VIII
STRENGTH FOR THE DAILY TASK
It is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear for the ninety-nine per cent. of us. Sometimes it seems as though we spend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away for no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the machine in condition for further toil.
How hopeless is the outlook of many a life! The mother with the weary round of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same task year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things, and coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only augmented as age makes itself felt—all who toil feel at times these depressing limitations.
Little wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.
Yet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that often seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring weariness and longing for relief. All worth while work involves much tediousness, painstaking exertion. All great things stand for so much life poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.
The stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but repression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks only for frivolity and amusement. Life is too large a business to be always light and trivial. Yet we must not allow its high purposes to be thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and brightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.
How may we find that proportion of toil and relief, that happy mixture of duty and delight that shall make life not only endurable but also useful, fruitful, and enjoyable? For it is man's duty to be happy; otherwise he can never be useful in any high or valuable sense.
It would be easy to try to give comfort by the philosophy which sees the fine fruitage that is coming from to-day's stern discipline. That fair fruitage is coming, but the trouble is it is too far off to give us much comfort now; we want something nearer and more easily apprehended. Then, too, the truth is no high fruitage will ever issue from a life crushed by slavish subjection.
After all, what life is to every one of us depends not on the demands of outer circumstances, but on the development of the life within. The heart determines the worth and beauty of life. It makes all the difference whether the physical determines its circumference or whether you have an intellect that is reaching out to the things unmeasurable and a soul that grows into glory indescribable.
You can tie a great soul down hand and brain to a loom or a machine and he will still see his visions and dream his deep, refreshing dreams; you can set the brutish being down in a gallery of the world's treasures of art and beauty and he will think of nothing and see nothing but bread and beer.
We must do our dull and heavy tasks, but we can do them and not be crushed by them so long as within there are fragrant memories, high aspirations, great thoughts; so long as the task does not set the boundary of the life. And it is the cherishing of these eternal riches within that lifts any life and makes it worthy of higher tasks.
We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.
The wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every spring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every great soul. Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing when the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift themselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that are infinite.