Essays on Work and Culture Part 1

Essays On Work And Culture.

by Hamilton Wright Mabie.

Chapter I

Tool or Man?

A complete man is so uncommon that when he appears he is looked upon with suspicion, as if there must be something wrong about him. If a man is content to deal vigorously with affairs, and leave art, religion, and science to the enjoyment or refreshment or enlightenment of others, he is accepted as strong, sounds and wise; but let him add to practical sagacity a love of poetry and some skill in the practice of it; let him be not only honest and trustworthy, but genuinely religious; let him be not only keenly observant and exact in his estimate of trade influences and movements, but devoted to the study of some science, and there goes abroad the impression that he is superficial. It is written, apparently, in the modern, and especially in the American, consciousness, that a man can do but one thing well; if he attempts more than one thing, he betrays the weakness of versatility. If this view of life is sound, man is born to imperfect development and must not struggle with fate. He may have natural apt.i.tudes of many kinds; he may have a pa.s.sionate desire to try three or four different instruments; he may have a force of vitality which is equal to the demands of several vocations or avocations; but he must disregard the most powerful impulses of his nature; he must select one tool, and with that tool he must do all the work appointed to him.

If he is a man of business, he must turn a deaf ear to the voices of art; if he writes prose, he must not permit himself the delight of writing verse; if he uses the pen, he must not use the voice. If he ventures to employ two languages for his thought, to pour his energy into two channels, the awful judgment of superficiality falls on him like a decree of fate.

So fixed has become the habit of confusing the use of manifold gifts with mere dexterity that men of quality and power often question the promptings which impel them to use different or diverse forms of expression; as if a man were born to use only one limb and enjoy only one resource in this many-sided universe!

Specialisation has been carried so far that it has become an organised tyranny through the curiously perverted view of life which it has developed in some minds. A man is permitted, in these days, to cultivate one faculty or master one field of knowledge, but he must not try to live a whole life, or work his nature out on all sides, under penalty of public suspicion and disapproval. If a Pericles were to appear among us, he would be discredited by the very qualities which made him the foremost public man of his time among the most intelligent and gifted people who have yet striven to solve the problems of life. If Michelangelo came among us, he would be compelled to repress his tremendous energy or face the suspicion of the critical mind of the age; it is not permitted a man, in these days, to excel in painting, sculpture, architecture, and sonnet-writing. If, in addition, such a man were to exhibit moral qualities of a very unusual order, he would deepen the suspicion that he was not playing the game of life fairly; for there are those who have so completely broken life into fragments that they not only deny the possibility of the possession of the ability to do more than one thing well, but the existence of any kind of connection between character and achievement.

Man is not only a fragment, but the world is a ma.s.s of unrelated parts; religion, science, morals, and art moving in little spheres of their own, without the possibility of contact. The arts were born at the foot of the altar, as we are sometimes reminded; but let the artist beware how he entertains religious ideas or emotions to-day; to suggest that art and morals have any interior relation is, in certain circles, to awaken pity that one's knowledge of these things is still so rudimentary. The scholar must beware of the graces of style; if, like the late Master of Balliol, he makes a translation so touched with distinction and beauty that it is likely to become a cla.s.sic in the language in which it is newly lodged, there are those who look askance at his scholarship; for knowledge, to be pure and genuine, must be rude, slovenly, and barbarous in expression. The religious teacher may master the principles of his faith, but let him beware how he applies them to the industrial or social conditions of society. If he ventures to make this dangerous experiment, he is promptly warned that he is encroaching on the territory of the economist and sociologist. The artist must not permit himself to care for truth, because it has come to be understood in some quarters that he is concerned with beauty, and with beauty alone. To a.s.sume that there is any unity in life, any connection between character and achievement, any laws of growth which operate in all departments and in all men, is to discredit one's intelligence and jeopardise one's influence. One field and one tool to each man seems to be the maxim of this divisive philosophy--if that can be called a philosophy which discards unity as a worn-out metaphysical conception, and separates not only men but the arts, occupations, and skills from each other by impa.s.sable gulfs.

Versatility is often a treacherous ease, which leads the man who possesses it into fields where he has no sure footing because he has no first-hand knowledge, and therefore no real power; and against this tendency, so prevalent in this country, the need of concentration must continually be urged. The great majority of men lack the abounding vitality which must find a variety of channels to give it free movement. But the danger which besets some men ought not to be made a limitation for men of superior strength; it ought not to be used as a barrier to keep back those whose inward impulse drives them forward, not in one but in many directions.

Above all, the limitations of a cla.s.s ought not to be made the basis of a conception of life which divides its activities by hard and fast lines, and tends, by that process of hardening which shows itself in every field of thought or work, to make men tools and machines instead of free, creative forces in society.

A man of original power can never be confined within the limits of a single field of interest and activity, nor can he ever be content to bear the marks and use the skill of a single occupation. He cannot pour his whole force into one channel; there is always a reserve of power beyond the demands of the work which he has in hand at the moment. Wherever he may find his place and whatever work may come to his hand, he must always be aware of the larger movement of life which incloses his special task; and he must have the consciousness of direct relation with that central power of which all activities are inadequate manifestations. To a man of this temper the whole range of human interests must remain open, and such a man can never escape the conviction that life is a unity under all its complexities; that all activities stand vitally related to each other; that truth, beauty, knowledge, and character must be harmonised and blended in every real and adequate development of the human spirit. To the growth of every flower earth, sun, and atmosphere must contribute; in the making of a man all the rich forces of nature and civilisation must have place.

Chapter II

The Man in the Work

The general mind possesses a kind of divination which discovers itself in those comments, criticisms, and judgments which pa.s.s from man to man through a wide area and sometimes through long periods of time. The opinion which appears at first glance to be an expression of materialism often shows, upon closer study, an element of idealism or a touch of spiritual discernment. It is customary, for instance, to say of a man that he lives in his works; as if the enduring quality of his fame rested in and was dependent upon the tangible products of his genius or his skill.

There is truth in the phrase even when its scope is limited to this obvious meaning; but there is a deeper truth behind the truism,--the truth that a man lives in his works, not only because they commemorate but because they express him. They are products of his skill; but they are also the products of his soul. The man is revealed in them, and abides in them, not as a statue in a temple, but as a seed in the grain and the fruit. They have grown out of him, and they uncover the secrets of his spiritual life. No man can conceal himself from his fellows; everything he fashions or creates interprets and explains him.

This deepest significance of work has always been divined even when it has not been clearly perceived. Men have understood that there is a spiritual quality even in the most material products of a man's activity, and, even in ruder times, they have discerned the inner relation of the things which a man makes with the man himself. In our time, when the immense significance of this essential harmony between spirit and product has been accepted as a guiding principle in historic investigation, the stray spear-head and broken potsherd are prized by the anthropologist, because a past race lives in them. The lowest and commonest kind of domestic vessels and implements disclose to the student of to-day not only the stage of manual skill which their makers had reached, but also the general ideas of life which those makers held. When it comes to the higher products, character, temperament, and genius are discerned in every mutilated fragment. The line on an urn reveals the spirit of the unknown sculptor who cut it in the enduring stone. It has often been said that if every memorial of the Greek race save the Parthenon had perished, it would be possible to gain a clear and true impression of the spiritual condition and quality of that race.

The great artists are the typical and representative men of the race, and whatever is true of them is true, in a lesser degree, of men in general.

There is in the work of every great sculptor, painter, writer, composer, architect, a distinctive and individual manner so marked and unmistakable as to identify the man whenever and wherever a bit of his work appears. If a statue of Phidias were to be found without any mark of the sculptor upon it, there would be no delay in determining whose work it was; no educated musician would be uncertain for a moment about a composition of Wagner's if he heard it for the first time without knowledge of its source; nor would a short story from the hand of Hawthorne remain unclaimed a day after its publication. Now, this individual manner and quality, so evident that it is impossible not to recognise it whenever it appears, is not a trick of skill; it has its source in a man's temperament and genius; it is the subtlest and most deep-going disclosure of his nature. In so far as a spiritual quality can be contained and expressed in any form of speech known among men--and all the arts are forms of speech--that which is most secret and sacred in a man is freely given to the world in his work.

Work is sacred, therefore, not only because it is the fruit of self- denial, patience, and toil, but because it uncovers the soul of the worker. We deal with each other on so many planes, and have so much speech with each other about things of little moment, that we often lose the sense of the sanct.i.ty which attaches to personality whenever it appears.

There come moments, however, when some intimate experience is confided to us, and then, in the pause of talk, we become aware that we are in presence of a human soul behind the familiar face of our friend, and that we are on holy ground. In such moments the quick emotion, the sudden thrill, bear eloquent witness to that deeper and diviner life in which we all share, but of which we rarely seem aware. This perception of the presence of a man's soul comes to us when we stand before a true work of art. We not only uncover our heads, but our hearts are uncovered as well.

Here is one who through all his skill speaks to us in a language which we understand, but which we rarely hear. A great work of art not only liberates the imagination, but the heart as well; for it speaks to us more intimately than our friends are able to speak, and that reticence which holds us back from perfect intercourse when we look into each other's faces vanishes. A few lines read in the solitude of the woods, or before the open fire, often kindle the emotion and imagination which slumber within us; in companionship with the greatest minds our shyness vanishes; we not only take but give with unconscious freedom. When we reach this stage we have reached the man who lives not only by but in the work, and whose innermost nature speaks to us and confides in us through the form of speech which he has chosen.

The higher the quality of the work, the clearer the disclosure of the spirit which fashioned it and gave it the power to search and liberate.

The plays of Sophocles are, in many ways, the highest and most representative products of the Greek literary genius; they show that genius at the moment when all its qualities were in harmony and perfectly balanced between the spiritual vision which it formed of life, and the art form to which it commits that precious and impalpable possession. One of the distinctive qualities of these plays is their objectivity; their detachment from the moods and experiences of the dramatist. This detachment is so complete that at first glance every trace of the dramatist seems to have been erased. But there are many pa.s.sages besides the famous lines descriptive of the grove at Colonus which betray the personality behind the plays; and, studied more closely, the very detachment of the drama from the dramatist is significant of character. In the poise, harmony, and balance of these beautiful creations there is revealed the instinct for proportion, the self-control and the subordination of the parts to the whole which betray a nature committed by its very instincts to a pa.s.sionate devotion to beauty. In one of the poems of our own century which belongs in the first rank of artistic achievements, "In Memoriam," the highest themes are touched with the strength of one who knows how to face the problems of life with impartial and impersonal courage, and with the tenderness of one whose own heart has felt the immediate pressure of these tremendous questions. So every great work, whether personal or impersonal in intention, conveys to the intelligent reader an impression of the thought behind the skill, and of the character behind the thought. Goethe frankly declared that his works const.i.tuted one great confession. All work is confession and revelation as well.

Chapter III

Work as Self-Expression

The higher the kind and quality of a man's work, the more completely does it express his personality. There are forms of work so rudimentary that the touch of individuality is almost entirely absent, and there are forms of work so distinctive and spiritual that they are instantly and finally a.s.sociated with one man. The degree in which a man individualises his work and gives it the quality of his own mind and spirit is, therefore, the measure of his success in giving his nature free and full expression. For work, in this large sense, is the expression of the man; and as the range and significance of all kinds of expression depend upon the scope and meaning of the ideas, forces, skills, and qualities expressed, so the dignity and permanence of work depend upon the power and insight of the worker. All sound work is true and genuine self-expression, but work has as many gradations of quality and significance as has character or ability. Dealing with essentially the same materials, each man in each generation has the opportunity of adding to the common material that touch of originality in temperament, insight, or skill which is his only possible contribution to civilisation.

The spiritual nature of work and its relation to character are seen in the diversity of work which the different races have done, and in the unmistakable stamp which the work of each race bears. First as a matter of instinct, and later as a matter of intelligence, each race has followed, in its activities, the lines of least resistance, and put its energies forth in ways which were most attractive because they offered the freest range and were nearest at hand. The attempt of some historians of a philosophical turn of mind to fit each race into a category and to give each race a sharply defined sphere of influence has been carried too far, and has discredited the effort to interpret arbitrarily the genius of the different races and to a.s.sign arbitrarily their functions. It remains true, however, that, in a broad sense, each race has had a peculiar quality of mind and spirit which may be called its genius, and each has followed certain general lines and kept within certain general limits in doing its work. The people who lived on the great plains of Central Asia worked in a different temper and with wide divergence of manner from the people who lived on the banks of the Nile; and the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman showed their racial differences as distinctly in the form and quality of their work as in the temper of their mind and character. And thus, on a great historical scale, the significance of work as an expression of character is unmistakably disclosed.

In this sense work is practically inclusive of every force and kind of life since every real worker puts into it all that is most distinctive in his nature. The moral quality contributes sincerity, veracity, solidity of structure; the intellectual quality is disclosed in order, lucidity, and grasp of thought; the artistic quality is seen in symmetry proportion, beauty of construction and of detail; the spiritual quality is revealed in depth of insight and the scope of relationships brought into view between the specific work and the world in which it is done. In work of the finer order, dealing with the more impressionable material, there are discoverable not only the character and quality of the worker, but the conditions under which he lives; the stage of civilisation, the vigour or languor of vital energy, the richness or poverty of social life, the character of the soil and of the landscape, the pallor or the bloom of vegetation, the shining or the veiling of the skies. So genuinely and deeply does a man put himself into the thing he does that whatever affects him affects it, and all that flows into him of spiritual, human, and natural influence flows into and is conserved by it. A bit of work of the highest quality is a key to a man's life because it is the product of that life, and it brings to light that which is hidden in the man as truly as the flower lays bare to the sun that which was folded in the seed. What a man does is, therefore, an authentic revelation of what he is, and by their works men are fairly and rightly judged.

For this reason no man can live in any real sense who fails to give his personality expression through some form of activity. For action in some field is the final stage of development; and to stop short of action, to rest in emotion or thought, is to miss the higher fruits of living and to evade one's responsibility to himself as well as to society. The man whose artistic instinct is deep cannot be content with those visions which rise out of the deeps of the imagination and wait for that expression which shall give them objective reality; the vision brings with it a moral necessity which cannot be evaded without serious loss. Indeed, the vitality of the imagination depends largely upon the fidelity with which its images are first realised in thought and then embodied by the hand. To comprehend what life means in the way of truth and power, one must act as well as think and feel. For action itself is a process of revelation, and the sincerity and power with which a man puts forth that which is disclosed to him determine the scope of the disclosure of truth which he receives. To comprehend all that life involves of experience, or offers of power, one must give full play to all the force that is in him. It is significant that the men of creative genius are, as a rule, men of the greatest productive power. One marvels at the magnitude of the work of such men as Michelangelo and Rembrandt, as Beethoven and Wagner, as Shakespeare, Balzac, Thackeray, Carlyle, and Browning; not discerning that, as these master workers gave form and substance to their visions and insight, the power to see and to understand deepened and expanded apace with their achievements.

Chapter IV

The Pain of Youth

It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision nor in faculty, to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed gaiety and pleasure, with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense of care. The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of discovery, the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a challenge to one's strength, invest youth with a charm which art is always striving to preserve, and which men who have parted from it remember with a sense of pathos; for the morning of life comes but once, and when it fades something goes which never returns. There are ample compensations, there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships; but a magical charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the morning. In reaching its perfection of beauty the flower must part with the dewy promise of its earliest growth.

All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part of man's nature, and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to him. But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit of youth no cares; on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more painful. The finer the organisation and the greater the ability, the more difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth pa.s.ses.

George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in the statement that the child has no background of other griefs against which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured. While that sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless, because the child has no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived. In this fact about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth. The young man is an undeveloped power; he is largely ignorant of his own capacity, often without inward guidance towards his vocation; he is unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself. He is full of energy and aspiration, but he does not know how to expend the one or realise the other. His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like the eagle, he must have s.p.a.ce on the ground before he rises in the air. If his imagination is active he has moments of rapture, days of exaltation, when the world seems to lie before him clear from horizon to horizon. His hours of study overflow with the pa.s.sion for knowledge, and his hours of play are haunted by beautiful or n.o.ble dreams. The world is full of wonder and mystery, and the young explorer is impatient to be on his journey. No plan is then too great to be accomplished, no moral height too difficult to be attained. After all that has been said, the rapture of youth, when youth means opportunity, remains unexpressed. No poet will ever entirely compa.s.s it, as no poet will ever quite ensnare in speech the measureless joy of those festival mornings in June when Nature seems on the point of speaking in human language.

But this rapture is inward; it has its source in the earliest perception of the richness of life and man's capacity to appropriate it. It is the rapture of discovery, not of possession; the rapture of promise, not of achievement. It is without the verification of experience or the corroborative evidence of performance. Youth is possibility; that is its charm, its joy, and its power; but it is also its limitation. There lies before it the real crisis through which every man of parts and power pa.s.ses: the development of the inward force and the adjustment of the personality to the order of life. The shadow of that crisis is never quite absent from those radiant skies which the poets love to recall; the uncertainty of that supreme issue in experience is never quite out of mind. Siegfried must meet the dragon before he can climb those heights on which, encircled by fire, his ideal is to take the form and substance of reality; and the prelusive notes of that fateful struggle are heard long before the sword is forged or the hour of destiny has come.

There is no test of character more severe or difficult to bear than the suspense of waiting. The man who can act eases his soul under the greatest calamities; but he who is compelled to wait, unless he be of hardy fibre, eats his heart out in a futile despair. Troops will endure losses when they are caught up in the stir of a charge which would demoralise and scatter them if they were compelled to halt under the relentless guns of masked batteries. Now, the characteristic trial of youth is this experience of waiting at a moment when the whole nature craves expression and the satisfaction of action. The greater the volume of energy in the man who has yet to find his vocation and place, the more trying the ordeal. There are moments in the life of the young imagination when the very splendour of its dreams fills the soul with despair, because there seems no hope of giving them outward reality; and the clearer the consciousness of the possession of power, the more poignant the feeling that it may find no channel through which to add itself to the impulsion which drives forward the work of society.

The reality of this crisis in spiritual experience--the adjustment between the personality and the physical, social, and industrial order in which it must find its place and task--is the measure of its possible painfulness.

It is due, perhaps, to the charm which invests youth, as one looks back upon it from maturity or age, that its pain is forgotten and that sympathy withheld which youth craves often without knowing why it craves. A helpful comprehension of the phase of experience through which he is pa.s.sing is often the supreme need of the ardent young spirit. His pain has its roots in his ignorance of his own powers and of the world. He strives again and again to put himself in touch with organised work; he takes up one task after another in a fruitless endeavour to succeed. He does not know what he is fitted to do, and he turns helplessly from one form of work for which he has no faculty to another for which he has less. His friends begin to think of him as a ne'er-do-weel; and, more pathetic still, the shadow of failure begins to darken his own spirit. And yet it may be that in this halting, stumbling, ineffective human soul, vainly striving to put its hand to its task, there is some rare gift, some splendid talent, waiting for the ripe hour and the real opportunity! In such a crisis sympathetic comprehension is invaluable, but it is rarely given, and the youth works out his problem in isolation. If he is courageous and persistent he finds his place at last; and work brings peace, strength, self-comprehension.

Chapter V

The Year of Wandering

Goethe prefaces Wilhelm Meister's travels with some lines full of that sagacity which was so closely related to his insight:

What shap'st thou here at the world? 't is shapen long ago; The Maker shaped it, he thought it best even so; Thy lot is appointed, go follow its hest; Thy way is begun, thou must walk, and not rest; For sorrow and care cannot alter the case; And running, not raging, will win thee the race.

My inheritance, how wide and fair!

Time is my estate: to time I'm heir.

Between the preparation and the work, the apprenticeship and the actual dealing with a task or an art, there comes, in the experience of many young men, a period of uncertainty and wandering which is often misunderstood and counted as time wasted, when it is, in fact, a period rich in full and free development. In the days when Wilhelm Meister was written, the _Wanderjahr_ or year of travel was a recognised part of student life, and was held in high regard as contributing a valuable element to a complete education. "The Europe of the Renaissance," writes M. Wagner, "was fairly furrowed in every direction by students, who often travelled afoot and barefoot to save their shoes." These wayfarers were light-hearted and often empty-handed; they were in quest of knowledge, but the intensity of the search was tempered by gaiety and ease of mood. Under a mask of frivolity, however, youth often wears a serious face, and behind apparent aimlessness there is often a steady and final turning of the whole nature towards its goal.