Chapter 6

It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves charged with the actual direction of the affairs concerning which they have held and uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic opinions. They have only learned discretion. For the first time they see in its entirety what it was that they were attempting. They are at last at close quarters with the world. Men of every interest and variety crowd about them; new impressions throng them; in the midst of affairs the former special objects of their zeal fall into new environments, a better and truer perspective; seem no longer susceptible to separate and radical change. The real nature of the complex stuff of life they were seeking to work in is revealed to them--its intricate and delicate fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts--and they work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they mend. Moral enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself, a suitable guide to practicable and lasting reformation; and if the reform sought be the reformation of others as well as of himself the reformer should look to it that he knows the true relation of his will to the wills of those he would change and guide. When he has discovered that relation he has come to himself: has discovered his real use and planning part in the general world of men; has come to the full command and satisfying employment of his faculties. Otherwise he is doomed to live forever in a fools' paradise, and can be said to have come to himself only on the supposition that he is a fool.

Every man--if I may adopt and paraphrase a passage from Dr. South--every man hath both an absolute and a relative capacity; an absolute in that he hath been endued with such a nature and such parts and faculties; and a relative in that he is part of the universal community of men, and so stands in such a relation to the whole. When we say that a man has come to himself, it is not of his absolute capacity that we are thinking, but of his relative. He has begun to realize that he is part of a whole, and to know _what_ part, suitable for what service and achievement.

It was once fashionable--and that not a very long time ago--to speak of political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud consciousness of their several and "absolute" capacities. It would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in political thinking. As a matter of fact, men have never dreamed of wishing to do without the "trammels" of organized society, for the very good reason that those trammels are in reality no trammels at all, but indispensable aids and spurs to the attainment of the highest and most enjoyable things man is capable of. Political society, the life of men in states, is an abiding natural relationship. It is neither a mere convenience nor a mere necessity. It is not a mere voluntary association, not a mere corporation. It is nothing deliberate or artificial, devised for a special purpose. It is in real truth the eternal and natural expression and embodiment of a form of life higher than that of the individual--that common life of mutual helpfulness, stimulation, and contest which gives leave and opportunity to the individual life, makes it possible, makes it full and complete.

It is in such a scene that man looks about to discover his own place and force. In the midst of men organized, infinitely cross-related, bound by ties of interest, hope, affection, subject to authorities, to opinion, to passion, to visions and desires which no man can reckon, he casts eagerly about to find where he may enter in with the rest and be a man among his fellows. In making his place he finds, if he seek intelligently and with eyes that see, more than ease of spirit and scope for his mind. He finds himself--as if mists had cleared away about him and he knew at last his neighborhood among men and tasks.

What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence, so long as he deems himself the center and object of effort. His mind is spent in vain upon itself. Not in action itself, not in "pleasure," shall it find its desires satisfied, but in consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly spent. It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of rectitude. Christianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its revelation of the power of pure and unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive, his example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a piece, out of other religions, other teachings and philosophies. Every thoughtful man born with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity to which he ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity, without love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as unsatisfied as Marcus Aurelius.

Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect image of right living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for the two are not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that secret in his own living has discovered not only the best and only way to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, indeed, has he come to himself. Henceforth he knows what his powers mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them all sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and serene maturity.

EDUCATION THROUGH OCCUPATIONS[12]

WILLIAM LOWE BRYAN

[Footnote 12: A commencement address, reprinted from _The Spirit of Indiana_, by William Lowe Bryan. Copyright, 1917, by the Indiana University Bookstore. By permission of the author and of the publishers.]

Young ladies and gentlemen, your chief interest at present, as I suppose, is in the occupations which you are about to follow. What I have to say falls in line with that interest.

In the outset, I beg to remind you that every important occupation has been made what it is by a guild--by an ancient guild whose history stretches back in direct or indirect succession to the farthest antiquity. Every such historic guild of artisans, scholars, lawyers, prophets, what not, rose, one may be sure, to meet some deep social necessity. In every generation those necessities were present demanding each the service of its share of the population, demanding each the perpetuation of its guild. And because in the historic arts and crafts and professions mankind has spent in every generation all that it had of drudgery or of genius, it has won in _them_ its whole estate. The steel mill, the battleship, the court of justice, the university--these and the like of them are not accidents, nor miracles of individual invention, nor products of the vague longings and gropings of society in general. They are each the product of a brotherhood, of generations working to meet one social necessity, of an apostolic succession of masters living in the service of one ideal. And so it is these brotherhoods of labor, it is these grim brotherhoods covered with grime and scars, that stand before you to-day inviting you to initiation.

The fact that an occupation can teach its far-brought wisdom to the men of each generation makes civilization and progress possible. But this on one condition, that many of the people and some of the best of them shall be able to make that occupation their life business.

The law is not in a country when you have imported Blackstone's Commentaries and the Statutes of Parliament. The law is in a country in the persons of such lawyers as are there. It is there in John Marshall.

Religion is not in a country because we have built a church and furnished it with cushions to sleep on once a week. It is there in Bishop Brooks and Mr. Moody and the Salvation Army.

The steel business is not in Pittsburgh in an industrial museum where the public may gad about on holidays. It is there in the men who earn their living by knowing a little better each year how to make armor-plate.

All this ought to be a matter of course. But there are many who think that science and art can be made to serve us at a cheaper price, that these stern guilds will give up their secret treasures in extension lectures and chautauqua clubs and twenty minutes a week in the public schools. History will show, I think, that this is not true, that no art and no sort of learning was ever vitally present among a people unless it was there as a living occupation.

Learning has come to us in this sense only within the last quarter-century. We were busy at other things before that. Our fathers were doing--as every people must--what they had to do. They had to live, to establish a government, and to maintain their fundamental faiths. They bent themselves to these tasks with the energy of our breed. And the tasks have shaped our national history and character. They gave us the Declaration of Independence and the American farmer who takes for granted that its principles are true. They gave us Chicago, the Amazon who stands yonder with _I will_ written upon her shield and a throng of men who are fit to serve her will. They gave us a Civil War--men who could fight it and afterwards live together in peace. They gave us industry, law, democracy. But not science, not art. These were not wholly absent, but they were guests. They were here in the persons of a few men who in spite of all difficulties did work at them as a life business.

In this far western village, for example, we had two men who brought here the old English classical learning, two who more than fifty years ago had been trained in the universities of Europe, and one whom the radical instinct which set science going in the first place, called from a village academy into membership in the international guild of scholars. What these men did for sound learning and what they did through their pupils to uplift every occupation in the State, it is wholly beyond our power to measure. But one thing they could not do. They could not furnish to society more men who should devote themselves to learning than society would furnish a living for. And the bare fact is that there was a living for very few such men in America in the days before the war. Within the past quarter-century there has been a change in this respect so great that none fails to see it. The millions that we have spent upon universities and high schools, the vast plant of buildings and libraries and laboratories, fill the public eye with amazement. But all this is the husk of what has happened. The real thing is that these millions, this vast plant, these thousands of _positions_ demanding trained men, have brought to life upon this ground the guild of scholars. We do not need any more to exhort men to become scholars. The spirit which was in Thales and Copernicus, in Agassiz and Kirkwood, calls to the Hoosier farmboy in its own voice, and shows him a clear path by which, if he is fit, he may join their great company.

And, if I am not mistaken, Art, which has also been a guest, is ready at last to become a citizen. Why should it not? What is lacking? Yonder are the works of art and the men who know. Here are the youths some share of whom must by right belong to the service of Art. And here are the millions which go to support men in every molehole of scientific research and other millions spent stupidly and wantonly for whatever the shopkeepers tell us is beautiful. We could not create these potential forces that make for art. But if it is true that they are here, we can organize them, as David Starr Jordan and the like of him less than twenty years ago organized the forces that make for science. We can make a path through the school and the university along which all the children of the State may go as far as they will and along which those who are fit may enter the artist's life.

"The mission of society," says Geddes, "is to bring to bloom as many sorts of genius as possible." And this it can do only when each sort of genius has the chance to choose freely its own life occupation.

Here, as I think, is the program for our educational system--to make plain highways from every corner of the State to every occupation which history has proved good.

II

However, as matters actually stand at present, it is your good fortune to have a wide range of occupations among which to choose.

It is no light matter to make the choice. It is to elect your physical and social environment. It is to choose where you will work--in a scholar's cloister, on a farm, or in the cliffs of a city street. It is to choose your comrades and rivals. It is to choose what you will attend to, what you will try for, whom you will follow. In a word, it is to elect for life, for better or worse, some one part of the whole social heritage. These influences will not touch you lightly. They will compass you with subtle compulsions. They will fashion your clothes and looks and carriage, the cunning of your hands, the texture of your speech, and the temper of your will. And if you are wholly willing and wholly fit, they can work upon you this miracle: they can carry you swiftly in the course of your single life to levels of wisdom and skill in one sort, which it has cost the whole history of your guild to win.

But there is, of course, no magic in merely choosing an occupation. If you do nothing to an occupation but choose it, it can do nothing at all to you. If you are an incorrigible lover of holidays, so that the arrival of a working-day makes you sick, if every task thrust into your hands grows intolerable, if every calling, as soon as you have touched its drudgery, grows hateful--that is to have the soul of a tramp. It is to be stricken with incurable poverty. You turn your back upon every company of men where anything worth while is to be done. You shut out of yourself every wisdom and skill which civilized work develops in a man. And you grow not empty but full, choked with evil life. Wretched are they that hunger and thirst after nothing good, for they also shall be filled. Herein is democracy, that whether you are a beggar's son or the son of Croesus you cannot escape from yourself--you cannot bribe or frighten yourself into being anything else than what your own hungers and thirsts have made you.

It is somewhat better but far from well enough if you enter many occupations, but stay in none long enough to receive thorough apprenticeship.

It is so ordered that it is easy for most of us to make a fair beginning at almost anything. In the rough and tumble of babyhood and youth we all accumulate experiences which are raw material for any and every occupation. So when one of them kindles in you a light blaze of curiosity, you have only to pull yourself together, you have only to mobilize your forces, and you are presently enjoying little successes that surprise and delight you and that may give you the illusion of mastery.

Doubtless the World Soul knows his own affairs in ordering this so. For one thing, the easy initial victories are fine baits, lures, by which youths are caught and drawn into serious apprenticeship. For another thing, the influence of each occupation upon society in general must be exercised largely through men who carry some intelligence of it into other occupations.

But if a man flits from one curiosity to another, if for fear of being narrow and with the hope of being broad, he forsakes every occupation before it can set its seal upon him, if he is through and through dilettante, jack-of-all-trades, he is a man only less poverty-stricken than a tramp. He has the illusion of efficiency. He wonders that society generally judges that he is not worth his salt, that on every battlefield Hotspur curses him for a popinjay, that in every company of master workmen met for council he is at most a tolerated guest. The judgment upon him--not my judgment, but the judgment which the days thrust in his face--is this: that when there is important work to be done he cannot do it. He is full of versatility. He knows the alphabet of everything--chemistry, engineering, business, law, what not. But with all these he cannot bridge the Mississippi. He cannot make the steel for the bridge, nor calculate the strength of it, nor find the money to build it, nor defend its interests in court. These tasks fall to men whom twenty years' service in their several callings have taught to speak for society at its best. And while their work goes on its way, the brilliant man who refused every sort of thorough training which society could give him, can only stand full of wonder and anger that with all his versatilities he is left to choose between the drudgery of unskilled labor and mere starvation.

There is another sort of man who will learn little in any occupation because he is wholly bent upon being original. The past is all wrong, full of errors, absurdities, iniquities. To serve apprenticeship is to indoctrinate one's self with pernicious orthodoxies. We must rebel. We must begin at the beginning. We must do something entirely new and revolutionary. We must rely upon our free souls to see and to do the right, as it has never been seen or done before. Some such declaration of independence, some such combination of hopeless pessimism about all that has been done, with confident optimism about what is just to be done, one finds in men of every art, craft, and calling. We are to have perpetual motion. We are to square the circle. We are to abandon our present political and religious and educational institutions and get new and perfect ones. Above all, the children must grow up free from the whole array of social orthodoxies. We are to escape from the whole wretched blundering past and by one bold march enter a new Garden of Eden.

There is something inspiring in this, something that stirs the youth like a bugle, and something, as I believe, that is essential in every generation for the purification of society. The past is as bad as anybody says it is, woven full of inconsistency and iniquity. We _must_ escape it. We _must_ fight it. And it is no doubt inevitable that there should be some who think that they owe it nothing but war.

And yet, for my part, I am convinced that this is a fatally one-sided view of things. Is there in existence one great work of any sort which owes nothing to the historic guild which does that sort of work? Is there one great man in history who gave to the future without getting anything from the past? The bare scientific fact is that no man escapes the tuition of society. The crank does not escape. The freak does not escape. They miss the highest traditions of society only to become victims of lower traditions. Whether such a man have genius or the illusion of genius, it is his tragic fate to have the best that he can do lie far below the best that society already possesses.

If one will see what genius without adequate instruction comes to, let him look at the case of the mathematical prodigy, Arthur Griffith. There is what no one would refuse to call genius. There is originality, spontaneity, insatiable interest, unceasing labor. And the result? A marvelous skill for which society has almost no use, and a knowledge of the science of arithmetic which is two hundred years behind that of the high school graduate.

III

But now that we have told off these three classes who will not learn what society has to teach, we have happily left most of mankind; certainly, I trust, most of you who have submitted to the instruction of society thus far. And it is you who are willing to work and eager for the best instruction that society can give, whom the question of occupations especially concerns.

And here I beg to have you discriminate between the work to which one gives his attention and the great swarm of activities physical and mental which are always going on in the background.

A boy who is driving nails into a fence has for the immediate task of his eyes and hands the hitting of a certain nail on the head. Meanwhile, the rest of the boy's body and soul may be full of rebellion and longing to be done with the fence on any terms and away at the fishing. Or instead of that the whole boy may be full of pride in what he has done and of resolution to drive the last nail as true as the first. Which of these two things is the more important--the task in the foreground or the disposition in the background--I do not know. They cannot be separated. They are both present in every waking hour, weaving together the threads of fate.

A man's life is not wholly fortunate unless all that is within him rises gladly to join in the work that he has to do.

It is, however, unhappily true that many good and useful men are forced by circumstances to work at one thing, while their hearts are tugging to be at something else. They have not chosen their tasks. They have been driven by necessity. There must be bread. There are the wife and the children. There is no escape. It is up with the sun. It is bearing the burden and heat of the day. It is intolerable weariness. It is worse than that. It is tramping round and round in the same hated steps until you cannot do anything else. You cannot think of anything else. They sound in your dreams--those treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot escape from yourself. You cannot take a vacation. You may grow rich and travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you lose yourself in it.

But at the worst this man is no such poverty-stricken soul as the crank, the tramp, or the jack-of-all-trades. If his occupation was worth while, those hated habits are far from deserving hate. If they are habits by which a man may live, by which one may give a service that other men need and will pay for, their value is certified from the sternest laboratory. The drudge has a right to respect himself. He has the right to the respect of other men and I give mine without reserve. I say that he who holds himself grimly for life to a useful commonplace work which he hates, is heroic. It is easy to be heroic on horseback. To be heroic on foot in the dust, lost in the crowd, with no applause--that is the heroism which has borne up and carried forward most of the work of civilization.

IV

We honor the drudge, but deplore his fate. And yet there are many who believe that there is in fact no other fate for any man; that every business is in the long run a belittling business; that whether you are a hodcarrier or a poet, as you go on in your calling, "shades of the prison-house" will close upon you and custom lie upon you "heavy as frost and deep almost as life."