It will thus be seen that he had already acquired a clear idea of the importance of order in every pursuit, and knew that method gives to an ordinary mortal Briærean arms with which to accomplish whatever he may desire to do. How few attain to this knowledge until it is too late!
As a writer, whose words we think worthy of remembrance, has said:
"This is an era of doing things scientifically. People make scientific calculations of the weather, and the average number of murders for the next year. They measure the stars and they measure the affections, both scientifically. The only thing they fail to do scientifically is, to manage themselves. As a rule, they drift, and then find fault with fate and Providence because they don't drift into the right port. They drift into life with a multiplicity of vague dreams, which are somehow to be realized; but they have a very dim idea of ways and means. They drift through it, carelessly, with an inadequate knowledge of their own resources, and a still more inadequate notion of using them to the best advantage; they drift out of it with a melancholy sense of failure, both absolutely as to themselves and relatively as to the world. Of all their splendid possibilities, none are realized. Nothing is completed. They start wrong or they make one fatal step, and everything goes wrong all the way through. It seems as if most lives were only experiments. Now and then one is turned out which fits in its niche and is tolerably symmetrical. The rest are all awry, unfinished, misplaced, and merely faint suggestions of what might have been. Much of this is doubtless beyond mortal control, but a far greater portion is due to the lack of a nice direction of forces. The human mechanism is complicated, and a very slight flaw sets it all wrong. There may be too much steam or too much friction, or too little power or too little balance. But clearly the first step is to strengthen the weak points, to gauge its capabilities, to set it running smoothly, and to give it a definite aim. If existence were simply passive and the mission of man was to be instead of to do, he might perhaps be left to develop as the trees do, according to his own will or fancy or according to certain natural laws. But as it is the universal wish wherever one is, to be somewhere else, a little higher in the scale, it seems to be a part of wisdom, as well as humanity, to fit one for climbing. But many an aspirant finds his wings clipped in the beginning of his career, through the ignorance or carelessness of his friends, who never took the trouble of measuring his capabilities. He is treated as a receptacle into which a certain amount of ideas are to be poured, no matter whether they may answer to anything within him or not. He is turned out of an educational mill with five hundred others, and with plenty of loose knowledge, but without the remotest idea of what to do with it, or what nature intended him for, and with no especial fitness for any one thing. He can think, probably, if he has the requisite amount of brains, but how to establish a relation between thought and bread and butter is the problem. He has the requisite motive power, but it is not attached to anything. He does not know how to attach it, so he revolves in a circle, or makes a series of floundering experiments, that bear meagre fruit, perhaps when the better part of his life is gone. He knows books, but he does not know men. He is a master of theories, but cannot apply them. If he has a small amount of brains, his case is still more hopeless. To be sure, a proper amount of knowledge has been poured in, but it has all slipped through. He might have assimilated some other kind of knowledge, but that particular kind has left him with mental dyspepsia, and a vague feeling of hopelessness which is likely to prove fatal to all useful effort. Or perhaps he has talent, but is destitute of the requisite tact to make it tell upon the world. His success depends largely on his power to move others, but he has no lever and is forced to rely upon main strength, which involves a serious expenditure of vitality, with only doubtful results. He works all his life against perpetual friction, because no one had the foresight or insight to discern that this was the flaw in his machinery.
"Another fatal point is in the choice of a vocation. Having drifted through an education, he next drifts into his business or profession. He rarely stops to take an inventory of his capital, or, at best, he takes a very partial one. Chance or circumstance decides him. His grandfather sits on the judge's bench. He thinks the judge's bench a desirable place, so he takes to the law. He puts on his grandfather's coat without the slightest reference to whether it will fit or not. Perhaps he intends to grow to it, but a willow sapling cannot grow into an oak. It may grow into a very respectable willow, but if it aspires to the higher dignity, it will most likely get crushed or blown over. It may be that he has a grand vision of commercial splendor, and plunges into business life with a very good idea of Sophocles and Horace and no idea whatever of trade; with a very good talent for theories, but none whatever for facts; with some insight into metaphysics, but none at all into people. Instead of trying his strength in shallow waters, he starts to cross the Atlantic in a very small skiff. By the time he has reached mid-ocean he discovers his error, but it is too late to turn back; so he is buffeted about by winds and waves until he, too, goes down and counts among the failures.
"Another of the few points upon which life hinges is marriage, and people drift into that as they do into everything else. It is one of the things to be done in order to complete the circle of human experience. A man is caught by a pretty face and a winning smile. He takes no thought of the new element he is adding to his life, either with reference to his outward career or his inward needs. Caprice governs his choice, or perhaps a hard form of self-interest. Having committed one or two of the grand errors of life, he settles down to its serious business, and speedily discovers that he has a dead weight to carry. He has mistaken his vocation, whatever it may be.
"He is conscious now that it is too late to change; that he might have attained supreme excellence in some other calling. He toils with heavy heart and sinking spirit at the plodding pace of dull mediocrity. His work is drudgery and wearies him body and soul. Those who once smiled upon him pass him by. Men of far inferior capabilities distance him in the race. Perhaps too he has made another misstep, and has a wife who sympathizes neither with his tastes nor his trials: who has no comprehension of him whatever, save that he is a being whose business it is to love her and furnish her with spending money. The beauty which fascinated him has grown faded and insipid. The pretty coquetries that won him pall upon him; he is absolutely alone with the burden of life pressing heavily upon him. Is it strange that he is mastered in the battle and finally falls beneath the world's pitiless tread? This is a sad little picture, but it is an every-day one, and the world goes on its way as before.
"What matters it that a lonely, dissipated man has lain down in sorrow to rise no more! The world cannot stop to weep over the remains of the departed one it has trampled upon. Those whose business it is can take them on one side, lay them away under the green sod out of sight, shed a tear perhaps, and pass on until their turn comes to lay down wearily, go to sleep, and be laid away. The world chides, the world laughs, but it takes no cognizance of the grief—
"'That inward breaks and shows no cause without,
Why the man dies.'
"Yet there is but the difference of a point in the game between the victim and the hero. The cards are the same, or the victim, perhaps, may hold the best trumps, but he plays recklessly, loses his point, loses his game, loses all! On such slight things does human destiny hinge. The hero has all his resources at command—his game dimly outlined. He knows his winning cards, and he plays them skilfully.
"Every point tells. Nothing is left to chance that can be accomplished by foresight. He wins the game. He wins the prizes. He has the mastery of life. The world takes off its hat to him. Fortune and people smile upon him. Not that he is better than others—very likely he is not so good. But the world counts results. Becky Sharp is not a model, but Becky Sharp is a power. The world does not like her in the abstract, but it likes her dinners, it courts her smiles, it fawns upon her, it showers its good things upon her, all because she has mastered it. Becky Sharp is not a model. Her aims are unworthy, and her means unscrupulous; but she reads us a lesson in fact, in foresight, in energy, in the subtle art of making the most of limited resources. So long as life is a game, it is worth studying. The difference between playing it well and playing it ill is the difference between light and darkness, between joy and desolation, between life and death."