Acres of Diamonds: Our Every-day Opportunities
realities are but dreams. He is astonished by his own success. He thinks
mainly of his own shortcomings. “God and man have ever been very patient
with me.” His depression is at times profound when he compares the
actual results with what he would like them to be, for always his hopes
have gone soaring far in advance of achievement. It is the “Hitch your
chariot to a star” idea.
His modesty goes hand-in-hand with kindliness, and I have seen him let
himself be introduced in his own church to his congregation, when he
is going to deliver a lecture there, just because a former pupil of the
university was present who, Conwell knew, was ambitious to say something
inside of the Temple walls, and this seemed to be the only opportunity.
I have noticed, when he travels, that the face of the newsboy brightens
as he buys a paper from him, that the porter is all happiness, that
conductor and brakeman are devotedly anxious to be of aid. Everywhere
the man wins love. He loves humanity and humanity responds to the love.
He has always won the affection of those who knew him, and Bayard Taylor
was one of the many; he and Bayard Taylor loved each other for long
acquaintance and fellow experiences as world-wide travelers, back in the
years when comparatively few Americans visited the Nile and the Orient,
or even Europe.
When Taylor died there was a memorial service in Boston at which
Conwell was asked to preside, and, as he wished for something more than
addresses, he went to Longfellow and asked him to write and read a poem
for the occasion. Longfellow had not thought of writing anything, and
he was too ill to be present at the services, but, there always being
something contagiously inspiring about Russell Conwell when he wishes
something to be done, the poet promised to do what he could. And he
wrote and sent the beautiful lines beginning:
_Dead he lay among his books,
The peace of God was in his looks_.
Many men of letters, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, were present at
the services, and Dr. Conwell induced Oliver Wendell Holmes to read the
lines, and they were listened to amid profound silence, to their fine
ending.
Conwell, in spite of his widespread hold on millions of people, has
never won fame, recognition, general renown, compared with many men of
minor achievements. This seems like an impossibility. Yet it is not an
impossibility, but a fact. Great numbers of men of education and culture
are entirely ignorant of him and his work in the world--men, these, who
deem themselves in touch with world-affairs and with the ones who make
and move the world. It is inexplicable, this, except that never
was there a man more devoid of the faculty of self-exploitation,
self-advertising, than Russell Conwell. Nor, in the mere reading of
them, do his words appeal with anything like the force of the same
words uttered by himself, for always, with his spoken words, is his
personality. Those who have heard Russell Conwell, or have known him
personally, recognize the charm of the man and his immense forcefulness;
but there are many, and among them those who control publicity through
books and newspapers, who, though they ought to be the warmest in their
enthusiasm, have never felt drawn to hear him, and, if they know of him
at all, think of him as one who pleases in a simple way the commoner
folk, forgetting in their pride that every really great man pleases the
common ones, and that simplicity and directness are attributes of real
greatness.
But Russell Conwell has always won the admiration of the really great,
as well as of the humbler millions. It is only a supposedly cultured
class in between that is not thoroughly acquainted with what he has
done.
Perhaps, too, this is owing to his having cast in his lot with the city,
of all cities, which, consciously or unconsciously, looks most closely
to family and place of residence as criterions of merit--a city with
which it is almost impossible for a stranger to become affiliated--or
aphiladelphiated, as it might be expressed--and Philadelphia, in spite
of all that Dr. Conwell has done, has been under the thrall of the fact
that he went north of Market Street--that fatal fact understood by all
who know Philadelphia--and that he made no effort to make friends in
Rittenhouse Square. Such considerations seem absurd in this twentieth
century, but in Philadelphia they are still potent. Tens of thousands
of Philadelphians love him, and he is honored by its greatest men,
but there is a class of the pseudo-cultured who do not know him or
appreciate him. And it needs also to be understood that, outside of his
own beloved Temple, he would prefer to go to a little church or a little
hall and to speak to the forgotten people, in the hope of encouraging
and inspiring them and filling them with hopeful glow, rather than to
speak to the rich and comfortable.
His dearest hope, so one of the few who are close to him told me, is
that no one shall come into his life without being benefited. He does
not say this publicly, nor does he for a moment believe that such a hope
could be fully realized, but it is very dear to his heart; and no man
spurred by such a hope, and thus bending all his thoughts toward the
poor, the hard-working, the unsuccessful, is in a way to win honor from
the Scribes; for we have Scribes now quite as much as when they were
classed with Pharisees. It is not the first time in the world’s history
that Scribes have failed to give their recognition to one whose work was
not among the great and wealthy.
That Conwell himself has seldom taken any part whatever in politics
except as a good citizen standing for good government; that, as he
expresses it, he never held any political office except that he was once
on a school committee, and also that he does not identify himself with
the so-called “movements” that from time to time catch public attention,
but aims only and constantly at the quiet betterment of mankind, may
be mentioned as additional reasons why his name and fame have not been
steadily blazoned.
He knows and will admit that he works hard and has all his life worked
hard. “Things keep turning my way because I’m on the job,” as he
whimsically expressed it one day; but that is about all, so it seems to
him.
And he sincerely believes that his life has in itself been without
interest; that it has been an essentially commonplace life with nothing
of the interesting or the eventful to tell. He is frankly surprised that
there has ever been the desire to write about him. He really has no idea
of how fascinating are the things he has done. His entire life has been
of positive interest from the variety of things accomplished and the
unexpectedness with which he has accomplished them.
Never, for example, was there such an organizer. In fact, organization
and leadership have always been as the breath of life to him. As a youth
he organized debating societies and, before the war, a local military
company. While on garrison duty in the Civil War he organized what is
believed to have been the first free school for colored children in
the South. One day Minneapolis happened to be spoken of, and Conwell
happened to remember that he organized, when he was a lawyer in that
city, what became the first Y.M.C.A. branch there. Once he even started
a newspaper. And it was natural that the organizing instinct, as years
advanced, should lead him to greater and greater things, such as his
church, with the numerous associations formed within itself through his
influence, and the university--the organizing of the university being in
itself an achievement of positive romance.
“A life without interest!” Why, when I happened to ask, one day, how
many Presidents he had known since Lincoln, he replied, quite casually,
that he had “written the lives of most of them in their own homes”; and
by this he meant either personally or in collaboration with the American
biographer Abbott.
The many-sidedness of Conwell is one of the things that is always
fascinating. After you have quite got the feeling that he is peculiarly
a man of to-day, lecturing on to-day’s possibilities to the people
of to-day, you happen upon some such fact as that he attracted the
attention of the London _Times_ through a lecture on Italian history at
Cambridge in England; or that on the evening of the day on which he was
admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of the United States he gave
a lecture in Washington on “The Curriculum of the Prophets in Ancient
Israel.” The man’s life is a succession of delightful surprises.
An odd trait of his character is his love for fire. He could easily have
been a veritable fire-worshiper instead of an orthodox Christian! He has
always loved a blaze, and he says reminiscently that for no single thing
was he punished so much when he was a child as for building bonfires.
And after securing possession, as he did in middle age, of the house
where he was born and of a great acreage around about, he had one of
the most enjoyable times of his life in tearing down old buildings that
needed to be destroyed and in heaping up fallen trees and rubbish and in
piling great heaps of wood and setting the great piles ablaze. You
see, there is one of the secrets of his strength--he has never lost the
capacity for fiery enthusiasm!
Always, too, in these later years he is showing his strength and
enthusiasm in a positively noble way. He has for years been a keen
sufferer from rheumatism and neuritis, but he has never permitted this
to interfere with his work or plans. He makes little of his sufferings,
and when he slowly makes his way, bent and twisted, downstairs, he does
not want to be noticed. “I’m all right,” he will say if any one offers
to help, and at such a time comes his nearest approach to impatience. He
wants his suffering ignored. Strength has always been to him so precious
a belonging that he will not relinquish it while he lives. “I’m all
right!” And he makes himself believe that he is all right even though
the pain becomes so severe as to demand massage. And he will still, even
when suffering, talk calmly, or write his letters, or attend to whatever
matters come before him. It is the Spartan boy hiding the pain of the
gnawing fox. And he never has let pain interfere with his presence on
the pulpit or the platform. He has once in a while gone to a meeting on
crutches and then, by the force of will, and inspired by what he is
to do, has stood before his audience or congregation, a man full of
strength and fire and life.
VII. HOW A UNIVERSITY WAS FOUNDED
THE story of the foundation and rise of Temple University is an
extraordinary story; it is not only extraordinary, but inspiring; it is
not only inspiring, but full of romance.
For the university came out of nothing!--nothing but the need of a young
man and the fact that he told the need to one who, throughout his life,
has felt the impulse to help any one in need and has always obeyed the
impulse.
I asked Dr. Conwell, up at his home in the Berkshires, to tell me
himself just how the university began, and he said that it began because
it was needed and succeeded because of the loyal work of the teachers.
And when I asked for details he was silent for a while, looking off into
the brooding twilight as it lay over the waters and the trees and the
hills, and then he said:
“It was all so simple; it all came about so naturally. One evening,
after a service, a young man of the congregation came to me and I saw
that he was disturbed about something. I had him sit down by me, and I
knew that in a few moments he would tell me what was troubling him.
“‘Dr. Conwell,’ he said, abruptly, ‘I earn but little money, and I see
no immediate chance of earning more. I have to support not only myself,