But now that we have told off these three classes who will not learn what
society has to teach, we have happily left most of mankind; certainly, I
trust, most of you who have submitted to the instruction of society thus
far. And it is you who are willing to work and eager for the best
instruction that society can give, whom the question of occupations
especially concerns.
And here I beg to have you discriminate between the work to which one gives
his attention and the great swarm of activities physical and mental which
are always going on in the background.
A boy who is driving nails into a fence has for the immediate task of his
eyes and hands the hitting of a certain nail on the head. Meanwhile, the
rest of the boy's body and soul may be full of rebellion and longing to be
done with the fence on any terms and away at the fishing. Or instead of
that the whole boy may be full of pride in what he has done and of
resolution to drive the last nail as true as the first. Which of these two
things is the more important--the task in the foreground or the disposition
in the background--I do not know. They cannot be separated. They are both
present in every waking hour, weaving together the threads of fate.
A man's life is not wholly fortunate unless all that is within him rises
gladly to join in the work that he has to do.
It is, however, unhappily true that many good and useful men are forced by
circumstances to work at one thing, while their hearts are tugging to be at
something else. They have not chosen their tasks. They have been driven by
necessity. There must be bread. There are the wife and the children. There
is no escape. It is up with the sun. It is bearing the burden and heat of
the day. It is intolerable weariness. It is worse than that. It is tramping
round and round in the same hated steps until you cannot do anything else.
You cannot think of anything else. They sound in your dreams--those
treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot
escape from yourself. You cannot take a vacation. You may grow rich and
travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to
the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of
drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you
lose yourself in it.
But at the worst this man is no such poverty-stricken soul as the crank,
the tramp, or the jack-of-all-trades. If his occupation was worth while,
those hated habits are far from deserving hate. If they are habits by which
a man may live, by which one may give a service that other men need and
will pay for, their value is certified from the sternest laboratory. The
drudge has a right to respect himself. He has the right to the respect of
other men and I give mine without reserve. I say that he who holds himself
grimly for life to a useful commonplace work which he hates, is heroic. It
is easy to be heroic on horseback. To be heroic on foot in the dust, lost
in the crowd, with no applause--that is the heroism which has borne up and
carried forward most of the work of civilization.