Essays On Work And Culture | Page 7

fibre, eats his heart out in a futile despair. Troops will endure
losses when they are caught up in the stir of a charge which would
demoralise and scatter them if they were compelled to halt under the
relentless guns of masked batteries. Now, the characteristic trial of
youth is this experience of waiting at a moment when the whole nature
craves expression and the satisfaction of action. The greater the volume
of energy in the man who has yet to find his vocation and place, the
more trying the ordeal. There are moments in the life of the young
imagination when the very splendour of its dreams fills the soul with
despair, because there seems no hope of giving them outward reality;
and the clearer the consciousness of the possession of power, the more
poignant the feeling that it may find no channel through which to add
itself to the impulsion which drives forward the work of society.

The reality of this crisis in spiritual experience--the adjustment between
the personality and the physical, social, and industrial order in which it
must find its place and task--is the measure of its possible painfulness.
It is due, perhaps, to the charm which invests youth, as one looks back
upon it from maturity or age, that its pain is forgotten and that
sympathy withheld which youth craves often without knowing why it
craves. A helpful comprehension of the phase of experience through
which he is passing is often the supreme need of the ardent young spirit.
His pain has its roots in his ignorance of his own powers and of the
world. He strives again and again to put himself in touch with
organised work; he takes up one task after another in a fruitless
endeavour to succeed. He does not know what he is fitted to do, and he
turns helplessly from one form of work for which he has no faculty to
another for which he has less. His friends begin to think of him as a
ne'er-do-weel; and, more pathetic still, the shadow of failure begins to
darken his own spirit. And yet it may be that in this halting, stumbling,
ineffective human soul, vainly striving to put its hand to its task, there
is some rare gift, some splendid talent, waiting for the ripe hour and the
real opportunity! In such a crisis sympathetic comprehension is
invaluable, but it is rarely given, and the youth works out his problem
in isolation. If he is courageous and persistent he finds his place at last;
and work brings peace, strength, self-comprehension.

Chapter V
The Year of Wandering
Goethe prefaces Wilhelm Meister's travels with some lines full of that
sagacity which was so closely related to his insight:
What shap'st thou here at the world? 't is shapen long ago; The Maker
shaped it, he thought it best even so; Thy lot is appointed, go follow its
hest; Thy way is begun, thou must walk, and not rest; For sorrow and
care cannot alter the case; And running, not raging, will win thee the
race.

My inheritance, how wide and fair! Time is my estate: to time I'm heir.
Between the preparation and the work, the apprenticeship and the
actual dealing with a task or an art, there comes, in the experience of
many young men, a period of uncertainty and wandering which is often
misunderstood and counted as time wasted, when it is, in fact, a period
rich in full and free development. In the days when Wilhelm Meister
was written, the Wanderjahr or year of travel was a recognised part of
student life, and was held in high regard as contributing a valuable
element to a complete education. "The Europe of the Renaissance,"
writes M. Wagner, "was fairly furrowed in every direction by students,
who often travelled afoot and barefoot to save their shoes." These
wayfarers were light-hearted and often empty-handed; they were in
quest of knowledge, but the intensity of the search was tempered by
gaiety and ease of mood. Under a mask of frivolity, however, youth
often wears a serious face, and behind apparent aimlessness there is
often a steady and final turning of the whole nature towards its goal.
Uncertainty breeds impatience; and in youth, before the will is firmly
seated and the goal clearly seen, impatience often manifests itself in the
relaxation of all forms of restraint. The richer the nature the greater the
reaction which sometimes sets in at this period; the more varied and
powerful the elements to be harmonised in a man's character and life,
the greater the ferment and agitation which often precede the final
discernment and acceptance of one's work. If the pressure of
uncertainty with regard to one's gifts and their uses ought to call out
patience and sympathy, so