And he sincerely believes that his life has in itself been without interest; that it has been an essentially commonplace life with nothing of the interesting or the eventful to tell. He is frankly surprised that there has ever been the desire to write about him. He really has no idea of how fascinating are the things he has done. His entire life has been of positive interest from the variety of things accomplished and the unexpectedness with which he has accomplished them.
Never, for example, was there such an organizer.
In fact, organization and leadership have always been as the breath of life to him. As a youth he organized debating societies and, before the war, a local military company. While on garrison duty in the Civil War he organized what is believed to have been the first free school for colored children in the South. One day Minneapolis happened to be spoken of, and Conwell happened to remember that he organized, when he was a lawyer in that city, what became the first Y.M.C.A. branch there. Once he even started a newspaper. And it was natural that the organizing instinct, as years advanced, should lead him to greater and greater things, such as his church, with the numerous associations formed within itself through his influence, and the university--the organizing of the university being in itself an achievement of positive romance.
``A life without interest!'' Why, when Ihappened to ask, one day, how many Presidents he had known since Lincoln, he replied, quite casually, that he had ``written the lives of most of them in their own homes''; and by this he meant either personally or in collaboration with the American biographer Abbott.
The many-sidedness of Conwell is one of the things that is always fascinating. After you have quite got the feeling that he is peculiarly a man of to-day, lecturing on to-day's possibilities to the people of to-day, you happen upon some such fact as that he attracted the attention of the London _Times_ through a lecture on Italian history at Cambridge in England; or that on the evening of the day on which he was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of the United States he gave a lecture in Washington on ``The Curriculum of the Prophets in Ancient Israel.'' The man's life is a succession of delightful surprises.
An odd trait of his character is his love for fire.
He could easily have been a veritable fire-worshiper instead of an orthodox Christian! He has always loved a blaze, and he says reminiscently that for no single thing was he punished so much when he was a child as for building bonfires. And after securing possession, as he did in middle age, of the house where he was born and of a great acreage around about, he had one of the most enjoyable times of his life in tearing down old buildings that needed to be destroyed and in heaping up fallen trees and rubbish and in piling great heaps of wood and setting the great piles ablaze. You see, there is one of the secrets of his strength--he has never lost the capacity for fiery enthusiasm!
Always, too, in these later years he is showing his strength and enthusiasm in a positively noble way. He has for years been a keen sufferer from rheumatism and neuritis, but he has never permitted this to interfere with his work or plans.
He makes little of his sufferings, and when he slowly makes his way, bent and twisted, downstairs, he does not want to be noticed. ``I'm all right,'' he will say if any one offers to help, and at such a time comes his nearest approach to impatience. He wants his suffering ignored.
Strength has always been to him so precious a belonging that he will not relinquish it while he lives. ``I'm all right!'' And he makes himself believe that he is all right even though the pain becomes so severe as to demand massage. And he will still, even when suffering, talk calmly, or write his letters, or attend to whatever matters come before him. It is the Spartan boy hiding the pain of the gnawing fox. And he never has let pain interfere with his presence on the pulpit or the platform. He has once in a while gone to a meeting on crutches and then, by the force of will, and inspired by what he is to do, has stood before his audience or congregation, a man full of strength and fire and life.
