What men live by; work, play, love, worship

Front matter

3 J ci i

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

Preface

This book has been written in many Pullmans and in the homes of many friends. I fear it bears evidence of the Pullmans; I am proudly certain that it shows traces of all the friends, — of Dr. and Mrs. Philip King Brown, of San Francisco; Bruce Porter, of the same impressive city; Maulsby Kimball, of Buffalo; Professor W. E. Hocking, of New Haven; Florence Painter, Rosalind Huidekoper Greene, and Henry Copley Greene, of Boston. The last five have read the entire manuscript, corrected many errors, and put in many improvements; to all I am deeply grateful.

I owe still more to my wife, whose influence appears, I hope, on every page. Other friends, visible and invisible, have also helped, — G. K. Chesterton, Josiah Royce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so many others that no title-page would hold their beloved names. I must be content with thanking them for whatever is true and absolving them from whatever is false in the pages to follow.

My title is that of one of Tolstoy's most beautiful stories. Such use of his words is quite in accord with the spirit and letter of his beliefs and with the gratitude which I owe him.

Parts of several chapters have already been printed in the Atlantic Monthly and are here reprinted by courtesy of the editor.

Contents

Introduction xi

Part I: Work

I. Work, Play, and Drudgery .... 3

II. The Call of the Job as a Doctor hears it ii

III. The Joy of Work 21

IV. The Points of a Good Job 27

V. The Reproach of Commercialism: Thought

and Action in Work 38

VI. The Glory of Raw Material .... 50

VII. The Radiations of Work 59

VIII. Work and Loyalty: The Idealization of

Work 65

IX. The Rewards of Work 73

Part Ii: Play

X. Playfulness, Seriousness, and Dullness . 89

XI. Play, Recreation, and the Other Arts . 98 XII. The Popular Arts, the Minor Arts, and

their Big Brothers 106

XIII. Jewels 112

XIV. Give-and-Take in the Minor Arts and

Elsewhere 117

XV. Trance in Play 13°

XVI. Chaotic Plays, Disjointed Plays, and

Others 136 x CONTENTS

XVII. The Game, or Art, of Impersonation in

Work, Play, and Love . • • • *4 2 XVIII. The Penetration of Work by Play and

the Minor Arts I 5 I

XIX. By-Products of Play: Consecration of

Play I 54

Part Iii: Love

XX. The Allies of Love 167

XXI. Love's House of Many Mansions . . 175 XXII. Our Awareness of Infinite Love . .181

XXIII. Symbolism in Love 187

XXIV. Loyalty in Love 200

XXV. Impersonality in Love 210

XXVI. Integrity in Love 219

XXVII. Reticence, Modesty, Chastity . . . 222

XXVIII. Imperfect Mutuality in Love : Romance 232

XXIX. Marriage 239

Part Iv: Worship

XXX. Spiritual Fatigue: Mountain-Top Views 267

XXXI. Recollection: Disenthrallment: Solitude and Sincerity: The Reinforcement of Association 279

XXXII. Confession: Petition: Praise . . . 298

XXXIII. Communion: The Answer to Prayer:

Summary 314

XXXIV. All Together 324

Index 337

Introduction

In the spring of 1909, I had been gnawing away at three tough and ancient problems which came to me through the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital: What is the best way to care for the tuberculous? How can "nervous people" (neurasthenics) be restored to balance and happiness? Where can we find help that is worth offering to a girl facing motherhood without a husband ?

A vacation in England that summer took me far enough away from the surface details of these problems to see that the solutions thus far suggested for them all have a strong family likeness and illustrate three stages of opinion.

An institution is our first idea for all these sufferers. A sanitarium for the tuberculous, a nervine for the neurasthenics, a "Rescue Home" for the unmarried mother. This solution contents us for a time, but further experience shows us how limited is the good which an institution can do. Even at its best it is too artificial, too much of a hothouse existence, to accomplish more than the beginning of a cure. The violent herding of special miseries in one place — disease facing similar disease, day in and day out — makes physical or moral contagion always a danger, sometimes a fact. More individual attention is needed for each xii INTRODUCTION

body and soul. Mass treatment will accomplish only the first stages of cure.

Personal care, then, personal teaching, personal influence, seem to be the need. We form a small group of consumptives into a "class." The doctor and the nurse not only teach the patients hygiene, but use their Christian names and try to become friendly with each. The nurse visits the tenement and tries to show the poor consumptive how to carry out at home the sanitary regime of the hospital. Personal influence is appealed to for the momentum needed to encourage the sufferer along the barren, ugly path toward recovery.

So with sexual troubles. The reaction against institutionalism brings us to rely on personal influence and personal teaching. Some one must win the affection of each sufferer, penetrate the intricacies of the past, and guide the future better. Not alms or institutions, but a friend is what we hope to provide. Not material aid or mere instruction, but one's self, one's best service, seems now the ideal gift.

But though this is certainly part of the answer, we cannot rest content with it, for any one who tries to give "himself" in this way soon finds out that the gift is pitifully small and weak. We soon use up our slender stock of wisdom. The appeal, " Do this for my sake," soon wears out. No human personality is rich enough to suffice for another's food. Moreover, in proportion as this plan succeeds, we perceive the dangers of dependence. The sufferer must learn to stand upon his

INTRODUCTION xiii

own feet. He must get back into life. "Real Life," then, as we now begin to see, is after all the best teacher and the best doctor. Nothing less fruitful will nourish body and soul. We do not give up friendship and personal influence ; but we see that they must take their part with the other sanative elements of normal experience.

For the neurasthenic and for those struggling with problems of sex, this need of "real life" is now pretty generally recognized. Seclusion in sanitaria or rescue homes is being replaced by efforts to get the sufferers back into the industrial world, back into family life, back to the surroundings which keep ordinary people a-going. It is not so obvious that the tuberculous need anything of the kind as a means of cure. Yet, if not, why do consumptive doctors at a sanitarium like Trudeau get along better than other consumptive patients? Because (so Dr. Trudeau once told me) the doctors are living a more normal life, — they can sometimes do a little doctoring or microscopy, and so forget that they are patients. The successful progress of their work in sick-room or laboratory gives them courage to be faithful to rules and to force down food.

In three widely separate fields, then, I think I see a similar evolution, away from institutionalism, away from dependence upon personal influence, — toward a plan, the essence of which is to get the sufferer back to real life: not back to "nature," but back to the best that civilization has to offer to normal people.

xiv INTRODUCTION

Educators, social workers, and physicians with whom I have talked, seem to agree upon the following mysti< cal prescription : —

REAL LIFE an indefinite

amount

Take a full dose after meals and at bedtime.

But what do we mean by "real life"? What are the essentials which we want to secure for consumptives, neurasthenics, and "wayward" youth of both sexes?

Watching like a Boswell the practice of experts in the healing of broken souls and wounded characters, I have noticed that besides work — my own favorite prescription — the experts apply two other remedies : recreation (through play, art, or natural beauty) and affection. They also hope rather helplessly that a fourth resource, worship, will somehow get into the sufferer's life.

Out of the dazzle and welter of modern civilization, which offers a hundred quack remedies for every ill of the soul, work, play, and love emerge as the permanent sources of helpfulness to which parents, educators, and social workers are now turning with confidence, while over their shoulders they glance wistfully toward worship.

INTRODUCTION xv

"Real Life," then, if it is to mean the nourishing, sustaining, and developing of existence, demands work, play, and love, and so much of the material and spiritual conditions of existence as make these possible.

Though I came to this belief first from a doctor's point of view, and as the result of search for the essential principles of healing within a special field, I have since come to notice that the special groups of people whom I see as patients are not the only ones who need these great medicines. I notice a growing tendency to center all remedial effort upon the same trio of ends, no matter what sort of trouble is at hand. More satisfying and interesting occupation, more refreshment through art and play, deeper and more intense affection, are the life-preservers which one wants to secure about the blind, the maimed, the invalid, the discharged prisoner, the boy who lies and steals but is not yet a prisoner, the orphan, the deserted wife, the discouraged, down-at-the-heel family, the neglected or abused child, the alcoholic, the convalescent, the insane, the feeble-minded, the morphinist, the boy who has inherited millions, and the society girl who has got through "coming out." In genuine emergencies and for those overdriven in their industrial harness, material relief (food, rest, air, sleep, warmth) may be the first necessity, but unless we can give the vital nourishment which I am now advising, all material relief soon becomes a farce or a poison, just as medicine is in most xvi INTRODUCTION

chronic diseases a farce or a poison. Vitality and resisting power are what we most need, and these must be created for the sick out of the same nourishment which keeps the well people well.

I made just now a long list of sufferers. Did I mention all who need the essentials of real life? Obviously not, for those who are going right need these life-saving activities as much as those who are going wrong. It is the stake in life given us by our work, our play, and our love that keeps any one from going wrong. The conservative needs them to leaven his conservatism; the radical needs them to hold him down to solid ground. Young and old need them, for by these three principles we are helped to grow up and saved from growing old.

In this style I was sailing confidently along when one day a friend asked me: "How do you distinguish Work, Play, and Love from Drudgery, Frivolity, and Lust? You have made saints of your favorites and put halos around their heads, but not every one can see the halos or can believe in them upon your say-so."

"True!" I should answer, "not on my say-so, but on your own. You believe in them now." Everybody sees halos and worships saints of some kind, though many have learned to hide the habit even from themselves. Work, play, and love are my saints, and in this book I want to draw their lineaments and make their halos visible to others. The religion of work, or art, and of love is not the strongest or the truest, but it is

INTRODUCTION xvii

a good beginning. There one finds outlet for devotion and gropes toward God. One can do all but speak to God. One fails only when it comes to worship, which is to-day so unfashionable a habit that one must be prepared to shock the modern ear and to violate all the scientific proprieties if one confesses belief in it. Civilization is supposed to have carried us beyond the need of rites and forms and to have fused the demonstrative and emotional side of religion into daily work, play, and affection.

But this is theory, not observation. As a matter of fact the doctor, social worker, or teacher who believes that all true religion can be woven into work, play, or affection falls into the same fallacy as those who think English composition can be taught by weaving it into the courses in history, science, and philosophy. Experience shows, I think, that vital religion and the ability to write good English are not acquired in this incidental way. Scientists, economists, and historians often write barbarously. We must practice the art of writing directly as well as incidentally, else we shall duplicate the catastrophe of our public-school system, wherein the conscientious effort to avoid proselyting, to abolish sectarian teaching, and let religion take care of itself, has now brought us perilously near the French secularism.

There is no originality in my suggestion that we should focus our efforts upon work, play, love, and xviii INTRODUCTION

worship. For though we talk a great deal about "efficiency," economics, hygiene, and other matters of secondary importance, at bottom we all know well enough what we need, and what all the paraphernalia of civilization, money, health, and education, are really meant for. If I were not persuaded that, in our right minds, we know the fundamental reasons for all this hurry and bustle, I should not venture to write a reminder. We know where we are traveling, but we need a time-table to remind us of details.

I do not say that every one wants only the ends which I have named. He usually wants fame, riches, wisdom, talents, personal beauty, and an easy time of it generally. He may be too sleepy and comfortable, or too tired and miserable, to want anything but Nirvana or release. Yet, enervated by heat, calloused by routine, steeped in sin, crazed with pain, stupefied by luxury or by grief, still he needs four inexorable blessings.

The interplay of these four is the end of life, and the sole worthy end, in my creed. This is the fruit of the "life and liberty " which are guaranteed under our Constitution. This is the goal to be secured through efficient and progressive governmental machinery. This is the end of all education and all moral training. This is the food of the soul in health or in disease, needed by the doctor, the social worker, the teacher, and the statesman, to feed their own souls as well as to prevent and to cure social ills. This is our justification for the enormous machinery and the costly ugliness of civili-

INTRODUCTION xix

zation. This is the essential of that "more abundant "ife" which many modern prophets l extol without defining.

Every human being, man, woman, and child, hero and convict, neurasthenic and deep-sea fisherman, needs the blessing of God through these four gifts. With these any life is happy despite sorrow and pain, successful despite bitter failure. Without them we lapse into animalism or below it. If you want to keep a headstrong, fatuous youth from overreaching himself and falling, these must be the elements of strength. When you try to put courage and aspiration into the gelatinous character of the alcoholic or the street-walker, you will fail unless you can give responsibility, recreation, affection, and through them a glimpse of God.

I do not believe that evolution, revolution, or decadence have power to change these elemental needs. For all I know, we may be this instant in the position of the French court before the Revolution. At this very moment we may be lurching over the smooth bend of a cataract that is to overwhelm us; but if so, it is because we have not enough of that unchanging valor which has preserved us so far, and will reconstitute us after our downfall. For work, play, love, and prayer are open to rich and poor, to young and old ; they are of all times and all races in whom character is an ideal.

1 For example, Ellen Key.

xx INTRODUCTION

On each of these gigantic forces I have particular designs: I want to show the sacredness of work and love; I want to show the accessibility and the universality of play and worship. That despite our secular habits, we are so close to worship that we may at any time abruptly fall into it; that play and art can be closely woven into the fabric of work, till drudgery is reduced to a minimum; that work is our key to the sacredness of material nature, and that affection can be disciplined only by consecration. These are my theses.

This book has still another motive: gratitude for the good things that have come to me through work, play, love, and worship. Is it not churlish to make no attempt at hearty applause for all that is given us in this world? Grant that I am shielded from much that makes others curse God or nature ; shall I not praise my side of the shield ?

"On the 19th of July, 1857," says Tolstoy, "in Lucerne before the Schweizerhof Hotel, where many rich people were lodging, a wandering minstrel sang for half an hour his songs and played his guitar. About a hundred people listened to him. The little man in the darkness poured out his heart like a nightingale in couplet after couplet, song after song. Near by on the boulevard were heard frequent murmurs of applause, though generally the most respectful silence reigned. The minstrel thrice asked them all to give him something.

INTRODUCTION xxi

Not one person gave him anything, and many made fun of him.'" (The italics are Tolstoy's.)

There is no sin that I would not rather have upon my soul than to have displayed to the universe such ingratitude.

Do you say that the universe cares as little about our praise as the ocean for Byron's command to "roll on"? Well, I vote against you. I believe the universe does care, and needs our gratitude.

WHAT MEN LIVE BY PART I: WORK

Chapter I Work, Play, And Drudgery

A camper starting into the woods on his annual vacation undertakes with enthusiasm the familiar task of carrying a Saranac boat upon a shoulder-yoke. The pressure of the yoke on his shoulders feels as good as the grasp of an old friend's hand. The tautening of his muscles to the strain of carrying seems to gird up his loins and true up his whole frame. With the spring of the ground beneath him and the elastic rebound of the boat on its resilient yoke, he seems to dance over the ground between two enlivening rhythms. It is pure fun.

In the course of half a mile or so, the carry begins to feel like work. The pleasant, snug fit of the yoke has become a very respectable burden, cheerfully borne, for the sake of the object in view, but not pleasant. The satisfaction of the carry is now something anticipated, no longer grasped in the present. The job is well worth while, but it is no joke. It will feel good to reach the end and set the boat down.

Finally, if in about ten minutes more there is still no sight of the end, no blue, sparkling glimmer of distant water low down among the trees, the work becomes drudgery. Will it ever end? Are we on the right trail at all? Is it worth while to go on? Perhaps not; but to stop means painfully lowering the boat to the ground and later heaving it up again, which is the worst task of all — worse than going on as we are. So we hang to it, but now in scowling, stumbling, swearing misery, that edges ever nearer to revolt.

In varying proportions every one's life mingles the experiences of that carry. At its best and for a few, work becomes play, at least for blessed, jewel-like moments. By the larger number it is seen not as a joy but a tolerable burden, borne for the sake of the children's education, the butter on the daily bread, the hope of promotion. Finally, for the submerged fraction of humanity who are forced to labor without choice and almost from childhood, life seems drudgery, borne simply because they cannot stop without still greater misery. They are committed to it, as to a prison, and they cannot get out.

It is not often, I believe, that a whole life is possessed by any one of these elements, — play, work, or drudgery. Work usually makes up the larger part of life, with play and drudgery sprinkled in. Some of us at most seasons, all of us at some seasons, find work a galling yoke to which we have to submit blindly or angrily for a time, but with revolt in our hearts. Yet I have rarely seen drudgery so overwhelming as to crush out altogether the play of humor and good-fellowship during the day's toil as well as after it.

WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 5

In play you have what you want. In work you know what you want and believe that you are serving or approaching it. In drudgery no desired object is in sight; blind forces push you on.

Present good, future good, no good, — these possibilities are mingled in the crude ore which we ordinarily call work. Out of that we must smelt, if we can, the pure metal of a vocation fit for the spirit of man. The crude mass of "work," as it exists to-day in mines, ships, stores, railroads, schoolrooms, and kitchens, contains elements that should be abolished, elements that are hard, but no harder than we need to call out the best of us, and here and there a nugget of pure delight.

I want to separate, in this book, the valuable ingredients from the conglomerate loosely called work, especially those ingredients which preserve a "moral equivalent" J for the virtues bred in war, in hunting, and in the savage's struggle against nature. For in battle, in the chase, and in all direct dealing with elementary forces, we have built up precious powers of body and of mind. These we are in danger of losing in our more tame and orderly civilization, as William James has so convincingly shown.

His warning is echoed in different keys by President Briggs, 2 and by others, who fear that kindergarten

1 William James, " The Moral Equivalent for War," Memories and Studies. Longmans, Green & Co., 1911.

2 LeBaron R. Briggs, School, College, and Character. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1901.

6 v WHAT MEN LIVE BY

methods in education are making children soft and spiritless, and that all sting and stubbornness has been extracted from modern school work. President Briggs quotes, apparently with approval, the opinion of James Martineau that "power to drudge at distasteful tasks is the test of faculty, the price of knowledge, and the matter of duty."

This conception blurs, I think, the most vital distinction in the whole matter, that, namely, between work and drudgery on the one side and that between work and play on the other. Work, like morality and self-government, differs from play because play is spontaneous and delightful, while work is done soberly and against resistance. Nevertheless we work because we want the fruit of work — not from pure dogged determination. To force ourselves along without any desire for a goal of attainment is drudgery. Work is doing what you don't now enjoy for the sake of a future which you clearly see and desire. Drudgery is doing under strain what you don't now enjoy and for no end that you can now appreciate.

To learn how to work is so to train our imagination that we can feel the stimulus from distant futures, as the coast cities of California get heat, light, and power from distant mountain streams. In all work and all education the worker should be in touch with the distant sources of interest, else he is being trained to slavery, not to self-government and self-respect.

WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 7

Defined in this way, work is always, I suppose, an acquired taste. For its rewards are not immediate, but come in foretastes and aftertastes. It involves postponement and waiting. In the acquisition of wealth, economists rightly distinguish labor and waiting, but in another sense labor is always waiting. You work for your picture or your log house because you want it, and because it cannot be had just for the asking. It awaits you in a future visible only to imagination. Into the further realization of that future you can penetrate only by work: meantime you must wait for your reward.

Further, this future is never perfectly certain. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip; and even when gross accidents are avoided, your goal — your promotion, your home, the degree for which you have worked — usually does not turn out to be as you have pictured it. This variation you learn to expect, to discount, perhaps to enjoy, beforehand, if you are a trained worker, just because you have been trained in faith. For work is always justified by faith. Faith, holding the substance (not the details) of things unseen, keeps us at our tasks. We have faith that our efforts will some day reach their goal, and that this goal will be something like what we expected. But no literalism will serve us here. If we are willing to accept nothing but the very pattern of our first desires, we are forever disappointed in work and soon grow slack in it. In the more fortunate of us, the love of work includes a love of the unexpected, and finds a pleasant spice of adventure in the difference between what we work for and what we actually get.

Yet this working faith is not pure speculation. It includes a foretaste of the satisfaction to come. We plunge into it as we jump into a cold bath, not because the present sensations are altogether sweet, but because they are mingled with a dawning awareness of the glow to follow. We do our work happily because the future is alive in the present — not like a ghost but like a leader.

Where do we get this capacity to incarnate the future and to feel it swelling within us as a present inspiration? The power to go in pursuit of the future with sevenleagued boots or magic carpets can hardly be acquired, or even longed for, until we have had some actual experience of its rewards. We seem then to be caught in one of those circles which may turn out to be either vicious or virtuous. In the beginning, something or somebody must magically entice us into doing a bit of work. Having done that bit, we can see the treasure of its results; these results will in turn spur us to redoubled efforts, and so once more to increased rewards. Given the initial miracle and we are soon established in the habit and in the enjoyment of work.

But there is a self-maintaining circularity in disease, idleness, and sloth, as well as in work, virtue, and health. Until we get the result of our work, we cannot

WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 9

feel the motive for exertion. Until we make the exertion (despite present pain and a barren outlook), we cannot taste the delightful result, nor feel the spur to further effort. The wheel is at the dead point ! Why should it ever move?

Probably some of us are moved at first by the leap of an elemental instinct in our muscles, which act before and beyond our conscious reason. Other people are tempted into labor by the irrational contagion of example. We want to be "in it" with the rest of our gang, or to win some one's approval. So we get past the dead point, — often a most alarming point to parents and teachers, — and once in motion, keep at it by the circular process just described.

Various auxiliary motives reinforce the ordinary energies of work. Here I will allude only to one — a queer pleasure in the mere stretch and strain of our muscles. If we are physically fresh and not worried, there is a grim exhilaration, a sort of frowning delight, in taking up a heavy load and feeling that our strength is adequate to it. It seems paradoxical to enjoy a discomfort, but the paradox is now getting familiar. For modern psychologists have satisfactorily bridged the chasm between pleasure and pain, so that we can now conceive, what athletes and German poets have long felt, the delight in a complex of agreeable and disagreeable elements. In work we do not often get as far as the "selige Schmerzen" so familiar in German lyrics, but we welcome difficulties, risks, and physical strains io WHAT MEN LIVE BY

because (if we can easily conquer them) they add a spice to life, — a spice of play in the midst of labor. Work gets itself started, then, by the contagion of some one else's example, or by an explosion of animal energies within us. After a few turns of the work-rest cycle we begin to get a foretaste of rewards. A flavor of enjoyment appears in the midst of strain. Habit then takes hold and carries us along until the taste for work is definitely acquired.

Chapter II The Call Of The Job As A Doctor Hears It

Most doctors have set a good many women to work and taken a good many men out of it. Doctors have, therefore, a doubly fortunate opportunity to see what work can do for people, and a better right than any one else to speak (if, alas, they cannot sing!) of its blessings.