Self-Help

 

Self-Help was published the same year as Darwin’s Origin of the Species and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. While Darwin drew a picture of how closer adaptation to environment refines life and Mill sketched a society based on liberty, Smiles gave the world a work that still inspires in its scenes of individuals who have fashioned a life from pure will. Self-Help may not have the scholarly or philosophical depth of the other two, but it was seminal to the self-help genre and its ethos of personal responsibility.

In many Victorian homes the book had a status second only to the Bible and though it is now considered a classic display of Victorian values (industry, thrift, progress, and so on),the old-fashioned turns of phrase and unquestioning morality represent the cover by which we should not judge the book. It is a work within a broader literary tradition that includes Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the novels of Horatio Alger, one in which human beings advance despite the odds.

The self-help ethic comes alive through biography. Smiles knew this and he packed his book with remarkable people, many now forgotten. He mentions:

 

 

Yet these lives are paraded before us not merely so that we can marvel, but to give some idea of the vast range of possible models for our own life. Smiles sorted these lives according to how they illuminate the great qualities like tenacity, industry, and endurance; they form the chapters of the book.

 

Smiles believed that, since it was about human nature, Self-Help would remain valid. However, to accept that you would have to believe that perseverance and unremitting work are still primary elements of success—are they?

The myth of the artist is a person of wild genius who produces masterpieces in creative bursts, while the common denominator in Smiles’ “lives of the artists” is their singular industry and never-say-die application to the task, almost equal to their artistic talent. In showing that many of the methods they pioneered were the result of years of trial and error, he explodes the belief that the most famous artists have the most “talent.” In fact talent is not thinly spread; what is rare is the willingness to put in the back-breaking labor to fulfill an artistic vision. Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling if he had not been willing to lie on his back on boards for months on end. It took Titian seven years to produce his Last Supper for Charles V, yet the viewer might assume that it was created in a “burst of genius.”

Smiles noted the motto of both painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and sculptor David Wilkie: “Work! Work! Work!” Johann Sebastian Bach reflected: “I was industrious; whoever is equally sedulous, will be equally successful.” History has a tendency to turn unwavering commitment and hard graft into grand words like genius, when its subjects knew otherwise. Smiles wrote:

 

 

He told us about George-Louis Buffon (1707–88),author of the famous 44-volume Histoire Naturelle, which took stock of all that was known about natural history in his era and foreshadowed the theory of evolution. The massive self-discipline needed to complete such a project led Buffon to conclude that “genius is patience.” Smiles went on to quote De Maistre: “To know how to wait is the great secret of success.” He also noted Isaac Newton’s understanding of what produced genius: constant thought about the solution of a problem.

Patience, ordering of the mind, and absorption in the task at hand are the key elements that Smiles cited in all our great advances, and neither government funding nor education can supply them. They are created talents.

 

These days the phrase “character building” is usually uttered with a laugh to someone contemplating a cold shower or doing a 10-day trek across the Himalayas. As Smiles warned even back in the 1850s, education, wealth, or noble family does not come close to replacing character. Today we live in the so-called knowledge society in which the highest value is taken to be creative deployment of data and information, but Smiles asserted that “Character is power, more than knowledge is power.”

Self-Help may be a simple book for a simpler time, but its dogged reiteration of the need to cultivate personal qualities that bring freedom of mind reveals a timeless truth: Character is something formed in spite of the great forces of instinct and cultural conditioning. Smiles included a statement by Sir Humphry Davy: “What I am I have made myself: I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of heart.” Davy’s admission spoke of courage, not as part of exciting tales of derring-do but of small daily decisions that reaffirm independence. This is the primary ingredient of Stephen Covey’s “highly effective people.”

But where will character get me? How will it make my living? In the nineteenth century, business was not seen as it tends to be now, as the arena for the brightest, most creative minds, yet Smiles was able to see that it would become so. He wasted no time in stripping business to its core element: integrity of word and deed. Since trust is the glue that holds free societies together, it follows that lasting success will be attracted to those who can be trusted. As Max Weber famously argued, this attribute had been so rare that early Protestant merchants, in their utter dependability, scooped up fortunes.

Nothing dulls the mind and destroys character as much as drugs and alcohol, and Smiles did not miss a chance to praise that most esteemed quality, temperance. How we laugh in the old movies when the preacher rails against the “road to ruin.” It is the fevered fear of alcohol that amuses, because we are “sensible” about it. But who will admit its less dramatic consequences that add up over a lifetime: the things you don’t get done the next day because of the night before, the drinking “to be social” that does little more than cover an acceptance of mediocrity. Smiles thought of Sir Walter Scott, who said, “Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.”

 

In Samuel Smiles’ lifetime the British Empire covered roughly a quarter of the planet. Like any empire it spawned its fair share of misery among those forced into keeping the whole show going. Its good qualities—social reform, some enlightened political principles, sheer energy, and inventiveness—were held together by a larger belief in “progress.”

One effect of Mill’s On Liberty was to make us see such values in relative terms. By being a missive against political oppression, it also unwittingly beat a path for socialism, which raised the ideal of community to such a level that individuals were protected from having to push their own boundaries. Yet Smiles reminded us that Mill actually said, “The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

If the progress ideal makes a comeback in the twenty-first century, it is less likely to be the property of governments than the faith of individuals. While Mill’s principle of political liberty is the basic condition for personal progress, it is the ethos of Self-Help that can actually make us do something with our freedom. Interestingly, Smiles was in his earlier life a rabid political reformer, but gave this up when he realized that the more pressing type of reform was personal.

Self-Help is monumentally sexist, there being a total lack of women in the biographies. Its small defense is that it was developed from talks given to working men, who at that time would probably not have stomached female role models. With some more stories of women in the book it would perhaps be less obscure today, but any reader who can laugh off or forgive Smiles’ oversight will be well rewarded. This Titanic of the self-help literature deserves to rise again.

 

The eldest of 11 children, Smiles was born in 1812 in Haddington, Scotland, the son of a paper maker. At 14 he left school and worked for three years before enrolling at Edinburgh University to study medicine. After some time as a doctor, his interests soon shifted to politics, leading to his becoming editor in 1838 of the radical Leeds Times, where he stayed until 1842. Influenced by the utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (John Stuart’s father),his causes included freer trade, extension of suffrage, and better conditions for factory workers.

Smiles became disillusioned with political reform and increasingly advocated personal development, and in the same year that he began a career as a railway administrator gave the course of lectures that would later be molded into Self-Help. Translated into many languages, it was one of a handful of English titles circulating in Japan after the Meiji restoration, becoming a bible for western-inspired businessmen. The millionaire industrialist Lord Leverhume and the American writer and founder of Success magazine Orison Swett Marden were among many who said that they owed their achievements to Self-Help.

Other works by Smiles include a biography of railway pioneer George Stephenson (1857),the three-volume economic history text Lives of the Engineers (1874),the books Character (1871),Thrift (1875),and Duty (1880),and a life of potter Josiah Wedgwood (1894). An autobiography was published after his death in 1904.