The Genius of America (collection)/Vocation
Vocation
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.
Emerson.
If he thinks a sonnet the flower and result of the world, let him sacrifice all to the sonnet.
Emerson.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that "They asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied: Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads."
Thoreau.
It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided;
Something long preparing and formless is arrived and formed in you.
Whitman.
"That maleficent word 'service'!" exclaims a critic for whom I have high respect, and tears the word from his lexicon. The cry is a protest against the disparagement of the contemplative life by the champions of the active life. Since at the present time the "practical" men display the arrogance engendered by an overwhelming predominance, I sympathize with the spirit of the protest. And yet the moment that one sets to work to justify the protest, one finds oneself in need precisely of that discarded word "service." For either one must admit that the contemplative life is indefensible or one must contend that the contemplative life is serviceable.
Words which have long exhibited a radiant energy, words and things like "God," "patriotism," "home," and "pure gold" are not to be lightly rejected in periods like our own, when their magic has fallen into temporary abeyance or when their value has suffered from mishandling. Before we abandon them to accept some wretched modern substitate—a band of greyishwhite platinum, thin and fragile, for a plain ring of pure gold or "a stream of tendency" for "God"—we had better scrape the encrustations of time and base uses from the old symbols, and see whether a divine fire does not still burn at the heart of them.
Before we finally make up our minds to scoff at the whole idea of service, we had better scrutinize it rather carefully in relation to the whole idea contained in the word "vocation," which survives in the maligned phrase "vocational training." Whenever educators assemble, they begin to consult anxiously together on what can be done to impart a loftier tone and keener incentives to higher education. On such an occasion, after several of us had proposed the customary modern mechanical means of "raising the standards," a university president remarked with a kind of apologetic shyness: "I wonder whether the good old watchword which we heard in my youth, the old watchword of 'service,' has become quite obsolete. Has the thought of service quite lost its power to animate the minds of our young people?"
"No, I think not," replied a college dean. "In our graduating class, for example, there is a fine group of young men who are preparing to enter Y. M. C. A. work in Poland, and there is another group who are going as medical missionaries to China. These men," he declared, "are still animated by a desire to serve humanity."
No sensible person can have the slightest wish to disparage the work of the Y. M. C. A. in Poland or of the medical missionaries in China. Yet one is constrained to say that the remarks of this good dean illustrate exactly the attitude of mind which has tended to bring the "old watchword of service" into disrepute. I mean this: that among the young generation there is a growing resentment, and I think on the whole a legitimate resentment, at the traditional identification of service with certain definitely limited activities of an obviously humanitarian character, performed for the physically or morally needy classes in foreign lands or in the slums of great cities or backward rural districts. These moral and medical missionaries are engaged, we all admit, in a great work, which demands devotion and self-sacrifice. But their champions make a mistake in tactics, they damage their own position, when they attempt to set apart these special types of activitiy under a peculiar glory of "service."
All good work, at home or abroad, in public or in private, of the hand or of the brain—all work that is done as it should be done—demands devotion and self-sacrifice and partakes of the nature of service. That so much of it is now done so feebly, so shabbily, so perfunctorily, is due to the fact that the inspiriting idea of service has never been extended to it.
What we want at present more than a fresh call to service is a wider conception of the field. Humanity has needed to have its moral and physical wounds looked after and has required ministrants to those needs since man appeared on the planet; and will always require them, and will always praise and reward, more or less, workers who supply those needs. But if humanity's adventure on the earth is ever to issue in anything more satisfying than mere self-preservation, humanity needs a multitude of other things. It needs, not least, satisfactions for a multitude of men and women who are not merely suffering bodies clamorous with physical wants but are also emotional, intellectual, and moral beings craving a higher and larger life for their special human faculties.
If the word and thought of service are to be rehabilitated, we must have new criterions of service. We cannot set apart the word for those who give food to the body and withhold it from those who give food to the mind. We cannot reserve it for those who help the sick and deny it to those who help the well. Service does not cease to be service when the intelligent and the strong are assisted. We cannot consecrate the word for ministers and teachers merely because they work for a smaller wage than presidents of railroads and singers in grand opera. Service does not cease to be service when it is remunerated. On the contrary, the world, as it grows wiser, will steadily insist on rewarding more amply all those who know how to provide what it wants. Deep in the heart of the world is a passion for discovering a larger and better life for all the people in the world, not even excluding the intellectual and other privileged classes; and every one who assists in any way at that discovery does honorable service. Furthermore, whoever bends his full strength to increasing the healthy and pleasurable life of men, sooner or later will find in his work, whatever it is, something of the peace and satisfaction of religious devotion.
In the days of one's youth, however, in one's period of apprenticeship, it is of far more importance to make oneself an effective instrument than it is to know precisely how and where the instrument is going to be employed. Temper the iron; sharpen the blade; and rest assured that the world will use you by and by. Good workmen eager for a part in the building of civilization will not worry much about where they are to be sent; they will desire only to be sent where they can be used most effectively. And they will not, for example, foolishly set off the "service" of a good missionary against the usefulness of a good dressmaker. A really skilful dressmaker, I fancy, could wipe away as many tears from human eyes as any sister of charity.
The opposite of a life of service is not any form of happy activity, but a slack, idle, joyless, half-hearted, shrinking life. There are numerous so-called good-people who go about to do good in such a crabbed, peevish, and melancholy fashion that contact with them makes the day bitter and burdensome. There are, on the other hand, persons gay and nonchalant, who never seem to give a thought to the "still sad music of humanity"; and yet one feels in their presence something better than a sermon, better than medicine, better than alms—one feels a current of energy and joy, one feels new power and incentive within oneself. Such persons confer a favor on mankind merely by being alive. They add directly to the sum of human happiness. They add to the goodness of life. Theirs is perhaps the rarest and most precious form of service, the most beautiful of vocations.
Next to those who hearten us by their natural gusto and their capacity for communicating whatever of sweetness they find in the taste of their own days, I would place in one class all those who do anything whatever excellently well. In formal ethical treatises we arrange the members of this class in a severe hierarchy with high places reserved for those who have held positions of political responsibility or who have attained eminence in science and the arts. But we are not very realistic in our ethical treatises. Outside the book, we find a different system of rating. In the frank unconventional judgment of the street, and in the tribunal of our own hearts we find a curious equality of gratitude and admiration for the best preacher and the best prize fighter, the chess champion and the prime minister, the successor of Newton and the world's supreme tenor, the man who has written the outstanding novel of the year, and the baker who makes the best Parker House rolls in town. Perhaps we even go so far as to number among the ninety-nine worthies of the world an extraordinary rogue or two. Certainly few of us ever purge ourselves of a lingering fondness for such eminent villains as Richard III, Cellini, Henry VIII, Ivan the Terrible, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.
It is not of course their criminality that we admire. Paradoxical as it sounds, we seldom show ourselves such disinterested lovers of virtue as when we feel a thrill of approbation in the presence of the great criminals. We have no weak bias of a merely personal and self-interested attachment in their favour. What we respond to in them is the pure quality of their cutting intelligence, the rare hardness of their courage, the sheer potency of their will—virtues by us for once subconsciously abstracted from their practical consequences and so valued. Whenever you find yourself saying, "I like that man—I don't know why; he has almost every trait that I dislike," you may be reasonably sure that the man has also some powerful virtue which you have overlooked, or which has as yet not been listed by the professors of ethics. For the popular and undiscriminating idolization of athletes, dancers, singers, marksmen, poets, jockeys, and supreme bakers there is this justification: each one of these heroes has demonstrated for the time the utmost capacity of the human body or mind in that direction. He has established a standard. He has set us a mark which enables us to look with equanimity upon any one who does not approach it or surpass it. To throw fifty successive "ringers" at quoits is a feat requiring an almost godlike faculty. There are few services higher than demonstrating the utmost capacities of the human spirit; and it is a sound popular instinct which applauds such demonstrations, even in matters which impress the censorious as trivial.
"But suppose," objects a wary moralist, "suppose a man wishes to demonstrate the utmost capacity of the human spirit for being a tiger or a snake. Should you applaud that experiment?" No, I should not applaud that experiment. I should do mon possible to dissuade the aspirant from that, and I should proceed in this way. I should first lead him through a zoölogical garden to the cage of the Bengal tiger and the python; and I should say: "Here is a far better tiger, and here is a far better snake than you can ever hope to become by the utmost stretch of your tigerish or reptilian propensities. You will make no inspiring contribution by this experiment. You will bungle towards it and fall short. An unsurpassable mark has already been set by the framer of this "dreadful symmetry." But why not go in for aeronautics? It does look as if we might eventually surpass the eagle in flight. And the desire to get above the earth has always impressed me as a very human, though a dangerous, passion. If, however, danger and difficulty really attract you, why not go in for the big experiment? It is much more difficult than becoming a python or a tiger. Why not attempt to demonstrate the utmost capacity of the human spirit for being a man?"
But let us descend from the dizzy heights where the heroes and villains dwell. Few of us can belong to that eminent class which sets new standards of human achievement. Below that high level, however, is the wide workaday world where professional competence is ever in request and ample scope is afforded for the display of a relative excellence. Educators of the Renaissance ordinarily composed their outlines of education with a prince in their mind's eye, who was to be instructed in every art and science necessary or becoming to a member of the governing class. In a democratic society, as every one knows, the assumption is that we are all peers, that we are all princes, that each one of us is to be trusted with some share of the burden of the political and social government. Under the influence of that assumption, we take an ever broader view of the useful activities of men. As our humanism becomes democratic, our snobism dwindles, the number of "base" activities declines, we begin to recognize all those workmen as engaged in "gentle" or "noble" enterprise who are spending themselves for the stability and growth of the commonwealth. The circumstance makes it steadily easier for each man to choose a vocation according to his nature, and so to discharge at the same time his duty to the State and his responsibility to his own individual "genius."
Failure to recognize how near at hand and how rich and various the fields of service are is responsible for much of the unhappiness and unrest which many young people feel between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. It is customary for old people to add to the confusion of the young by talking to them about the happiness of youth. They say, amiable but sentimental grey-beards say, to a youth of twenty: "Enjoy yourself now while you can. You are now in the happiest years of your life." If I were addressing an audience on the verge of twenty, I should say: Distrust these sentimental old people. Don't believe a word of all this. In all probability your most happy and fruitful days are still to come. If you gird yourselves now strictly and austerely for the tasks of springtime, it is more than likely that after the age of twenty-five you will find the years growing, for all their shocks and accidents, steadily richer and sweeter in their main substance, to the end. I think it hardly doubtful that most of you are now, in the early twenties, in your most restless and unhappy period. Why? Well, for a most interesting reason: because, as Emerson says, "All young persons thirst for a real existence for an object—for something great and good which they shall do with their heart."
You are at precisely the period when one casts about most earnestly for something great and good to do with one's heart. You have considered many possibilities, yet you hang in the doldrums of indecision. As yet, you have not found any object within your reach which seems great and good enough to command a life's devotion. You sigh for definite objects which you know are not for you, or you seethe with vague desires for dim unattainable things. You are unhappy because you still stand with arms wide-outstretched to embrace the infinite. You have not yet soberly reflected upon the elementary physical and spiritual truth that it is only by closing your arms and resolutely shutting most of the infinite out that you can really embrace and keep anything. You have not yet taken to heart the great maxim of Goethe: "It is within limits that the master first shows his mastership." You are still fighting against that law of nature which fixes the pain of choice as the cost of every practical step forward.
Meanwhile you hear from men of a certain narrow intensity a disquieting summons to a self-sacrificing—life of service, a summons to precisely that form of service in which these "dreadful summoners" have themselves attained the fullest self-realization. While you are under the spell of their exhortation, the definite things at hand which you can now do well, or which you are now learning to do well, seem small and humdrum and mean. And some of you, perhaps, with a real talent for millinery or landscape gardening are considering whether you ought not to renounce these talents and go to China as medical missionaries. And some of you with a talent for chemical investigation or stockbreeding are wondering whether you ought not to renounce these talents, and, chanting the old song, "Nothing in my hands I bring," devote yourselves to spreading the gospel among the Buddhists.[1] A great many more of you, I suppose, have a beautiful genius for an occupation more various than that of Leonardo da Vinci and the many-sided men of the Renaissance. I mean the occupation of domestic managership, including in one endlessly versatile person the professions of wife, mother, nurse, dietitian, milliner, tailor, economist, artist, architect, teacher, religious guide, counsellor, and dictator—I have mentioned only a few of the activities which every competent matriarch undertakes. Yet many of you, I suspect, with a real talent for this rich life of high and varied service, in which every virtue and every charm count, many of you have been persuaded that this life is not service but servitude, and are considering whether you should not renounce your beautiful talent and devote yourselves to selling bonds or writing for the short-story magazines. "I don't want to spend all my life washing dishes," you have cried—as if washing dishes were a hundredth part of the fascinating things you are expected to do!
I suspect this unrest to be present among the younger generation because I hear of it constantly. Recently one of the most interesting and intelligent members of a graduating class came to me to talk, as she said, about her future. "I have spent," she said, "four years at the University. Now they want me to go home and marry and settle down and be 'just a good woman.' My home-town will sweep over me and swallow up everything that I have learned in my years here. I don't want to be a good woman!" "What do you want to be?" I enquired. She could not phrase the answer promptly. But she had both arms extended towards the infinite. And by that token I could tell well enough that what she wanted was "something great and good that she should do with her heart."
Now, every educator who is worth his salt knows that this hungry discontent of one-and-twenty indicates in the hopefullest way that education is "taking." But it indicates also that education is still incomplete. It indicates that imagination has not yet surveyed realistically the field of service. A girl of twenty who stands with arms wide-stretched towards the infinite is usually thinking secretly of New York or Chicago, which are by no means infinite. And so the small towns and provincial cities are stripped of the bright, tempered instruments necessary for their regeneration; and the great metropolis is crowded too full for elbow-room. I think the next step in our higher education must be the effective preaching of a "new provincialism." I think we need to show our graduates the field for service and the large opportunity for the increase of happiness by carrying their college and university training back to the home-town, and making the new standards prevail there. The mentally poor and needy should perhaps go to the metropolis and receive. But the essentially rich may safely remain in the provinces and give. The greater your talent, the better you can afford to strike root where you are.
Our democratic theory is that American life should taste good at all points in the States, We cannot tolerate the idea of a rich and intellectual capital of highly civilized people surrounded by an immense population of peasants and yokels. Already many conveniences of our material civilization have penetrated the remote countryside. Already one can buy as good gasoline, soap, shredded wheat biscuit, and tobacco in Gopher Prairie and Sleepy Eye as in New York City. But we want more than that. We want to be able to get as good talk, as good books and magazines, as good music, as good health, exercise, and recreation, as respectable schools, and as cheerful homes with lawns and abundance of flowers and trees in Gopher Prairie and in Sleepy Eye as in New York City or Stockbridge. This object is perfectly attainable. It will be attained just as soon as the beautiful vague imaginations of our hungry young people become positive, realistic, and practical; just as soon as they clasp their wide's tretched arms and hold fast the good that is within reach.
Two girls of my acquaintance who can write a little are now looking towards going to New York as the great adventure. "If all goes well," they will soon be living in a six-by-eight bedroom on 120th Street, and they will be writing fourth-rate stories for fourth-rate magazines; and the great metropolis will sweep over them and leave not a trace to mark the place where they sink.
The trouble with these young women is not that they have "aspirations," but that they are insufficiently and unrealistically ambitious. For the sake of expressing their mediocrity, they are abandoning a chance to express their excellence. After a good course in domestic science, these same girls, let us say, might go into some squalid, fly-infested, half-civilized town of the great Border; set up a clean, modern, scientific, attractive tea-room and cafeteria; and gradually teach the entire town what to eat, how to cook, how to serve meals, and how to behave at table. Or, let us say for the sake of those who savor their "idealism" more in the abstract than in the concrete: three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, they might bring something of grace, cleanliness, charm, and civility into the lives of an entire community. They might contribute permanently and substantially to the advance of civilization.
And they might actually have turned to this enterprise with imaginative gusto and practical effectiveness if work of this sort had ever been related in their minds to their "suppressed desire" for that enchanting will-o'-the-wisp, a beautiful and heroic life. The "service" as I state it here does not kindle the imagination like the thought of Florence Nightingale organizing her hospital in the Crimean War, nor like the thought of Jenny Lind contributing the glory of her voice to charity; but if there is one sound principle of human economy, it is this: To save a man from death or even to make him ecstatically happy once or twice, is a small service compared with making him comfortable and contented and civilized every day of his life.
For some years I had in my house a bright young Japanese student who was preparing to be an engineer. He was not a Christian, but he had a tincture of Buddhism, and he used to come in from time to time and ask for some book "about culture." He received his degree with honors, and began his apprenticeship in one of our great electrical manufacturing establishments. From there he wrote me a remarkably interesting letter, interesting for two reasons: first, because it illustrates the deep-seated human passion to be of use; and, second, it illustrates the common human inability to recognize the usefulness of the tools within one's hand. Here is a portion of the letter:
I want to ask you the following, on which you may smile again. It is the similar question to that which I once did while I stayed yours: What is the Life? and how we have to live up in this world? Once I told you that I have to live for the sake of others, at least within my own scope. Although I think it ought to be, the idea is very vague and I am still doubting how I can go at it, in spite of the fact that I am so poor both materially and intellectually, as I have hardly help my own self. This is mainly, I think, due to the lack of any strong belief in any of the religions. Thus things do not seem very real but as virtual vision. I have interested in religion, philosophy, and literature, but I cannot comprehend why I do not get into enthusiastic enough to obtain from either religious belief or philosophical reason the sound composure of my own mind. . . . Engineer as I am, cannot entirely be managed away from the material environment: there is always certain contradiction between the ideal and material views, which means the fighting or uneasiness in the soul."
I said to this Japanese boy, so anxious to live for others yet so poor that he could hardly help himself, and so torn by the "fighting in his own soul" that he was losing even the capacity for self-help: "The remedy is very simple. You wish to serve the world. Well, you know one way to serve it. Japan needs electric lights. You know how to make them. Throw the full strength of your soul and body into making good electric lights, and you will have performed your best service to the world. In this material environment in which we all must work, there is no more shining avenue of 'service' open to you than to become a good engineer and to work manfully at that." Advice of this sort, I know well enough, will bring no immediate comfort to the romantic mind which yearns for "the land where I am not," and which has established no working terms with the material environment; but it may lead in the long run to a fruitful reconsideration of the relation between usefulness and the special powers of the individual. And it is advice which may be given, mutatis mutandis, with just as much pertinence to a poet as to an engineer.
It is a platitude, which nevertheless each generation has to discover afresh, that one serves the world best by doing eagerly what one can do best, and not something else. Therefore Pindar gave as a rule of life this injunction: "Become what you are." It is not quite so simple as it sounds, to become what one is. Most of us are creatures moving about in worlds half-realized—only half-conscious, only half emerged from our own dullness and indolence and inefficiency. We do not know what we want or what we can do because we do not know clearly what we are. Meanwhile we play the ape and the parrot to our companions. We become creatures of convention and, careless habit. We accept the task work thrusts into our empty hands by whatever busy man passes our way. We become what our parents were or what our neighbors are. We make a virtue of our indolence, and call a lazy yielding to chance or a passive drifting with the stream, a patient acceptance of destiny. This destiny is a weak-hearted old-fashioned god whom educated men and women are sent into the world to dethrone. This destiny dwells in the past or lurks furtively in the environment, and is not ours. The only destiny which a man of grit will allow to influence him much is his destination. Our chance of reaching our destination does not lie in the line of what is ordinarily called renunciation and martyrdom, but rather in the discovery of our own inmost desires and our true powers and in the resolute organization of our lives around them. It ought to be a platitude that this is also the way to make ourselves the most useful instruments for the world's work.
The wary moralist, whom I have quoted before, here interjects a remonstrance against my dismissal of all those priceless virtues involved in "renunciation and martyrdom." I am glad that he does; for he gives me occasion to declare that I do not dismiss these virtues. On the contrary I propose to put them to the hardest possible use. Instead of advocating renunciation and martyrdom for the purpose of becoming a nonentity, I am advocating renunciation and, if need be, martyrdom for the purpose of becoming an entity. There is no course which demands more resolute power of abnegation than the course which leads to becoming what you are. In order to become an individual, you must cease to be a crowd. You must learn the law of self-integration and loyally obey it. You must hurry past all the flowery by-paths into which the conflicting crowd of your own instincts tries to tempt you. At every fork in the road, you will find some one crying, "Come this way!" At every oasis in desert lands, you will hear a beguiling invitation to tarry there or wait awhile. And nothing will get you by—not eyes blindfolded nor ears stopped with wax—nothing but an imperative sense of "mission," nothing but a lively sense of the appointed service which you are to perform by reaching your destination.
Scrutinize yourself mercilessly and find out what you really are before you commit yourself. Don't lie to yourself about that. But when you have found out, insist upon it. "He that rides his hobby gently," as Emerson says, "must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard." If you are really a missionary to the Chinese, put your life on the cast of that die. China does not wish to be served by cowards. If you are really by nature and instinct and talent a toe-dancer, be a toe-dancer with all your might. If you are really that, you will probably put more of a "kick" into toe-dancing than into anything else. Chesterfield's exhortation to his son to "shine" somewhere may be taken to heart even by a bootblack. If you are sure that you are called to be a teacher, put your entire capital into that investment. If you are a poet, by all means become one, body and soul. If you are really "domestic," put your heart into domesticity; and don't expect praise for doing even a multitude of little things ill. So far as my observation goes, young people with a modern liberal education can usually do several things fairly well. If you are in doubt which thing you do best, it is wiser to resort to an oracle than to hang in perpetual uncertainty or to flutter in eternal oscillation. Draw lots for the best of two guesses, and then abide by the lot.
Lay out the line of your own destiny. Then work faithfully on that line year after year with the zeal for improvement and the love of excellence which open the doors of a natural aristocracy; and you may rest assured that twenty years hence in your own circle, in your own community, you will be one of the "indispensable" members of your generation. When you have patiently perfected your own usefulness, you need not fear that you will not be used. Your special instrument of service and all your virtues and all your charms will be called for and taken at one time or another, in one place or another, for the purposes of the better human society which we are eager to create. In the period of your apprenticeship, it behooves you to meditate upon the means of self-perfection, upon becoming what you are, rather than upon rewards or glory or even upon service. But if when you present yourselves at the door of the next age, you offer to concentrate all that you have and are upon the task which you can do best, you will not have to wait for good fortune. You yourselves are good fortune.
- ↑ I recently received an illumination when one of my Japanese friends remarked casually of a fellow student from Nippon that after a preliminary survey of Christianity and Buddhism, he had embraced Christianity because: "It is so much easier—to be a Buddhist you have to study."