Essays on Work and Culture — Chapters 13 and 14
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.
