Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We have often wondered at the inordinate selfishness of man, compared to which the innocent egoism of the beasts is angelic. This tremendous range and depth of selfishness is because of that essential enlargement of self which comes with socialisation—the individual of a given society is that society—feels it as a “self.” The Roman, to the limits of his capacity, is Rome. The socialised individual carries in him the enlargement of his society. He has a wider soul, perforce, that is our human quality. This larger self, a thing frankly essential to social existence, enabling the individual to so think, feel, and act with and for his society, comes into action long before it is recognised by the “local office”—the mind of the individual. The mind has to learn its own contents as well as its outside environment. Our traditional labelling of those contents is no more correct than our primitive misconceptions of geography or physics.

What we personally call a quality does not affect its nature, but does affect our own conscious behaviour. The ability we display to mistake and miscall our own qualities and those of other people, is apparently immeasurable. So we feel this social soul, this larger aliveness; a power of caring for millions, of wanting for millions, and of doing for millions; and, since we ourselves feel it in ourselves, we call it self-consciousness.

A man, joining a regiment of old and splendid fame, comes to feel and act strongly from the regimental consciousness. He feels it with his own mental machinery; but it is not an enlargement of his personal self-consciousness—that is forever limited to his personality. This larger self—society, and its accompanying social consciousness—we calmly appropriate as a personal quality, and proceed to act on it. Having the capacity to think, feel, act for a thousand, we proceed to think, feel, and act a thousand times more for ourselves. Therefore we are naturally appalled at the limitlessness of “human selfishness.”

The whole mistake is natural enough—the conscious mind always lagging behind our unconscious growth; but to-day the social consciousness is finally forcing itself on the perception of the individual; and that which we have called selfishness, and which is really socialness misused, will be lifted from vice to virtue as we re-name it. Once properly recognised, we have quite ability enough to measure the man who uses a public power for a private end; to measure and condemn. But while this misconception still exists we have a minor confusion as to “self-expression” and “social service.”

The artist feels this more perhaps than other workers. He feels it because his feelings are more prominent, and more often handled, than those of the workman in the more mechanical trades. A man may make tremendous engines or run them; and never “feel himself work” so much as the maker of very inconsiderable poems. This is because the poet is so highly socialised a product. His power to be a poet is a social power. What he feels is the heart of his people, and he, poor man! thinks it is his own. He thinks his heart is far more exquisitely sensitive than theirs, whereas it is their hearts he is feeling! His capacity for pain and for pleasure is their capacity; it is greater because he is more people, or at least is the specialised point of sensation and expression for more people.

“Let me write the songs of a people and let who will make their laws.”

The songs of a people—not his songs forced down upon them, but their songs forced up through him. “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred until his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

Artists, of all men, are most exquisitely specialised to the social service. Their work, of all men’s, is least valuable to themselves, most valuable to others. They are absolutely for other people to so extreme a degree as nearly always to warp and injure their personal relations, even under the fairest conditions. They must do the work for which they are built, cost what it may, and this compelling power, this insistent force from within which will out through whatever medium is at hand, this they call “self-expression”! An artist, they say, must not consider social service in the least; he must express himself.

It is a true recognition of the kind of work he must do; he must indeed express that which is good in him quite regardless of whether the people around him want it or not; will pay him for it or not; will kill him for it or not. But that unfaltering expression is his social service, his true function, what he was built for. And it is not “himself” that he is expressing, it is “themself.” He is, of that people and that time, a voice, an eye, an ear, a hand to do. Holland made the Dutch painters, not they Holland. They in return in their accomplished work made Holland Hollander, so to speak, but the lives of many generations of Dutchmen and Dutchwomen went to form those painters first.

There is no necessary conflict between the two conceptions of the artist’s duty—to express himself, or to serve society—as far as the special performance goes: but the misconception carries wide error and evil with it none the less. It makes the artist morbid in what he fancies a vast self-consciousness, whereas he might remain as free and unassuming personally as any child, once he recognised that it was not he who was doing all this, but they. It would save him too from the common mistake of applying his splendid range of social sensitiveness to his own personal affairs as he too commonly does. Had Carlyle, for instance, seen truly what was the nature of his place and power, he would have been less haughty and less irritable—also less lonely.