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SKETCH OF A CLERK'S DAY.

virtue, in God, is most unfaltering. We cannot all be great sculptors, painters, musicians, men of letters, or successful merchants and wealthy manufacturers. The dishonour and the failure do not lie in the choice of a lowly trade, or even in the unfortunate selection of the wrong vocation; they lie in our not doing the work before us with all our might. It is no disgrace to be a shoemaker; but it is a shame for a shoemaker to make bad shoes.

The infatuation which induces parents to convert their sons into "clerks," in which capacity a wearisome poverty must always be their lot; the delusion that sitting on a stool and adding up columns of figures is more honourable work than "pushing" a large business or carrying on a respectable trade, or than the higher forms of manual labour, must always remain inexplicable. We have met with a very vivid sketch of the ordinary life of a banker's clerk, and have every reason to believe in its accuracy. It does not represent the position as one of epicurean ease or divine independence. He is born, says the writer, to a high stool. He is taught vulgar fractions, patience, and morals, in a suburban academy. At fourteen he shoulders the office quill or "Gillott's Commercial." He copies letters from morning till night, receiving no salary; but he is to be remembered at Christmas. He is out in all weathers; and at twenty is, or is required to be, thoroughly impervious to rain, snow, and sunshine. At last he gets forty pounds per annum. He walks five miles to business and five miles home. He never stirs out without his umbrella. He never exceeds twenty minutes for his dinner. He runs about all day with a big chain round his waist and a gouty bill-book in his breast-pocket. He marries, and asks for an increase of salary. He is told "the house can do without him." He reviews every day a large array of ledgers, and has to "write up" the customers' books before he leaves. He reaches home at nine o'clock, and falls asleep over the yesterday's paper, borrowed from the public-house. He reaches eighty pounds a year. He fancies his fortune is made; but small boots and shoes and large school-bills stop him on the highroad to independence, and bring him no nearer to Leviathan Rothschild. He tries to get "evening employment," but his eyes fail him. He grows old, and learns that

ROUND HOLES AND Ssquare peGS.

39

the firm never pensions. One morning his stool is found to be unoccupied, and a subscription is raised amongst his old companions to pay the expenses of his funeral.

We have been greatly struck by the truth of some homely remarks of an American writer. He is contesting the fallacy that "the three black graces," Law, Physic, and Divinity, must be worshipped by the candidate for honour and respectability; and he observes that "it has spoiled many a good carpenter, done injustice to the sledge and the anvil, cheated the goose and the shears out of their rights, and committed fraud on the corn and the potato field." It is a melancholy fact that thousands have died of broken hearts in these professions who might have prospered at the plough or behind the counter; that thousands, dispirited and hopeless, wistfully gaze on the farmer's healthful and independent calling, or pluck up courage to try their fortune in the Colonies or the United States in the very trade they regarded as "not respectable" when entering upon life; while no inconsiderable numbers are reduced to necessities which humiliate them in their own estimation, rendering the most splendid worldly success a miserable compensation for the sense of degradation which accompanies it, and compelling them to derive from the miseries of their fellow-men the livelihood denied to their legitimate exertions. Hence, in society, we are constantly meeting with men who, conscious of their unfitness for their vocation, and earning their living by their weakness instead of by their strength, are doomed to hopeless infirmity. "If you desire," says Sydney Smith, "to represent the various parts in life by holes in a table of different shapes,—some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,—and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, while the square person has squeezed himself into the round hole."

Is it true that "our wishes are presentiments of our capabilities"? To our thinking the maxim is dangerously delusive. Few of us set any rigid limit to our wishes. In those daydreams which all but the sober and self-contented permit themselves which, let us own, assist us in bearing the burden of our daily life—we are fond of giving full range to our desires, and frequently they aim both high and far. That a

40

66

THE WISH AND THE CAPACITY.

burning wish to become a great musician or a great painter is a proof of the possession of superior artistic genius we cannot admit. Young men fresh from the study of Tennyson are animated by a longing to gain the laureate wreath; but how sadly their capabilities fall short of their ideal, still-born volumes of unread rhymes proclaim. On the other hand, success in any particular pursuit depends undoubtedly in no small degree upon the spirit in which it is embraced. No man can expect to excel if his heart be not in his work. It is true, unquestionably, that Mozart yearned to become a great musician, and that but for this yearning and his passionate love of music he would never have written "Don Giovanni” or Le Nozze di Figaro." But this by no means implies that the "capacity" necessarily accompanies the "wish." If the wish ripen into action, if it inspire a resolute determination to succeed, if it encourage perseverance and energy and calm endurance-then, indeed, it may work out its own fulfilment. Handel practising on his clavichord at midnight in a remote attic was a true foreshadowing of Handel the composer of "The Messiah;" not because he wished to become a great musician, but because he gave himself up heart and soul to the study of the art he loved. So with the boy Bach, who copied intricate pieces of music by moonlight because he was denied a candle. Here was the resolution as well as the desire, and the patient labour as well as the natural genius.

Whatever our aims in life, let us take care, at all events, that they are not unworthy of honest men. Do not let us set before ourselves a low mark. For instance, do not let us live and strive simply that we may "get on in the world," but to the intent that we may turn to the best account the talents with which God has endowed us, that we may do our duty as men and Christians, each within his proper sphere. We do not desire to discourage an honourable ambition; every healthy soul seeks to rise; but we pity those who suffer that ambition to overmaster them. To work for social advancement is nothing wrong. A man may profitably work for money, since money is a means to an end; but wealth and social position are, after all, the poorest imaginable ideals, and will hardly excite the aspirations of any generous nature. A contemporary essayist has some judicious observations on true ends of life; on the objects for which it is fitting that men should live and toil; on

A CONGENIAL CAREER ESSENTIAL.

41

the definite purpose that should inspire their studious youth and animate the efforts of their maturer years. "Why do we consume our nights and days in study? Why do we devote to toil and thought the bright hours of life's sweet spring?" These are the questions we should put to our hearts in the privacy of the closet. For what end do we work? What motive stimulates us? To what goal are our steps directed? We repeat that it is a vulgar and degrading ambition which endeavours simply to secure "a respectable position" in life. We have no sympathy with the man who disregards the higher excellences of knowledge, and fails to appreciate the sublimity of patience, resolution, self-denial; "Soul-strengthening

patience and sublime control." It is "the struggle" which ennobles us, and not "the prize." He who thinks only of "the prize" will probably fail in "the struggle;" for, wanting the inspiration of a lofty and exalting impulse, his heart may well faint before the obstacles which Fortune accumulates in the aspirant's path. Our admiration should and must be reserved for the heroic effort; and when we recognise that such an effort has been or is being made, we should not wait for failure or success, but bestow our hearty sympathy on the courageous and honest worker.

It has been said that "trifles light as air" often decide a young man's career; and this may be true in the sense that a spark may destroy a town if it alight upon a train of gunpowder. Where the will, and the sympathy, and the capacity already exist, a very slight impetus will be sufficient to guide them into the proper channel. But unless the career be in harmony with the natural aptitude, it will prove neither prosperous nor tranquil. Dryden tells us that

"What the child admired,

The youth endeavoured, and the man acquired;"

and the poet's saying embodies a true philosophy. The labour that is to ripen into a golden harvest must spring from an innate sense and be carried out by a spontaneous will. "We are not surprised," remarks a popular writer, "to hear from a schoolfellow of the Chancellor Somers that he was a weakly boy, who always had a book in his hand, and never looked up at the play of his companions; to learn from his affectionate biographer that Hammond at Eton sought opportunities of

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CAUSES AND CALLINGS.

stealing away to say his prayers; to read that Tournefort forsook his college class that he might search for plants in the neighbouring fields; or that Smeaton, in petticoats, was discovered on the top of his father's barn in the act of fixing the model of a windmill which he had constructed. These early traits of character are such as we expect to find in the cultivated lawyer who turned the eyes of his age upon Milton; in the Christian whose life was one varied strain of devout praise; in the naturalist who enriched science by his discoveries; and in the engineer who built the Eddystone lighthouse." In each of these cases we see that the calling, however seemingly determined by accidental and external causes, was exactly that which would have been the result of deliberate choice. Nelson became a great seaman, not because when a boy he played with a miniature ship on the village pond, but because he had a natural disposition towards "a life on the ocean wave." In his boyhood Burns eagerly drank in the stories of witches and hobgoblins with which the old cronies of his father's fireside regaled him. But these did not make him a poet; they simply fed and fostered the poetic faculty which slumbered in his breast. George Law, the farmer's boy, chanced upon an old volume containing the history of a farmer's son who went out into the world to seek his fortune, and "after long years returned home laden with wealth. But it was not this narrative which made Law a great steamship owner and merchant prince, however it may have operated as an incentive to his exertions. It was the firm, manly strain of his character, combined with the energy of a quick and lucid intellect.

It is told of the admirable philanthropist, Thomas Clarkson, that, competing for a prize essay at the University of Cambridge, he had given no consideration to its theme, which was May one man lawfully enslave another?" But happening one day to see in the newspapers an advertisement of a "History of Guinea," he hastened to London and purchased the work, which revealed to him the horrible cruelties practised upon the victims of the accursed slave-trade. Coming one day," he writes, "in sight of Wade's Mill in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the wayside, and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind that, if the contents of this essay were true, it was time that some person should see those calamities to their end." Thus was Clarkson