Читать книгу Benjamin Franklin - John Torrey Morse - Страница 8

Table of Contents

So has ended the first stage, in the benign presence of Hymen. The period of youth may be regarded as over; but the narrative thereof, briefly as it has been given, is not satisfactory. One longs to help out the outline with color, to get the expression as well as merely the features of the young man who is going to become one of the greatest men of the nation. Many a writer and speaker has done what he could in this task, for Franklin has been for a century a chief idol of the American people. The Boston boy, the boy printer, the runaway apprentice, the young journeyman, friendless and penniless in distant London, are pictures which have been made familiar to many generations of schoolboys; and the trifling anecdote of the bread rolls eaten in the streets of Philadelphia has for its only rival among American historical traditions the more doubtful story about George Washington, the cherry-tree, and the little hatchet.

Yet, if plain truth is to be told, there was nothing unusual about this sunrise, no rare tints of divine augury; the luminary came up in every-day fashion. Franklin had done much reading; he had taken pains to cultivate a good style in writing English; he had practiced himself in dispute; he had adopted some odd notions, for example vegetarianism in diet; he had at times acquired some influence among his fellow journeymen, and had used it for good; he had occasionally fallen into the society of men of good social position; he had kept clear of the prevalent habit of excessive drinking; sometimes he had lived frugally and had laid up a little money; more often he had been wasteful; he had been very dissolute, and in sowing his wild oats he had gone down into the mud. His autobiography gives us a simple, vivid, strong picture, which we accept as correct, though in reading it one sees that the lapse of time since the occurrences narrated, together with his own success and distinction in life, have not been without their obvious effect. By the time he thought it worth while to write those pages, Franklin had been taught to think very well of himself and his career. For this reason he was, upon the one hand, somewhat indifferent as to setting down what smaller men would conceal, confident that his fame would not stagger beneath the burden of youthful wrong-doing; on the other hand, he deals rather gently, a little ideally, with himself, as old men are wont to acknowledge with condemnation tempered with mild forgiveness the foibles of their early days. It is evident that, as a young man, Franklin intermingled sense with folly, correct living with dissipation, in a manner that must have made it difficult for an observer to forecast the final outcome, and which makes it almost equally impossible now to form a satisfactory idea of him. He is not to be disposed of by placing him in any ready-made and familiar class. If he had turned out a bad man, there would have been abundance in his early life to point the moralist's warning tale; as he turned out a very reputable one, there is scarcely less abundance for panegyrists to expatiate upon. Certainly he was a man to attract some attention and to carry some weight, yet not more than many another of whom the world never hears. At the time of his marriage, however, he is upon the verge of development; a new period of his life is about to begin; what had been dangerous and evil in his ways disappears; the breadth, originality, and practical character of his mind are about to show themselves. He has settled to a steady occupation; he is industrious and thrifty; he has gathered much information, and may be regarded as a well-educated man; he writes a plain, forcible style; he has enterprise and shrewdness in matters of business, and good sense in all matters—that is the chief point, his sound sense has got its full growth and vigor, and of sound sense no man ever had more. Very soon he not only prospers financially, but begins to secure at first that attention and soon afterward that influence which always follow close upon success in practical affairs. He becomes the public-spirited citizen; scheme after scheme of social and public improvement is suggested and carried forward by him, until he justly comes to be one of the foremost citizens of Philadelphia. The enumeration of what he did within a few years in this small new town and poor community will be found surprising and admirable.

His first enterprise, of a quasi public nature, was the establishment of a library. There were to be fifty subscribers for fifty years, each paying an entrance fee of forty shillings and an annual due of ten shillings. He succeeded only with difficulty and delay, yet he did succeed, and the results were important. Later a charter was obtained, and the number of subscribers was doubled. "This," he says, "was the mother of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous. … These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common traders and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges." "Reading became fashionable," he adds. But it was not difficult to cultivate the desire for reading; that lay close to the surface. The boon which Franklin conferred lay rather in setting the example of a scheme by which books could be cheaply obtained in satisfactory abundance.

From the course of this business he drew one of those shrewd, practical conclusions which aided him so much in life. He says that he soon felt "the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project. I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it." This method he found so well suited to the production of results that he habitually followed it in his subsequent undertakings. It was sound policy; the self-abnegation helped success; the success secured personal prestige. It was soon observed that when "a number of friends" or "a few gentlemen" were represented by Franklin, their purpose was usually good and was pretty sure to be carried through. Hence came reputation and influence.

In December, 1732, he says, "I first published my Almanack, under the name of Richard Saunders," price five pence, thereby falling in with a common custom among the colonial printers. Within the month three editions were sold; and it was continued for twenty-five years thereafter with an average sale of 10,000 copies annually, until "Poor Richard" became a nom de plume as renowned as any in English literature. The publication ranks as one of the most influential in the world. Its "proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue," were sown like seed all over the land. The almanac went year after year, for quarter of a century, into the house of nearly every shopkeeper, planter, and farmer in the American provinces. Its wit and humor, its practical tone, its shrewd maxims, its worldly honesty, its morality of common sense, its useful information, all chimed well with the national character. It formulated in homely phrase and with droll illustration what the colonists more vaguely knew, felt, and believed upon a thousand points of life and conduct. In so doing it greatly trained and invigorated the natural mental traits of the people. "Poor Richard" was the revered and popular schoolmaster of a young nation during its period of tutelage. His teachings are among the powerful forces which have gone to shaping the habits of Americans. His terse and picturesque bits of the wisdom and the virtue of this world are familiar in our mouths to-day; they moulded our great-grandparents and their children; they have informed our popular traditions; they still influence our actions, guide our ways of thinking, and establish our points of view, with the constant control of acquired habits which we little suspect. If we were accustomed still to read the literature of the almanac, we should be charmed with its humor. The world has not yet grown away from it, nor ever will. Addison and Steele had more polish but vastly less humor than Franklin. "Poor Richard" has found eternal life by passing into the daily speech of the people, while the "Spectator" is fast being crowded out of the hands of all save scholars in literature. At this period of his life he wrote many short fugitive pieces, which hold some of the rarest wit that an American library contains. Few people suspect that the ten serious and grave-looking octavos, imprinted "The Works of Benjamin Franklin," hide much of that delightful kind of wit that can never grow old, but is as charming to-day as when it came damp from the press a century and more ago. How much of "Poor Richard" was actually original is a sifting not worth while to make. Franklin said: "I was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my own which he ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings that I had made of the sense of all ages and nations." No profound wisdom is really new, but only the expression of it; and all that of "Poor Richard" had been fused in the crucible of Franklin's brain.

But the famous almanac was not the only pulpit whence Franklin preached to the people. He had an excellent ideal of a newspaper. He got news into it, which was seldom done in those days, and which made it attractive; he got advertisements into it, which made it pay, and which also was a novel feature; indeed, Mr. Parton says that he "originated the modern system of business advertising;" he also discussed matters of public interest. Thus he anticipated the modern newspaper, but in some respects improved in advance upon that which he anticipated. He made his "Gazette" a vehicle for disseminating information and morality, and he carefully excluded from it "all libeling and personal abuse." The sheet in its every issue was doing the same sort of work as "Poor Richard." In a word, Franklin was a born teacher of men, and what he did in this way in these his earlier days gives him rank among the most distinguished moralists who have ever lived.

What kind of morality he taught is well known. It was human; he kept it free from entangling alliances with any religious creed; its foundations lay in common sense, not in faith. His own nature in this respect is easy to understand but difficult to describe, since the words which must be used convey such different ideas to different persons. Thus, to say that he had the religious temperament, though he was skeptical as to all the divine and supernatural dogmas of the religions of mankind, will seem to many a self-contradiction, while to others it is entirely intelligible. In his boyhood one gets a flavor of irreverence which was slow in disappearing. When yet a mere child he suggested to his father the convenience of saying grace over the whole barrel of salt fish, in bulk, as the mercantile phrase would be. By the time that he was sixteen, Shaftesbury and Collins, efficiently aided by the pious writers who had endeavored to refute them, had made him "a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine;" and while he was still his brother's apprentice in Boston, he fell into disrepute as a skeptic. Apparently he gathered momentum in moving along this line of thought, until in England his disbelief took on for a time an extreme and objectionable form. His opinions then were "that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world; and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions, no such things existing." But the pamphlet, already mentioned, in which he expressed these views, was the outburst of a youthful free-thinker not yet accustomed to his new ideas; not many years passed over his head before it "appear'd not so clever a performance as [he] once thought it;" and in his autobiography he enumerates it among the "errata" of his life.

It was not so very long afterward that he busied himself in composing prayers, and even an entire litany, for his own use. No Christian could have found fault with the morals therein embodied; but Christ was entirely ignored. He even had the courage to draw up a new version of the Lord's Prayer; and he arranged a code of thirteen rules after the fashion of the Ten Commandments; of these the last one was: "Imitate Jesus and Socrates." Except during a short time just preceding and during his stay in London he seems never to have been an atheist; neither was he ever quite a Christian; but as between atheism and Christianity he was very much further removed from the former than from the latter. He used to call himself a deist, or theist; and said that a deist was as much like an atheist as chalk is like charcoal. The evidence is abundant that he settled down into a belief in a personal God, who was good, who concerned himself with the affairs of men, who was pleased with good acts and displeased with evil ones. He believed also in immortality and in rewards in a life to come. But he supported none of these beliefs upon the same basis on which Christians support them.

Unlike the infidel school of that day he had no antipathy even to the mythological portions of the Christian religion, no desire to discredit it, nor ambition to distinguish himself in a crusade against it. On the contrary, he was always resolute to live well with it. His mind was too broad, his habit of thought too tolerant, to admit of his antagonizing so good a system of morals because it was intertwined with articles of faith which he did not believe. He went to church frequently, and always paid his contribution towards the expenses of the society; but he kept his commendation only for those practical sermons which showed men how to become virtuous. In like manner the instruction which he himself inculcated was strictly confined to those virtues which promote the welfare and happiness of the individual and of society. In fact, he recognized none other; that which did not advance these ends was but a spurious pretender to the title of virtue.

One is tempted to make many quotations from Franklin's writings in this connection; but two or three must suffice. In 1743 he wrote to his sister:—