and of action.  He finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him, executive, thorough-going, careful of details, full of drudgery and obedience to orders.  Everybody is ahead of him.  Just now he was a senior, at the top of the world he knows and reigned in, a finished product and pattern of good form.  Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his first school year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules—­at sea amid crosswinds, and a bit seasick withal.  Presently, if he be made of stuff that will shake into shape and fitness, he settles to his tasks and is comfortable.  He has come to himself:  understands what capacity is, and what it is meant for; sees that his training was not for ornament or personal gratification, but to teach him how to use himself and develop faculties worth using.  Henceforth there is a zest in action, and he loves to see his strokes tell.

The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city, a big and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic boy must stand puzzled for a little how to use his placid and unjaded strength.  It happens, too, though in a deeper and more subtle way, to the man who marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather.  Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was “an amateur at life,” and wit and wisdom are married in the jest.  A man who lives only for himself has not begun to live—­has yet to learn his use, and his real pleasure, too, in the world.  It is not necessary he should marry to find himself out, but it is necessary he should love.  Men have come to themselves serving their mothers with an unselfish devotion, or their sisters, or a cause for whose sake they forsook ease and left off thinking of themselves.  If is unselfish action, growing slowly into the high habit of devotion, and at last, it may be, into a sort of consecration, that teaches a man the wide meaning of his life, and makes of him a steady professional in living, if the motive be not necessity, but love.  Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no mere drudge ever made a professional of himself; that demands a higher spirit and a finer incentive than his.

III

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit for.  It is only then that he knows of what he is capable and what his heart demands.  And, assuredly, no thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.  That alone seems to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood.  And so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden of other people’s business.  Their powers are put out at interest, and they get usury in kind.  They are like men multiplied.  Each counts manifold.  Men who live with an eye only upon what is their own are dwarfed beside them—­seem fractions while they are integers.  The trustworthiness of men trusted seems often to grow with the trust.