The Recreations of A Country Parson | Page 8

had to say
about Growing Old seems very poor, do I see it rightly? Do I see it as
my reader would always have seen it? Or has it faded into falsehood, as
well as into distance and dimness? When I look back, and see my
thoughts as trash, is it because they are trash and no better? When I
look back, and see Ailsa as a cloud, is it because it is a cloud and
nothing more? Or is it, as I have already suggested, that in one respect
the analogy between the moral and the material fails.
I am going to write Concerning Disappointment and Success. In the
days when I studied metaphysics, I should have objected to that title,
inasmuch as the antithesis is imperfect between the two things named
in it. Disappointment and Success are not properly antithetic; Failure
and Success are. Disappointment is the feeling caused by failure, and

caused also by other things besides failure. Failure is the thing;
disappointment is the feeling caused by the thing; while success is the
thing, and not the feeling. But such minute points apart, the title I have
chosen brings out best the subject about which I wish to write. And a
very wide subject it is; and one of universal interest.
I suppose that no one will dispute the fact that in this world there are
such things as disappoititment and success. I do not mean merely that
each man's lot has its share of both; I mean that there are some men
whose life on the whole is a failure, and that there are others whose life
on the whole is a success. You and I, my reader, know better than to
think that life is a lottery; but those who think it a lottery, must see that
there are human beings who draw the prizes, and others who draw the
blanks. I believe in Luck, and Ill Luck, as facts; of course I do not
believe the theory which common consent builds upon these facts.
There is, of course, no such thing as chance; this world is driven with
far too tight a rein to permit of anything whatsoever falling out in a way
properly fortuitous. But it cannot be denied that there are persona with
whom everything goes well, and other persons with whom everything
goes ill. There are people who invariably win at what are called games
of chance. There are people who invariably lose. You remember when
Sydney Smith lay on his deathbed, how he suddenly startled the
watchers by it, by breaking a long silence with a sentence from one of
his sermons, repeated in a deep, solemn voice, strange from the dying
man: His life had been successful at last; but success had come late;
and how much of disappointment he had known! And though he had
tried to bear up cheerily under his early cares, they had sunk in deep.
'We speak of life as a journey,' he said, 'but how differently is that
journey performed! Some are borne along their path in luxury and ease;
while some must walk it with naked feet, mangled and bleeding.'
Who is there that does not sometimes, on a quiet evening, even before
he has attained to middle age, sit down and look back upon his college
days, and his college friends; and think sadly of the failures, the
disappointments, the broken hearts, which have been among those who
all started fair and promised well? How very much has after life
changed the estimates which we, formed in those days, of the
intellectual mark and probable fate of one's friends and acquaintances!
You remember the dense, stolid dunces of that time: you remember the

men who sat next you in the lecture-room, and never answered rightly a
question that was put to them: you remember how you used to wonder
if they would always be the dunces they were then. Well, I never knew
a man who was a dunce at twenty, to prove what might be called a
brilliant or even a clever man in after life; but we have all known such
do wonderfully decently. You did not expect much of them, you see.
You did not try them by an exacting standard. If a monkey were to
write his name, you would be so much surprised at seeing him do it at
all, that you would never think of being surprised that he did not do it
very well. So, if a man you knew as a remarkably stupid fellow
preaches a decent sermon, you hardly think of remarking that it is very
common-place and dull, you are so much pleased and surprised' to find
that the man can preach at all. And then, the dunces of college days are