and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

ESSAYS ON WORK AND CULTURE

BY

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

To
Henry Van Dyke

"Along the slender wires of speech
 Some message from the heart is sent;
 But who can tell the whole that's meant?
 Our dearest thoughts are out of reach."

CONTENTS

I. Tool or Man?
II. The Man in the Work
III. Work as Self-Expression
IV. The Pain of Youth
V. The Year of Wandering
VI. The Ultimate Test
VII. Liberation
VIII. The Larger Education
IX. Fellowship
X. Work and Pessimism
XI. The Educational Attitude
XII. Special Training
XIII. General Training
XIV. The Ultimate Aim
XV. Securing Right Conditions
XVI. Concentration
XVII. Relaxation
XVIII. Recreation
XIX. Ease of Mood
XX. Sharing the Race-Fortune
XXI. The Imagination in Work
XXII. The Play of the Imagination
XXIII. Character
XXIV. Freedom from Self-Consciousness
XXV. Consummation

Work and Culture

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 aptitudes of many kinds; he may have a passionate 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 mass 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 classic 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 assume 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 impassable 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 class 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 pass 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 sanctity 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 passages 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 passionate 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 constituted 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 associated 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 assign 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 passes. 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 space 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 passion for knowledge, and his hours of play are haunted by beautiful or noble 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 compass 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 passes: 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 passing 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.

Uncertainty breeds impatience; and in youth, before the will is firmly seated and the goal clearly seen, impatience often manifests itself in the relaxation of all forms of restraint. The richer the nature the greater the reaction which sometimes sets in at this period; the more varied and powerful the elements to be harmonised in a man's character and life, the greater the ferment and agitation which often precede the final discernment and acceptance of one's work. If the pressure of uncertainty with regard to one's gifts and their uses ought to call out patience and sympathy, so ought that experience of spiritual and intellectual agitation which often intervenes between the training for life and the process of actual living. This experience is a true year of wandering, and there is nothing of which the wanderer stands in such need as the friendly hand and the door which stands hospitably open.

It is the born drudge alone who is content to go from the school to the office or the shop without so much as asking the elementary questions about life. The aspiring want to know what is behind the occupation; they must discover the spiritual necessity of work before they are ready to bend to the inevitable yoke. Strong natures are driven by the Very momentum of their own moral impulse to explore the world before they build in it and unite themselves with it; the imagination must be fed with beauty and truth before they are content to choose their task and tools. It is often a sign of greatness in a man that he does not quickly fit into his place or easily find his work. Let him look well at the stars before he bends to his task; he will need to remember them when the days of toil come, as they must come, at times, to every man. Let him see the world with his own eyes before he gives to fortune those hostages which hold him henceforth fast-bound in one place.

It is as natural for ardent and courageous youth to wish to know what is in life, what it means, and what it holds for its children, as for a child to reach for and search the things that surround and attract it. Behind every real worker in the world is a real man, and a man has a right to know the conditions under which he must live, and the choices of knowledge, power, and activity which are offered him. In the education of many men and women, therefore, there comes the year of wandering; the experience of travelling from knowledge to knowledge and from occupation to occupation. There are men and women, it is true, who are born under conditions so free and prosperous that the choice of work is made almost instinctively and unconsciously, and apprenticeship merges into mastery without any intervening agitation or uncertainty. At long intervals Nature not only sends a great talent into the world, but provides in advance for its training and for its steady direction and unfolding; but Nature is not often so minute in her provision for her children. Those who receive most generously from her hand are, for the most part, compelled to discover their gifts and find their places in the general order as the result of much searching, and often of many failures.

And even in the most harmonious natures the elements of agitation and ferment are rarely absent. The forces which go to the making of a powerful man can rarely be adjusted and blended without some disturbance of relations and conditions. This disturbance is sometimes injurious, because it affects the moral foundations upon which character rests; and for this reason the significance of the experience in its relation to development ought to be sympathetically studied. The birth of the imagination and of the passions, the perception of the richness of life, and the consciousness of the possession of the power to master and use that wealth, create a critical moment in the history of youth,—a moment richer in possibilities of all kinds than comes at any later period. Agitation and ferment of soul are inevitable in that wonderful moment. It is as idle to ask youth to be calm and contented in that supreme moment as to ask the discoverer who is catching his first glimpse of a new continent to avoid excitement. There are times when agitation is as normal as is self-control at other and less critical times. There are days in June when Nature seems to betray an almost riotous prodigality of energy; but that prodigality is always well within the limits of order. In youth that which is to be feared is not the explosive force of vitality, but its wrong direction; and it is at this crisis that youth so often makes its mute and unavailing appeal to maturity. The man who has left his year of wandering behind him forgets its joys and perils, and regards it as a deflection from a course which is now perfectly plain, although it may once have been confused and uncertain. He is critical and condemnatory where he ought to be sympathetic and helpful. If he reflects and comprehends, he will hold out the hand of fellowship; for he will understand that the year of wandering is not a manifestation of aimlessness, but of aspiration, and that in its ferment and uncertainty youth is often guided to and finally prepared for its task.

Chapter VI

The Ultimate Test

"I have cut more than one field of oats and wheat," writes M. Charles Wagner, "cradled for long hours under the August sky to the slow cadence of the blade as it swung to and fro, laying low at every stroke the heavy yellow heads. I have heard the quail whistle in the distant fields beyond the golden waves of wheat and the woods that looked blue above the vines. I have thought of the clamours of mankind, of the oven-like cities, of the problems which perplex the age, and my insight has grown clearer. Yes, I am Positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields." In these characteristically ardent words one of the noblest Frenchmen of the day has brought out a truth of general application. To come once more into personal relations with mother earth is to secure health of body and of mind; and with health comes clarity of vision. To touch the soil as a worker is to set all the confined energies of the body free, to incite all its functions to normal activity, to secure that physical harmony which results from a full and normal play of all the physical forces on an adequate object.

In like manner, true work of mind or technical skill brings peace, composure, sanity, to one to whom the proper outlet of his energy has been denied. To youth, possessed by an almost riotous vitality, with great but unused powers of endurance and of positive action, the finding of its task means concentration of energy instead of dissipations directness of action instead of indecision, conscious increase of power instead of deepened sense of inefficiency, and the happiness which rises like a pure spring from the depths of the soul when the whole nature is poised and harmonised. The torments of uncertainty, the waste and disorder of the period of ferment, give place to clear vision, free action, natural growth. There are few moments in life so intoxicating as those which follow the final discovery of the task one is appointed to perform. It is a true home-coming after weary and anxious wandering; it is the lifting of the fog off a perilous coast; it is the shining of the sun after days of shrouded sky.

The "storm and stress" period is always interesting because it predicts the appearance of a new power; and men instinctively love every evidence of the greatness of the race, as they instinctively crave the disclosure of new truth. In the reaction against the monotony of formalism and of that deadly conventionalism which is the peril of every accepted method in religion, art, education, or politics, men are ready to welcome any revolt, however extravagant. Too much life is always better than too little, and the absurdities of young genius are nobler than the selfish prudence of aged sagacity. The wild days at Weimar which Klopstock looked at askance, and not without good reason; the excess of passion and action in Schiller's "Robbers;" the turbulence of the young Romanticists, with long hair and red waistcoats, crowding the Theatre Francais to compel the acceptance of "Hernani,"—these stormy dawns of the new day in art are always captivating to the imagination. Their interest lies, however, not in their turbulence and disorder, but in their promise. If real achievements do not follow the early outbreak, the latter are soon forgotten; if they herald a new birth of power, they are fixed in the memory of a world which, however slow and cold, loves to feel the fresh impulse of the awakening human spirit. The wild days at Weimar were the prelude to a long life of sustained energy and of the highest productivity; "The Robbers" was soon distanced and eclipsed by the noble works of one of the noblest of modern spirits; and to the extravagance of the ardent French Romanticists of 1832 succeeded those great works in verse and prose which have made the last half-century memorable in French literary history.

It is the fruitage of work, not the wild play of undirected energy, which gives an epoch its decisive influence and a man his place and power. Both aspects of the "storm and stress" period need to be kept in mind. When it is tempted to condemn too sternly the extravagance of such a period, society will do well to recall how often this undirected or ill-directed play of energy has been the forerunner of a noble putting forth of creative power. And those who are involved in such an outpouring of new life, on the other hand, will do well to remember that extravagance is never the sign of art; that licence is never the liberty which sets free the creative force; that "storm and stress" is, at the best, only a promise of sound work; and that its importance and reality depend entirely upon the fruit it bears.

The decisive test, in other words, comes when a man deals, in patience and fidelity, with the task which is set before him. Up to this point his life, however rich and varied, has been a preparation; now comes that final trial of strength which is to bring into clear light whatever power is in him, be that power great or small. If work had no other quality, the fact that it settles a man's place among men would invest it with the highest dignity; for a man's place can be determined only by a complete unfolding and measurement of all the powers that are in him, and this process of development must have all the elements of the highest moral process. So great, indeed, is the importance of work from this point of view that it seems to involve, under the appearance of a provisional judgment, the weight and seriousness of a final judgment of men. Such a judgment, as every man knows who has the conscience either of a moralist or of an artist, is being hourly registered in the growth which is silently accomplished through the steady and skilful doing of one's work, or in the gradual but inevitable decline and decay which accompany and follow the slovenly, indifferent, or unfaithful performance of one's task.

We make or unmake ourselves by and through our work; marring our material and spiritual fortunes or discovering and possessing them at will. The idle talk about the play of chance in the world, the futile attempt to put on the broad back of circumstances that burden of responsibility which rests on our own shoulders, deceives no man in his saner moments. The outward fruits of success are not always within our reach, no matter how strenuous our struggles to pluck them; but that inward strength, of which all forms of outward prosperity are but visible evidences, lies within the grasp of every true worker. Fidelity, skill, energy—the noble putting forth of one's power in some worthy form of work—never fail of that unfolding of the whole man in harmonious strength which is the only ultimate and satisfying form of success.

Chapter VII

Liberation

Work is the most continuous and comprehensive form of action; that form which calls into play and presses into steady service the greatest number of gifts, skills, and powers. Into true work, therefore, a man pours his nature without measure or stint; and in that process he comes swiftly or slowly to a clear realisation of himself. Work sets him face to face with himself. So long as he is getting ready to work he cannot measure his power, nor take full account of his resources of skill, intelligence, and moral endurance; but when he has closed with his task and put his entire force into the doing of it, he comes to an understanding not only of but with himself. Under the testing process of actual contact with materials and obstacles, his strength and his weakness are revealed to him; he learns what lies within his power and what lies beyond it; he takes accurate account of his moral force, and measures himself with some degree of accuracy against a given task or undertaking; he discovers his capacity for growth, and begins to see, through the mist of the future, how far he is likely to go along the road he has chosen. He discerns his lack of skill in various directions, and knows how to secure what he needs; in countless ways he measures himself and comes to know himself.

For work speedily turns inward power into outward achievement, and so makes it possible to take accurate account of what has hitherto lain wholly within the realm of the potential. In a very deep and true sense an artist faces his own soul when he looks at his finished work. He sees a bit of himself in every book, painting, statue, or other product of his energy and skill. What was once concealed in the mystery of his own nature is set in clear light in the work of his hands; the reality or unreality of his aspirations is finally settled; the question of the possession of original power or of mere facility is answered. The worker is no longer an unknown force; he has been developed, revealed, measured, and tested.

In this process one of his highest gains is the liberation of his inward power and the attainment of self-knowledge and self-mastery. No man is free until he knows himself, and whatever helps a man to come to clear understanding of himself helps him to attain freedom. A man does not command his resources of physical strength until he has so trained and developed his body that each part supplements every other part and bears the strain with equal power of resistance. When every part has been developed to its highest point of efficiency, and the whole body answers the command of the will with that completeness of strength which has its source in harmony of parts through unity of development, the man has come into full possession of his physical resources. In like manner a man comes into complete mastery of himself when through self-knowledge he presses every force and faculty into activity, and through activity secures for each its ultimate perfection of power and action.

When every force within has been developed to its highest efficiency, complete liberation has been effected. The perfectly developed and trained man would have the poise and peace which come from the harmonious expression of the soul through every form of activity, and the freedom which is the result of complete command of all one's resources and the power to use them at will. This ultimate stage of power and freedom has, perhaps, never been attained by any worker under the conditions of this present life; but in the exact degree in which the worker approaches this ideal does he secure his own freedom. The untrained man, whose sole resource is some kind of unskilled labour, is in bondage to the time and place in which and at which he finds himself, and to the opportunities and rewards close at hand; the trained man has the freedom of the whole world of work. Michael Angelo receives commissions from princes and popes; Velasquez paints with kings looking over his shoulder; Tesla can choose the place where he will work; Mr. Gladstone would have found fame and fortune at the end of almost any road he chose to take. In the case of each of these great workers inward power was matured and harmonised by outward work, and through work each achieved freedom.

No man is free until he can dispose of himself; until he is sought after instead of seeking; until, in the noblest sense of the words, he commands his own price in the world. There are men in every generation who push this self-development and self-mastery so far, and who obtain such a large degree of freedom in consequence, that the keys of all doors are open to them. We call such men masters, not to suggest subjection to them, but as an instinctive recognition of the fact that they have secured emancipation from the limitations from which most men never escape. In a world given over to apprenticeship these heroic spirits have attained the degree of mastership. They have not been carried to commanding positions by happy tides of favourable circumstance; they have not stumbled into greatness; they have attained what they have secured and they hold it by virtue of superior intelligence, skill, and power. They possess more freedom than their fellows because they have worked with finer insight, with steadier persistence, and with more passionate enthusiasm. They are masters because they are free; but their freedom was bought with a great price.

Chapter VIII

The Larger Education

The old idea that the necessity of working was imposed upon men as a punishment is responsible, in large measure, for the radical misunderstanding of the function and uses of work which has so widely prevailed. In the childhood of the world a garden for innocence to play in secured the consummation of all deep human longings for happiness; but there is a higher state than innocence: there is the state to which men attain through knowledge and trial. Knowledge involves great perils, but it is better than innocuous ignorance; virtue involves grave dangers, but it is nobler than innocence. Character cannot be secured if choice between higher and lower aims is denied; and without character the world would be meaningless. There can be no unfolding of character without growth, and growth is inconceivable without the aid of work. The process of self- expression through action is wrought, therefore, into the very structure of man's life; it is not a penalty, but a spiritual opportunity of the highest order. It is the most comprehensive educational process to which men are subjected, and it has done more, probably, than all other processes to lift the moral and social level of the race.

Instead of being a prison, the workshop has been a place of training, discipline, and education. The working races have been the victorious races; the non-working races have been the subject races. Wandering peoples who trust to what may be called geographical luck for a living often develop strong individual qualities and traits, but they never develop a high degree of social or political organisation, nor do they produce literature and art. The native force of imagination which some semi-civilised races seem to possess never becomes creative until it is developed and directed by training. Education is as essential to greatness of achievement in any field as the possession of gifts of genius. An untrained race, like an untrained man, is always at an immense disadvantage, not only in the competition of the world, but in the working out of individual destiny. The necessity for work is so far from being a penalty that it must be counted the highest moral opportunity open to men, and, therefore, one of the divinest gifts offered to the race. The apparent freedom of nomadic peoples is seen, upon closer view, to be a very hard and repulsive bondage; the apparent servitude of working peoples is seen to be, upon closer view, an open road to freedom.

There is no real freedom save that which is based upon discipline. The chance to do as one pleases is not liberty, as so many people imagine; liberty involves knowledge, self-mastery, capacity for exertion, power of resistance. Emerson uncovered the fundamental conception when he declared that character is our only definition of freedom and power. Now, character is always the product of an educational process of some kind; its production involves tests, trials, temptations, toils. It does not represent innocence, but that which is higher and more difficult of attainment, virtue. Innocence is the starting-point in life; virtue is the goal. Between these two points lies that arduous education which is effected, for most men, chiefly by and through work. In comparison with the field, the shop, the factory, the mine, and the sea, the school has educated a very inconsiderable number; the vast majority of the race have been trained by toil. On the farm, in the innumerable factories, in offices and stores, on sea-going craft of all kinds, and in the vast field of land transportation, the race, as a rule, has had its education in those elemental qualities which make organised society possible. When the race goes to its work in the morning, it goes to its school; and the chief result of its toil is not that which it makes with its hands, but that which it slowly and unconsciously creates within itself. It is concerned with the product of its toil; with soil, seed, or grain; with wood, paper, metal, or stone; with processes and forces; but in the depths of the worker's nature there is a moral deposit of habit, quality, temper, which is the invisible moral result of his toil. The real profit of a day's work in the world can never be estimated in terms of money; it can be estimated only in terms of character.

The regularity, promptness, obedience, fidelity, and skill demanded in every kind of work, skilled or unskilled, compels the formation of a certain degree of character. No worker can keep his place who does not develop certain moral qualities in connection with his work. Honesty, truthfulness, sobriety, and skill are essential to the most elementary success,—the getting of the bare necessities of life; and these fundamental qualities, upon which organised society rests as on an immovable foundation, are the silent deposit of the work of the world. Through what seems to be the bondage of toil the race is emancipated from the ignorance, the licence, and the dull monotony of savagery; through what seems to be a purely material dealing with insensate things men put themselves in the way of the most thorough moral training.

The necessity of working gives society steadiness and stability; when large populations are freed from this necessity, irresponsible mobs take the place of orderly citizens, and the crowd of idlers must be fed and amused to be kept out of mischief. A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been. When work has disciplined a man, he may safely be left to himself; for he will not only govern himself, but he will also employ himself. There are few worse elements in society than an idle leisure class,—a body of men and women who make mere recreation the business of living, and so reverse or subvert the natural order of life.

On the other hand, there is no more valuable element in society than a working leisure class,—a body of men and women who, emancipated from the harder and more mechanical work of the world, give themselves to the higher activities and enrich the common life by intelligence, beauty, charm of habit and manners, dignity of carriage, and distinction of character and taste. So long as men need other food than bread, and have higher necessities than those of the body, a leisure class will be essential to the richest and completest social development. What society does not need is an idle class.

Chapter IX

Fellowship

The comradeship of work is an element which is rarely taken into account, but which is of great importance from many points of view. Men who work together have not only the same interests, but are likely to develop a kinship of thought and feeling. Their association extends beyond working hours, and includes their higher and wider interests. There seems to be something in the putting forth of effort upon the same material or for the same end which binds men together with ties which are not wholly the result of proximity. Those who have given no thought to the educational side of work, and who are ignorant that it has such a side, are, nevertheless, brought within the unifying influence of a process which, using mainly the hands and the feet, is insensibly training the whole nature.

There is a deeper unity in the work of the world than has been clearly understood as yet; there is that vital unity which binds together those who are not only engaged in a common task, but who are also involved in a common spiritual process. The very necessity of work carries with it the implication of an incomplete world and an imperfectly developed society. The earth was not finished when it was made ready for the appearance of man; it will not be finished until man has done with it. In the making of the world man has his part; here, as elsewhere, he meets God and co- operates with him; the divine and the human combining to perfect the process of unfolding and evolution. Until the work of men has developed it, the earth is raw material. It is full of power, but that power is not conserved and directed, it is full of the potentialities of fertility, but there are no harvests; all manner of possibilities both of material and spiritual uses are in it,—food, ore, force, beauty,—but these possibilities must await the skill of man before they can be turned into wealth, comfort, art, civilisation. God gives the earth as a mine, and man must work it; as a field, and man must till it; as a reservoir of force, and man must make connection with it; as the rough material out of which order, symmetry, utility, beauty, culture may be wrought, and men must unfold these higher uses by intelligence, skill, toil, and character. At some time every particle of the civilised world has been like the old frontier on this continent, and men have reclaimed either the desert or the wilderness by their heroic sacrifices and labours. It is a misuse of language, therefore, to say that the world is made; it is not made, because it is being made century by century through the toil of successive generations.

Now, this creative process, in which God and men unite, is what we call work. It is not a process introduced among men as an afterthought or as a form of punishment; it was involved in the initial creative act, and it is part of the complete creative act. The conception of a process of development carries with it the idea, not of a finished but of an unfinished world; it interprets history not as a record of persons and events separate from the stage upon which they appear, like actors on the boards, but as the story of the influence of an unfinished world upon an undeveloped race, and of the marvellous unfolding through which the hidden powers and qualities of the material and the worker are brought into play. Work becomes, therefore, not only a continuation of the divine activity in the world, but a process inwrought in the very constitution of that world. Growth is the divinest element in life, and work is one of the chief factors in growth.

The earth is, therefore, in its full unfolding and its final form, the joint product of the love and power of God and of the toil and sacrifice of men; the creative purpose is not accomplished in a single act; it is being wrought out through a long progression of acts; and in this continuous process God and men are brought together in a way which makes the labour of the hand the work also of the spirit. If one reflects on all that this intimate cooperation of the divine and the human in the fields, the factories, and the shops means, the nobility of work and its possibilities of spiritual education become impressively clear. In this fellowship men are trained in ways of which they are insensible; spiritual results are accomplished within them of which they are unconscious. The Infinite is nowhere more beneficently present than in the strain and anguish of toil; and the necessity of putting forth one's strength in some form of activity is not a hardship but a divine opportunity.

To well-conditioned men work is a joy; under normal conditions, for healthful men, it is always a joy. The spiritual meaning behind the hard face which toil wears makes itself dimly understood at times, and men sing at their tasks not only out of pure exuberance of good spirits and sound health, but because there is something essentially rhythmical and harmonious in their toil. The song of the sailor at the windlass is a song of fellowship; an expression of the deepened consciousness of strength and exhilaration which come from standing together in a joint putting forth of strength. When a man honestly gives himself to any kind of work he makes himself one with his fellows in the creative process; he enters into deepest fellowship with the race. And, as in the intimacy of the family, in its structure and habit, there lies a very deep and rich educational process, so in the community of work there lies a training and enrichment which go to the very centre of the individual life. The ideal development involves harmonious adjustment of the man to the world, through complete development of his personality and through complete unity with the race; and the deepest and most fruitful living is denied those who fail of entire unfolding in either of these hemispheres, which together make up the perfect whole. In genuine culture solitude and society must both find place; a man must secure the strength and poise which enable him to stand alone, and he must also unite himself in hand, mind, and heart with his fellows. In isolation the finer parts of nature wither; in fellowship they bear noble fruitage. To work in one's day with one's fellows; to accept their fortune, bear their burdens, perform their tasks, and accept their rewards; to be one with them in the toil, sorrow, and joy of life,—is to put oneself in the way of the richest growth and the purest happiness.

Chapter X

Work and Pessimism

When perils thickened about him and the most courageous grew faint- hearted, Francis Drake's favourite phrase was: "It matters not; God hath many things in store for us." No man ever wore a more dauntless face in the presence of danger than the great adventurer who destroyed the foundations of Spanish power in this continent, and whose smile always grew sweeter as the situation grew more desperate. That smile carried the conviction of ultimate safety to a crew which was often on the verge of despair; its serenity and confidence were contagious; it conveyed the impression, in the blackest hour, that the leader knew some secret way of escape from encircling peril. He knew, as a rule, no more than his men knew; but as danger deepened, his genius became energised to the utmost quickness of discernment and the utmost rapidity of action. He had no time for despair; he had only time for decision and action. In his dying hour, on a hostile sea, half a hemisphere from home, he arose, dressed himself, and called for his arms; falling before the only foe to whom he ever yielded with the same dauntless courage which had made him the master of untravelled seas and the terror of a continent. He so completely identified himself with the work he had in hand that he sapped the very sources of fear.

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 nobly 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 lassitude 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 passionate 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 substitute 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 participation 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. Participation 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 Attitude

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,
   Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
   And marching single in an endless file,
   Bring diadems and fagots 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 unobtrusively 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. Noble 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 noble 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 constituents, and he sits down as empty as he arose; the same hour, arriving unexpectedly to Burke or Webster, draws upon vast accumulations of knowledge, thought, and illustration. 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 gods 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 mass 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 attitude 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 classes of men of business; one class is shrewd, keen, successful, but entirely uninteresting, because it fastens its attention exclusively upon the bare, hard facts of the situation; the other class 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 hoarding; 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 noblest 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 analysis, 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 noble language and to have nothing to say in it; it is equally fatal to have noble 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 Japanese 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 passed 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 passion 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 Japanese 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 competition 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 institutions 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 passion 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, dispassionateness 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 mass of preparatory notes and memoranda of every description, illustrates in a very noble 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 attitude 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 passion 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 illustrated 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 identity of great working power with great spiritual energy.

Chapter XIV

The Ultimate Aim

Workers of all kinds are divided into two classes 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 noble. 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 analysis 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 noblest 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 noblest 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.

If a man sets a specific position or an external reward of any kind before him as the limit of his journey, he is in danger of getting to the end before he has fully put forth his strength, and so giving his life the pathos of an anti-climax. The more noble and able a man is, the less satisfaction can he find in any material return which his work brings him; no man with a touch of the artist in him can ever rest content with anything short of the complete putting forth of all that is in him, and the consciousness of having done his work well.

For a man's ultimate responsibility is met by what he is and does, not by what he gains. When he sets an exterior reward of any kind before him as the final goal of his endeavour, he breaks away from the divine order of life and destroys that deep interior harmony which ought to keep a man's spirit in time and tune with the creative element in the world.

We are not to seek specific rewards; they must come to us. They are the recognition and fruit of work, not its inspiration and sustaining power. Let a man select the right seed and give it the right soil, and sun, rain, and the warm earth must do the rest. Goethe touched the heart of the matter when he wrote:

  "Shoot your own thread right through the earthly tissue
   Bravely; and leave the gods to find the issue."

In all work of the highest quality God must be taken into account. No man works in isolation and solitude; he works within the circle of a divine order, and his chief concern is to work with that order. To aim exclusively at one's own advancement and ease is to put oneself outside that order and to sever oneself from those sources of power which feed and sustain all whom they reach. In that order a man finds his place by bringing to perfection all that is in him, and so making himself a new centre of life and power among men.

Whatever is true of the religious life is true also of the working life; the two are different aspects of the same vital experience. In the field of work he who would keep his life must lose it, and in losing his life a man secures it for immortality. The noble worker pours himself into his work with sublime indifference to its rewards, and by the very completeness of his self-surrender and self-forgetfulness touches degrees of excellence and attains a splendour of vision which are denied those whose ventures are less daring and complete. And the largeness of conception, the breadth of treatment, the beauty of skill which a man gains when he casts all his spiritual fortune into his work often secure the richest measure of those returns which men value so highly because they are the tangible evidences of success. No man can forget himself for the sake of fame; but let him forget himself for the sake of his work, and fame will gladly serve him while lesser men are vainly wooing her. The man who is superior to fortune is much more likely to be fortunate than he who flatters fortune and wears her livery. Notwithstanding the successes that attend cleverness and dexterity and the flattery of popular taste and the study of the weaknesses of men, it remains true that greatness rules in every sphere, and that in the exact degree in which a man is superior is he authoritative and finally successful. Notoriety is easily bought, but fame remains unpurchasable; external successes, sought as final ends, are but the hollow mockeries of true achievement.

Chapter XV

Securing Right Conditions

To secure the finest growth of a plant there must be a careful study of the conditions of soil, exposure, and moisture, or sun which it needs; when these conditions are supplied and the necessary oversight furnished, nature may be trusted to do her work with ideal completeness. Now, the perfect unfolding of a rich personality involves the utmost intelligence in the discernment of the conditions which are essential, and the utmost persistence in the maintenance of those conditions after they have been secured. Perfectly developed men and women are rare, not only because circumstances are so often unfavourable, but also because so little thought is given, as a rule, to this aspect of life. The majority of men make use of such conditions and material as they find at hand; they do not make a thorough study of the things they need, and then resolutely set about the work of securing these essential things. Many men use faithfully the opportunities which come to hand, but they do not, by taking thought, convert the whole of life into one great opportunity.

When a man discovers that he has a special gift or talent, his first duty is to turn that gift into personal power by securing its fullest development. The recognition of such a gift generally brings with it the knowledge of the conditions which it needs for its complete unfolding; and when that discovery is made a man holds the clew to the solution of the problem of his life. The world is full of unintelligent sacrifice,— sacrifice which is sound in motive, and therefore does not fail to secure certain results in character, but which is lacking in clear discernment, and fails, therefore, to accomplish the purpose for which it was made. Such unavailing sacrifice is always pathetic, for it involves a waste of spiritual power. One of the chief sources of this kind of waste is the habit which so many American communities have formed of calling a man into all kinds of activity before he has had time to thoroughly train and develop himself. Let a young teacher, preacher, speaker, or artist give promise of an unusual kind, and straightway all manner of enterprises solicit his support, local organisations and movements urge their claims upon him, reforms and philanthropies command his active co-operation; and if he wisely resists the pressure he is in the way of being set down as selfish, unenterprising, and lacking in public spirit.

As a matter of fact, in most cases, it is the community, not the individual, which is selfish; for communities are often ruthless destroyers of promising youth.

The gifted young preacher must clearly discern the needs of his own nature or he will miss the one thing which he was probably sent into the world to accomplish, the one thing which all men are sent into the world to secure,—free and noble self-development. He must be wiser than his parish or the community; he must recognise the peril which comes from the too close pressure of near duties at the start. The community will thoughtlessly rob him of the time, the quiet, and the repose necessary for the unfolding of his spirit; it will drain him in a few years of the energy which ought to be spread over a long period of time; and at the end of a decade it will begin to say, under its breath, that its victim has not fulfilled the promise of his youth. It will fail to discern that it has blighted that promise by its own urgent demands. The young preacher who is eager to give the community the very greatest service in his power will protect it and himself by locking his study door and resolutely keeping it locked.

The young artist and writer must pass through the same ordeal, and must learn before it is too late that he who is to render the highest service to his fellows must be most independent in his relations to them. He cannot commit the management of his life to others without maiming or blighting it. The community insists upon immediate activity at the expense of ultimate service, upon present productivity at the cost of ultimate power. The artist must learn, therefore, to bar his door against the public until he has so matured his own strength and determined his own methods that neither crowds nor applause nor demands can confuse or disturb him. The great spirits who have nourished the best life of the race have not turned to their fellows for their aims and habits of work; they have taken counsel of that ancient oracle which speaks in every man's soul, and to that counsel they have remained steadfastly true. There is no clearer disclosure of divine guidance in the confusion of human aims and counsels than the presence of a distinct faculty or gift in a man; and when such a gift reveals itself a man must follow it, though it cost him everything which is most dear; and he must give it the largest opportunity of growth, though he face the criticism of the world in the endeavour.

Life is always a struggle, and no man comes to any kind of mastery without a conflict. The really great man is often compelled to light for his right to live in the freedom of spirit. Prophets, poets, teachers, and artists have known the scorn, hatred, and rejection of society; they have known also its flatteries, rewards, and imperious demands; and they have learned that in both moods society is the foe of the highest development and of the noblest talent. He who breaks under the scorn or yields to the adulation becomes the creature of those whom he would serve, and so misses his own highest fortune and theirs as well; he who forgets the indifference in steadfast work, and holds to his aims and habits when success knocks at his door, gains the most and the best for himself and for others.

For the highest service which a man can render to his kind is possible only when he secures for himself the largest and noblest development; to stop short of that development is to rob himself and society. Selfishness does not lie in turning a deaf ear to present calls for work and help; it lies in indifference to the ultimate call. Goethe was by no means a man of symmetrical character, and there were reaches of spiritual life which he never traversed; but the charge of selfishness urged against him because he gave himself up completely to the work which he set out to do cannot be sustained. The very noblest service which he could render to the world was to hold himself apart from its multiform activities in order that he might enrich every department of its thought. For life consists not only in the doing of present duties, but in the unfolding of the relations of men to the entire spiritual order of which they are part, and in the enrichment of human experience by insight, interpretation, and the play of the creative faculties. The artist finds his use in the enrichment of life, and his place in the order of service is certainly not less assured and noble than that of the man of action. Such a nature as Dante's does more for men than a host of those who are doing near duties and performing the daily work of the world. Let no man decry the spiritual greatness of these obvious claims and tasks; but on the other hand, let not the man of practical affairs and of what may be called the executive side of ethical activity decry the artists, the thinkers, and the poets.

It is the duty of some men to leave reforms alone, and to give themselves up to study, meditation, and the creative spirit and mood. Of men of practical ability the world stands in little need; of men of spiritual insight, imaginative force, and creative energy it stands in sore need. When such a gift appears it ought to be sacredly guarded. It may be that it has a work to do which demands absolute detachment from the ordinary affairs of society. To assault it with the claims of the hour is to defeat its purpose and rob the future. It must have quiet, leisure, repose. Let it dream for a while in the silence of sweet gardens, within the walls of universities, in the fruitful peace of undisturbed days; for out of such dreams have come "As You Like It," "The Tempest," "In Memoriam," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal." Out of such conditions have come also the work of Darwin, Spencer, Martineau, Maurice, Jowett, and Childs. He who is bent on making a wise use of his abilities may safely be left to choose his own methods and to create his own conditions.

Chapter XVI

Concentration

When a man has discovered the conditions which are necessary to his most complete development, he will, if he is wise and strong, resolutely preserve these conditions from all disturbing influences and claims. He will not hesitate to disappoint the early and eager expectation of his friends by devoting himself to practice while they are clamorous for work; he will take twenty years for preparation, if necessary, and cheerfully accept indifference and the pangs of being forgotten, if at the end of that time he can do a higher work in a better way. He who takes a long range must expect that his target will be invisible to those who happen to be taking note of him; he will need, therefore, to have a very clear perception of the end he is pursuing, and great persistence in the pursuit of that end.

The alertness and facility of the American temperament are very engaging and useful qualities, but they involve serious perils for those who are bent upon doing the best thing in the best way. The man who can turn his hand readily to many things is likely to do many things well, but to do nothing with commanding force and skill. One may have a fund of energy which needs more than one field to give it adequate play; but he who hopes to achieve genuine distinction in any kind of production must give some particular work the first place in his interest and activity, and must pour his whole soul into the doing of that work. A man may enjoy many diversions by the way, but he must never forget the end of his journey. If he is wise, he will not hasten; he will not miss the sights and sounds and pleasures which give variety to travel and bring rest to the traveller; but he will hold all these things subordinate to the accomplishment of his journey. He will rest for the sake of the strength it will give him; he will turn aside for the enjoyment of the view; he will linger in sweet and silent places to take counsel with his own thoughts; but the staff and wallet will never be laid aside.

There are no men so interesting as those who are quietly and steadfastly following some distant aim which is invisible to others. One recognises them because they seem to be moving silently but surely onward. Skill, insight, and power steadily flow to them; and, apparently without effort, they climb step by step the steep acclivity where influence and fame abide. They are supremely interesting because, through absorption in their work, they are largely free from self-consciousness, and because they bring with them the air and stir of growth and movement. They rarely obtrude their interests or pursuits upon others, but they give the impression of a definiteness of aim which cannot be obscured or blurred, and a concentration of energy which steadily reacts in increase of power. They are not only the heroic workers of the world, but they also set in motion the deeper currents of thought and action; into the atmosphere of a sluggish age they infuse freshness and vitality; they do not drift with majorities, they determine their own courses, and sweep others into the wide circles of influence which issue from them. They are the leaders, organisers, energising spirits of society; they do not copy, but create; they do not accept, but form conditions; they mould life to their purpose, and stamp themselves on materials.

To the making of genuine careers concentration is quite as essential as energy; to achieve the highest success, a man must not only be willing to pour out his vitality without stint or measure, but he must also be willing to give himself. For concentration is, at bottom, entire surrender of one's life to some definite end. In order to focus all one's powers at a single point, there must be abandonment of a wide field of interest and pleasure. One would like to do many things and take into himself many kinds of knowledge, many forms of influence; but if one is to master an art, a craft, or a profession, one must be willing to leave many paths untrod, to build many walls, and to lock many doors. When the boy has learned his lessons he may roam the fields and float on the river at his own sweet will; but so long as he is at the desk he must be deaf to the invitation of sky and woods. When a man has mastered his work he may safely roam the world; but while he is an apprentice let him be deaf and blind to all things that interrupt or divert or dissipate the energies.

Mr. Gladstone's astonishing range of interests and occupations was made possible by his power of concentration. He gave himself completely to the work in hand; all his knowledge, energy, and ability were focussed on that work, so that his whole personality was brought to a point of intense light and heat, as the rays of the sun are brought to a point in a burning-glass. When the power of concentration reaches this stage of development, it liberates a man from dependence upon times, places, and conditions; it makes privacy possible in crowds, and silence accessible in tumults of sound; it withdraws a man so completely from his surroundings that he secures complete isolation as readily as if the magic carpet of the "Arabian Nights" were under him to bear him on the instant into the solitude of lonely deserts or inaccessible mountains. More than this, it enables a man to work with the utmost rapidity, to complete his task in the shortest space of time, and to secure for himself, therefore, the widest margin of time for his own pleasure and recreation.

The marked differences of working power among men are due chiefly to differences in the power of concentration. A retentive and accurate memory is conditioned upon close attention. If one gives entire attention to what is passing before him, he is not likely to forget it or to confuse persons or incidents. The book which one reads with eyes which are continually lifted from the page may furnish entertainment for the moment, but cannot enrich the reader, because it cannot become part of his knowledge.

Attention is the simplest form of concentration, and its value illustrates the supreme importance of that focussing of all the powers upon the thing in hand which may be called the sustained attention of the whole nature.

Here, as everywhere in the field of man's life, there enters that element of sacrifice without which no real achievement is possible. To secure a great end, one must be willing to pay a great price. The exact adjustment of achievement to sacrifice makes us aware, at every step, of the invisible spiritual order with which all men are in contact in every kind of endeavour. If the highest skill could be secured without long and painful effort it would be wasted through ignorance of its value, or misused through lack of education; but a man rarely attains great skill without undergoing a discipline of self-denial and work which gives him steadiness, restraint, and a certain kind of character. The giving up of pleasures which are wholesome, the turning aside from fields which are inviting, the steady refusal of invitations and claims which one would be glad to accept or recognise, invest the power of concentration with moral quality, and throw a searching light on the nature of all genuine success. To do one thing well, a man must be willing to hold all other interests and activities subordinate; to attain the largest freedom, a man must first bear the cross of self-denial.

Chapter XVII

Relaxation

The ability to relax the tension of work is as important as the power of concentration; for the two processes combine in the doing of the highest kind of work. There are, it is true, great differences between men in capacity for sustained toil. Some men are able to put forth their energy at the highest point of efficiency for a short time only, while the endurance of others seems to be almost without limit. In manual or mechanical work it is mainly a question of physical or nervous resources; in creative work, however relaxation is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of necessity, because it affects the quality of the product. In the alertness of attention, the full activity of every faculty, the glow of the imagination, which accompany the putting forth of the creative power, the whole force of the worker is concentrated and his whole nature is under the highest tension. Everything he holds of knowledge, skill, experience, emotion flows to one point; as waters which have gathered from the surface of a great stretch of country sometimes run together and sweep, in deep, swift current, through a narrow pass. In such moments there is a concentration of thought, imagination, and spiritual energy which fuses all the forces of the worker into one force and directs that force to a single point.

In such a moment there is obviously a closing in of a man's nature from outward influences. The very momentum with which the absorbed worker is urged on in the accomplishment of his design shuts him from those approaches of truth and knowledge which are made only when the mind is at ease. One sees a hundred things in the woods as he saunters through their depths which are invisible as he rushes through on a flying train; and one is conscious of a vast world of sights, sounds, and odours when he sits out of doors at ease, of which he is oblivious when he is absorbed in any kind of task. Now, in order to give work the individuality and freshness of the creative spirit, one must be, at certain times, as open to these manifold influences from without as one must be, at other times, closed against them; the tension of the whole being which is necessary for the highest achievement must be intermitted. The flow of energy must be stopped at intervals in order that the reservoir may have time to fill. In the lower forms of work relaxation is necessary for health; in the higher forms of work it is essential for creativeness.

It is a very superficial view of the nature of man which limits growth to periods of self-conscious activity; a view so superficial that it not only betrays ignorance of the real nature of man's relation to his world, but also of the real nature of work. Activity is not necessarily work; it is often motion without direction, progress, or productiveness; mere waste of energy. In every field of life—religious, intellectual, material—there is an immense amount of activity which is sheer waste of power. Work is energy intelligently put forth; and intelligence in work depends largely upon keeping the whole nature in close and constant relation with all the sources of power. To be always doing something is to be as useless for the higher purposes of growth and influence as to be always idle; one can do nothing with a great show of energy, and one can do much with very little apparent effort. In no field of work is the difference between barren and fruitful activity more evident than in teaching. Every one who has acquaintance with teachers knows the two types: the man who is never at rest, but who pushes through the school day, watch in hand, with gongs sounding, monitors marking, classes marching, recitations beginning and ending with military precision, sharply defined sections in each text-book arbitrarily covered in each period; a mechanic of tireless activity, who never by any chance touches the heart of the subject, opens the mind of the pupil, enriches his imagination, or liberates his personality: and the other type, the real teacher, who is concerned not to sustain a mechanical industry, but to create a dynamic energy; who cares more for truth than for facts, for ability than for dexterity, for skill of the soul than for cunning of the brain; who aims to put his pupil in heart with nature as well as in touch with her phenomena; to disclose the formative spirit in history as well as to convey accurate information; to uncover the depths of human life in literature as well as to set periods of literary development in external order. Such a man may use few methods, and attach small importance to them; the railroad atmosphere of the schedule may be hateful to him in the school-room; but he is the real worker, for he achieves that which his noisier and more bustling colleague misses,—the education of his pupils. He is not content to impart knowledge; he must also impart culture; for without culture knowledge is the barren possession of the intellectual artisan.

Now, culture involves repose, openness of mind, that spiritual hospitality which is possible only when the nature is relaxed and lies fallow like the fields which are set aside in order that they may regain fertility. The higher the worker the deeper the need of relaxation in the large sense. A man must be nourished before he can feed others; must be enriched in his own nature before he can make others rich; must be inspired before he reveal, prophesy, or create in any field. If he makes himself wholly a working power, he isolates himself from the refreshment and re-creative power of the living universe in which he toils; in that isolation he may do many things with feverish haste, but he can do nothing with commanding ability. He narrows his energy to a rivulet by cutting himself off from the hills on which the feeding springs rise and the clouds pour down their richness. The rivulet may be swift, but it can never have depth, volume, or force. The great streams in which the stars shine and on which the sails of commerce whiten and fade are fed by half a continent.

To the man who is bent upon the highest personal efficiency through the most complete self-development a large part of life must be set aside for that relaxation which, by relief from tension and from concentration, puts the worker into relation with the influences and forces that nourish and inspire the spirit. The more one can gain in his passive moods, the more will he have to give in his active moods; for the greater the range of one's thought, the truer one's insight, and the deeper one's force of imagination, the more will one's skill express and convey. A man's life ought to be immensely in excess of his expression, and a man's life has its springs far below the plane of his work. Emerson's work reveals the man, because it contains the man, but the man was fashioned before the work began. The work played no small part in the unfolding of the man's nature, but that which gave the work individuality and authority antedated both poems and essays. These primal qualities had their source in the personality of the thinker and poet, and were developed and refined by long intimacy with nature, by that fruitful quietness and solitude which open the soul to the approach of the deepest truths and most liberating experiences. Emerson knew how to relax, to surrender to the hour and the place, to invite the higher powers by throwing all the doors open; and these receptive hours, when he gave himself into the keeping of the spirit, were the most fertile periods of his life; they enriched and inspired him for the hours of work.

Chapter XVIII

Recreation

There is a radical difference between relaxation and recreation. To relax is to unbend the bow, to diminish the tension, to lie fallow, to open the nature on all sides. Relaxation involves passivity; it is a negative condition so far as activity is concerned, although it is often a positive condition so far as growth is concerned. Recreation, on the other hand, involves activity, but activity along other lines than those of work. Froebel first clearly developed the educational significance and uses of play. Earlier thinkers and writers on education had seen that play is an important element in the unfolding of a child's nature, but Froebel discerned the psychology of play and showed how it may be utilised for educational purposes. His comments on this subject are full of significance: "The plays of the child contain the germ of the whole life that is to follow; for the man develops and manifests himself in play, and reveals the noblest aptitudes and the deepest elements of his being. …The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life; for the whole man is developed and shown in these, in his tenderest dispositions, in his innermost tendencies." And one of Froebel's most intimate associates suggests another service of play, when he says: "It is like a fresh bath for the human soul when we dare to be children again with children." Play is the prelude to work, and stands in closest relation to it; it is the natural expression of the child's energy, as work is the natural expression of the man's energy. In play and through play the child develops the power that is in him, comes to knowledge of himself, and realises his relation with other children and with the world about him. In the free and unconscious pouring out of his vitality he secures for himself training, education, and growth.

The two instincts which impel the child to play are the craving for activity and the craving for joy. In a healthy child the vital energy rushes out with a fountain-like impetuosity and force; he does not take thought about what he shall do, for it is of very little consequence what he does so long as he is in motion. A boy, with the high spirits of perfect health, is, at times, an irresponsible force. He acts instinctively, not intelligently; and he acts under the pressure of a tremendous vitality, not as the result of design or conviction. The education of play is the more deep and fundamental because it is received in entire unconsciousness; like the landscape which sank into the soul of the boy blowing mimic hootings to the owls on the shore of Winander. The boy who has the supreme good fortune of physical, mental, and moral health often passes the invisible line between play and work without consciousness of the critical transition. In the life of a man so harmonious in nature and so fortunate in condition, work is a normal evolution of play; and the qualities which make play educational and vital give work its tone and temper. Activity and joy are not dissevered in such a normal unfolding of a man's life.

Now, play is as much a need of the man's nature as of the boy's, and if work is to keep its freshness of interest, its spontaneity, and its productiveness, it must retain the characteristics of play; it must have variety, unconsciousness of self, joy. Activity it cannot lose, but joy too often goes out of it. The fatal tendency to deadness, born of routine and repetition, overtakes the worker long before his force is spent, and blights his work by sapping its vitality. Real work always sinks its roots deep in a man's nature, and derives its life from the life of the man; when the vitality of the worker begins to subside, through fatigue, exhaustion of impulse, or loss of interest, the work ceases to be original, vital, and genuine. Whatever impairs the worker's vitality impairs his work. So close is the relation between the life of the artist and the life of his art that the stages of his decline are clearly marked in the record of his work. It is of the highest importance, therefore, that a man keep himself in the most highly vitalised condition for the sake of productiveness.

No one can keep in this condition without the rest which comes from self- forgetfulness and the refreshment which comes from joy; one can never lose the capacity for play without some sacrifice of the capacity for work. The man who never plays may not show any loss of energy, but he inevitably shows loss of power; he may continue to do a certain work with a certain efficiency, but he cannot give it breadth, freshness, spiritual significance. To give one's work these qualities one must withdraw from it at frequent intervals, and suffer the energies to play in other directions; one must not only diminish the tension and lessen the concentration of attention; one must go further and seek other objects of interest and other kinds of activity; and these objects and activities must be sought and pursued freely, joyfully, and in forgetfulness of self. The old delight of the playground must be called back by the man, and must be at the command of the man. The boy's play, in a real sense, creates the man; the man's play re-creates him by re-vitalising him, refreshing him and restoring to him that delight in activity for its own sake which is the evidence of fresh impulse.

This is the true meaning of recreation; it involves that spiritual recuperation and reinforcement which restore a man his original energy of impulse and action. Recreation is, therefore, not a luxury, but a necessity; not an indulgence, but a duty. When a man is out of health physically and neglects to take the precautions or remedies which his condition demands, he becomes, if he has intelligence, a suicide; for he deliberately throws his life away. In like manner, the man who destroys his freshness and force by making himself a slave to work and so transforming what ought to be a joy into a task, commits a grave offence against himself and society. The highest productivity will never be secured until the duty of recreation is set on the same plane with that of work, and the obligation to nourish one's life made as binding as the obligation to spend one's life.

How a man shall secure recreation and in what form he shall take it depends largely upon individual conditions. Mr. Gladstone found recreation not only in tree-cutting but in Homeric studies; Lord Salisbury finds it in chemistry; Washington found it in hunting; Wordsworth in walking; Carlyle in talking and smoking; Mr. Balfour finds it in golf, and Mr. Cleveland in fishing. Any pursuit or occupation which takes a man out of the atmosphere of his work-room and away from his work, gives him different interests, calls into activity different muscles or faculties, brings back the spirit of play, recalls the spontaneous and joyous mood, and re-creates through diversion, variety, and the appeal to another side of the nature. To work long and with cumulative power, one must play often and honestly; that is to say, one must play for the pure joy of it.

Chapter XIX

Ease of Mood

Ease, it has been said, is the result of forgotten toil; and ease is essential to the man who works continuously and on a large scale. It is fortunate, rather than the reverse, when one's work is not easily done at the start; for early facility is often fatal to real proficiency. The man who does his work without effort at the beginning is tempted to evade the training and discipline which bring ease to the mind and the hand because both have learned the secret of the particular work and mastered the art of doing it with force and freedom. Facility is mere agility; ease comes from the perfect adjustment of the man to his tools, his materials, and his task. The facile man, as a rule, does his work with as little effort at twenty as at fifty; the man of trained skill does his work with increasing comfort and power. The first starts more readily; the second has the greater faculty of growth, and is more likely to become an artist in the end.

It is significant that the most original and capacious minds, like the most powerful bodies, often betray noticeable awkwardness at the start; they need prolonged exercise in order to secure freedom of movement; they must have time for growth. Minds of a certain superficial brilliancy, on the other hand, often mature early because they have so little depth and range. To be awkward in taking hold of one's work is not, therefore, a thing to be regretted; as a rule it is a piece of good fortune.

But awkwardness must finally give place to ease if one is to do many things or great things, and do them well. Balzac wrote many stories before he secured harmony and force of style; but if, as the result of his long apprenticeship, he had failed to secure these qualities, the creation of the "Comedie Humaine" would have been beyond his power. The work was so vast that no man could have accomplished it who had not learned to work rapidly and easily. For ease, when it is the result of toil, evidences the harmonious action of the whole nature; it indicates that mastery which comes to those only who see all the possibilities of the material in hand and readily put all their power into the shaping of it. A great work of art conveys an impression, not of effort, but of force and resource. One is convinced that Shakespeare could have written plays and Rembrandt painted portraits through an indefinite period of time without strain or exhaustion.

Strain and exhaustion are fatal to fine quality of work,—exhaustion, because it deprives work of vitality; and strain, because it robs work of repose, harmony, and charm. It is interesting to note how deeply an audience enjoys ease in a speaker; when he seems to be entirely at home and to have complete command of his resources, his hearers throw off all apprehension, all fear that their sympathies may be drawn upon, and give themselves up to the charm of beautiful or compelling speech. Let a speaker show embarrassment or anxiety, on the other hand, and his hearers instantly share his anxiety. There are speakers, moreover, who give no occasion for any concern about their ability to deal with a subject or an occasion, but whose exertion is so evident that the audience, which is always sensitive to the psychologic condition of a speaker, is wearied and sometimes exhausted. It is one of the characteristics of art that it conceals all trace of toil; and a man's work never takes on the highest qualities until all evidences of labour and exertion are effaced from it. Not many months ago the members of a court of very high standing expressed great pleasure in the prospect of hearing a certain lawyer of eminence on the following morning. These judges were elderly men, who had listened patiently through long years to arguments of all kinds, presented with all degrees of skill. They had doubtless traversed the whole field of jurisprudence many times, and could hardly anticipate any surprises of thought or novelties of argument. And yet these patient and long-suffering jurists were looking forward with delight to the opportunity of hearing another argument on an abstruse question of legal construction! The explanation of their interest was not far to seek. The jurist whose appearance before them was anticipated with so much pleasure is notable in his profession for ease of manner, which is in itself a very great charm. This ease invests his discussions of abstract or obscure questions with a grace and finish which are within the command of the artist only; and the artist is always fresh, delightful, and captivating. Mr. Gladstone's friends recall as one of his captivating qualities the ease with which he seemed to do his work. He was never in haste; he always conveyed the impression of having ample time for his varied and important tasks. If he had felt the spur of haste he would have lost his power of winning through that delightful old-fashioned courtesy which none could resist; if in his talks, his books, or his speeches there had been evidences of strain, he would not have kept to the end an influence which was due in no small measure to the impression of reserve power which he always conveyed.

Ease of mood is essential to long-sustained working-power. The anxious man loses force, and the laborious man time, which cannot be spared from the greater tasks. Wellington used to say that a successful commander must do nothing which he could get other men to do; he must delegate all lesser tasks and relieve himself of all care of details, in order that he might concentrate his full force on the matter in hand. It is said that the most daring and compelling men are invariably cool and quiet in manner. Such men lose nothing by friction or waste of energy; they work with the ease which is born of toil.

Chapter XX

Sharing the Race-Fortune

The development of one's personality cannot be accomplished in isolation or solitude; the process involves close and enduring association with one's fellows. If work were purely a matter of mechanical skill, each worker might have his cell and perform his task, as in a prison. But work involves the entire personality, and the personality finds its complete unfolding, not in detachment, but in association. Talent, says Goethe, thrives in solitude, but character grows in the stream of the world. It is a twofold discovery which a man must make before the highest kind of success lies within his grasp: the discovery of his own individual gift, force, or aptitude, and the discovery of his place in society. If it were possible to secure complete development of one's power in isolation, the product would be, not the full energy of a man expressing itself through a congenial activity, but a detached skill exercised automatically and apart from a personality.

In order to stand erect on his feet, in true and fruitful relations with the world about him, a man must join hands with his fellows. For a very large part of his education must come from his contact with the race. Since men began to live and to learn the lessons of life, each generation has added something to that vital knowledge of the art of living which is the very soul of culture, and something to the constructive and positive product of this vital knowledge wrought out into institutions, organisations, science, art, and religion. This inheritance of culture and achievement is the richest possession into which the individual member of the race is born, and he cannot take possession of his share of the race- fortune unless he becomes one of the race family. This race-fortune is the product of the colossal work of the race through its entire history; it represents the slow and painful toil and saving of countless multitudes of men and women. It is a wealth beside which all purely monetary forms of riches are fleeting and secondary; it is the enduring spiritual endowment of the race secured by the incalculable toil of all past generations.

Now, no man can secure his share in this race-fortune until he joins the ranks of the workers and takes his place in the field, the shop, the factory, the study, or the atelier. The idle man is always a detached man, and is, therefore, excluded from the privileges of heirship. To get the beauty of any kind of art one must train himself to see, to understand, and to enjoy; for art is a sealed book to the ignorant. To secure the largeness of view which comes from a knowledge of many cities and races, one must travel with a mind already prepared by prolonged study. The approach to every science is guarded by doors which open only to the hand which has been made strong by patient and persistent exercise. Every department of knowledge is barred and locked against the ignorant; nothing which represents achievement, thought, knowledge, skill, beauty, is within reach of the idle. Society has secured nothing which endures save as the result of persistent and self-denying work; and nothing which it has created can be understood, nothing which it has accumulated can be appropriated, without kindred self-denial and toil. It is evident, therefore, that the material for the education of the individual cannot be secured save by intimate fellowship with the race. This fellowship must rest also in present relations; for while man may get much that is of vast importance by contact with the working race of the past, he cannot get either the richest material or put himself under the deepest educational process without making himself one with the working race of to-day. The race-fortune, unlike other fortunes, does not increase by its own productive powers; it grows only as it is employed by those who inherit it. Investments of capital often lose their vitality; they still represent a definite sum of money, but they make no returns of interest. In like manner the accumulations of the race become dead unless they are constantly vitalised by effective use. The richest material for culture is valueless unless it is so employed as continually to renew the temper of culture in those who possess it. The richest results of past toil, genius, and life are without significance in the hands of the ignorant; and it has happened more than once that the pearls of past civilisation have been trampled into the mire by the feet of swine.

The architectural remains of the older Rome were ruthlessly destroyed in the years before the Renaissance and put to menial use as mere building material. They had reverted to the condition and value of crude stone, because no one perceived their higher values.

There is, unfortunately, another kind of ignorance, not quite so dense as that which does not recognise beauty of form or value of historical association, but not less destructive; there is that ignorance of the spiritual force behind the form which makes a fetish of the form, and so misses the interior wealth which it contains. There has spread among men and women of the dilettante temper the belief that to know the results and products of the past simply as curios and relics is to share the culture which these things of beauty and skill embody and preserve; and this false idea has helped to spread abroad the feeling that culture is accomplishment rather than force, and that it is for the idle rather than for the active and creative. There never was a more radical misconception of a fundamental process, for culture in the true sense involves, as a process, the highest and truest development of a race, and, as a product, the most enduring spiritual expression of race genius and experience. The culture of the Greeks was the highest form of their vital force; and the product of that culture was not only their imperishable art, but their political, social, and religious organisation and ideals. Their deepest life went into their culture, and the most enduring fruits of that culture are also the most significant expressions of their life.

To get at the sources of power in Shakespeare's plays, one must not only understand the secrets of their structure as works of art, but one must also discern their value as human documents; one must pass through them into the passion, the suffering, the toil of the race. No one can get to the heart of those plays without getting very near to the heart of his race; and no one can secure the fruits of culture from their study until he has come to see, with Shakespeare, that the unrecorded life-experience of the race is more beautiful, more tragic, and more absorbing than all the transcriptions of that experience made by men of genius. In other words, the ultimate result of a true study of Shakespeare is such an opening of the mind and such a quickening of the imagination that the student sees on all sides, in the lives of those about him, the stuff of which the drama is made. Not to the idle, but to the workers, does Shakespeare reveal himself.

Chapter XXI

The Imagination in Work

The uses of the imagination are so little understood by the great majority of men, both trained and untrained, that it is practically ignored not only in the conduct of life, but of education. It receives some incidental development as a result of educational processes, but the effort to reach and affect it as the faculties of observation, of reasoning, and of memory are made specific objects of training and unfolding, is rarely made. It is relegated to the service of the poets and painters if it is recognised at all; and so far as they are concerned it is assumed that they will find their own way of educating this elusive faculty. As for other men, dealing with life from the executive or practical sides, it is taken for granted that if they have imagination they can find no proper use for it. Individual teachers have often understood the place and function of the imagination, and have sought to liberate and enrich it by intelligently planned study; but the schools of most, if not of all, times have treated it as a wayward and disorderly gift, not amenable to discipline and training, and of very doubtful value. There has always been, in every highly civilised society, a good deal that has appealed to this divinest of all the gifts with which men have been endowed; there have been periods in which the imagination has been stirred to its depths by the force of human energy and the play and splendour of human experience and achievement; but there has never yet been adequate recognition of its place in the life of the individual and of society, nor intelligent provision for its education. The movements of thought along educational lines in recent years show, however, a slow but steady drift toward a clearer conception of what the imagination may do for men, and of what education may do for the imagination.

So long as the uses of the imagination in creative work are so little comprehended by the great majority of men, it can hardly be expected that its practical uses will be understood. There is a general if somewhat vague recognition of the force and beauty of its achievements as illustrated in the work of Dante, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Wagner; but very few people perceive the play of this supreme architectural and structural faculty in the great works of engineering, or in the sublime guesses at truth which science sometimes makes when she comes to the end of the solid road of fact along which she has travelled. The scientist, the engineer, the constructive man in every department of work, use the imagination quite as much as the artist; for the imagination is not a decorator and embellisher, as so many appear to think; it is a creator and constructor. Wherever work is done on great lines or life is lived in fields of constant fertility, the imagination is always the central and shaping power. Burke lifted statesmanship to a lofty plane by the use of it; Edison, Tesla, and Roebling in their various ways have shown its magical quality; and more than one man of fortune owes his success more to his imagination than to that practical sagacity which is commonly supposed to be the conjurer which turns all baser metals into gold.

That splendour of the spirit which shines in the great art of the world shines also in all lesser work that is genuine and sincere; for the higher genius of man, which is the heritage of all who make themselves ready to receive it, is present in all places where honest men work, and moulds all materials which honest men handle. Indeed the most convincing evidence of the activity of this supreme faculty is to be found, not in the works of men of exceptional gift, but in the work of the obscure and undistinguished. It is impossible to energise the imagination among the workers without energising it among the artists; and artists never appear in great numbers unless there is in the common work of common men a touch of vitality and freshness. A real movement of the imagination is never confined to a class; it is always shared by the community. It does not come in like a group of unrelated rivulets fed by separate fountains; it comes like a tide, slowly or swiftly rising until it enfolds a wide reach of territory. The presence of a true art spirit shows itself not so conclusively in a few noble works as in the touch of originality and beauty on common articles in common use; on furniture, and domestic pottery, and in the love of flowers.

The genius of a race works from below upward, as the seed sends its shoot out of the hidden place where it is buried; and when it becomes luminous in books, painting, and architecture, it grows also in out-of-the-way places and in things of humble use. The instinct for beauty, which is more pronounced and fruitful among the Japanese than among any other modern people, shows itself most convincingly in the originality, variety, and charm of the shapes which household pottery takes on, and in the quiet but deep enjoyment of the blossoming apple or cherry, the blooming vine or the fragrant rose. It is the presence of beauty diffused through the life of a people in habit, taste, pleasure, and daily use which makes the concentration of beauty in great and enduring works not only possible but inevitable; for if a people really care for beauty they will never lack artists to give enduring expression to that craving which, among men of lesser gift, shows itself in a constant endeavour to bring material surroundings into harmony with spiritual aspirations.

This play of the imagination over the whole landscape of life gives it perennial charm, because it perpetually re-forms and re-arranges it; and the free movement of the imagination in all occupations and tasks not only makes work a delight, but gives it a significance and adequacy, which make it the fit expression, not of a mere skill, but of an immortal spirit. The work from which this quality is absent may be honest and sincere, but it cannot be liberalising, joyful, and contagious; it cannot give the nature free play; it cannot express the man. Patience, persistence, fidelity are fundamental but not creative qualities; the true worker must possess and practise them; but he must go far beyond them if he is to put himself into his work, and bring his work into harmony with those spiritual conditions and aims which are the invisible but final standards and patterns of all works and tasks.

One may always get out of hard work the satisfaction which comes from the consciousness of an honest endeavour to do an honest piece of work; but the work which inspires rather than exhausts, and the doing of which gives the hand more freedom and power for the next tasks must be penetrated, suffused, and shaped by the imagination. The great lawyer, physician, electrician, teacher, and builder must give his work largeness, completeness, and nobility of structure by the use of the imagination in as real and true a sense as the great poet or painter. Without it all work is hard, detached, mechanical; with it all work is vital, co-ordinated, original. It must shape, illumine, and adorn; it must build the house, light the lamp within its walls, and impart to it that touch of beauty which invests wood and stone with the lightness, the grace, and the loveliness of spirit itself. We begin with the imagination; it holds its light over the play of childhood; it is the master of the revels, the enchantments, and the dreams of youth; it must be also the inspiration of all toil and the shaping genius of all work.

Chapter XXII

The Play of the Imagination

It is interesting to study the personality of a man whose work is invested with freshness, charm, and individuality, because such a study invariably makes us aware of that subtle and elusive skill in the use of all materials which is not technical but vital. That skill is impossible without special training, but it is not the product of training; it is not dexterity; it is not facility; it has the ease and grace of a harmonious expression of all that is distinctive and original in the man. No one thinks of technical skill in that moment of revelation which comes when one stands for the first time in the presence of a noble work; later one may study at length and with delight the perfection of workmanship disclosed in solidity of structure and in harmony of detail; but in the moment of revelation it is the essential and interior truth and beauty, which shine from form and colour and texture as the soul shines in a human face, which evoke a thrill of recognition in us.

Now, this higher skill which dominates and subordinates the technical skill, this skill of the spirit which commands and uses the skill of the body, is born in the soul of the worker and is the ultimate evidence and fruit of his mastership. It is conditioned on the free play of the imagination through all the material which the worker uses. It involves that fusion of knowledge, intelligence, facility, and insight which can be effected only by the constant use of the imagination. In statesmanship Burke and Webster are examples of this highest type of worker; men who not only command the facts with which they are called upon to deal, but who so organise and vitalise those facts that, in their final presentation, they possess the force of irresistible argument, and are illumined and clothed with perennial beauty as works of art. In like manner, in the pulpit, Chrysostom, Fenelon, Newman, and Brooks not only set religious truth in impressive order, but gave it the appealing power of a noble and enduring beauty.

It is impossible to do a great piece of work unless one can form an image of it in advance, unless one can see it as it will finally appear. If one were limited in vision to the detail actually in hand, the whole would never be completed; that which makes the perfection of the whole possible is the ability of the worker to keep that whole before him while he deals with the detached parts. Without that power the worker is a mechanical drudge, whose work has no quality save that of dogged fidelity to the task. Now, this power of keeping the whole before the mind while dealing with the parts, of seeing the completed machine while shaping a pin or a cog, of getting the complete effect of the argument while elaborating a minor point, resides in the imagination. It is the light which must shine upon all toil that has in it intelligence, prevision, and freshness; and its glow is as essential in mechanical as in purely artistic work. Whenever, in any kind of work dealing with any kind of material, there is any constructive quality, any fitting of part with part, any adjustment of means to ends, there must be imagination.

Work which is done without imagination is so rudimentary that, at the best, its highest use is to save some one else a little drudgery. This elementary kind of work is often done by those students of literature who confuse the study of grammatical construction with style, and those students of the Bible who think they are illustrating the truths of religion by purely textual study. Theology has suffered many things at the hands of those who have attempted to explain the divine mysteries without the light which alone penetrates these mysteries. To do the commonest work with sincerity and force; to understand the simplest character; to perform the simplest services of friendship; to enter into another's trial and to give the balm of sympathy to one who is smitten and bruised; to conduct a campaign by foreseeing the movements of an adversary, or to carry on successfully a great enterprise by forecasting its probable development; to make any invention or discovery; to be a really great preacher, physician, lawyer, teacher, mechanic;—to do any of these things one must have and one must use the imagination.

The charm with which the imagination invests childhood is due to its habitual and unconscious use by children, and is suggestive of the methods by which this faculty may be made the inspirer of all tasks and toil. The child makes vivid images of the ideas which appeal to it; it gives reality to those ideas by identifying them with the objective world; it clothes all things with which it plays with life. In his autobiography Goethe describes the door in the wall of a certain garden in Frankfort within which many marvellous things happened; a true romance of incident and adventure which became as real to the romancer as to his eager and credulous listeners. De Quincey created an imaginary kingdom, peopled with imaginary beings whom he ruled with benignant wisdom, amid universal prosperity and peace, until, in an unlucky hour, he admitted his brother into a partnership of authority; and that brother, unable to withstand the temptation of absolute power, became a remorseless tyrant. And De Quincey feelingly describes the reality of his anguish when, to protect his innocent subjects from a tyrant's rapacity, he was compelled to destroy his imaginary kingdom. The imaginative boy turns a vacant lot into an African jungle, and hunts wild beasts in constant peril of his life; the imaginative girl carries on social intercourse with her dolls as seriously as with her most intimate playmates. Everything is real and alive to a child, and the world of ideas has as much substance as the world of matter.

These characteristics of a child in its play throw clear light on the true methods of the man in his work; for the play of childhood is prophetic of the work of maturity; it is the prelude in which all the great motives are distinctly audible. The man who gives his work completeness and charm must conceive of that work, not as a detached and isolated activity, but as part of the great order of life; a product of the vital forces as truly as the flower which has its roots in the earth. To the growth of the flower everything contributes; it is not limited to the tiny plot in which it is planted: the vast chemistry of nature in soil, atmosphere, and sky nourish it. In like manner a man must habitually think of his work, not as a mere putting forth of his technical skill, but as the vital product of all the forces which sustain him. A real poem grows out of all that is deepest in a man's nature; to its making in spiritual conception, structure, form, and style his body, his mind, and his soul contribute; its metre adjusting itself to his breathing, its ideas taking direction and significance from his thought, and its elusive suggestiveness and beauty conveying something of his mysterious personality. A true sermon is never what is sometimes called a pulpit effort; it is always the product of the preacher's experience; he does not and cannot make it; it must grow within him. A great oration has the same vital relationship with the orator, the occasion, the theme, and human experience. It is never a bit of detached brilliancy; it is always, like Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, the summing up and expression of a vast and deep movement of the human spirit. In its form it reveals the man who makes it; in its content it is seen to be inevitable. It lies in the consciousness of a race before it rises into the consciousness of the orator and takes flight on the wings of immortal speech.

To think habitually of one's work as a growth and not a thing made out of hand, as a product of all the forces of one's nature and not a bit of skill, as alive in the sense in which all things are alive in which spirit and life express themselves,—to conceive of one's work in this large and vital way is to keep the imagination playing through and inspiring it.

Chapter XXIII

Character

Superiority of any kind involves discipline, self-denial, and self- sacrifice. It is the law of excellence that he who would secure it must pay for it. In this way the intellectual process is bound up with the moral process, and a man must give his character firmness and fibre before he can make his talent effective or his genius fruitful. The way of the most gifted workman is no easier than that of the most mediocre; he learns his lesson more easily, but he must learn the same lesson. The familiar story of the Sleeping Princess protected by a hedge of thorns, told in so many languages, is a parable of all success of a high order. The highest prizes are always guarded from the facile hand; they exact patience, persistence, intelligence, and force. If they were easily secured they would be easily misused; it rarely happens, however, that a man of high artistic gifts degrades his talent. He may set it to unprofitable uses, but he rarely makes merchandise of it. A Rembrandt, Thackeray, or Lowell cannot do inferior work for personal ends without suffering that devouring remorse which accompanies the conscience of the artist, and turns all ignoble popular successes into mockeries and scourges.

Moral education precedes mastership in every art, because the training which mastery involves reacts upon character and gives it steadiness and solidity. Great writers have sometimes lived careless, irresponsible lives, but they have always paid a great price for self-indulgence. The work of an irresponsible man of genius always suggests the loss which society has suffered by reason of his moral instability. Such men have done charming work; they have touched their creations with the magic of natural grace and the beauty of fresh and rich feeling; but they miss that completeness and finality which carry with them the conviction that the man has put forth all that was in him. We value what they have done, but we are always asking whether they could not have done more. Genius is of so rare and vital a nature that it will flash through all manner of obscurations, but there is a vast difference between the light which shines through a clear medium and that which is dimmed and reflected by a murky atmosphere. A man of Chatterton's temperament will give evidence of the possession of genius, but how far removed he is, in influence, position, and power, from a Tennyson or a Wordsworth!

The connection between sane living and sound work is a physiological and psychological necessity. The time, strength, poise, capacity for sustained work, steadiness of will, involved in the successful performance of great tasks or the production of great artistic creations exclude from the race all save those who bring to it health, vigour, and energy. It is unnecessary to inquire with regard to the habits of the man who builds up a great business enterprise or who secures genuine financial reputation and authority; these achievements always involve self-control, courage, persistence, and moral vigour. They are beyond the reach of the self- indulgent man. The man whose weakness of will makes him the victim of appetite or passion may make brilliant efforts, but he is incapable of sustained effort; he may do beautiful things from time to time, he cannot do beautiful things continuously and on a large scale. A Villon may give the world a few songs of notable sweetness or power; he cannot give the world a Divine Comedy or the plays of Corneille.

Every attempt to dissever art from character, however brilliantly sustained, is doomed to failure because the instinct, the intelligence, and the experience of the race are against it. Physiology and psychology are as definite as religion in their declarations on this matter; it is not a question of dogma or even of faith; it is a question of elementary laws and of common sense. All modern investigation goes to show the subtle and vital relations which exist between the different parts of a man's nature, and the certainty of the reaction of one part upon another; so that whatever touches the body ultimately touches the innermost nature of the man, and whatever affects the spirit eventually leaves its record on the physique. Every piece of genuine work which comes from a man's hand bears the impress of and is stamped with the quality of his whole being; it is the complex product of all that the man is and of all that be has done; it is the result of his genius, his industry, and his character.

Goethe saw clearly, as every critic of insight must see, that the artist is conditioned on the man; that whenever a man does anything which has greatness in it he does it with his whole nature. Into his verse the poet puts his body, his mind, and his soul; he is as powerless to detach his work from his past as he is to detach himself from it; and one of the saddest penalties of his misdoings is their survival in his work. The dulness of the poet's ear shows itself in the defective melody of his verse; for both metre and rhythm have a physiological basis; they represent and express the harmony which is in the body when the body is finely attuned to the spirit. Dull senses and a sluggish body are never found in connection with a great command of the melodic quality in language.

Goethe, with his deep insight, held so uncompromisingly to the unity of man and his works, that he would not have tried to escape the criticism of his nature which his works, adequately interpreted, suggest. He would have expected to find his moral limitations reproduced in his art. He indicated the fundamental principle when he said that his works, taken together, constituted one great confession. And this may be affirmed of every man's work; it is inevitably, and by the law of his nature, a disclosure of what he is, and what he is depends largely upon what he has been. Men have nowhere more conspicuously failed to escape themselves than in their works. Literary history, especially, is a practically unused treasure- house of moral illustration and teaching; for in no other record of human activity is the dependence of a man's work on his nature more constantly and strikingly brought out. The subtle relation between temperament, genius, environment, and character is in constant evidence to the student of literature; and he learns at last the primary truth that because a man's work is a revelation of the man, it is, therefore, as much a matter of his character as of his genius. The order of the world is moral in every fibre; men may do what they please within certain limits, and because they do what they please society seems to be in a state of moral chaos; but every word and deed reacts instantly on the man, and this reaction is so inevitable that since time began not one violator of any law of life has ever escaped the penalty. He has paid the price of his word or his deed on the instant in its reaction upon his character. God does not punish men; they punish themselves in their own natures and in the work of their hands. When Mirabeau, in the consciousness of the possession of the most masterful genius of his time, rose to speak in the States General, he became aware that his dissolute past was standing beside him and mocking him. His vast power, honestly put forth for great ends, was neutralised by a record which made belief in him almost impossible. In bitterness of soul he learned that genius and character are bound together by indissoluble ties, and that genius without character is like oil that blazes up and dies down about a shattered lamp. More than once, in words full of the deepest pathos, he recognised the immense value of character in men of far less ability than himself. The words which Mrs. Ward puts into the mouth of Henri Regnault are memorable as embodying searching criticism: "No, we don't lack brains, we French. All the same, I tell you, in the whole of that room there are about half-a-dozen people,— oh, not so many!—not nearly so many!—who will ever make a mark, even for their own generation, who will ever strike anything out of nature that is worth having—wrestle with her to any purpose. Why? Because they have every sort of capacity—every sort of cleverness—and no character!"

If a man is insensibly determining the quality of his work by everything which he is doing; if he is fixing the excellence of its workmanship by the standards he is accepting and the habits he is forming; if he is creating in advance its spiritual content and significance by the quality which his own nature is unconsciously taking on; and if he is determining its quantity and force by the strength, persistence, and steadfastness which he is developing, it is clear that work rests ultimately upon character, and that character conditions work in quality, content, skill, and mass.

Chapter XXIV

Freedom from Self-Consciousness

The sublime paradox of the spiritual life is repeated in all true development of personal gift and power. In order to find his life a man must first lose it; in order to keep his soul a man must first give it. The beginning of all education is self-conscious; at the start every effect must be calculated, every skill, method, or dexterity carefully studied. Training involves a rigid account of oneself based on searching self-knowledge. To become an effective speaker one must know his defects of bearing, gesture, voice; one must bring his whole personality into clear light, and study it as if it were an external thing; one must become intensely self-conscious. The initiation to every art is through this door of rigid scrutiny of self and entire surrender of self to the discipline of minute study and exacting practice. The pianist knows the artistic value of every note, and strikes each note with carefully calculated effect. The artist gives himself up to a patient study of details, and is content with the monotony of laborious imitation; subjecting every element of material and manner to the most thorough analysis.

The first stage in the education of the true worker is self-conscious; the final stage is self-forgetful. No man can enter the final stage without passing through the initial stage; no man can enter the final stage without leaving the initial stage behind him. One must first develop intense self-consciousness, and then one must be able to forget and obliterate himself. One must first accept the most exacting discipline of the school, and then one must forget that schools exist. The apprentice is the servant of detail; the master is the servant of the idea: the first accepts methods as if they were the finalities of art; the second uses them as mere instruments. Tennyson's attention was once called to certain very subtle vowel effects in one of his later poems; he promptly said that he had not thought of them. That was undoubtedly true, for he had become a master; but there was a time, in his days of apprenticeship, when he had studied the musical qualities and resources of words with the most searching intelligence. The transition from apprenticeship to mastery is accomplished when a man passes through self-consciousness into self- forgetfulness, when his knowledge and skill become so much a part of himself that they become instinctive. When the artist has gained, through calculation, study, and, practice, complete command of himself and his materials, he subordinates skill to insight, and makes his art the unconscious expression of his deepest nature. When this stage is reached the artist can pour his whole soul into his work almost instinctively; his skill and methods have become so completely a part of himself that he can use them almost without being conscious of them.

This ability to transform skill into character, to make instinct do the work of intelligence, to pass from intense self-consciousness into self- forgetfulness, is the supreme test to which every artist must subject himself let him sustain this test and his place is secure. To find one's life in the deepest sense, to bring out and express one's personality, a man must lose that life; that is to say, he must have the power of entire self-surrender. When the inspiration comes, as it does come to all creative spirits, a man must be able to surrender himself to it completely. When the hour of vision arrives the prophet has no time or thought to waste on himself; if he is to speak, he must listen with intense and utter stillness of soul.

In the degree in which a man masters his art does he attain unconsciousness of self. Great artists have sometimes been great egotists, but not in their greatest hours or works. And in so far as their egotism has touched their art it has invariably limited its range or diminished its depth and power; for in those moments in which the vision is clearest a man is always lifted above himself. He escapes for the moment the limitations which ordinarily encircle him as the horizon encircles the sea.

That which is true of the master worker, the artist, is true of all lesser workers: the highest efficiency is conditioned on the ability to forget oneself. Self-consciousness is the most serious and painful limitation of many men and women of genuine capacity and power. It rests like a heavy load on shoulders which ought to be free; it is an impediment of speech when speech ought to have entire spontaneity, and freedom. This intense consciousness of self, although always revealing a certain amount of egoism, is often devoid of egotism; it is, in many cases, a sign of diffidence and essential modesty. It is the burden and limitation of those especially who have high aims and standards, but who distrust their own ability to do well the things they are eager to do. To be self-conscious is to waste a great deal of force which ought to go into work; it is to put into introspection the vitality which ought to issue in some form of expression. The speaker is never in full command of his theme or his audience until he has gotten rid of himself; so long as he has to deal with himself he cannot wholly surrender himself to his theme nor to his audience. He is hampered, troubled, and anxious when he ought to be free, calm, and unconcerned. There is but one remedy for self-consciousness, and that is absorption in one's work. There must first be not only thorough preparation for the task in hand but thorough training of the whole nature; for every weak place in a man's education for his work is a point of self-consciousness. No man of conscience can do easily and instinctively that which he knows he cannot do well. The worker must have, therefore, the serenity which comes from confidence in the adequacy of his preparation. A man can even fail with a clear conscience, if he has taken every precaution against the possibility of failure. Adequate training being assumed, a man must cultivate the habit of self-surrender. This is sometimes difficult, but it is rarely, if ever, impossible.

To take a further illustration from the experience of the speaker, who is, perhaps, as often as any other kind of worker, burdened and limited at the start by self-consciousness: it is entirely possible to lose consciousness of self for the time in the theme or the occasion. Assuming that the preparatory work has been thorough, a man can train himself to fasten his thought entirely on his subject and his opportunity. If his theme is a worthy one and he has given adequate thought or research to it, he can learn to forget himself and his audience in complete surrender to it. Companionship with truth invests a man with a dignity which ought to give him poise and serenity; which will give him calmness and effectiveness if he regards himself as its servant and messenger. An ambassador is held in great honour because of the power which he represents; a man who is dealing in any way with truth or beauty has a right to repose in the greatness and charm of that for which he stands. This transference of interest from the outcome of a personal effort to the sharing of a vision or the conveyance of a power has often made the stammerer eloquent and the timid spirit heroically indifferent to self. The true refuge of the artist is absorption in his art; the true refuge of the self-conscious worker is complete surrender to the dignity and interest of his work.

Chapter XXV

Consummation

If the conception of man's relation to the world set forth in these chapters is sound, work is the chief instrumentality in the education of the human spirit; for it involves both self-realisation and the adjustment of self to the order of life. Through effort a man brings to light all that is in him, and by effort he finds his place in the universal order. Work is his great spiritual opportunity, and the more completely he expresses himself through it the finer the product and the greater the worker. There is an essential unity between all kinds of work, as there is an essential continuity in the life of the race. The rudest implements of the earliest men and the divinest creations of the greatest artists are parts of the unbroken effort of humanity to bring into clear consciousness all that is in it, and all that is involved in its relationship with the universe. The spiritual history of the race is written in the blurred and indistinct record of human energy and creativeness, made by the hands of all races, in all times, in every kind of material. Work has emancipated, educated, developed, and interpreted the human spirit; it has made man acquainted with himself; it has set him in harmony with nature; and it has created that permanent capital of force, self-control, character, moral power, and educational influence which we call civilisation.

Work has been, therefore, not only the supreme spiritual opportunity, but the highest spiritual privilege and one of the deepest sources of joy. It has been an expression not only of human energy but of the creativeness of the human spirit. By their works men have not only built homes for themselves in this vast universe, but they have co-operated with the divine creativeness in the control of force, the modification of conditions, the fertilisation of the earth, the fashioning of new forms.

In his work man has found God, both by the revelation of what is in his own spirit and by the discovery of those forces and laws with which every created thing must be brought into harmony. The divine element in humanity has revealed itself in that instinct for creativeness which is always striving for expression in the work of humanity; that instinct which blindly pushes its way through rudimentary stages of effort to the possession of skill; slowly transforming itself meanwhile into intelligence, and flowering at last in the Parthenon, the Cathedral at Amiens, the Book of Job, Faust, Hamlet, the Divine Comedy, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Wagner's Parsifal, Rembrandt's portraits. This ascent of the spirit of man out of the mysterious depths of its own consciousness to these sublime heights of achievement is the true history of the race; the history which silently unfolds itself through and behind events, and makes events comprehensible. In the sweat of his brow man has protected and fed himself; but this has been but the beginning of that continuous miracle which has not only turned deserts into gardens and water into wine, but has transformed the uncouth rock into images of immortal beauty, and the worker from the servant of natural conditions and forces into their master. Men still work, as their fathers did before them, for shelter and bread; but the spiritual products of work have long since dwarfed its material returns. A man must still work or starve in any well-ordered society; but the products of work to-day are ease, travel, society, art,— in a word, culture. In that free unfolding of all that is in man and that ripening of knowledge, taste, and character, which are summed up in culture, work finds its true interpretation. A man puts himself into his work in order that he may pass through an apprenticeship of servitude and crudity into the freedom of creative power. He discovers, liberates, harmonises, and enriches himself. Through work he accomplishes his destiny; for one of the great ends of his life is attained only when he makes himself skilful and creative, masters the secrets of his craft and pours his spiritual energy like a great tide into his work. The master worker learns that the secret of happiness is the opportunity and the ability to express nobly whatever is deepest in his personality, and that supreme good fortune comes to him who can lose himself in some generous and adequate task.

The last word, however, is not task but opportunity; for work, like all forms of education, prophesies the larger uses of energy, experience, and power which are to come when training and discipline have accomplished their ends and borne their fruit.