A MAN'S OWN
The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic impossibility.
The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.
... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a dining-table—the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way, like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely, shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.
"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just now. It is seeing us through these hard days."
But I missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is, my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work, published in the book called Midstream.
"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man who has found his work—and the splendid discovery invariably follows, that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising; because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.
"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work. No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.
"I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his daily task—and watching for his own among them.
"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness for buying cheap and selling dear—if as a race we were lifted into our own work.