The Amateur Spirit

ONE interesting result of the British struggle in South Africa has been a revival among Englishmen of the spirit of self-examination. The unexpected duration and the staggering cost of the war have brought sharply home to them a realization of national shortcomings. When every allowance has been made for the natural difficulties against which the British troops have so gallantly contended, there remains a good deal of incontrovertible and unwelcome evidence of defective preparation, of inadequate training. The War Office maps were incomplete ; the Boer positions were ill reconnoitred ; British officers of long experience were again and again outgeneraled by farmers. Of the many frank and manly endeavors to analyze the causes of such a surprising weakness, one of the most suggestive has been made by the Hon. George C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton College. In an article published not long ago, he inquires whether his countrymen may well be called, not, as formerly, “ a nation of shopkeepers,” but, with more justice, a nation of amateurs. “ Conspicuous as are the virtues of British soldiers and British officers,” he remarks, “ these virtues are essentially the virtues of the amateur, and not of the professional, arising from the native vigor of our national temperament, and not from intelligent education or training.” ¹

The distinction here made between the amateur and the professional is one that, for ordinary purposes, is obvious enough. The amateur, we are accustomed to say, works for love, and not for money. He cultivates an art or a sport, a study or an employment, because of his taste for it; he is attached to it, not because it gives him a living, but because it ministers to his life. Mr. Joseph Jefferson, for instance, is classed as a professional actor and an amateur painter. Charles Dickens was an amateur actor and a professional novelist. Your intermittent political reformer is an amateur. His opponent, the “ ward man,” is a professional; politics being both his life and his living, his art and his constant industry.

In any particular art or sport, it is often difficult to draw a hard-and-fast line between amateur and professional activity. The amateur athlete may be so wholly in earnest as to take risks and to endure hardships which no amount of money would tempt him to undergo. Amateur philanthropy is of great and increasing service in the social organism of the modern community. Many an American carries into his amusement, his avocation, — such as yachting, fancy farming, tarpon fishing, — the same thoroughness, energy, and practical skill that win him success in his vocation.

And yet, as a general rule, the amateur betrays amateurish qualities. He is unskillful because untrained ; desultory because incessant devotion to his hobby is both unnecessary and wearisome ; ineffective because, after all, it is not a vital matter whether he succeed or fail. The amateur actor is usually interesting, at times delightful, and even, as in the case of Dickens, powerful ; his performance gives pleasure to his friends; but, nevertheless, the professional, who must act well or starve, acts very much better. In a country where there is a great leisure class, as the Warden of Merton points out, amateurism is sure to flourish. “ The young Englishman of this great leisure class,” he says, “ is no dandy and no coward, but he is an amateur born and bred, with an amateur’s lack of training, an amateur’s contempt of method, and an amateur’s ideal of life.” The English boy attends school, he adds, with other boys who are amateurs in their studies, and almost professionals in their games ; lie passes through the university with the minimum of industry ; he finds professional and public life in Great Britain crippled by the amateur spirit; in the army, the bar, the church, in agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, there is a contempt for knowledge, an inveterate faith in the superiority of the rule of thumb, a tendency to hold one’s self a little above one’s work.

Similar testimony has recently been given by Mandell Creighton, the late Bishop of London, in a posthumously published address entitled A Plea for Knowledge. “ The great defect of England at present,” confesses the bishop, “ is an inadequate conception of the value of knowledge in itself, and of its importance for the national life. We have a tendency to repose on our laurels ; to adopt the attitude that we are no longer professionals, but high - minded and eclectic amateurs. . . . We do not care to sacrifice our dignity by taking undue care about trifles.” ²

With the validity of such indictments against a whole nation we have no direct concern. But they suggest the importance of the distinction between the amateur and the professional spirit; they show that a realization of this distinction may affect many phases of activity, personal and national, and how far reaching may be its significance for us as we face those new conditions under which the problems of both personal and national life must be worked out.

Amateurs, then, to borrow Mr. Brodrick’s definition, “ are men who are not braced up to a high standard of effort and proficiency by a knowledge that failure may involve ruin, who seldom fully realize the difficulties of success against trained competitors, and who therefore rebel against the drudgery of professional drill and methodical instruction.” One may accept this definition, in all its implications, without ceasing to be aware of the charm of the amateur. For the amateur surely has his charm, and he has his virtues, — virtues that have nowhere wrought more happily for him than here upon American soil. Versatility, enthusiasm, freshness of spirit, initiative, a fine recklessness of tradition and precedent, a faculty for cutting across lots, — these are the qualities of the American pioneer. Not in the Italians of the Renaissance nor in the Elizabethan Englishmen will one find more plasticity of mind and hand than among the plain New Englanders of 1840. Take those men of the Transcendentalist epoch, whose individuality has been fortunately transmitted to us through our literature. They were in love with life, enraptured of its opportunities and possibilities. No matter to what task a man set his hand, he could gain a livelihood without loss of self-respect or the respect of the community. Let him try teaching school, Emerson would advise ; let him farm it awhile, drive a tin peddler’s cart for a season or two, keep store, go to Congress, live “ the experimental life.” Emerson himself could muse upon the oversoul, but he also raised the best Baldwin apples and Bartlett pears in Concord, and got the highest current prices for them in the Boston market. His friend Thoreau supported himself by making sandpaper or lead pencils, by surveying farms, or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans; his true vocation being steadily that of the philosopher, the seeker. The type has been preserved, by the translucent art of Hawthorne, in the person of Holgrave, the daguerreotypist of The House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave was twenty-two, but he had already been a schoolmaster, storekeeper, editor, peddler, dentist. He had traveled in Europe, joined a company of Fourierists, and lectured on mesmerism. Yet “ amid all these personal vicissitudes,” Hawthorne tells us, “ he had never lost his identity. He had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience along with him.”

No doubt there is something humorous, to our generation, in this glorification of the Yankee tin peddler. Yet how much there is to admire in the vivacity, the resourcefulness, the very mobility, of that type of man, who was always in light marching order, and who, by flank attack and feigned retreat and in every disguise of uniform, stormed his way to some sort of moral victory at last! And the moral victory was often accompanied by material victory as well. These men got on, by hook or by crook ; they asked no favors ; they paid off their mortgages, and invented machines, and wrote books, and founded new commonwealths. In war and peace they had a knack for getting things done, and learning the rules afterward.

Nor has this restless, inventive, querying, accomplishing type of American manhood lost its prominence in our political and social structure. The selfmade man is still, perhaps, our most representative man. Native shrewdness and energy and practical capacity — qualities such as the amateur may possess in a high degree — continue to carry a man very far. They have frequently been attended by such good fortune as to make it easy for us to think that they are the only qualities needed for success. Some of the most substantial gains of American diplomacy, for instance, have been made by men without diplomatic training. We have seen within a very few years an almost unknown lawyer, from an insignificant city, called to be the head of the Department of State, where his achievements, indeed, promptly justified his appointment. The conduct of the War Department and the Navy has frequently been intrusted to civilians whose frank ignorance of their new duties has been equaled only by their skill in performing them. The history of American cabinets is, in spite of many exceptions, on the whole, an apotheosis of the amateur. It is the readiest justification of the tin peddler theory, — the theory, namely, that you should first get your man, and then let him learn his new trade by practicing it. “ By dint of hammering one gets to be a blacksmith,” say the French ; and if a blacksmith, why not a postmaster, or a postmaster general, or an ambassador ?

The difficulty with this theory lies in the temptation to exaggerate it. Because we have been lucky thus far, we are tempted to proceed upon the comfortable conviction that if we once find our man, the question of his previous apprenticeship to his calling, or even that of his training in some related field of activity, may safely be ignored. The gambler is in our blood. We like to watch the performance of an untried man in a responsible position, much as we do the trotting of a green horse. The admitted uncertainty of the result enhances our pleasure in the experiment. In literature, just now, we are witnessing the exploitation of the “ young writer.” Lack of experience, of craftsmanship, is actually counted among a fledgeling author’s assets. The curiosity of the public regarding this new, unknown power is counted upon to offset, and more, the recognition of the known power of the veteran writer. Power is indeed recognized as the ultimate test of merit; but there is a widespread tendency to overlook the fact that power is largely conditioned upon skill, and that skill depends not merely upon natural faculty, but upon knowledge and discipline. The popularity of the “ young writer ” is, in short, an illustration of the easy glorification of amateur qualities to the neglect of professional qualities.

This tendency is the more curious because of our pronounced national distaste for ineffectiveness. The undisguisedly amateurish traits of unskillfulness and desultoriness have not been popular here. If we have been rather complaisant toward the jack-of-all-trades, we have never wholly forgotten that he is “ master of none.” In the older New England vernacular, the village ne’er-do-well was commonly spoken of as a “ clever ” fellow ; the adjective was distinctly opprobrious. And indeed, if the connoisseur is the one who knows, and the dilettante the one who only thinks he knows, the amateur is often the one who would like to know, but is too lazy to learn. Accordingly, he keeps guessing, in an easy, careless, “ clever ” fashion, which is agreeable enough when no serious interests are at stake. He has transient affections for this and that department of thought or activity ; like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, he has “ gone into that a good deal at one time.” Mr. Brooke is a delightful person in fiction, but in actual life a great many Mr. Brookes end their career at the town farm. Even this would not in itself be so lamentable a matter, if it were not in the power of a community of Mr. Brookes to create conditions capable of driving the rest of us to the town farm. “ Dilettanteism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur search for truth, — this,” says Carlyle, “ is the sorest sin.”

The amateur search for truth has always flourished, and is likely to flourish always, in the United States. That the quest is inspiriting, amusing, sometimes highly rewarded, one may readily admit. But if it promotes individualism, it also produces the crank. If it brevets us all as philosophers, it likewise brands many of us as fools. Who does not know the amateur economist, with his “ sacred ratios,” or his amiable willingness to “ do something for silver ” ? The amateur sociologist, who grows strangely confused if you ask him to define Sociology ? Popular preachers, who can refute Darwin and elucidate Jefferson “while you wait,”—if you do wait? Amateur critics of art and literature, who have plenty of zeal, but no knowledge of standards, no anchorage in principles ? The lady amateur, who writes verses without knowing prosody, and paints pictures without learning to draw, and performs what she calls “ social service” without training her own children either in manners or religion? Nay, are there not amateur college professors, who walk gracefully through the part, but add neither to the domain of human knowledge nor to the practical efficiency of any pupil ?

But the roll call of these dependents and defectives is long enough. The failures of the amateur search for truth are often brilliant failures. Its occasional successes have often been brilliant, too. Yet the real workaday progress, the solid irretraceable advance in any art or profession, has commonly been made by the professional. He sums up in himself both connoisseurship and craftsmanship. He not only knows, but does. Pasteur was a professional, and Helmholtz, and Huxley. John Marshall was a professional. Mr. John Sargent is a professional, and so is Mr. Secretary Hay.

If the gifted amateur desires to learn his relative rank when compared with a professional, the way is easy. Let him challenge the professional! Play a match at golf against the dour Scotchman who gives lessons for his daily bread. He will beat you, because he cannot afford not to beat you. Shoot against your guide in the North Woods. You will possibly beat him at a target, but he will hit the deer that you have just missed ; you can cast a fly on the lawn much farther than he, but he will take more fish out of the pool. It is his business, your recreation. Some one dear to you is critically ill. It seems cruel to surrender the care of the sick person to a hireling, when you are conscious of boundless love and devotion. But your physician will prefer the trained nurse, because the trained nurse will do what she is told, will keep cool, keep quiet, count the drops accurately, read the thermometer right; because, in short, he can depend upon a professional, and cannot depend upon an amateur.

What is true of the sport, of the art, is even more invariably true in the field of scientific effort. How secure is the course of the Fachmann, who by limiting his territory has become lord of it, who has a fund of positive knowledge upon all the knowable portions of it, and has charted, at least, the deepening water where knowledge sheers off into ignorance ! It is late in the day to confess the indebtedness of our generation to the scientific method. How tonic and heartening, in days of dull routine, has been the example of those brave German masters to whom our American scholarship owes so much ! What industry has been theirs, what confidence in method, what serene indifference to the rivalry of the gifted amateur ! I recall the fine scorn with which Bernhard ten Brink, at Strassburg, used to wave aside the suggestions of his pupils that this or that new and widely advertised book might contain some valuable contribution to his department. “Nay,” he would retort, “ wissenschaftliche Bedeutung hat’s doch nicht.” Many a pretentious book, a popular book, even a very useful book, was pilloried by that quiet sentence, “ It has no scientific significance.” To get the import of that sentence thoroughly into one’s head is worth all it costs to sit at the feet of German scholars. There speaks the true, patient, scientific spirit, whose service to the modern man was perhaps the most highly appraised factor when we of the western world tried to take an inventory of ourselves and our indebtedness, at the dawn of the new century.

For to be able to assess the scientific bearing of the new book, the new fact, upon your own profession proves you a master of your profession. Modern competitive conditions are making this kind of expert knowledge more and more essential. The success of German manufacturing chemists, for example, is universally acknowledged to be due to the scientific attainments of the thousands of young men who enter the manufactories from the great technical schools. The alarm of Englishmen over the recent strides of Germany in commercial rivalry is due to a dawning recognition of the efficacy of knowledge, and of the training which knowledge recommends. It is the well-grounded alarm of the gifted amateur when compelled to compete with the professional. The professional may not be a wholly agreeable antagonist; he may not happen to be a “ clubable ” person; but that fact does not vitiate his record. His record stands.

Is it possible to explain this patent or latent antagonism of the amateur toward the professional ? It is explicable, in part at least, through a comparison not so much of their methods of work — where the praise must be awarded to the professional — as of their characteristic spirit. And here there is much more to be said for the amateur. The difference will naturally be more stalking if we compare the most admirable trait of the amateur spirit with the least admirable trait of the professional spirit.

The cultivated amateur, who touches life on many sides, perceives that the professional is apt to approach life from one side only. It is a commonplace to say that without specialized training and accomplishment the road to most kinds of professional success is closed. Yet, through bending one’s energies unremittingly upon a particular task, it often happens that creation narrows “ in man’s view,” instead of widening. Your famous expert, as you suddenly discover, is but a segment of a man, — overdeveloped in one direction, atrophied in all others. His expertness, his professional functioning, so to speak, is of indisputable value to society, but he himself remains an unsocial member of the body politic. He has become a machine, — as Emerson declared so long ago, “ a thinker, not a man thinking.” He is uninterested, and consequently uninteresting. Very possibly it may not be the chief end of man to afford an interesting spectacle to the observer. And yet so closely are we bound together that a loss of sympathy, of imagination, of free and varied activity, soon insulates the individual, and lessens his usefulness as a member of society. Surely we are playing an interesting comedy, here between heaven and the mire, and we ought to play it in an interested way. We can afford to be human. Scientific Method is a handmaiden whose services have proved indispensable. No one can fill her place. We should raise her wages. But, after all, Personality is the mistress of the house. Method must be taught to know her station, and

No doubt there is a temptation, in such a comparison of qualities and gifts, to dally with mere abstractions. None of us have known a wholly methodized, mechanicalized man. But none the less we may properly endeavor to measure a tendency, and to guard against its excess. There are few observers of American life who believe that specialization has as yet been carried too far. Yet one may insist that the theory of specialized functions, necessitated as it is by modern conditions, and increasingly demanded as it must be as our civilization grows in complexity, needs examination and correction in the interests of true human progress. It is not that we actually meet on the sidewalk some scientific Frankenstein, some marvelously developed special faculty for research or invention or money-making, which dominates and dwarfs all other faculties,— though we often see something that looks very much like it. It is rather that thoughtful people are compelled to ask themselves, How far can this special development — this purely professional habit of mind — proceed without injury to the symmetry of character, without impairing the varied and spontaneous and abundant play of human powers which gives joy to life ? And the prejudice which the amateur feels toward the professional, the more or less veiled hostility between the man who does something for love which another man does for money, is one of those instinctive reactions — like the vague alarm of some wild creature in the woods —which give a hint of danger.

Let us make the very fullest acknowledgment of our debt to the professional spirit. Many of our best inheritances, such as our body of law, represent the steady achievements of professional skill, professional self-sacrifice. The mechanical conveniences and equipments in which the age abounds, all this apparatus for communication and transportation, have been wrought out for us by the most patient, the most concentrated activity of professionals. The young man who is entering medicine, the law, business, the army, the church, finds himself ranked at once by his power to assimilate the professional experience of older men. Some day, let us trust, the young man who desires to serve his country in her civil service, her consular and diplomatic service, will find himself, not, as now, blocked by an amateurish system of rewards for partisan fealty, but upon the road to a genuine professional career. The hope of society, no doubt, depends largely upon those men who are seriously devoting their energies to some form of expert activity. They are the torchbearers, the trained runners who bear the light from stage to stage of the heavenbeholden course. And at least in the immediate future the necessity for unwearying professional endeavor will be more pressing than ever before in the history of the world.

Ours must be, not “ a nation of amateurs,” but a nation of professionals, if it is to hold its own in the coming struggles, — struggles not merely for commercial dominance, but for the supremacy of political and moral ideals. Our period of national isolation, with all it brought of good or evil, has been outlived. The new epoch will place a heavy handicap upon ignorance of the actual world, upon indifference to international usages and undertakings, upon contempt for the foreigner. What is needed is, indeed, knowledge, and the skill that knowledge makes possible. The spirit with which we confront the national tasks of the future should have the sobriety, the firmness, the steady effectiveness, which we associate with the professional.

Yet is it not possible, while thus acknowledging and cultivating the professional virtues, to free ourselves from some of the grosser faults of the mere professional ? The mere professional’s cupidity, for instance, his low aim, his time-serving, his narrowness, his clannish loyalty to his own department only, his lack of imagination, his indifference to the religious and moral passions, to the dreams, hopes, futilities, regrets, of the breathing, bleeding, struggling men and women by his side ? It is not the prizefighter only who brings professionalism into disrepute, nor the jockey that “ pulls ” a horse, the oarsman that “ sells ” a race, the bicyclist that fouls a rival. The taint of professionalism clings to the business man that can think only of his shop, the scholar that talks merely of letters, the politician that asks of the proposed measure, “ What is there in this for me ? ” To counteract all such provinciality and selfishness, such loss of the love of honor in the love of gain, one may rightly plead for some breath of the spirit of the amateur, the amator, the “ man who loves; ” the man who works for the sheer love of working, plays the great complicated absorbing game of life for the sake of the game, and not for his share of the gate money ; the man who is ashamed to win if he cannot win fairly, — nay, who is chivalric enough to grant breathing space to a rival, whether he win or lose !

Is it an impossible ideal, this combination of qualities, this union of the generous spirit of the amateur with the method of the professional ? In the new world of disciplined national endeavor upon which we are entering, why may not the old American characteristics of versatility, spontaneity, adventurousness, still persist? These are the traits that fit one to adjust himself readily to unforeseen conditions, to meet new emergencies. They will be even more valuable in the future than in the past, if they are employed to supplement, rather than to be substituted for, the solid achievements of professional industry. If we are really to lead the world’s commerce, — though that is far from being the only kind of leadership to which American history should teach us to aspire, — it will be the Yankee characteristics, plus the scientific training of the modern man, that will enable us to do it. The personal enthusiasm, the individual initiative, the boundless zest, of the American amateur must penetrate, illuminate, idealize, the brute force, the irresistibly on-sweeping mass, of our vast industrial democracy.

The best evidence that this will happen is the fact that it is already happening. There are amateurs without amateurishness, professionals untainted by professionalism. Many of us are fortunate enough to recognize in some friend this combination of qualities, this union of strict professional training with that free outlook upon life, that human curiosity and eagerness, which are the best endowment of the amateur. Such men are indeed rare, but they are prized accordingly. And one need hardly say where they are most likely to be found. It is among the ranks of those who have received a liberal education. Every higher institution of learning in this country now offers some sort of specialized training. To win distinction in academic work is to come under the dominion of exact knowledge, of approved methods. It means that one is disciplined in the mechanical processes and guided by the spirit of modern science, no matter what his particular studies may have been. The graduates whose acquisitions can most readily be assessed are probably the ones who have specialized most closely, who have already as undergraduates begun to fit themselves for some form of professional career. They have already gained something of the expert’s solid basis of accurate information, the expert’s sureness of hand and eye, the expert’s instinct for the right method.

But this professional discipline needs tempering by another spirit. The highest service of the educated man to our democratic society demands of him breadth of interest as well as depth of technical research. It requires unquenched ardor for the best things, spontaneous delight in the play of mind and character, a many-sided responsiveness that shall keep a man from hardening into a mere high-geared machine. It is these qualities that perfect a liberal education and complete a man’s usefulness to his generation. Taken by themselves, they fit him primarily for living, rather than for getting a living. But they are not to be divorced from other qualities; and even if they were, the educated American can get a living more easily than he can learn how to live. The moral lessons are harder than the intellectual, and faith and enthusiasm, sympathy and imagination, are moral qualities.

Here is some young scholar who has been taught the facts of history, trained to sift historical evidence, to compare historical periods, to trace historical causes ; but has he imagination enough to see into the mind and heart of the historical man ? He has been taught to analyze the various theories of society and government; he has learned to sneer at what he calls “glittering generalities yet has he sympathy enough, moral passion enough, to understand what those glittering generalities have done for the men and the generations that have been willing to die for them ? Such secrets forever elude the cold heart and the calculating brain. But they are understood by the generous youth, by the man who is brave enough to take chances, to risk all for the sake of gaining all. It is for this reason that the amateur football game, for all its brutalities, has taught many a young scholar a finer lesson than the classroom has taught him, namely, to risk his neck for his college ; yet no finer one than the classroom might afford him if his teacher were always an amator, — a lover of virility as well as of accuracy ; a follower not of the letter only, but of the spirit which makes alive. “ Our business in this world,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, — a craftsman who through all his heart-breaking professional toil preserved the invincible gayety of the lover,— “ is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.” In this characteristically Stevensonian paradox there is a perfect and a very noble expression of the amateur spirit. He does not mean, we may be sure, that failure is preferable to success*, but that more significant than either success or failure is the courage with which one rides into the lists. It is his moral attitude toward his work which lifts the workman above the fatalities of time and chance, so that, whatever fortune befall the labor of his hands, the travail of his soul remains undefeated and secure.