Essays On Work And Culture | Page 9

in its ferment
and uncertainty youth is often guided to and finally prepared for its
task.

Chapter VI
The Ultimate Test
"I have cut more than one field of oats and wheat," writes M. Charles
Wagner, "cradled for long hours under the August sky to the slow
cadence of the blade as it swung to and fro, laying low at every stroke
the heavy yellow heads. I have heard the quail whistle in the distant
fields beyond the golden waves of wheat and the woods that looked
blue above the vines. I have thought of the clamours of mankind, of the
oven-like cities, of the problems which perplex the age, and my insight
has grown clearer. Yes, I am Positive that one of the great curatives of

our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a
return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields." In these
characteristically ardent words one of the noblest Frenchmen of the day
has brought out a truth of general application. To come once more into
personal relations with mother earth is to secure health of body and of
mind; and with health comes clarity of vision. To touch the soil as a
worker is to set all the confined energies of the body free, to incite all
its functions to normal activity, to secure that physical harmony which
results from a full and normal play of all the physical forces on an
adequate object.
In like manner, true work of mind or technical skill brings peace,
composure, sanity, to one to whom the proper outlet of his energy has
been denied. To youth, possessed by an almost riotous vitality, with
great but unused powers of endurance and of positive action, the
finding of its task means concentration of energy instead of dissipations
directness of action instead of indecision, conscious increase of power
instead of deepened sense of inefficiency, and the happiness which
rises like a pure spring from the depths of the soul when the whole
nature is poised and harmonised. The torments of uncertainty, the waste
and disorder of the period of ferment, give place to clear vision, free
action, natural growth. There are few moments in life so intoxicating as
those which follow the final discovery of the task one is appointed to
perform. It is a true home-coming after weary and anxious wandering;
it is the lifting of the fog off a perilous coast; it is the shining of the sun
after days of shrouded sky.
The "storm and stress" period is always interesting because it predicts
the appearance of a new power; and men instinctively love every
evidence of the greatness of the race, as they instinctively crave the
disclosure of new truth. In the reaction against the monotony of
formalism and of that deadly conventionalism which is the peril of
every accepted method in religion, art, education, or politics, men are
ready to welcome any revolt, however extravagant. Too much life is
always better than too little, and the absurdities of young genius are
nobler than the selfish prudence of aged sagacity. The wild days at
Weimar which Klopstock looked at askance, and not without good

reason; the excess of passion and action in Schiller's "Robbers;" the
turbulence of the young Romanticists, with long hair and red waistcoats,
crowding the Theatre Francais to compel the acceptance of
"Hernani,"--these stormy dawns of the new day in art are always
captivating to the imagination. Their interest lies, however, not in their
turbulence and disorder, but in their promise. If real achievements do
not follow the early outbreak, the latter are soon forgotten; if they
herald a new birth of power, they are fixed in the memory of a world
which, however slow and cold, loves to feel the fresh impulse of the
awakening human spirit. The wild days at Weimar were the prelude to
a long life of sustained energy and of the highest productivity; "The
Robbers" was soon distanced and eclipsed by the noble works of one of
the noblest of modern spirits; and to the extravagance of the ardent
French Romanticists of 1832 succeeded those great works in verse and
prose which have made the last half-century memorable in French
literary history.
It is the fruitage of work, not the wild play of undirected energy, which
gives an epoch its decisive influence and a man his place and power.
Both aspects of the "storm and stress" period need to be kept in mind.
When it is tempted to condemn too sternly the extravagance of such a
period, society will do well to recall how often this undirected or
ill-directed play of energy has been the forerunner of a noble putting
forth of creative power. And those who are involved in such an
outpouring of new