Essays On Work And Culture | Page 5

of work and its relation to character are seen in the
diversity of work which the different races have done, and in the
unmistakable stamp which the work of each race bears. First as a matter
of instinct, and later as a matter of intelligence, each race has followed,
in its activities, the lines of least resistance, and put its energies forth in

ways which were most attractive because they offered the freest range
and were nearest at hand. The attempt of some historians of a
philosophical turn of mind to fit each race into a category and to give
each race a sharply defined sphere of influence has been carried too far,
and has discredited the effort to interpret arbitrarily the genius of the
different races and to assign arbitrarily their functions. It remains true,
however, that, in a broad sense, each race has had a peculiar quality of
mind and spirit which may be called its genius, and each has followed
certain general lines and kept within certain general limits in doing its
work. The people who lived on the great plains of Central Asia worked
in a different temper and with wide divergence of manner from the
people who lived on the banks of the Nile; and the Jew, the Greek, and
the Roman showed their racial differences as distinctly in the form and
quality of their work as in the temper of their mind and character. And
thus, on a great historical scale, the significance of work as an
expression of character is unmistakably disclosed.
In this sense work is practically inclusive of every force and kind of life
since every real worker puts into it all that is most distinctive in his
nature. The moral quality contributes sincerity, veracity, solidity of
structure; the intellectual quality is disclosed in order, lucidity, and
grasp of thought; the artistic quality is seen in symmetry proportion,
beauty of construction and of detail; the spiritual quality is revealed in
depth of insight and the scope of relationships brought into view
between the specific work and the world in which it is done. In work of
the finer order, dealing with the more impressionable material, there are
discoverable not only the character and quality of the worker, but the
conditions under which he lives; the stage of civilisation, the vigour or
languor of vital energy, the richness or poverty of social life, the
character of the soil and of the landscape, the pallor or the bloom of
vegetation, the shining or the veiling of the skies. So genuinely and
deeply does a man put himself into the thing he does that whatever
affects him affects it, and all that flows into him of spiritual, human,
and natural influence flows into and is conserved by it. A bit of work of
the highest quality is a key to a man's life because it is the product of
that life, and it brings to light that which is hidden in the man as truly
as the flower lays bare to the sun that which was folded in the seed.

What a man does is, therefore, an authentic revelation of what he is,
and by their works men are fairly and rightly judged.
For this reason no man can live in any real sense who fails to give his
personality expression through some form of activity. For action in
some field is the final stage of development; and to stop short of action,
to rest in emotion or thought, is to miss the higher fruits of living and to
evade one's responsibility to himself as well as to society. The man
whose artistic instinct is deep cannot be content with those visions
which rise out of the deeps of the imagination and wait for that
expression which shall give them objective reality; the vision brings
with it a moral necessity which cannot be evaded without serious loss.
Indeed, the vitality of the imagination depends largely upon the fidelity
with which its images are first realised in thought and then embodied
by the hand. To comprehend what life means in the way of truth and
power, one must act as well as think and feel. For action itself is a
process of revelation, and the sincerity and power with which a man
puts forth that which is disclosed to him determine the scope of the
disclosure of truth which he receives. To comprehend all that life
involves of experience, or offers of power, one must give full play to all
the force that is in him. It is significant that the men of creative genius
are, as a rule, men of the greatest productive power. One marvels at the
magnitude of the work of such men as Michelangelo and Rembrandt, as
Beethoven and Wagner, as Shakespeare, Balzac,