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.