Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/377

354 were going forward suitably he praised them, and, if not, he reproved them or tried to shame them into rivalling the sons of those who, with fewer advantages, were forging far ahead.

In a letter written early in 1843 he mentions the three indispensable conditions of progress, the 'will to learn,' understanding, and constant application. "If you have the 'will to learn' it will not be pleasant to drift along; with understanding you know that learning is inexhaustible and will not consider that you have enough — like the river spirit gazing on the sea, or the frog from the well viewing the skies, both without understanding; if you are possessed of constancy there is nothing that you cannot accomplish. Of these three you cannot spare a single one."

We are not left without many indications of the amount of work he himself did. In the last four months of 1844, for instance, he carefully read and annotated the complete works of Wang Ching (one hundred Chinese volumes), the literary works of Kwei Chen-ch'üan (forty volumes), the book of Odes (twenty volumes), and the historical books of the later Han Dynasty (one hundred volumes). During the busy years after he entered on his military career, he could not perform such heavy tasks, but he made it a rule not to let a day pass without a prescribed amount of study, and, in order that he might not fall into the temptation to neglect it, he laid out definite programmes for this work. In a homely illustration he compares study to cooking. If one prepares meals over a good, steady fire the task is easily accomplished, but if the fire is alternately kindled and permitted to die out the meal is never cooked. In another place he tells