Essays On Work And Culture | Page 8

ought that experience of spiritual and
intellectual agitation which often intervenes between the training for
life and the process of actual living. This experience is a true year of
wandering, and there is nothing of which the wanderer stands in such
need as the friendly hand and the door which stands hospitably open.
It is the born drudge alone who is content to go from the school to the
office or the shop without so much as asking the elementary questions
about life. The aspiring want to know what is behind the occupation;
they must discover the spiritual necessity of work before they are ready
to bend to the inevitable yoke. Strong natures are driven by the Very

momentum of their own moral impulse to explore the world before
they build in it and unite themselves with it; the imagination must be
fed with beauty and truth before they are content to choose their task
and tools. It is often a sign of greatness in a man that he does not
quickly fit into his place or easily find his work. Let him look well at
the stars before he bends to his task; he will need to remember them
when the days of toil come, as they must come, at times, to every man.
Let him see the world with his own eyes before he gives to fortune
those hostages which hold him henceforth fast-bound in one place.
It is as natural for ardent and courageous youth to wish to know what is
in life, what it means, and what it holds for its children, as for a child to
reach for and search the things that surround and attract it. Behind
every real worker in the world is a real man, and a man has a right to
know the conditions under which he must live, and the choices of
knowledge, power, and activity which are offered him. In the education
of many men and women, therefore, there comes the year of wandering;
the experience of travelling from knowledge to knowledge and from
occupation to occupation. There are men and women, it is true, who are
born under conditions so free and prosperous that the choice of work is
made almost instinctively and unconsciously, and apprenticeship
merges into mastery without any intervening agitation or uncertainty.
At long intervals Nature not only sends a great talent into the world, but
provides in advance for its training and for its steady direction and
unfolding; but Nature is not often so minute in her provision for her
children. Those who receive most generously from her hand are, for the
most part, compelled to discover their gifts and find their places in the
general order as the result of much searching, and often of many
failures.
And even in the most harmonious natures the elements of agitation and
ferment are rarely absent. The forces which go to the making of a
powerful man can rarely be adjusted and blended without some
disturbance of relations and conditions. This disturbance is sometimes
injurious, because it affects the moral foundations upon which
character rests; and for this reason the significance of the experience in
its relation to development ought to be sympathetically studied. The

birth of the imagination and of the passions, the perception of the
richness of life, and the consciousness of the possession of the power to
master and use that wealth, create a critical moment in the history of
youth,--a moment richer in possibilities of all kinds than comes at any
later period. Agitation and ferment of soul are inevitable in that
wonderful moment. It is as idle to ask youth to be calm and contented
in that supreme moment as to ask the discoverer who is catching his
first glimpse of a new continent to avoid excitement. There are times
when agitation is as normal as is self-control at other and less critical
times. There are days in June when Nature seems to betray an almost
riotous prodigality of energy; but that prodigality is always well within
the limits of order. In youth that which is to be feared is not the
explosive force of vitality, but its wrong direction; and it is at this crisis
that youth so often makes its mute and unavailing appeal to maturity.
The man who has left his year of wandering behind him forgets its joys
and perils, and regards it as a deflection from a course which is now
perfectly plain, although it may once have been confused and uncertain.
He is critical and condemnatory where he ought to be sympathetic and
helpful. If he reflects and comprehends, he will hold out the hand of
fellowship; for he will understand that the year of wandering is not a
manifestation of aimlessness, but of aspiration, and that