HUMDRUM OCCUPATIONS. T HE Prince of Wales, in the interesting little
speech which he made at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, last Satur- day, in opening the National Workmen's Exhibition, lamented the effect of the subdivision of labour in depriving the labourer of any opportunity of taking pride in his work. If a man only makes a small part of any product, he said,—for instance, the head to a pin, or even the pin to a head,—he can hardly throw his mind, still less his soul, into that very frag- mentary achievement. The consequence is that the maker of such fragments finds it impossible to express his higher natnre in the work by which he lives. He becomes a mere mechanic, a mere drudge ; and though the consumer benefits, and benefits largely, by this subdivision of labour, getting both vastly cheaper and generally vastly more effective products by means of it, the operative suffers, having nothing to do into which he can really pour his heart and soul. The Prince of Wales is quite right in his inference ; but it may fairly be doubted whether to the majority of men it is a great misfortune to have an occupation which does not absorb the attention and elicit the character of the man, as any artistic occupation absorbs his attention and elicits his character. Are humdrum occupations without great advantages ? Consider only that almost all occu- pations, even when requiring at first very considerable skill and delicacy of manipulation, tend to become humdrum so soon as the art is acquired of doing them with the highest efficiency. Unless the method of doing them has to be varied in every separate case, the art soon becomes a sort of tact hardly requiring the serious attention of the artificer. Look at a woman with even the most elaborate fancy-work. As soon as her fingers are well trained to it, and discharge their function as they ought, you see that she hardly needs to think at all of what she is doing, and that heart and soul wander off to the topics which interest her most. You see a smile steal over her face as she remembers her children's quaint little vagaries, or she sighs as she thinks of the dying mother or the anxious husband, Her heart and soul are no longer in the mere work, elaborate though it be. The stitch has been thoroughly learnt, the practice of it is merely automatic,—" reflex action," as the physiologists call it,— and the heart and soul are at liberty to expatiate on any subject which 'most deeply interests her. In a word, even the difficult technique in which she is engaged, has become for her a humdrum occupation. Now, when Nature takes so much pains to reduce the organisation of even the highest skill to an automatic process, is it likely that there can be any great misfortune in the mere fact that a constantly increasing proportion of the work of the world tends to become automatic, and falls naturally into the character of humdrum work We suspect that it is no misfortune at all, that it may be on the whole a beneficent provision for liberating the heart and soul of the worker to dwell on the class of subjects which best feed—or, at all events, in the higher class of minds best feed—the heart or the imagination. We remember bearing bow three sisters, all of them women of a good deal of intelligence and warmth of character, were once comparing their favourite occupations. One of them said she enjoyed her music so much ; another that reading poetry was her chief delight ; while the third, and certainly the cleverest of the three, said : "Well, for my part, there is nothing that soothes me so much as patching an old chemise." The truth was that that not very intel- lectual occupation set her mind and heart free to dwell on the thoughts and objects which most deeply interested her, while at the same time giving her the soothing feeling that she was doing something useful, and contributing to the economy and comfort of the household. Indeed, we doubt very much whether it is either always, or often, a great blessing to have for your chief work in life that which takes up your whole attention, and admits of no excursions beyond its range. It may be a very great blessing when the subjects of thought on which the mind chiefly dwells are of a very painful and unnerving kind. But in nine eases out of ten, this is not so ; and the only effect of an occupation which concentrates the whole energy of the mind, is to exclude from a man's thoughts those casual glimpses of his fellow-creatures' interests and feelings by which mainly he comes to understand them, and to realise that there are a good many competing interests in the world, and that he is not the very centre of creation. We believe that what are called the engrossing and.
intellectual occupations are by no means those which most promote the health and unselfishness of the soul. As it is not an engrossed mind which catches the most vivid glimpses of the beauty of Nature, so it is not an engrossed mind which catches the most vivid glimpses of the needs, and characteristic attitudes, and unsatisfied desires of the people about us. What Wordsworth says of Nature is equally true of man :— "Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress ; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness."
It is humdrum occupations which best minister to thie "wise passiveness." Who has not experienced those flashes of new insight in the course of a solitary walk or ride or other purely automatic proceeding, which seldom, or never, come to us when engaged in what requires our full attention ? It is the humdrum occupation which best liberates the heart and soul and imagination of man to muse on that which fills it with life and energy. From Joseph and David onwards, how many star-gazing shepherds have become poets or astronomers or shepherds of the people in the higher sense P And though, of course, these greater results of humdrum occupations are relatively rare, how much of the humanity of man has grown up in the musings on each others' needs and interests which the soothing humdrum occupations of knitting or netting, or the carpenter's shop, or the cobbler's awl, or the tailor's or seam- stress's needle, promote. We cannot believe that Nature takes so much pains to organise into a sort of automatic mechanism such large portions of our life, if that process does not tend to stimulate the growth of the gentler affections and to give the heart and soul a liberty and spontaneousness of insight they could not otherwise acquire. If even the sharp Yankee enjoys the perfectly useless whittling of a stick for the purpose of soothing his mind with the mere appearance of work, while his active wits are engaged in pondering the next attack he shall make on the witless world, we can well understand how a use- ful occupation which is purely humdrum and makes no draft upon the attention, soothes the mind while it muses on the growing needs of children or friends, or on the strange medley of human joys and griefs, and hopes and wants. Engrossing occupations frequently injure the mind by the self-importance they are apt to produce, and still more, perhaps, by rendering it unfit for those leisurely side-glances on the world about us, in which the best experience of man is gained. Even the poet's highest thoughts, even Shakespeare's finest reveries, seem to be the fruit not of hard study, but of those careless flashes of insight which it is the best effect of unexacting humdrum occupations to promote. The men who throw their whole heart and life into their ordinary occupations are very apt to have a poorer reserve of vividness and insight for their human relations, than those who feed their souls on life's various visions while they occupy their fingers with a useful and fruitful but unexacting toil. And even if the work they do be hardly of a kind in which they can take pride, may not that be all the better for theza? After all, we are in many respects only parts of a great whole, and to feel that we are only parts of a great whole, is very good as promoting humility, and because it does not stimulate our vanity and excite our self-approval.
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