There is opportunity for a thriving trade in indulgences for necessarily slighted work. I emphasize the idea of necessity, for I am aware of the danger of gross abuse if poets and painters should get the notion that they may find easy absolution for the sin of offering to the public something less than their best. Their best is none too good. We must not, through misdirected charity, lower the standards of self-respecting artists.
But some of us are not artists. The ordinary man is compelled to spend most of his time on pot-boilers of one kind or another. When the pot is merrily boiling, and all the odds and ends are being mingled in a savory stew, I would allow the ordinary man some satisfaction. As fingers were made before forks, so mediocrity was made before genius. Has mediocrity no right to enjoy its own work, just because it is not the very best?
We of the commonalty who are fitted to live happily in the comparative degree, allow ourselves to be bullied by the superlative. There are uneasy spirits who trouble Israel. They continually quote the maxim that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. It is a good maxim in its way, and causes no particular hardship until our eyes are opened and we see what it means to do anything superlatively well. When we are shown by example the technical excellence which is possible in the simplest forms of activity, and the extent to which we fall short, we are appalled. It is a wonder that we keep going at all when we consider the slovenly way we breathe. And yet breathing, though it well might engage all our attention, is only one of the things we have to do.
I attribute a good deal of the sense of stress in modern life to the new standards of excellence that are set in regard to the multifarious activities which make up our daily lives. We have to do a hundred different things. This is not particularly trying so long as it is merely touch and go. In our amateurish way we rather enjoy the variety. But when a hundred experts beset us, each one of whom has made a life study of a particular act, we are bowed in contrition. There is no good in us but good intentions, and they cannot save us. Our life story is summed up like that of the unfortunate sparrow in the tragical history of Cock Robin:
His aim then he took
But he took it not right.
Our capacity for imperfectness seems absolutely unlimited. The effort taken to achieve success in one direction is from another point of view a dissipation of energy. It is so much power withdrawn from another possible achievement. The most versatile men do not do all things equally well, and while the world calls them successful they are inwardly conscious of their manifold failures. Mr. Balfour as Prime Minister of the British Empire has had much to gratify his ambition, but he takes the public into his confidence and confesses that he is a bitterly disappointed man. For, in addition to other accomplishments, he plays golf, a game that develops a conscience of its own. He plays well, but his conscience tells him that he does not play as well as he might. “I belong,” he says, “to that unhappy class of beings forever pursued by remorse, who are conscious that they threw away in youth opportunities that were open to them of beginning golf at a time of life when alone the muscles can be attuned to the full perfection required by the most difficult game that perhaps exists.”
Surely there must be a way by which such vain regrets may be stilled. Life has its inevitable compromises. We cannot always be at our best. Take such a simple matter as that of masticating our food. Before I had given much thought to it, I should have said that it was something worth doing and worth doing well. When I learned that Mr. Gladstone was accustomed to chew each morsel of food thirty-two times, I thought it greatly to his credit. For a man who had so many other things to do, that seemed enough.
But when I read a book of some three hundred pages containing the whole duty of man in regard to chewing, I was disheartened. Mr. Gladstone appeared to be a mere tyro guilty of bolting his food. “The author has found that one fifth of the midway section of the garden young onion, sometimes called shallot, has required seven hundred and twenty-two mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing.”
The author evidently did his whole duty by that young onion, and yet I should have pardoned him if he had done something less. That doctrine of his about involuntary swallowing being the only kind that is morally justifiable, seems to me to be too austere. If we have to swallow in the end, why not show a cheerful willingness?