A SAILOR'S FORTUNE - ESSAY I

Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

by Samuel T. Coleridge

A SAILOR'S FORTUNE - ESSAY I, CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT by Samuel T. Coleridge
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Fortuna plerumque est veluti
Galaxia quarundam obscurarum
Virtutum sine nomine.
BACON.

(Translation)--Fortune is for the most part but a galaxy or milky
way, as it were, of certain obscure virtues without a name.

"Does Fortune favour fools? Or how do you explain the origin of the
proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the
languages of Europe?"

This proverb admits of various explanations, according to the mood of
mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and the soothing
persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless,
and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring
for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as "God
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"--or the more sportive adage, that
"the fairies take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion
itself, in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and
the scarcely less general love of the marvellous, may be accounted
for from our tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem
disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circumstances that
are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons
under them. Secondly, it arises from the safety and success which an
ignorance of danger and difficulty sometimes actually assists in
procuring; inasmuch as it precludes the despondence, which might have
kept the more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the
depression which would retard its progress, and those overwhelming
influences of terror in cases where the vivid perception of the
danger constitutes the greater part of the danger itself. Thus men
are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow
bridge, over which they had ridden, the night before, in perfect
safety; or at tracing the footmarks along the edge of a precipice
which the darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause,
yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact that
the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or bedim
those mysterious instincts of skill, which, though for the most part
latent, we nevertheless possess in common with other animals.

Or the proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary
of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood
and fool-hardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet
will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the
chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always
availing itself of them: and in this sense Fortune may be said to
favour fools by those who, however prudent in their own opinion, are
deficient in valour and enterprise. Again: an emiently good and
wise man, for whom the praises of the judicious have procured a high
reputation even with the world at large, proposes to himself certain
objects, and adapting the right means to the right end attains them;
but his objects not being what the world calls fortune, neither money
nor artificial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual
worth, but more prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to
have been favoured by Fortune and be slighted; although the fools did
the same in their line as the wise man in his; they adapted the
appropriate means to the desired end, and so succeeded. In this
sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least,
of both the words, fortune and fools.


How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.

REPLY.

For shame! dear friend, renounce this canting strain;
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? Three treasures, love, and light,
And calm thoughts regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.
S. T. C.

But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to fortune,
distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from
that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according
to my favourite proverb, "extremes meet,") the fool not seldom
obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by
the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real
existence in human affairs, from the infinite number of powers that
are in action at the same time, and from the co-existence of things
contingent and accidental (such as to US at least are accidental)
with the regular appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar
instance will make these words intelligible. The moon waxes and
wanes according to a necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the
manifold appearances connected with them, are governed by certain
laws no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which
determine the latter are known and calculable, while those of the
former are hidden from us. At all events, the number and variety of
their effects baffle our powers of calculation; and that the sky is
clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common
language, as a matter of accident. Well! at the time of the full
moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am
walking on in the dark, aware of no particular danger: a sudden gust
of wind rends the cloud for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses
to me a chasm or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced
my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or
less serious mood or habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky! or, how
providential! The co-presence of numberless phaenomena, which from
the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called
contingencies, and the co-existence of these with any regular or
necessary phaenomenon (as the clouds with the moon for instance),
occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage
or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or
foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny
afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt the farmer's hay; and
this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same event to take
place, when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science,
provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had
neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence.
Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have
greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what
possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself,
his good luck will excite less attention and the instances be less
remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems
natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that
success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight;
but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when
the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, though the
latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might
have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than
might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no
hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other
undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs
by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously
false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn
of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of
some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion
and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having
been as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out
of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the
illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they
presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence
of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this
battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident,
and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for
the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his
principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the
inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal
answers to prepared and preconceived questions--yet still they would
not have been talked of or described, as instances of LUCK, but as
the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But
should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic
at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in
consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbours, and partly
with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the
general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh, what a lucky fellow!
Well, Fortune does favour fools--that's certain! It is always so!"--
and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instances.
Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the
other, we do, as poets in their diction, and quacks of all
denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at
once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvellous, by the
sweeping proverb, "Fortune favours fools."