CHAPTER V.

CONCENTRATION, OR ONENESS OF AIM.

One science only will one genius fit;

So wide is art, so narrow human wit. - POPE.

"So it comes to pass that now, at last, the measure of a man's learning will be the amount of his voluntary ignorance; the measure of his practical effectiveness, the amount of what he is content to leave unattempted."

Be not simply good, be good for something. - THOREAU.

We should guard against a talent which we cannot hope to practise in perfection. Improve it as we may, we shall always, in the end, when the merit of the master has become apparent to us, painfully lament the loss of time and strength devoted to such botching. — GOETHE.

one.

NOTHER indispensable requisite to success is concentration, or devotion to one object.

The great State of New York, which leads the Union in commerce, has but one port upon the ocean, and none elsewhere of any importance. The State of New Jersey has several ports, but so poor that all of them, with their shallow water and narrow limits, are a miserable substitute for a good What is the result? The universal sea is whitened with the sails of Manhattan, while the voyages of New Jersey are restricted to a visit to the neighboring emporium, or to the Hudson, that washes her shores. So with human talent. One, well cultivated, deepened, and enlarged, is worth a hundred shallow faculties. The first law of success at this day, when so many things are clamoring for attention, is concentration, to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor to the left. It has been justly said that a great deal of the wisdom of a man in this century is shown in leaving things unknown, and a great deal of his practical sense in leaving things undone. The day of universal scholars is past. Life is short, and art is long. The

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range of human knowledge has increased so enormously, that no brain can grapple with it; and the man who would know one thing well must have the courage to be ignorant of a thousand other things, however attractive or inviting. As with knowledge, so with work. The man who would get along must single out his specialty, and into that must pour the whole stream of his activity, all the energies of his hand, eye, tongue, heart, and brain. Broad culture, many-sidedness, are beautiful things to contemplate; but it is the narrowedged men, the men of single and intense purpose, who steel their souls against all things else that accomplish the hard work of the world, and who are everywhere in demand when hard work is to be done.

Every beginner in life, therefore, should try early to ascertain the strong faculty of his mind or body, fitting him for some special pursuit, and direct his utmost energies to bring it to perfection. A man, says Emerson, is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in man; but each has his special talent; and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall need oftenest to be practised. The successful man in every calling, whether literary, scientific, or business, is he who is totus in illo, — who can say with Paul, "This one thing I do." With the exception of a few great creative minds, the men whose names are historic are identified with some one achievement, upon which all their life-force is spent. You think of Watt, and instantly the steam-engine is suggested; of Arkwright, and the spinningjenny whirls before you; of Davy, and the safety-lamp lights up the mine; of Harvey, and the blood courses the more quickly in your veins; of Jenner, and you see disease stayed in its progress by the pricking of a lancet; of Morse, and the electric spark is seen darting from continent to continent, ready, like Puck, to "put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes."

"Whatever I have tried to do in my life," said Charles Dickens, I have tried with all my heart to do well. What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely. Never to put one hand to anything on which I would throw my whole self, and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now to have been golden rules."

A man may have the most dazzling talents, but if they are scattered upon many objects, he will accomplish nothing. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say that a painter should sew up his mouth; that is, he must not shine as a talker, if he would excel in his art. Strength is like gunpowder, to be effective, it needs concentration and aim. The marksman who aims at the whole target will seldom hit the centre. The literary man or philosopher may revel among the sweetest and most beautiful flowers of thought, but unless he gathers and condenses the sweets in the honeycomb of some great thought or work, his finest conceptions will be lost or useless. When Michael Angelo was asked why he did not marry, he replied, "Painting is my wife, and my works are my children." "Mr. A. often laughs at me," said a learned American chemist, "because I have but one idea. He talks about everything, aims to excel in many things; but I have learned that if I wish ever to make a breach, I must play my guns continually upon one point." His gunnery was successful. Beginning life as an obscure schoolmaster, and poring over Silliman's Journal by the light of a pine-knot in a log-cabin, he was erelong performing experiments in electro-magnetism to English earls, and has since been at the head of one of the chief scientific institutions of his country.

It was the opinion of William Hazlitt that life is long enough for many pursuits, provided we set about them properly, and give our minds wholly to them. Let one devote himself to any art or science ever so strenuously, he said, and he will still have leisure to make considerable progress in half a dozen acquisitions. "Let a man do all he can in any one branch of study, he must either exhaust himself and doze over

it, or vary his pursuit, or else lie idle. All our real labor lies in a nutshell. The mind makes, at some period or other, one Herculean effort, and the rest is mechanical." All this is true enough of a few prodigies of genius that have appeared at rare intervals in the ages. Cicero was master of logic, ethics, astronomy, and natural philosophy, besides being well versed in geometry, music, and all the other fine arts. Bacon took all knowledge for his province. Dante, skilled in all the learning of his times, sustained arguments at the University of Paris against fourteen disputants, and conquered in all. Scipio Africanus was not only a great warrior, but famed for his learning and eloquence. Salvator Rosa was a lutenist and a satirist. The variety of knowledge and accomplishment accumulated by Leonardo da Vinci almost staggers belief. It has been said that if he had stood before the gates of Macedon, he would have tamed Bucephalus ; if he had been seated on the magic throne of Comus, he would have broken the wand of the demon; if he had seen the chariot of the King of Phrygia, he would have unravelled the Gordian Knot. He was not only a great painter, but a mathematician, metaphysician, musician, poet, sculptor, engineer, architect, chemist, botanist, anatomist, astronomer, besides being skilled in mechanics and natural history. But how many Bacons, Dantes, Salvators, or Da Vincis have there been in the world's history? nay, among the men of any generation, how many are even Hazlitts? The very rarity of such prodigies is what makes them prodigies. To every such instance of universal accomplishment may be opposed thousands of men who have failed in life by dabbling in too many things. Most men run uncertainly if they have two goals. Hobbes made himself a laughing-stock as a poet; Milton wrote but little good prose, and provokes a smile at himself as a humorist; Bentley's hand forgot its cunning when he laid it on. Paradise Lost; Boileau failed almost utterly when he attempted to sweep the strings of the lyre, as did Corneille in comedy and Dryden in tragedy. "Art, not less eloquently than literature," says Willmott, "teaches her children to vener

ate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer."

Sydney Smith, in an excellent lecture on the conduct of the understanding, justly censures what he calls the foppery of universality, of knowing all sciences and excelling in all arts, chemistry, mathematics, algebra, dancing, history, reasoning, riding, fencing, Low Dutch, High Dutch, natural philosophy, and enough Spanish to talk about Lope de Vega. The modern precept of education, he says, is, very often, Be ignorant of nothing. "Now my advice, on the contrary, is to have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. I would exact of a young man a pledge that he would never read Lope de Vega; he should pawn to me his honor to abstain from Bettinelli and his thirty-five original sonneteers; and I would exact from him the most rigid securities that I was never to hear anything about that race of penny poets who lived in the reigns of Cosmo and Lorenzo di Medici."

The world has few Admirable Crichtons, few universal geniuses, who are capable of mastering a dozen languages, arts, or sciences, or driving a dozen callings abreast. Beginners in life are perpetually complaining of the disadvantages under which they labor; but it is an indisputable fact that more persons fail from a multiplicity of pursuits and pretensions than from an absolute poverty of resources. Don Quixote thought that he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks, if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry; and many other persons would achieve an easy success in their callings, if they were not distracted by rival ambitions. "The one prudence in life," says a shrewd American essayist, "is concentration, the one evil is dissipation; and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine,—property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one play