"How's that?"
There you have the question that startled me. Simple enough, isn't it? There doesn't seem to be much to it, but wait.
It has been my privilege to stand beside a great artist while he drew aside the curtain from his picture, and then to have him fling the same question at me:
"How's that?"
It has also been my privilege to have poets whom the world acclaims as great, recite their poems to me, and then ask:
"How's that?"
To have the same question flung at me in the orchard was something of a shock. The manner and the tone were the same. I realised that once more I had been asked to pass on something in which a man had expressed himself. The chance question suddenly elevated work to a form of self-expression worthy to rank with the great arts. Ever since I have been able to see possibilities in work—mere work. It is something that a man can engage in as a man, and not simply as a drudge.
"How's that?"
Now the cat is out of the bag. I have let you see that I do not like physical work, and never have. But I am neither humiliated nor ashamed. Why should I like work? I have seen it in almost all its forms, and have practised it in a few. Almost everywhere it is slavish and sordid. I have seen it in the sweat-shops of the big cities, in the factories of the New England States, the mills of the south, and of England, and on the Canadian farms. Always it was wearing, soul-stifling, degrading. Men, women, and children—little children—were being ground to extinction by work. They became old before their time, broken-spirited, deformed. Work is a hideous monster, demanding all we can give of youth and strength and vitality, and giving in return only a starved and meagre living. Seeing work in this way, I learned to hate it. It has "the primal, eldest curse on it." It is slavery of the cruellest kind, and makes slaves of men even where they are their own masters. Do you wonder that I turned to the arts? The arts are joyous, exultant. They enable a man to express himself, and we all hunger for self-expression. The greatest tragedy in the world is to be misunderstood, and we are all misunderstood. The artist makes himself understood—at least, to a select few—but the worker usually dies
"With all his sweetness in him."