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.