“Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.” – Spurgeon.

The annals of time bear mute testimony to the fact…

Why is it that the greatness of man should always be seen in the light of his many defeats? Has man got to be crushed under the heavy foot of oppression before he can exhibit his greatness? Perhaps it is so, perhaps nobility is a dormant virtue which flares out only under pressure from some external circumstances. Greatness can only be attained, it may be said, when there is some outside catalyst, some stimulant which goads us on to greater things. So long as there is peace, plenty and prosperity, thus long will there be no feats to sing songs about, but so long as there is strife, lack and poverty, thus long will man show himself in his most glorious form.
Grandeur is something attributed to one by others. We are, in the eyes of posterity, as others see us. Unfortunately, man is invariably unable to perceive incidents and people with an objective eye… Napoleon had to meet his Waterloo, Raziya had to fight her Altuniya, Prithviraj had to have a Ghori before the historian could sing his story. In death, in adversity, in struggle is it that man has emerged in all his glory. Born in a log cabin, struggling to educate himself, pushed about here and there, perpetually an object of ridicule, striving, striving to reach his goal and attaining it only to be sent hurtling down into the gaping jaws of death—that was Abraham Lincoln.

Yet the very same thing which Lincoln did in the face of such tremendous difficulties, Wilberforce did in England through parliamentary legislation. But the difference lay in the fact that Wilberforce was not born in a log cabin, in the fact Wilberforce did not rise from an obscure country lawyer to become the President of the United States of America, in the fact that he did not have to fight a Civil War or die as soon as he saw his aim fulfilled. In short, Wilberforce did not have to face the “tremendous difficulties”; Abraham Lincoln had more than an ample share of them!

A glance at any history book will show how true Mr. Spurgeon is. Amundsen reached the South Pole first, yet is it he who is endowed with all the grandeur and spleandour, or is it Robert Scott? The story of how Scott and his band strove against every kind of impediment that Mother Nature could cast across their path, only to find that someone else had reached the South Pole less than four weeks before them is a story which tears at the heart strings… So it is that it is Scott we remember and revere. Amundsen is forgotten and only the man to whom fate was so cruel we admire.

The Walter Raleigh touching the executioner’s blade and saying, “This is a good remedy for disease” we honour; the Marie Antoinette being led to the guillotine it is we think about. Indeed, the pen of tragedy always appears to have written the ode of grandeur… Man, by nature, has a morbid mind, and because it is Man who writes history, it is inevitable that the tragic it is whom he endows with grandeur… Strip the heroes of history of their trimmings and they all stand a conglomeration of alike beings. But. perhaps, we should not. Who are we to disturb the beatitudes of historians by the platitudes of philosophers?

Mani S. Aiyar.