Civilization will mark its highest tide when every man has chosen his proper work. No man can be ideally successful until he has found his place. Like a locomotive, he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere else. "Like a boat on a river," says Emerson, "every boy runs against obstructions on every side but one. On that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea."
Only a Dickens can write the history of "Boy Slavery," of boys whose aspirations and longings have been silenced forever by ignorant parents; of boys persecuted as lazy, stupid, or fickle, simply because they were out of their places; of square boys forced into round holes, and oppressed because they did not fit; of boys compelled to pore over dry theological books when the voice within continually cried "Law," "Medicine," "Art," "Science," or "Business"; of boys tortured because they were not enthusiastic in employments which they loathed, and against which every fiber of their being was uttering perpetual protest.
It is often a narrow selfishness in a father which leads him to wish his son a reproduction of himself. "You are trying to make that boy another you. One is enough," said Emerson. John Jacob Astor's father wished his son to be his successor as a butcher, but the instinct of commercial enterprise was too strong in the future merchant.
Nature never duplicates men. She breaks the pattern at every birth. The magic combination is never used but once. Frederick the Great was terribly abused because he had a passion for art and music and did not care for military drill. His father hated the fine arts and imprisoned him. He even contemplated killing his son, but his own death placed Frederick on the throne at the age of twenty-eight. This boy, who, because he loved art and music, was thought good for nothing, made Prussia one of the greatest nations of Europe.
How stupid and clumsy is the blinking eagle at perch, but how keen his glance, how steady and true his curves, when turning his powerful wing against the clear blue sky!
Ignorant parents compelled the boy Arkwright to become a barber's apprentice, but Nature had locked up in his brain a cunning device destined to bless humanity and to do the drudgery of millions of England's poor; so he must needs say "hands off" even to his parents, as Christ said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"
Galileo was set apart for a physician, but when compelled to study anatomy and physiology, he would hide his Euclid and Archimedes and stealthily work out the abstruse problems. He was only eighteen when he discovered the principle of the pendulum in a lamp left swinging in the cathedral at Pisa. He invented both the microscope and telescope, enlarging knowledge of the vast and minute alike.
The parents of Michael Angelo had declared that no son of theirs should ever follow the discreditable profession of an artist, and even punished him for covering the walls and furniture with sketches; but the fire burning in his breast was kindled by the Divine Artist, and would not let him rest until he had immortalized himself in the architecture of St. Peter's, in the marble of his Moses, and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
Pascal's father determined that his son should teach the dead languages, but the voice of mathematics drowned every other call, haunting the boy until he laid aside his grammar for Euclid.
The father of Joshua Reynolds rebuked his son for drawing pictures, and wrote on one: "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." Yet this "idle boy" became one of the founders of the Royal Academy.