Sharing the Race-Fortune
The development of one's personality cannot be accomplished in isolation
or solitude; the process involves close and enduring association with
one's fellows. If work were purely a matter of mechanical skill, each
worker might have his cell and perform his task, as in a prison. But work
involves the entire personality, and the personality finds its complete
unfolding, not in detachment, but in association. Talent, says Goethe,
thrives in solitude, but character grows in the stream of the world. It is
a twofold discovery which a man must make before the highest kind of
success lies within his grasp: the discovery of his own individual gift,
force, or aptitude, and the discovery of his place in society. If it were
possible to secure complete development of one's power in isolation, the
product would be, not the full energy of a man expressing itself through a
congenial activity, but a detached skill exercised automatically and apart
from a personality.
In order to stand erect on his feet, in true and fruitful relations with
the world about him, a man must join hands with his fellows. For a very
large part of his education must come from his contact with the race.
Since men began to live and to learn the lessons of life, each generation
has added something to that vital knowledge of the art of living which is
the very soul of culture, and something to the constructive and positive
product of this vital knowledge wrought out into institutions,
organisations, science, art, and religion. This inheritance of culture and
achievement is the richest possession into which the individual member of
the race is born, and he cannot take possession of his share of the race-
fortune unless he becomes one of the race family. This race-fortune is the
product of the colossal work of the race through its entire history; it
represents the slow and painful toil and saving of countless multitudes of
men and women. It is a wealth beside which all purely monetary forms of
riches are fleeting and secondary; it is the enduring spiritual endowment
of the race secured by the incalculable toil of all past generations.
Now, no man can secure his share in this race-fortune until he joins the
ranks of the workers and takes his place in the field, the shop, the
factory, the study, or the _atelier_. The idle man is always a detached
man, and is, therefore, excluded from the privileges of heirship. To get
the beauty of any kind of art one must train himself to see, to
understand, and to enjoy; for art is a sealed book to the ignorant. To
secure the largeness of view which comes from a knowledge of many cities
and races, one must travel with a mind already prepared by prolonged
study. The approach to every science is guarded by doors which open only
to the hand which has been made strong by patient and persistent exercise.
Every department of knowledge is barred and locked against the ignorant;
nothing which represents achievement, thought, knowledge, skill, beauty,
is within reach of the idle. Society has secured nothing which endures
save as the result of persistent and self-denying work; and nothing which
it has created can be understood, nothing which it has accumulated can be
appropriated, without kindred self-denial and toil. It is evident,
therefore, that the material for the education of the individual cannot be
secured save by intimate fellowship with the race. This fellowship must
rest also in present relations; for while man may get much that is of vast
importance by contact with the working race of the past, he cannot get
either the richest material or put himself under the deepest educational
process without making himself one with the working race of to-day. The
race-fortune, unlike other fortunes, does not increase by its own
productive powers; it grows only as it is employed by those who inherit
it. Investments of capital often lose their vitality; they still represent
a definite sum of money, but they make no returns of interest. In like
manner the accumulations of the race become dead unless they are
constantly vitalised by effective use. The richest material for culture is
valueless unless it is so employed as continually to renew the temper of
culture in those who possess it. The richest results of past toil, genius,
and life are without significance in the hands of the ignorant; and it has
happened more than once that the pearls of past civilisation have been
trampled into the mire by the feet of swine.
The architectural remains of the older Rome were ruthlessly destroyed in
the years before the Renaissance and put to menial use as mere building
material. They had reverted to the condition and value of crude stone,
because no one perceived their higher values.
There is, unfortunately, another kind of ignorance, not quite so dense as
that which does not recognise beauty of form or value of historical
association, but not less destructive; there is that ignorance of the
spiritual force behind the form which makes a fetish of the form, and so
misses the interior wealth which it contains. There has spread among men
and women of the _dilettante_ temper the belief that to know the results
and products of the past simply as curios and relics is to share the
culture which these things of beauty and skill embody and preserve; and
this false idea has helped to spread abroad the feeling that culture is
accomplishment rather than force, and that it is for the idle rather than
for the active and creative. There never was a more radical misconception
of a fundamental process, for culture in the true sense involves, as a
process, the highest and truest development of a race, and, as a product,
the most enduring spiritual expression of race genius and experience. The
culture of the Greeks was the highest form of their vital force; and the
product of that culture was not only their imperishable art, but their
political, social, and religious organisation and ideals. Their deepest
life went into their culture, and the most enduring fruits of that culture
are also the most significant expressions of their life.
To get at the sources of power in Shakespeare's plays, one must not only
understand the secrets of their structure as works of art, but one must
also discern their value as human documents; one must pass through them
into the passion, the suffering, the toil of the race. No one can get to
the heart of those plays without getting very near to the heart of his
race; and no one can secure the fruits of culture from their study until
he has come to see, with Shakespeare, that the unrecorded life-experience
of the race is more beautiful, more tragic, and more absorbing than all
the transcriptions of that experience made by men of genius. In other
words, the ultimate result of a true study of Shakespeare is such an
opening of the mind and such a quickening of the imagination that the
student sees on all sides, in the lives of those about him, the stuff of
which the drama is made. Not to the idle, but to the workers, does
Shakespeare reveal himself.