to luck turns out on closer examination to be the natural though infrequent result of certain cultivated qualities. I have heard of several persons who have had handsome legacies left them by strangers in unexpected acknowledgment of kindness shown. Uniform courtesy is almost sure to be followed sooner or later by some such reward. People who are what we call “quick-witted,” whose judgment is cool and action prompt, are apt to be lucky even in misfortune. William of Normandy, landing for the conquest of England, tripped and fell on the sand. It was an evil presage, and his soldiers shrank back in terror. But William, seizing a handful of the soil, cried—“Thus I grasp this earth, and, by the splendor of God, I shall keep it.” With this he turned the gloomy portent into one the most auspicious. Moderate luck with good sense will repair any blunder, while folly will spoil the best of chances. “Fortune favors the bold,” simply because they have the courage to act; but she rarely favors them when they act without knowledge and prudence. When Shakespeare in the familiar passage says, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” he assumes that the fortunate man knows when flood-tide arrives.
As we are thus often deceived in the lives of others, so we are almost as frequently the dupes of our own experience. It is not easy to decide, concerning our successes and failures, which are owing to luck and which to ourselves. Confucius advises those who fail to follow the example of
the archer when he misses the target, and examine first the instruments employed, and then themselves, as the cause of failure is likely to be in one or the other. Some minds are more exhilarated by gains than they are depressed by losses; others deplore losses more keenly than they enjoy successes; few estimate both at a just relative value.
Even the very unlucky should feel some cheerfulness when he reflects how in modern times we have learned to conciliate the Fates, and compel even the most adverse destiny to drop the ugliest of its masks. This we accomplish through the various forms of insurance, all of them based on the study of the very caprices of Fortune herself. Marvelous example of mind setting at nought the threats of brute nature! The very disasters before which our ancestors bowed most hopeless and most helpless, are those whose attacks we dread the least. Hail and lightning, storms on the ocean and fire in populous cities, we read about with small concern providing our property is well insured. By the same process we can protect our children from poverty and our own old age from want. Beneficent discovery, which in its varied forms has added incalculably to the happiness of man by freeing him from the terrors of the unknown, and providing him with a shield behind which he can afford to smile at the gloomiest frowns of Fate!
Subtler than any beast of the field is man, and filled with Promethean courage to rob the gods themselves! But behind the impenetrable veil, through which he sees
not even darkly, are powers who smile in derision at his attempts to free himself from their eternal mastery. No logic can explain and no calculus compute the workings of their mysterious ways. Against the elemental wrath of fire and water man can guard himself; but against the results of the most thoughtless of his words or the slightest of his actions he has no protection, for he has not and cannot form the least idea of their consequences. Here Destiny rules undisputed and supreme.
Such reflections led the great Goethe in his old age to dwell more and more on the illimitable influence of trifling events, bedeutende Kleinigkeiten. Dull critics have misunderstood and some of the dullest have even made merry about his insistence on this pivotal truth in the history of every individual and in that of the world. The fate of nations has ever been decided by the most trivial occurrences. Cæsar, going to the Senate, refused to read a letter which was handed him, saying, “Business for to-morrow.” Had he opened it, the greatest empire that ever was would have had a different story to transmit to a different posterity. One summer morning the pretty Arleta, daughter of a Norman butcher, tripped down to the brook to wash her mother’s soiled linen. Had she waited a few minutes later, Robert the Devil would have already passed, and neither their son, the bastard William of Normandy, nor his thousands of knights would have set their iron heels on English soil. Louis XVI stops at St. Ménéhould to eat a pig’s foot, and the great and famous line of
the Bourbons of France is extinguished by that single dish.
These are celebrated examples. But the thoughtful man will recognize in his own life and in the lives of those around him how they have been altered, directed, completely transformed by such slightest of incidents. His decision to pursue this or that avocation, that as to where he should settle, the first meeting with her who is his wife, the conversation which led to such or such an investment of the first importance, these, the most momentous actions of his life, turned on such casual and insignificant incidents that it makes him shiver to think of it! In such moments he is ready to exclaim,
“We do confess ourselves the slaves of chance