The Cost of Being Polished.
By Selected
EVERYBODY wants to appear polished. Almost everybody thinks that he is polished. But not everybody takes into account the cost of being polished; nor would everybody submit cheerfully to the polishing process, if its cost were fairly foreseen. To be polished is to shine; and to shine in one's sphere is a well-nigh universal craving. If men could shine by nature, shine of one's unaided substance as the sun shines, shining would be without cost, and as easy a thing as it was free. But innate luminousness is not a common characteristic of the human race. There are those, it is true, who shine from birth, who from beauty of person attract the eye and dazzle the sight of those about them. But this shining is a rare and an exceptional quality, and its nature is rather that of the glow-worm than of the sun; moreover, such shining is not a polish; for a polish is never natural, but is always acquired by rubbing or friction, as the word itself would indicate. If men could shine by reflection, as the moon shines, shining would still be an easy matter for all who were in the rays of a bright light. There certainly are those who shine from their relation to others, whose brilliancy is made apparent by their reflection of the light of a distinguished parent, or partner, or associate, or friend; of one with whom they are linked by their fortunes or their labors; but even then their shining indicates a personal polish which makes their reflection of light a possibility. Proximity to a brilliant man does not in itself ensure brilliancy. If one has the polish to shine in reflected light, that polish had its cost—as polish always has. The cost of being polished is inevitable to the polished one; and that cost is, in the realm of personality, always—as it is commonly in the field of mechanics—heavy in exact proportion to the hardness and real worth of the thing polished. Wax is easier polished than leather; leather than wood. Woods take the highest polish of which they are capable, according to their relative hardness of fiber and closeness of grain. Lead is easier polished than silver; pewter than bronze. Marble receives a polish by friction which would make no impression on granite; but when granite is once fairly polished, its luster will show long after the marble has crumbled or tarnished. It is a small matter to give a polish to glass or agate in comparison with the work necessary to bring out the brilliancy of a ruby or a sapphire; and a diamond is hardest of all to polish, as its worth and brilliancy give it, when polished, the pre-eminent place among precious stones. A similar gradation is found in all personal polish. The polish of the manners is easier secured than the polish of the intellect; of the intellect than of the character. A dancing-master can give his pupils all the polish they are after, or he has to supply, in a hundredth part of the time taken by a college faculty to polish up their students. A table-waiter or a footman can secure his requisite polish in less time than a good salesman. The polish of the sales-room is easier of acquisition than the polish of the parlor. The highest society polish is not so difficult of attainment as the classic polish of an orator or a poet. Yet in the lower spheres as in the higher, all polish has its inevitable cost—a larger cost than most people suppose. If one is a polished dancer, or table-waiter, or salesman, or conversationalist, or entertainer, it has cost him a great deal of friction to become so. And if he speaks or writes with polish it has cost him far more. The polish of manners may be a polish of veneering, of an overlaid surface quite different from the main body; but the polish of the intellect or of the character must be of the main stock—of the polished one's personality. Polish always comes through friction, and friction rubs off excrescences, and smooths down roughnesses, and wears away protuberances. Friction, in one's personality, hurts. It requires courage to bear up while being polished. It is never a pleasant thing to have one's surface peculiarities ground down to their base. The polishing process lowers one's pride, cuts one's fancies, and seems for the time to be destroying one's self. And the more there is to one's intellect and character, the greater is the cost of one's polishing, and the more essential is the need of one's full recognition of that cost, and a heroic acquiescence in it. The foremost English biographer of the poet Goethe suggests a felicitous illustration of this truth, although he uses it in a lower sense: "The diamond, it is said, can be polished only by its own dust; is not this symbolical of the truth that only by its own fallings-off can genius properly be taught? And is not our very walk, as Goethe says, a series of falls?" It is not the chipping off of the diamond's surface that polishes the diamond; but it is by the wise use of the diamond dust or chippings, in the hands of a skilled lapidary, that the diamond's polish is finally secured. It is not the making of mistakes that makes a man; but it is the wise use of mistakes that enables a man to be made—to become a polished man in his best sphere. "Instruction," says Froude, "does not prevent waste of time or mistakes, and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all." Or, as Coleridge says in encouragement of a wise use of the diamond chippings in character polishing,—
"Mother-sage of self dominion,
Firm thy steps, O Melancholy!
The strongest plume in wisdom's pinion
Is the memory of past folly."
That is, the folly being past and not again present; for "a sound discretion is not so indicated by never making a mistake, as by never repeating it." Whenever we see the light and glow of a beautiful character, we may know that its illuminating power came through its slow polishing by its own diamond dust, at the hands of the Great Lapidary. And we can be sure that the cost of that polishing was long days and longer nights of suffering under the soul-friction that brought the polish. And the means whereby we are polished cannot be appreciated while we are undergoing the process, from the fact that they do produce suffering. A truth sent to work directly toward our soul-sanctifying, according to our Saviour's prayer for all his followers, comes as an unwelcome or unpopular truth; one well calculated to abrade the rough corners of our perverse natures. No one can tell the dark hours through which many sensitive and highly conscientious persons have passed before they came to accept the conclusion recently avowed by Dr. Lyman Abbott, of the everlasting destruction of the finally impenitent. Saul of Tarsus, and Martin Luther, and the Wesleys, had to pass through just such experiences, and we do not appreciate the comparison, because we do not realize that the truths for which these suffered were just as unpopular in their days, as the doctrine of conditional immortality is in our days. And when we wince and groan under our own sensitiveness, in view of our often stumbling over a duty plainly revealed in the Bible, which is rejected by the multitude, and by even our dearest associates, we must remember that our Lord did not "come to send peace on the earth;" that these crosses are inevitable if we would be so polished as to shine gloriously in the reflected light of the Sun of Righteousness. Diamond polishing can be compassed only by diamond-dust friction. And the character that has the closest diamond grain has anything but the diamond brilliancy to begin with. "In this dull stone, so poor, and bare
Of shape or lustre, patient care
Will find for thee a jewel rare.
"But first must skillful hands essay,
With jewel dust to clear away
The film which hides its fire from day." The heavy cost of character-polishing by character-friction is unavoidable, and it pays well in the end; but it is none the less grievous at its time, for all that. "Now no chastening [even for one's polishing] for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit [or result] of righteousness unto them which are exercised"—polished—"thereby."