SKILL.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously
adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures
the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift.
The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The
young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper
building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or
distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour
after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as
well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in
steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.
Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by
long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their
parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem
to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future
emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow
and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to
monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by
playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels
play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A
British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught
his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little
engineer had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood,
etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes
in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out
the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would
“stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to
mend a misarrangement here and there.
Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two
or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels,
or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of
breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a
plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are
too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy
a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s
Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with
self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son
of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the
most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges,
etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally
surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of
nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of
a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness
frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates
have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and
passing whole days in the retirement of an amateur workshop. The
emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and
bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his
own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred
watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the
construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter
of his empire.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The English word king, like Danish kong and German König, are derived
from können (practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most
skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether
in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established
the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many
respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical
dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of
princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of
travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the
sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility
form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only
counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once
overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons.
Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found
clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old
sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents.
“There’s a use for all that, no doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you,
mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick
fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large
degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling
being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is
often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies
theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war
the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the
superior constructiveness of an army that could bridge a river while
their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of
Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a
plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the
Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish
engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an
overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain
grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from
Carthage to Rome.
Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of
mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work
gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft
even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving
exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular
system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains
the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the
disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet Goethe, whose intuitions
of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the
opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in
order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical
debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no
cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical
wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily
expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and
mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.
Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could
dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard
against the chief bane of wealth: ennui, with its temptations to folly
and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo
Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in
practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren
lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum
filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be
less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators,
and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which
fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A
mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of
safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go
begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed
savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic
need only enter the next workshop and show a sample of his handiwork.
‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch
in.’”
Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless
perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home
and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that
her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years;
and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and
philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to
instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers,
in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be
permanently avoided.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the
direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect
tendency of that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the
antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient
Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children
of toil that a Sudra was not permitted to approach a priest without
ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The
temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers.
The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to
such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.
The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of
body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast
by constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and
occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical
creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular
work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the
military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce
respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of
the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers;
peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many
respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable
master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a
little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any
manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would
have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of
Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French
nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the
secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him?
You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The
manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of
employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a
chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a
foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an
incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the same
Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had
no hesitation in eking out an income by highway robbery. The princes of
the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept
sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing
and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a
vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey
the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for
secular concerns.
That sort of other-worldliness still seems to bias our plans of
education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few
minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of
hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger.
Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a
place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable
parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit
joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic
friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his
social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to
the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the
mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a
sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers
of a mythology-school.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges
itself in ennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less
monotonous afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of
emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is
a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the
wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to
the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving.
Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect
and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice,
and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a
tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and
gambling debts.
Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the
prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a
farmer, and every farm a polytechnicum of home-taught trades; but
European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound
with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers
laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices
faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted with
ennui—
We lack the word but have the thing;
and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical
hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who
practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could
challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a
choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly
preferable to games of chance; but to that last resort of inanity the
traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven
thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the
abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become
a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a
stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to
be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in
all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of
hirelings.
Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages
of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that
the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with
that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in
relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest
illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in
every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the
guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the
playground and follows them over mountains and seas.
E.—REFORM.
The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish
school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education,
and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture
of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of
constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native
energy to make the change a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by
the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many
pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in
their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would
be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents
from the neglect of such training.
The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its
leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by
educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military
training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry,
sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional
with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a
polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the
practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a
plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has
banished the specter of ennui from his hospitable country seat. His
private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite
chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at
wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive
crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus.
Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and
even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once
known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of the
ennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages of mechanical
training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with
nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man
as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.
II.—MENTAL MAXIMS.