Essays on Work and Culture Part 2

Such heroic self-forgetfulness is not the exclusive possession of men of action; it lies within the reach of any man who is strong enough to grasp it. Two writers of our time have n.o.bly worn this jewel of courage in the eyes of the world. John Addington Symonds was for many years an invalid whose life hung on a thread. He had youth, gifts of a high order, culture, ambition, but a desolating shadow blackened the landscape of his life; he might have yielded to the la.s.situde which came with his disease; he might have become embittered and poured his sorrows into the ear of the world, as too many less burdened men and women have done in these recent decades.

Instead of accepting these weak alternatives and wasting his brief years in useless complainings, he plucked opportunity out of the very jaws of death; found in the high Alps the conditions most favourable for activity, and poured his life out in work of such sustained interest and value that he laid the English-reading peoples under lasting obligations. In spite of his invalidism he achieved more than most men who live out the full period of life in complete possession of their powers.

In like manner disease touched Robert Louis Stevenson in his early prime, and would have daunted a spirit less gallant than his. He bore himself in the presence of death as a dashing leader bears himself in the presence of an overwhelming foe; he was intrepid, but he was also wise. He sought such alleviations as climates afforded a man in his condition, and then gave himself to his work with a kind of pa.s.sionate ardour, as if he would pluck the very heart out of time and toil before the night fell. Neither of these men was blind to his condition; neither was indifferent; both loved life and both had their moments of revolt and depression; but both found in work resource from despair, and both made the world richer not only by the fruits of self-conquest, but by the contagious power of heroic example. Such careers put to shame the self-centred, egotistic, morbid pessimism which has found so many voices in recent years that its cowardly outcries have almost drowned the great, sane, authoritative voices of the world.

Despair has many sources, but one of its chief sources is the attempt to put an incomplete in the place of a complete life, and to subst.i.tute a partial for a full and rounded development. The body keeps that physical unconsciousness which is the evidence of health only so long as every part of it is normally used and exercised; when any set of organs is ignored and neglected, some form of disorder begins, and sooner or later physical self-consciousness in some part announces the appearance of disease. In like manner, intellectual and spiritual self-unconsciousness, which is both the condition and the result of complete intellectual and spiritual health, is preserved only so long as a man lives freely and naturally in and through all his activities. Expression of the whole nature through every faculty is essential to entire sanity of mind and spirit. Every violation of this fundamental law is followed by moral or spiritual disorder, loss of balance, decline of power. To see the world with clear eyes, as Shakespeare saw it, instead of seeing it through distorted vision, as Paul Verlaine saw it, one must think, feel, and act. To compress one's vital power into any one of these forms or channels of expression is to limit growth, to destroy the balance and symmetry of development, to lose clarity of vision, and to invite that devastating disease of our time and of all times, morbid self-consciousness. The man who lives exclusively in thought becomes a theorist, an indifferent observer, or a cynic; he who lives exclusively in feeling becomes a sentimentalist or a pessimist; he who lives exclusively in action becomes a mere executive energy, a pure objective force in society. These types are found in all times, and exhibit in a great variety of ways the perils of incomplete development.

In our time the chief peril for men of imagination and the artistic temperament comes from that aloofness of temper which separates its victim from his fellows, isolates him in the very heart of society, and turns his energy inward so that he preys upon himself. The root of a great deal of that pessimism which has found expression in modern literature is found in inactivity. He who contents himself with looking at life as a spectator sees its appalling contradictions and its baffling confusions, and misses the steadying power of the common toil, the comprehension through sympathy, the slow but deep unfolding and education which come from partic.i.p.ation in the world's work. He who approaches life only through his feelings is bruised, hurt, and finally exhausted by a strain of emotion unrelieved by thought and action. No man is sound either in vision or in judgment who holds himself apart from the work of society. Partic.i.p.ation in that work not only liberates the inward energy which preys upon itself if repressed; it also, through human fellowship, brings warmth and love to the solitary spirit; above all, it so identifies the man with outward activities that his personal force finds free access to the world, and he is delivered from the peril of self-consciousness. He who cares supremely for some worthy activity and gives himself to it has no time to reflect on his own woes, and no temptation to exaggerate his own claims. He sees clearly that he is an undeveloped personality to whom the supreme opportunity comes in the guise of the discipline of work. To forget oneself in heroic action as did Drake, or in heroic toil as did Symonds and Stevenson, is to make even disease contribute to health and mastery.

Chapter XI

The Educational Att.i.tude

The man whose life is intelligently ordered is always preparing himself for the highest demands of his work; he is not only doing that work with adequate skill from day to day, but he is always fitting himself in advance for more exacting and difficult tasks.

If a man is to become an artist in his work, his specific preparation for particular occasions and tasks must be part of a general preparation for all possible occasions and tasks. It is not only impossible to foresee opportunities, but it is often impossible to recognise their importance until they are past. It is well to know by heart Emerson's significant lines,--

"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, m.u.f.fled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and f.a.gots in their hands.

To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my mourning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."

The Days, which come so un.o.btrusively and go so silently, are opportunities in disguise, and to enable a man to penetrate that disguise and discern the royal figure in the meanest dress is one of the great ends of that education which must always, in some form, precede real success.

For nothing which endures is ever done without some kind of preliminary training. Men do not happen, by chance, upon greatness; they achieve it.

n.o.ble work of any kind is the fruit of laborious apprenticeship, and from the higher forms of success the idler and the amateur are for ever shut out. A man often enters a new field or takes up a new tool with surprising facility and power; but in these cases the man is only carrying into a fresh field the skill already acquired elsewhere. It has sometimes happened that a sudden occasion has called an obscure man to his feet, and he has sat down famous. In such instances it is the custom to say that the orator has spoken without preparation; as a matter of fact, the man knows that he has been all his life preparing for that critical moment. If he had not risen full of his theme, with the rich material of n.o.ble speech within reach of his memory or imagination, he would have left the hour empty and unmarked. In such a moment a man rises as high as the reach of his nature and no higher, and the reach of his nature depends on the training he has given himself.

The hour for commanding speech comes to the politician, whose study of public affairs is chiefly a study of the management of his const.i.tuents, and he sits down as empty as he arose; the same hour, arriving unexpectedly to Burke or Webster, draws upon vast acc.u.mulations of knowledge, thought, and ill.u.s.tration. In the famous debate with Hayne, Webster had practically but one day in which to prepare his reply to his persuasive and accomplished adversary; but when he spoke it was to put into language for all time the deep conviction of the reality of the national idea. The great orator had scant time to make ready for the greatest opportunity of his life, but, in reality, he had been preparing from boyhood to make that immortal speech. Brilliant speeches are often made extemporaneously; but such speeches are never made without long and arduous preparation. "The G.o.ds sell anything and to everybody at a fair price," says Emerson; and he might have added that they give nothing away.

Whatever a man secures in the way of power or fame he pays for in preliminary preparation; nothing is given him except his native capacity; everything else he must pay for. To recognise opportunity when it comes, or to make the highest use of it when it is not to be recognised at the moment, involves constant enrichment and education of the whole nature.

It is one of the secrets of the higher kind of success to make life interesting, and this secret is committed mainly to those who get the educational value of events, conditions, and relationships. The man who can rationalise his entire experience is in the way of learning the deepest lesson of life and of keeping the keenest interest in all its happenings. A ma.s.s of facts exhausts and wearies the student, but when they fall into order, disclose connections, and reveal truth they awaken enthusiasm. The body of fact without the soul of truth is a dead and repellent thing; but if the soul of truth shine through straightway it becomes vital, companionable, stimulating. Now, the most fruitful preparation for opportunities and tasks of all degrees of importance is that att.i.tude towards life which habitually secures from it the truth behind the experience and the principle behind the fact. Some men are enriched by everything they touch because they seem instinctively to get at the spiritual meaning of events; other men get nothing but material results from their dealing with the world. One man takes nothing off his broad acres but crops; another harvests his crops with as large results, but harvests also knowledge of the chemistry of nature, appreciation of the landscape beyond his own fields, and those qualities of character which have their root in honest work in the open fields.

A striking difference is discernible between two cla.s.ses of men of business; one cla.s.s is shrewd, keen, successful, but entirely uninteresting, because it fastens its attention exclusively upon the bare, hard facts of the situation; the other cla.s.s is not only equally successful, but possesses a rare interest, because it penetrates behind the facts of trade to the laws of trade, studies general conditions, and continually deals with the situation from the point of view of large intelligence. No human being is so entirely devoid of interest to his fellows as the trader who barters one commodity for another without any comprehension of higher values or wider connections; on the other hand, few men are more interesting than the great merchants whose vision penetrates to the principles behind business, and who acquire a kind of wisdom which is the more engaging because it is constantly verified by contact with affairs. The man who is a trader never gets beyond the profit of his shrewd bargain; the man who trains himself to study general conditions puts himself in the way, not only of great wealth, but of leadership and power.

Behind every trade and occupation there are the most intimate human connections; beneath every trade and occupation there are deep human relationships; and it is only as we discern these fundamental relations and connections that we get at a true conception of the magnitude of the practical activities of society and of their significance in civilisation.

The man who treats his trade as mere opportunity of making money, without taking into account the service of that trade to men or its relation to the totality of social activities, is as truly anti-social in his spirit and methods as an anarchist. Such a man breaks society into selfish fragments, and turns commerce into vulgar bartering. The penalty of such a sordid and narrow view of life is never evaded; the trader makes gains and often swells them by h.o.a.rding; but he rarely secures great wealth,--for great fortunes are built by brains and force,--and he never secures leadership. He who is to win the n.o.blest successes in the world of affairs must continually educate himself for larger grasp of principles and broader grasp of conditions.

Chapter XII

Special Training

It is a very superficial conception of workmanship which sets it in conflict with originality. There is often an inherent antagonism between the impulse for freedom and spontaneity which is characteristic of genius, and a conventional, hard-and-fast rule or method of securing certain technical results; but there is no antagonism between the boldest originality and the most complete mastery of craftsmanship. There is, rather, a deep and vital relationship between the two. For every art is a language, and to secure power and beauty and adequacy of expression a man must command all the secrets and resources of the form of speech which he has chosen. The power of the great artist rests, in the last a.n.a.lysis, upon the freedom with which he uses his material; and this freedom does not come by nature; it comes by training. It is fatal to the highest success to have the command of a n.o.ble language and to have nothing to say in it; it is equally fatal to have n.o.ble thoughts and to lack the power of giving them expression. Technical skill is not, therefore, an exterior, mechanical possession; it is the fitting of tools and material to heart and mind; it is the fruit of character; it is the evidence of sincerity, thoroughness, truthfulness. In his characteristically suggestive comment upon the j.a.panese artist Hokusai, Mr. John La Farge gives an interesting account of the training established and enforced in the school of the Kanos, a family of painters which survived the vicissitudes of more than four centuries. The course of study in a Kano school covered at least ten years, and the average age of graduation was thirty. The rules of conduct were rigid; the manner of life simple to the point of bareness; the discipline of work severe and unbroken. During the first year and a half of study the pupil devoted his entire time to copying certain famous works in the possession of the school; making, in the first instance, a copy from the picture set before him, and then reproducing his own copy again and again until every stroke and detail was thoroughly comprehended and mastered. In the course of eighteen months sixty pictures were studied with this searching thoroughness; the secrets of skill in each were uncovered, the sources of beauty or power discerned; and the eye and hand of the pupil gained intelligence, quickness, penetration. Month after month pa.s.sed in what seemed to be a monotony of mechanical imitation; but in this arduous and literal reproduction of the skill of others was laid the sure foundations of individual skill. This devout attention to methods secured for a considerable number of men a technical expertness for which we look, as a rule, only in the work of the greatest artists. The result of this training was not mechanical skill, but truth and freshness of observation. The signature of the artist in question reveals not an imitative but an original nature, not a faculty absorbed in accuracy but in pa.s.sion for expression: "Hokusai, the Old Man Crazy about Painting."

The arduous patience of these Oriental students of painting bore its fruit in a tradition of skill which was in itself an immense stimulus to the aspiring and ambitious; it established standards of craftsmanship which made the possession of expert knowledge a necessity on the part of every one who seriously attempted to practice the art. Mr. La Farge comments upon the level of superior artistic culture which these j.a.panese artists had attained. They had advanced their common skill so far that a superior man began at a great height of attainment, and was compelled to exhibit power of a very rare order before he could claim any kind of prominence among his fellows.

The establishment of such a standard in any art, profession, or occupation has the immense educational value of making clear to the student, at the very beginning of his career, the prime importance of mastering in detail every part of the work which he has undertaken to do. There is no place in the modern working world for the sloven, the indifferent, or the unskilled; no one can hope for any genuine success who fails to give himself the most thorough technical preparation, the most complete special education. Good intentions go for nothing, and industry is thrown away, if one cannot infuse a high degree of skill into his work. The man of medium skill depends upon fortunate conditions for success; he cannot command it, nor can he keep it. In the fierce compet.i.tion of the day the trained man has all the advantages on his side; the untrained man invites all the tragic possibilities of industrial and economic failure. He is always at the mercy of conditions. To know every detail, to gain an insight into every secret, to learn every method, to secure every kind of skill, are the prime necessities of success in any art, craft, or trade. No time is too long, no study too hard, no discipline too severe for the attainment of complete familiarity with one's work and complete ease and skill in the doing of it. As a man values his working life, he must be willing to pay the highest price of success in it,--the price which severe training exacts.

The external prosperity which is called success is of value because it evidences, as a rule, thoroughness and ability in the man who secures it, and because it supplies the ease of body and of mind which is essential to the fullest and most effective putting forth of one's power; and the sane man, even while he subordinates it to higher things, never entirely ignores or neglects success. The possession of skill is to-day the inexorable condition of securing this outward prosperity; and, as a rule, the greater a man's skill the more enduring his success. But skill has other and deeper uses and ends. Thoroughness and adequacy in the doing of one's work are the evidences of the presence of a moral conception in the worker's mind; they are the witnesses to the pressure of his conscience on his work. Slovenly, careless, and indifferent work is dishonest and untruthful; the man who is content to do less than the best he is capable of doing for any kind of compensation--money, reputation, influence--is an immoral man. He violates a fundamental law of life by accepting that which he has not earned.

Skill in one's art, profession, or trade is conscience applied; it is honesty, veracity, and fidelity using the eye, the voice, and the hand to reveal what lies in the worker's purpose and spirit. To become an artist in dealing with tools and materials is not a matter of choice or privilege; it is a moral necessity; for a man's heart must be in his skill, and a man's soul in his craftsmanship.

Chapter XIII

General Training

It was the habit of an American statesman who rose to the highest official position, to prepare himself in advance upon every question which was likely to come before Congress by thorough and prolonged study. His vacations and his leisure hours during the session were spent in familiarising himself with pending questions in all their aspects. He was not content with a mastery of the details of a measure; he could not rest until he had mastered the principle behind it, had studied it in the light of history, and in its relation to our political inst.i.tutions and character. His voluminous note-books show the most thorough study, not only of particular measures and questions as they came before the country from time to time, but of a wide range of related subjects. He once said that for every speech he had delivered he had prepared five; and the statement throws clear light on a career of extraordinary growth and success.

For the characteristic of this career was its steady expansion along intellectual lines. It was exceptional in its disclosure of that inward energy which carries the man who possesses it over all obstacles, enables him to master adverse conditions, to secure education without means and culture without social opportunity; but it was not unexampled in a country which has seen many men of ultimate distinction emerge from entire obscurity. Its material success has been paralleled many times; but its intellectual success has rarely been paralleled. It disclosed inward distinction; a pa.s.sion for the best in life and thought; an eager desire to see things in their largest relations. And so out of conditions which generally breed the politician the statesman was slowly matured. History, religion, literature, art were objects of his constant and familiar study; and he made himself rich in general knowledge as well as in specific information. This ample background of knowledge of the best which the world has known and done in all the great fields of its activity gave his discussions of specific questions breadth, variety, charm, and literary interest. He brought to the particular measure largeness of view, dispa.s.sionateness of temper, and the philosophic mind; and his work came to have cultural significance and quality.

Such a career, the record of which may be clearly traced not only in public history but in a vast ma.s.s of preparatory notes and memoranda of every description, ill.u.s.trates in a very n.o.ble way the importance of that constant and general preparation which ought to include special preparation as a landscape includes the individual field. That field may have great value and ought to have the most careful tillage; but it cannot be separated, in any just and true vision, from the other fields which it touches and which run, in unbroken continuity, to the horizon; and this preparation not only involves the fruitful att.i.tude towards life upon which comment has been made, but it involves also constant study in many directions with the definite purpose of enrichment and enlargement. No kind of knowledge comes amiss in this larger training. History, literature, art, and science have their different kinds of nurture to impart, and their different kinds of material to supply; and the wise man will open his mind to their teaching and his nature to their ripening touch. The widely accepted idea that a man not only needs nothing more for a specific task than the specific skill which it demands, but that any larger skill tends to superficiality, is the product of that tendency to excessive specialisation which has impaired the harmony of modern education and dwarfed many men of large native capacity.

In some departments of knowledge and activity the demands are so great on time and strength that the man who works in them can hardly venture outside of them without impairing the totality of his achievement; but even in these cases it is often a question whether too great a price has not been paid for a narrow and highly specialised skill. There is not only no conflict between a high degree of technical skill and wide interests and knowledge; there is a clear and definite connection between the two.

For in all those higher forms of work which involve not only expert workmanship but a spiritual content of some kind, the worker must bring to his task not only skill but ideas, force, personality, temperament; and, sound workmanship being secured, his rank will depend not on specific expertness, but on the depth, energy, and splendour of the personality which the work reveals.

Creative men feel the necessity of many interests and of wide activities.

Their natures require rich pasturage; they must be fed from many sources.

They secure the skill of the specialist, but they never accept his limitations of interest and work. The clearer their vision of the unity of all forms of human action and expression, the deeper their need of studying at first hand these different forms of action and expression.

Goethe did not choose that comprehensiveness of temper which led him into so many fields; it was the necessity of a mind vast in its range and deep in its insight. Herbert Spencer has done work which discloses at every point the tireless industry and rigorous method of the specialist; but the field in which he has concentrated his energy has included practically the development of the universe and of human life and society. Mr. Gladstone was a master of all the details, skill, and knowledge of his profession; but how greatly he gained in power by the breadth of his interests, and what charm there was in the disclosure of the man of religious enthusiasm, of ardent devotion, and of ripe culture behind the politician and statesman!

Byron knew the secrets of the art which he practiced with such splendid success as few men have known them. His command of the lyric form was complete. And yet who that loves his work has not felt that lack in it which Matthew Arnold had in mind when he said that with all his genius Byron had the ideas of a country squire? The poet was a master of the technique of his art; he had rare gifts of pa.s.sion and imagination; but he lacked breadth, variety, and depth of thought. There is a monotony of theme and of motive in his compositions. Tennyson, on the other hand, exalted his technical skill by the reality and richness of his culture.

Nothing which contains and reveals the human spirit was alien to him. He did not casually touch a great range of themes; he studied them patiently, thoroughly, persistently. Religion, philosophy, science, literature, history were his familiar friends; he lived with them, and they so completely confided to him their richest truths that he became their interpreter. So wide were his interests and so varied his studies that he came to be one of those men in whom the deeper currents of an age flow together and from whom the tumult of angry and contending currents issues in a great harmonious tide. No modern man has prepared himself more intelligently for specific excellence by special training, and no man has more splendidly ill.u.s.trated the necessity of combining the expertness of the skilled workman with the insight, power, and culture of a great personality. A life which issues in an art so beautiful in form and so significant in content reveals both the necessity of constant and general preparation, and the ident.i.ty of great working power with great spiritual energy.

Chapter XIV

The Ultimate Aim

Workers of all kinds are divided into two cla.s.ses by differences of skill and by differences of aim. The artist not only handles his materials in a different way from that which the artisan employs, but he uses them for a different end and in a different spirit. The peculiar spiritual quality of the artist is his supreme concern with the quality of his work and his subordinate interest in the returns of reputation or money which the work brings him. No wise man ought to be indifferent to recognition and to material rewards, because there is a vital relation between honest work and adequate wages of all kinds; a relation as clearly existing in the case of Michael Angelo or of William Shakespeare as in the case of the farmhand or the day labourer. But when the artist plans his work, and while he is putting his life into it day by day, the possible rewards which await him are overshadowed by the supreme necessity of making the work sound, true, adequate, and n.o.ble. A man is at his best only when he pours out his vital energy at full tide, without thought or care for anything save complete self-expression.

He who hopes to reach the highest level of activity in work will not aim, therefore, to gain specific ends or to touch external goals of any kind; he will aim at complete self-development. His ultimate aim will be not material but spiritual; he cannot rest short of the perfect self- expression. The rewards of work--money, influence, position, fame--will be the incidents, not the ends, of his toil. He has a right to look for them and count upon them; but if he be a true workman they will never be his inspirations, nor can they ever be his highest rewards. The man in public life who sets out to secure a certain official position as the ultimate goal of his ambition may be a successful politician but can never be a statesman; for a statesman is supremely concerned with the interests of the state, and only subordinately with his own interests. Such a man may definitely seek a Presidency or a Premiership; but he will seek it, in any final a.n.a.lysis of his motives, not for that which it will give him in the way of reward, but for that which it will give him in the way of opportunity. A genuine man seeks a great place, not that he may be seen of men, but that he may speak, influence and lead men.

The motives of the vast majority of men are, to a certain extent, confused and contradictory; for the n.o.blest man never quite completes his education and brings his nature into final harmony; but the genuine man is inspired by generous motives, and to such an one success becomes not a snare but an education, in the process of which all that is n.o.blest becomes controlling and all that is merely personal becomes subordinate. In this way the politician often develops into the statesman, and the merely clever and successful painter or writer grows to the stature of the artist. It is one of the saving qualities of ability that it has the power of growth, and great responsibilities often educate an able man out of selfish aims.

The ultimate aim which the worker sets before him ought always to have a touch of idealism because it must always remain a little beyond his reach.

The man who attains his ultimate aim has come to the end of the race; there are no more goals to beckon him on; there is no more inspiration or delight in life. But no man ought ever to come to the end of the road; there ought always to be a further stretch of highway, an inviting turn under the shadow of the trees, a bold ascent, an untrodden summit shining beyond.