2 - The Art of Virtue

Summary

The title of this chapter is also the title of an unwritten treatise on the management of human character that Benjamin Franklin once thought of contributing to the world's extensive library of didactic literature. His friend Benjamin Vaughan looked forward to its publication. Along with Franklin's memoir, this manual of ethics (Vaughan thought) would help alleviate the anxiety and the pain that marred too much of earthly life. Even if its readers failed to follow Franklin's advice, Franklin's writing alone would delight the mind, and that prospect satisfied Benjamin Vaughan (A 140). But Franklin never got any farther than the title, and he never finished the autobiography to which Vaughan had attached many of his hopes for human reform. A prolific author of letters, pamphlets, proverbs, and newspaper columns of various kinds, Franklin was a disappointment when it came to the treatise, the monumental synthesis of intellectual life. And it is a good thing too. Virtue that required a barricade of books to fend off the assaults of appetite could scarcely hope to illuminate the surrounding moral darkness of the late eighteenth century. In any case, the provisional title that had aroused Benjamin Vaughan's expectations was misleading.

Virtue, as Benjamin Franklin understands it, is a means, not an end. Happiness is the end, the most desirable of life's good things. To achieve and to sustain it is a form of worship – in fact, the only form of worship capable of bringing delight to the Creator of the Universe, a mysterious entity, at once remote and intimate, to whom Franklin repeatedly directed a remarkably simple prayer of his own devising:

O Powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase in me that Wisdom which discovers my truest Interests; Strengthen my Resolutions to perform what that Wisdom dictates. Accept my kind Offices to thy other Children, as the only Return in my Power for thy continual Favours to me.

(A 153)