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The Story of the Sword

[2] _Dr, Conwell was living, and actively at work, when these pages were written. It is, therefore, a much truer picture of his personality than anything written in the past tense_.

I SHALL write of a remarkable man, an interesting man, a man of power, of initiative, of will, of persistence; a man who plans vastly and who realizes his plans; a man who not only does things himself, but who, even more important than that, is the constant inspiration of others. I shall write of Russell H. Conwell.

As a farmer's boy he was the leader of the boys of the rocky region that was his home; as a school- teacher he won devotion; as a newspaper correspondent he gained fame; as a soldier in the Civil War he rose to important rank; as a lawyer he developed a large practice; as an author he wrote books that reached a mighty total of sales. He left the law for the ministry and is the active head of a great church that he raised from nothingness. He is the most popular lecturer in the world and yearly speaks to many thousands. He is, so to speak, the discoverer of "Acres of Diamonds," through which thousands of men and women have achieved success out of failure. He is the head of two hospitals, one of them founded by himself, that have cared for a host of patients, both the poor and the rich, irrespective of race or creed. He is the founder and head of a university that has already had tens of thousands of students. His home is in Philadelphia; but he is known in every corner of every state in the Union, and everywhere he has hosts of friends. All of his life he has helped and inspired others.

Quite by chance, and only yesterday, literally yesterday and by chance, and with no thought at the moment of Conwell although he had been much in my mind for some time past, I picked up a thin little book of description by William Dean Howells, and, turning the pages of a chapter on Lexington, old Lexington of the Revolution, written, so Howells had set down, in 1882, I noticed, after he had written of the town itself, and of the long-past fight there, and of the present- day aspect, that he mentioned the church life of the place and remarked on the striking advances made by the Baptists, who had lately, as he expressed it, been reconstituted out of very perishing fragments and made strong and flourishing, under the ministrations of a lay preacher, formerly a colonel in the Union army. And it was only a few days before I chanced upon this description that Dr. Conwell, the former colonel and former lay preacher, had told me of his experiences in that little old Revolutionary town.

Howells went on to say that, so he was told, the colonel's success was principally due to his making the church attractive to young people. Howells says no more of him; apparently he did not go to hear him; and one wonders if he has ever associated that lay preacher of Lexington with the famous Russell H. Conwell of these recent years!

"Attractive to young people." Yes, one can recognize that to-day, just as it was recognized in Lexington. And it may be added that he at the same time attracts older people, too! In this, indeed, lies his power. He makes his church interesting, his sermons interesting, his lectures interesting. He is himself interesting! Because of his being interesting, he gains attention. The attention gained, he inspires.

Biography is more than dates. Dates, after all, are but mile-stones along the road of life. And the most important fact of Conwell's life is that he lived to be eighty-two, working sixteen hours every day for the good of his fellow-men. He was born on February 15, 1843-born of poor parents, in a low-roofed cottage in the eastern Berkshires, in Massachusetts.

"I was born in this room," he said to me, simply, as we sat together recently[3] in front of the old fireplace in the principal room of the little cottage; for he has bought back the rocky farm of his father, and has retained and restored the little old home. "I was born in this room. It was bedroom and kitchen. It was poverty." And his voice sank with a kind of grimness into silence.

[3] _This interview took place at the old Conwell farm in the summer of 1915_.

Then he spoke a little of the struggles of those long-past years; and we went out on the porch, as the evening shadows fell, and looked out over the valley and stream and hills of his youth, and he told of his grandmother, and of a young Marylander who had come to the region on a visit; it was a tale of the impetuous love of those two, of rash marriage, of the interference of parents, of the fierce rivalry of another suitor, of an attack on the Marylander's life, of passionate hastiness, of unforgivable words, of separation, of lifelong sorrow. "Why does grandmother cry so often?" he remembers asking when he was a little boy. And he was told that it was for the husband of her youth.

We went back into the little house, and he showed me the room in which he first saw John Brown. "I came down early one morning, and saw a huge, hairy man sprawled upon the bed there-and I was frightened," he says.

But John Brown did not long frighten him! For he was much at their house after that, and was so friendly with Russell and his brother that there was no chance for awe; and it gives a curious side- light on the character of the stern abolitionist that he actually, with infinite patience, taught the old horse of the Conwells to go home alone with the wagon after leaving the boys at school, a mile or more away, and at school-closing time to trot gently off for them without a driver when merely faced in that direction and told to go! Conwell remembers how John Brown, in training it, used patiently to walk beside the horse, and control its going and its turnings, until it was quite ready to go and turn entirely by itself.

The Conwell house was a station on the Underground Railway, and Russell Conwell remembers, when a lad, seeing the escaping slaves that his father had driven across country and temporarily hidden. "Those were heroic days," he says, quietly. "And once in a while my father let me go with him. They were wonderful night drives- the cowering slaves, the darkness of the road, the caution and the silence and dread of it all." This underground route, he remembers, was from Philadelphia to New Haven, thence to Springfield, where Conwell's father would take his charge, and onward to Bellows Falls and Canada.

Conwell tells, too, of meeting Frederick Douglass, the colored orator, in that little cottage in the hills. " `I never saw my father,' Douglass said one day-his father was a white man-`and I remember little of my mother except that once she tried to keep an overseer from whipping me, and the lash cut across her own face, and her blood fell over me.'

"When John Brown was captured," Conwell went on, "my father tried to sell this place to get a little money to send to help his defense. But he couldn't sell it, and on the day of the execu- tion we knelt solemnly here, from eleven to twelve, just praying, praying in silence for the passing soul of John Brown. And as we prayed we knew that others were also praying, for a church-bell tolled during that entire hour, and its awesome boom went sadly sounding over these hills."

Conwell believes that his real life dates from a happening of the time of the Civil War-a happening that still looms vivid and intense before him, and which undoubtedly did deepen and strengthen his strong and deep nature. Yet the real Conwell was always essentially the same. Neighborhood tradition still tells of his bravery as a boy and a youth, of his reckless coasting, his skill as a swimmer and his saving of lives, his strength and endurance, his plunging out into the darkness of a wild winter night to save a neighbor's cattle. His soldiers came home with tales of his devotion to them, and of how he shared his rations and his blankets and bravely risked his life; of how he crept off into a swamp, at imminent peril, to rescue one of his men lost or mired there. The present Conwell was always Conwell; in fact, he may be traced through his ancestry, too, for in him are the sturdy virtues, the bravery, the grim determination, the practicality, of his father; and romanticism, that comes from his grandmother; and the dreamy qualities of his mother, who, practical and hardworking New England woman that she was, was at the same time influenced by an almost startling mysticism.

And Conwell himself is a dreamer: first of all he is a dreamer; it is the most important fact in regard to him! It is because he is a dreamer and visualizes his dreams that he can plan the great things that to other men would seem impossibilities; and then his intensely practical side his intense efficiency, his power, his skill, his patience, his fine earnestness, his mastery over others, develop his dreams into realities. He dreams dreams and sees visions-but his visions are never visionary and his dreams become facts.

The rocky hills which meant a dogged struggle for very existence, the fugitive slaves, John Brown -what a school for youth! And the literal school was a tiny one-room school-house where young Conwell came under the care of a teacher who realized the boy's unusual capabilities and was able to give him broad and unusual help. Then a wise country preacher also recognized the unusual, and urged the parents to give still more education, whereupon supreme effort was made and young Russell was sent to Wilbraham Academy. He likes to tell of his life there,...