoble and no endeavor unfruitful.

Before we can command success we must be competent, and we must be confident in that com­petence. That is self-reliance. If you have not yet read Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance, I advise you to do so. In time of doubt and difficulty it is like the voice of a strong friend cheering you. Let a man, then, know his worth and keep things under his feet, he says. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. . . . Insist on yourself ; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half-posses­sion. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. . . . Where is the mas­ter who could have taught Shakespeare? . . . Do that which is assigned thee, and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much.

And again : To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by, the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what other men, but what they, thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts : they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility, the most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. I will take one more stirring passage from this essay, because it hints so plainly at the Divine providence that in times of inspiration we feel working within us :

Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the Divine providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves child-like to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us advance and advance on Chaos and the Dark.

Does this passage not inspire us in our lowliest and humblest work? Is it not a grand destiny to form a part in a great scheme planned by an allwise Providence, working out His will, subordinate to it, but necessary to its perfection? And should we not in our smallest work strive to make our labors worthy of the noble fabric which we are permitted to build? If we are to make a real success of our lives, we must develop and use the talents with which the Creator has endowed us.

We come, then, to the question of the methods by which we are to do our best work, and how we are to fit ourselves to fill our allotted place in life. The athlete trains himself for the strain of the race. In an athletic contest the body is sharply tried. The heart and lungs are called upon to do a vast amount of extra work, but by careful training the runner gradually brings his organs to such a state of perfection that he is able to withstand easily the extra strain that is put upon him.

In the remorseless competition of our modern business life a similar strain is put upon the mental capacity. Have you ever thought of training your mind to meet it? Few men think of it, but those who do are the stronger for it. The mind is a mysterious element which we are unable to fathom. It governs the body, and, as we know, it is so potent that it even shapes the body. People judge other people by their faces. That is to say, they discern in a man’s face the impress of his mind. An imbecile has a vacant expression. A keen mind produces a keen-looking face.

I remember discussing a financial magnate with another man. The magnate in question, I pointed out, has a very indolent air, and at a casual glance looks very stupid. Yes, said my friend, but when you catch him looking at you, you are struck by the fact that he has a very intelligent eye.

A sage once remarked, No clever man ever had a lack-luster eye. I doubt if any very bad man has a serene face. Certainly he would not have a clear gaze. Such things are the external manifestations of the mind. The hypnotist exercises his influence through his eyes. The human voice, as shown by the orator, has its effect in producing emotions in the listener. The very expression plays its part, as a sympathetic look can take the place of volumes of words. All these things are directly influenced by the mind, and the stronger your mind is the more forcibly will you impress your will and your personality upon the people with whom you come into contact.

Start at once upon the preliminary training of the intellect, because its force in daily life depends upon the power with which you can exercise it, and that power can only be developed by careful study. First of all, you should strengthen your intellect by reading good literature, and whenever you come across a fine passage you should memorize it.

It was said of Macaulay that if every copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost were accidentally destroyed, he could replace it from his memory down to each comma. He trained his wonderful memory in the following way : When he was reading a book, he would stop at the end of each page and endeavor to recollect what that page was about. He did this so carefully that gradually he trained himself to such a pitch that by merely reading a passage, a page, or a poem, or even an article, he could repeat it word for word.

If you will follow this practise you will find that your memory will be wonderfully strengthened. More than this, you will lay up in your mind a vast store of literary treasure that will reflect itself in your speech and writing, and influence your thought in the most desirable manner. Take the best literary models and commit the passages to memory. John Bright, one of the most famous orators that ever lived, took the Bible for his model, and became so familiar with its style that his speeches, reflecting that style, were remarkable for the purity, grace, and splendor of their diction. The example of Demosthenes, whose name will ever live as an orator, is a shining light to the struggling man. He had an impediment in his speech, of which he cured himself by putting pebbles in his mouth and declaiming on the seashore. If you have a talent, you can develop it even if you possess some physical or mental disqualification. How much less should you be discouraged if you have no such drawback ?

Start training your memory with poetry, and learn it by reading it aloud. If you read it merely, you have only the eye to help you recall it. If you speak it, the sound of the words helps you to remember them. Blank verse is more difficult to memorize, but by choosing good models you acquire a nobility of diction and thought at the time that you are further strengthening your mind. Moreover, you will learn how to express your thoughts, both in words and writing, tersely