"That's what I want you to tell me," he returned."You set up for understanding human nature, it's a mystery to me.In my place, you would do as I do; you know that.If somebody left you a hundred thousand pounds to-morrow, you would start a newspaper, or build a theatre--some damn-fool trick for getting rid of the money and giving yourself seventeen hours' anxiety a day; you know you would."I hung my head in shame.I felt the justice of the accusation.It has always been my dream to run a newspaper and own a theatre.
"If we worked only for what we could spend," he went on, "the City might put up its shutters to-morrow morning.What I want to get at the bottom of is this instinct that drives us to work apparently for work's own sake.What is this strange thing that gets upon our back and spurs us?"A servant entered at that moment with a cablegram from the manager of one of his Austrian mines, and he had to leave me for his study.
But, walking home, I fell to pondering on his words.WHY this endless work? Why each morning do we get up and wash and dress ourselves, to undress ourselves at night and go to bed again? Why do we work merely to earn money to buy food; and eat food so as to gain strength that we may work? Why do we live, merely in the end to say good-bye to one another? Why do we labour to bring children into the world that they may die and be buried?
Of what use our mad striving, our passionate desire? Will it matter to the ages whether, once upon a time, the Union Jack or the Tricolour floated over the battlements of Badajoz? Yet we poured our blood into its ditches to decide the question.Will it matter, in the days when the glacial period shall have come again, to clothe the earth with silence, whose foot first trod the Pole? Yet, generation after generation, we mile its roadway with our whitening bones.So very soon the worms come to us; does it matter whether we love, or hate? Yet the hot blood rushes through our veins, we wear out heart and brain for shadowy hopes that ever fade as we press forward.
The flower struggles up from seed-pod, draws the sweet sap from the ground, folds its petals each night, and sleeps.Then love comes to it in a strange form, and it longs to mingle its pollen with the pollen of some other flower.So it puts forth its gay blossoms, and the wandering insect bears the message from seed-pod to seed-pod.
And the seasons pass, bringing with them the sunshine and the rain, till the flower withers, never having known the real purpose for which it lived, thinking the garden was made for it, not it for the garden.The coral insect dreams in its small soul, which is possibly its small stomach, of home and food.So it works and strives deep down in the dark waters, never knowing of the continents it is fashioning.
But the question still remains: for what purpose is it all?
Science explains it to us.By ages of strife and effort we improve the race; from ether, through the monkey, man is born.So, through the labour of the coming ages, he will free himself still further from the brute.Through sorrow and through struggle, by the sweat of brain and brow, he will lift himself towards the angels.He will come into his kingdom.
But why the building? Why the passing of the countless ages? Why should he not have been born the god he is to be, imbued at birth with all the capabilities his ancestors have died acquiring? Why the Pict and Hun that _I_ may be? Why _I_, that a descendant of my own, to whom I shall seem a savage, shall come after me? Why, if the universe be ordered by a Creator to whom all things are possible, the protoplasmic cell? Why not the man that is to be?
Shall all the generations be so much human waste that he may live?
Am I but another layer of the soil preparing for him?
Or, if our future be in other spheres, then why the need of this planet? Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive?
Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank.Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost.Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries.Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons.Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon.What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him.But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world.So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living.