thing. No doubt there is much truth in this
putting of the case, though it really begs the main
question. But even if we grant that in the larger
operations of commerce a certain type of genius is
required, we must remember that the men of this order
are few in number. Every lord of commerce is
attended by a vast retinue of slaves. Very few
of these humble servitors of commerce can ever hope
to rise from the ranks into supreme command.
They must labour to create the wealth of the successful
merchant as a private soldier suffers wounds and hardships
that fame may crown his general. Do these men
share the higher privileges of life? Is not
life with them the getting of a living rather than
living? Nay, more; is it not the getting of a
living for some one else?
The merchant-prince fulfils himself, for his highest
powers of intelligence are daily taxed to the uttermost;
but the case is very different with that vast army
of subordinates, whom we see marching every morning
in an infinite procession to the various warehouses
and offices of London. I have often wondered
at their cheerfulness when I have recollected the
nature of their life. For they bring to their
daily tasks not the whole of themselves, but a mere
segment of themselves; some small industrious faculty
which represents them, or misrepresents them, at the
tribunal of those who ask no better thing of them.
Few of them are doing the best that they can do, and
they know it. They are not doing it because
the world does not ask them to do it; indeed, the
world takes care that they shall have no opportunity
of doing it. A certain faculty for arithmetic
represents a man who has many higher faculties; and
thus the man is forced to live by one capacity which
is perhaps his least worthy and significant.
This is not the case in what we call the liberal professions
and the arts. The architect, the barrister,
the humblest journalist needs his whole mind for his
task, and hence his work is a delight. The artist,
if he be a true artist, does the one thing that he
was born to do, and so ’the hours pass away
untold, without chagrin, and without weariness,’
nor would he wish them to pass otherwise. Many
times as I took my way to the dreary labours of my
desk I stopped to watch, and sometimes to talk with,
a smiling industrious little Frenchman, who repaired
china and bronzes in a dingy shop in Welbeck Street.
He was an expert at his trade; knew all the distinctive
marks of old china, and could assign with certainty
the right date of any piece of bronze he handled; and
to hear him discourse on these things would have been
a liberal education to a budding connoisseur.
I never knew a man so indefatigably happy in his
work; his eye lit up at any special glow of colour
or delicacy of design; he used his tools as though
he loved them; and if he dreamed at night, I doubt
not that his canopies were coloured with the hues of
Sevres, and that bronze angels from the hand of Benvenuto
stood about his bed. Plainly the man was happy
because his work engaged his whole attention; and
to every cunning rivet that he fashioned he gave the
entire forces of his mind. Here was a man who
not merely got a living but lived; and I, chained
to my desk, knew well enough that his life was much
more satisfactory than mine.
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