Essays on Work and Culture

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.

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