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.