Work As Self-Expression

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Title:     Work As Self-Expression
Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie [More Titles by Mabie]

The higher the kind and quality of a man's work, the more completely does it express his personality. There are forms of work so rudimentary that the touch of individuality is almost entirely absent, and there are forms of work so distinctive and spiritual that they are instantly and finally associated with one man. The degree in which a man individualises his work and gives it the quality of his own mind and spirit is, therefore, the measure of his success in giving his nature free and full expression. For work, in this large sense, is the expression of the man; and as the range and significance of all kinds of expression depend upon the scope and meaning of the ideas, forces, skills, and qualities expressed, so the dignity and permanence of work depend upon the power and insight of the worker. All sound work is true and genuine self-expression, but work has as many gradations of quality and significance as has character or ability. Dealing with essentially the same materials, each man in each generation has the opportunity of adding to the common material that touch of originality in temperament, insight, or skill which is his only possible contribution to civilisation.

The spiritual nature 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, Thackeray, Carlyle, and Browning; not discerning that, as these master workers gave form and substance to their visions and insight, the power to see and to understand deepened and expanded apace with their achievements.

[The end]
Hamilton Wright Mabie's essay: Work As Self-Expression

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