It is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear
for the ninety-nine per cent. of us. Sometimes it seems as though we
spend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away
for no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the
machine in condition for further toil.
How hopeless is the outlook of many a life! The mother with the weary
round of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same
task year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things,
and coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only
augmented as age makes itself felt--all who toil feel at times these
depressing limitations.
Little wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of
relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and
excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they
foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty
substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.
Yet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that
often seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring
weariness and longing for relief. All worth while work involves much
tediousness, painstaking exertion. All great things stand for so much
life poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.
The stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but
repression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks
only for frivolity and amusement. Life is too large a business to be
always light and trivial. Yet we must not allow its high purposes to
be thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and
brightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.
How may we find that proportion of toil and relief, that happy mixture
of duty and delight that shall make life not only endurable but also
useful, fruitful, and enjoyable? For it is man's duty to be happy;
otherwise he can never be useful in any high or valuable sense.
It would be easy to try to give comfort by the philosophy which sees
the fine fruitage that is coming from to-day's stern discipline. That
fair fruitage is coming, but the trouble is it is too far off to give
us much comfort now; we want something nearer and more easily
apprehended. Then, too, the truth is no high fruitage will ever issue
from a life crushed by slavish subjection.
After all, what life is to every one of us depends not on the demands
of outer circumstances, but on the development of the life within. The
heart determines the worth and beauty of life. It makes all the
difference whether the physical determines its circumference or whether
you have an intellect that is reaching out to the things unmeasurable
and a soul that grows into glory indescribable.
You can tie a great soul down hand and brain to a loom or a machine and
he will still see his visions and dream his deep, refreshing dreams;
you can set the brutish being down in a gallery of the world's
treasures of art and beauty and he will think of nothing and see
nothing but bread and beer.
We must do our dull and heavy tasks, but we can do them and not be
crushed by them so long as within there are fragrant memories, high
aspirations, great thoughts; so long as the task does not set the
boundary of the life. And it is the cherishing of these eternal riches
within that lifts any life and makes it worthy of higher tasks.
We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the
riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the
food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its
secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.
The wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every
spring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every
great soul. Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing
when the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift
themselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that
are infinite.