Two Portraits

( Originally Published 1885 )

YOU have all heard, I dare say, the old story of a distinguished artist who painted a portrait of innocence. He took for his subject a beautiful boy, with face fair, frank, and friendly, his hair falling over his shoulders in golden ringlets, his eye full and large, his forehead high and noble, and his whole expression such as would attract one as a sweet face of innocent childhood. He was his mother's love and hope and joy. The painting was finished ; it was a great success ; everybody praised it. The artist soon became famous, and had a long career, particularly noted for his skill in delineating character.

At last, when he was an old man, some friend reminded him that he had never painted the companion picture to this early portrait of " Innocence." " You ought," said he, " to paint a companion piece, representing ' Vice.'" The painter thought upon the matter, and finally decided that if he could find a proper subject he would paint the counterpart for his " Innocence." One evening, as he was returning home, he stumbled over the prostrate form of a man stupefied with intoxicants. Fearing the man would perish, he kindly provided for his restoration to consciousness. He was one mass of filth. His hair long and matted, his face blotched and dirty, his clothing torn and filthy, — he was the impersonation of wretchedness, vice, and crime. " I have my subject," the painter exclaimed ; and he painted a faithful portrait of him, and hung it alongside of the picture of "Innocence." Here, then, was the contrast. On the one hand, childhood, innocence, joy, hope, ambition on the other, age, vice, crime, of hope bereft, ambition extinguished, absolute despair pictured upon his every feature. The sot lived but a few days after the picture was finished, but long enough, having seen the child's portrait, to recognize it, in extreme anguish and self-condemnation, as his own, taken in the early days of his innocence and purity.

The story points a moral of great consequence to every one of you. You are school children, young, gay, joyful, happy, looking forward to a long life of honorable labor and success in the world. Will you all attain the goal of your youthful ambitions and aspirations? This is an important question for you. It would be painful in the extreme if one should have full knowledge of the future, and should know and predict that any one of you would fall into vice, crime, and despair. But neither virtue nor fortune comes without the asking. There are laws which govern life, laws as inexorable as those of physics and chemistry. Nothing but a miracle interferes with these rules of working.

To win success, to achieve usefulness, and to secure happiness, require a well-spent youth. The object and purpose of school and school-life are to raise the young to true manhood. The school is not, primarily, to impart instruction, to cram into the young minds a mass of knowledge, however useful that might prove ; but the grand aim of the school, of education, is to develop the genius of manhood, to unfold the higher powers of our being, to discipline the mind, to implant correct habits and accurate notions of things, to gain true views of life, that the recipient of this schooling may know upon what depends life's success and what causes life's failure ; in short, to prepare him to stem the current and to resist temptation ; to acquire those habits of probity, industry, and perseverance which alone will give him the elements by which he may command success.

It will be well for you all to bear in mind what these elements of success are. No man can secure true good fortune in life unless he has firmly implanted within him (1) firm adherence to the right, true principle, an honest heart ; (2) fixed habits of industry, with that control over his will, his desires, his appetites, his passions, which will permit him to attend steadily to his business ; and (3) that perseverance, growing out of his industry and self-control, which will permit him to stick to his business or any object he may wish to pursue till success has been reached and his ideal realized. All these things depend upon strict attention to the duties of home and school at this period of your life. As the twig is bent the tree is inclined," is true if you give the right interpretation to it. Not every one manifests in the school days of youth what he afterwards becomes ; but by a careful analysis of what he was and what he did in his early days, the germ, the elements of his future life will generally be found apparent. Attention to duty, loyalty to truth, industry, and fidelity will invariably bring their reward.