CHAPTER VIII

LIVE MEN WANTED

"Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man.' JEREMIAH.

"If you would create something, you must be something." GOETHE.

WALKING one day in a business street of that livest of American cities, Chicago, we saw in a shop window this placard: "LIVE MEN WANTED HERE." It struck us as intensely significant, indicating a want felt not only in that focus of fiery energy, but in every part of our country, and, we might almost add, throughout the civilized world. Everywhere active, energetic, wideawake men are wanted; men who have the impulse of the age of the steam-engine-in them, and work at high pressure. The merchant wants live men, who can condense business, talk pithily and persuasively to customers, dash off letters quickly, economize time in their reports to him, and give their whole souls to the work before them. The master-mechanic wants live men to work the saw, turn the auger, and shove the fore-plane. Live men are wanted in the medical profession, to master the latest methods of surgery and cure, to make quick and accurate diagnoses and prescribe promptly in critical cases; they are wanted at the bar, to master the ever-swelling volumes of the law, and to seize and press home to juries the vital points

of testimony; and in the pulpit, there preeminently are live men, men desperately in earnest and with hearts throbbing with energy, wanted in this age of spiritual coldness, skepticism, money-worship, and selfish enjoyment.

"He is a good man, and preaches well," said a certain deacon of his pastor, "but he needs to be struck by lightning!" Of how many laborious, scholarly preachers, "coldly correct and critically dull," is this true! Ignorance in the pulpit can be overlooked, mistakes pardoned, and awkwardness excused; but for lukewarmness in an age when the agencies of evil, though subtle, are so deadly in earnest, there is no palliation. Live men are wanted, too, in the pews of our churches. "Have you ever read," said Mr. Spurgeon one day to his people, "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner'? I dare say you have thought it one of the strangest imaginations ever put together, especially that part where the old mariner represents the corpses of all the dead men rising up, all of them dead, yet rising up to manage the ship; dead men pulling the ropes, dead men steering, dead men spreading the sails. But, do you know, I have lived to see that? I have gone into churches, and I have seen a dead man in the pulpit, and a dead man as a deacon, and a dead man holding the plate at the door, and dead men sitting to hear."

During our late civil war, a brigadier-general, loafing about the streets of Washington, met a newsboy who cried his papers, announcing, " Another great battle." The general bought a paper, put up his eyeglass to examine it, and in a few moments said to the boy, "I don't see any battle here." No, darn ye," replied the boy, "you never will, while you hang round this

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town." Though there are moral battles raging all around them, there are men who never see them from lack of sympathy and earnestness. Well has Thoreau said that "to be awake is to be alive. I have never yet seen a man who was quite alive. How could I have looked him in the face?" Had Thoreau read the biography just published of Charles James Napier, the hero of Scinde, by Sir William F. Butler, we are sure he would have confessed that if he had not seen, he had at least read of, a man who was quite alive." Napier was, from crown to sole, topful of fiery life. Work, constant and unremitting, was his natural element. Without it he pined and languished, lost his health and spirits; but with it, especially if it had danger in it, he was roused to new life, and bounded, lion-like, to meet the crisis. Almost the only day when he was supremely happy, was that preceding the battle of Meeanee, the day before that in which, with an almost divine madness, he desperately hurled his handful of men against 40,000 warriors, the pick of the chivalry of Beloochistan. Whatever he engaged in, — gardening, road-making, or fighting, — he threw his whole soul into it.

All the great warriors of the world, Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Frederic, Adolphus, Napoleon, have been emphatically "live men." The last-named, who astonished the world by his intense, persistent, electrical energy, was struck by the lack of it in his fellow-beings. "How few men are there," he once observed, "that, in general, set to work on any given point or topic with more than a corner of their brain." Bajazet was called "The Lightning." Mermeroes, the Persian general who in the sixth century fought the Romans in Colchis, was old and lame; but neither of

these disadvantages diminished his mental or physical activity. Carried in a litter, he by his fiery energy inspired his troops with such confidence, and the enemy with such terror, that he was always victorious. Another live leader was Torstenson, the Swedish general, who bewildered his enemies by his rapidity, and won his victories as much by the legs of his soldiers as by their arms. In political revolutions, it is the "live men," the men fiercely in earnest, who carry the day. In the French Revolution, the Girondists, as we have already said, were every way superior to the Mountain; but the Mountain party had more energy and audacity than their learned, accomplished, and well-meaning but hesitating foes, and won a complete triumph.

All the masterpieces of literature have been produced by "live men." They have been, in most cases, elaborated in the intervals of less congenial toils, in the pauses of dull drudgery, — amidst neglect, anxiety, and privation. They that have spread light through the world had often scarcely oil for the lamp by which they worked; they that have left imperishable records of their mind, had often little to support the body, and gave forth the incense in which their knowledge is embalmed "in self-consuming flames." They toiled with intense, unresting energy, feeling as did Arnauld when Nicole, on a new work being proposed, said to him: "We are now old; is it not time that we should rest?" "Rest!" exclaimed Arnauld, "have we not all eternity to rest in?" They surpassed other men because they took more pains than other men. They have commonly, as another has said, passed the first half of life in the gross darkness of indigent humility, overlooked, mistaken,

condemned by other men, thinking while others slept, reading while others rioted, feeling something within them that told them they should not always be kept down among the dregs of the world; and then, when their time has come, and some little accident has given them their first occasion, they have burst out into the light and glory of public life, rich with the spoils of time, and mighty in all the labors and struggles of the mind.

Even in the present age, when authorship enjoys so many facilities and advantages which it formerly lacked, nearly all the successful writers are prodigious workers. See Dickens shutting himself up and living a hermit's life for six weeks to write a Christmas story, and looking, as he comes out, as haggard as a murderer! See George Eliot beginning "Romola " a young woman, and ending it an old woman! See the sickly, spectral Green, almost exhausted by literary toil, writing "The Making of England" when in such wretched health that those who saw him from day to day could hardly believe that he would live through the coming winter! "It is not study alone that produces a writer," says Bulwer; "it is intensity. In the mind, as in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn hot and quick, you must narrow the draught.' "Through every clause and part of speech of a right book I meet the eyes of the most determined of men," says Emerson. "His force and terror inundate every word; the commas and dashes are all alive, so that the writing is athletic and nimble, and can go far and live long. . . . It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a man behind it

or no.

Why is it that certain bold, bad men so often hold