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AMATEUR SPIRIT
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The Riverside Uplift Series
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT. By Bliss PERRY.
THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT. By
GBORGB H. PALMER.
SELF-CULTIVATION IN ENGLISH. By
GBORGE H. PALMBR.
TRADES AND PROFESSIONS. By GEORGE
H. PALMER.
THE CULTIVATED MAN.
W. ELIOT.
By CHARLES
WHITHER? ANONYMOUS.
CALM YOURSELF. By GBORGB L. WAL-
TON.
Each, so cents, net.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
BY
BLISS PERRY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
MDCCCCXV
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY BLISS PERRY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Reples
nat. Bibi
9-17-37
34760
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
toy Le-toz-
bo
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
ONE interesting result of the British struggle
in South Africa was a revival among English-
men of the spirit of self-examination. The unex-
pected duration and the staggering cost of the
war brought sharply home to them a realization
of national shortcomings. When every allowance
was made for the natural difficulties against which
the British troops so gallantly contended, there
remained a good deal of incontrovertible and un-
welcome evidence of defective preparation, of in-
adequate training. The War Office maps were
incomplete; the Boer positions were ill reconnoi-
tred; 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 was made by the Hon. George
C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton College. In an
article published in 1900 he inquired whether his
countrymen may well be called, not, as formerly,
4
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
"1
“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 vir-
tues of the amateur, and not of the professional,
arising from the native vigor of our national tem-
perament, and not from intelligent education or
training."
The distinction here made between the ama-
teur and the professional is one that, for ordi-
nary 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 polit-
ical reformer is an amateur. His opponent, the
“ward man,” is a professional; politics being
both his life and his living, his art and his con-
stant industry.
1 The Nineteenth Century, October, 1900.
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
5
In any particular art or sport, it is often diffi-
cult 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. This earnestness
has seldom, if ever, been carried so far as it is in
our American athletic contests of the present day.
Here, for instance, is the testimony of one of
the members of the Oxford-Cambridge Golfing
Society's team, which won so many victories on
the American links in the summer of 1903:
“ Apart from the American phraseology and
such minor distinctions, golf as played across
the Atlantic is fundamentally different from the
English, and more especially the Scotch variety
of the game. At bottom the game in America is
a business. At bottom the game in England
is a pleasure, a relaxation, and a means of
taking pleasant exercise. No doubt from its en-
thralling nature golf in England has devotees to
whom the game is a pleasure that's all but pain,'
'
but even so, the attitude of this minority is dif-
ferent from the great bulk of American players
who have set golf upon such a pedestal that it
6
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
.
has dominated them as a pain that is almost a
pleasure.' ...
“ The whole attitude towards golf is one of
comparison, just as in other branches of life.
The American is intensely interested in the tall-
est building, the richest man, the longest street,
the fastest train, and a host of other such combi-
nations which sound like exercises out of an ele-
mentary German grammar. It is imagined that
there is a list, at the head of which is the best
player, with the rest below him in descending
scale of efficiency. ...
“ The title of champion does not carry with it
honor and congratulation, but rather liability to
attack and disparagement if the holder does not
win every single match or competition in which
he plays. This criticism may be important from
the business point of view of the professional, as
an advertisement, but it cannot possibly affect an
amateur who has nothing whatever to gain or lose
pecuniarily by being champion. The principle is
to put a man at the head of a list and then tear
him down by all available means. . . . This con-
tinual golf-playing with an object does away with
the light-hearted and cheery matches and four-
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
7
somes which are the main part of golf in the
United Kingdom. The game under this treatment
easily loses its title to be called a game, and be-
comes a serious proposition, blighted with respon-
sibilities and overburdened with care. There is
no relaxation in golf of this kind, but only in-
creased consumption of both physical and mental
energy.” 1
And here is a Harvard rowing-man writing
with admirable frankness in a recent number of
The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, under the
title “ Sport or Business”: “I have known but
one 'Varsity athlete (I refer particularly to foot-
ball and rowing as the most strenuous branches
of our sport) who admitted for a moment that
he went out for the fun he got from the practice
and the contest. ...
“ As the thing now stands a man may have the
best of personal reasons for not playing, but if
he is a good athlete his duty to the college de-
mands a sacrifice of these. The duty to get Yale
beaten is just now reckoned to be the athlete's sole
duty, while his duty to his present and future self
looms small in the background, or vaguely in the
1 J. A. T. Bramston in Golf.
a
8
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
-
a
middle distance. It is hard lines for men who are
unable to adapt themselves to such a perspective,
and who are made to feel ashamed of this as of a
weakness. They bear indeed the athlete's bur-
den.' And there are too many such men, - men
who thoroughly dislike their work under the pre-
sent extreme conditions, moral as well as physical,
and who do it only from a vague feeling that it is
"up to them' to stake their persons in the gen-
eral obligation to organize victory.
“The spirit that makes a man, when he has once
undertaken a thing, put it through to a finish and
win out no matter what it costs (and this was
once given as a definition of the Yale spirit), is
an excellent maxim for business or politics, and
one that is frequently heard in defense of the
present teeth-gritting state of affairs between
Harvard and Yale. But such a maxim cannot be
applied to athletics. It means the death of ath-
letics. Its place is in the prize-ring or anywhere
you please save in a branch of activity which is
essentially a recreation. The true amateur ath-
lete, the true sportsman, is one who takes up sport
for the fun of it and the love of it, and to whom
success or defeat is a secondary matter so long as
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
9
a
-
the play is good. ... Rivalry is a vital element of
sport; it is from doing the thing well, doing the
thing handsomely, doing the thing intelligently
that one derives the pleasure which is the essence
of sport. Even more vital than the rivalry itself
is the checking of its fierceness and bitterness by
the graciousness of gentlemanly feeling. It must
be remembered that pure rivalry is fighting, and
the more its part is magnified in sport the more
sport takes on the nature of a fight, — the nature
of the sport which has come to exist between
Harvard and Yale. We have to admit that there
are some of us who prefer fighting-fun to sport,
and there is no doubt that the fighting is a healthy
discipline; but the majority of us do not, and
there is no reason why our athletics should be
moulded to suit the taste of the former, - that
we should be made to take our fun with all these
convulsions and hysterics. Yet just as long as we
meet the present-day Yale such will be the state
of things. ...
“I am well aware of the construction which
a part of the public would put upon Harvard's
giving up contests with Yale. “Hopeless of vic-
tory,' it would be repeated, and like a sulky
-
10
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
a
child, she won't play!' To make my own mean-
ing clear let me repeat that not the loss of vic-
tories, but fear of the loss of the true amateur
spirit here would be what would urge Harvard to
such a course. I have rowed against Yale three
times, twice in minor crews which beat her, and
once in a university boat which she beat hand-
somely. I should be willing to see her beat Har-
vard incessantly if the business and hysterical
elements of the thing could be left out. And for
these elements it is by no means fair to blame
Yale exclusively, though her spirit' is popularly
understood to include them. The contestants if
left to themselves would not develop this spirit
to such excess. It comes from outside pressure,
from the papers, the graduates, the non-athletic
,
undergraduates, the crowd of betting toughs who
turn up at every important game, and, in general,
the false friends of sport.'”1
'
The athletic contests of zealous undergraduates
are of course but one illustration of the earnest-
ness which the amateur may carry into every
department of life. Amateur philanthropy, for
1 William James, Jr., in The Harvard Graduates' Magazine,
December, 1903.
"
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
11
-
example, is of great and increasing service in
the social organism of the modern community.
Many an American brings to 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 un-
trained ; 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 flour-
ish. “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
12
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
attends school, he adds, with other boys who are
amateurs in their studies, and almost professionals
in their games; he passes through the university
with the minimum of industry; he finds profes-
sional and public life in Great Britain crippled
by the amateur spirit; in the army, the bar, the
church, in agriculture, manufacturing, and com-
merce, there is a contempt for knowledge, an in-
veterate 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 also been given by Man-
dell 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 inade-
quate 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 profes-
sionals, but high-minded and eclectic amateurs.
We do not care to sacrifice our dignity by
taking undue care about trifles.” 1
With the validity of such indictments against
1 Contemporary Review, April, 1901.
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
13
a whole nation we have no direct concern. But
they suggest the importance of the distinction be-
tween the amateur and the professional spirit.
They show that a realization of this distinction
may affect many phases of activity, personal and
national. They indicate how far reaching may
be its significance for us Americans 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 sel-
dom 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
-
14
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
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 plas-
ticity of mind and hand than among the plain
Americans of 1840. Take those men of the Tran-
scendentalist epoch, whose individuality has been
fortunately transmitted to us through our litera-
ture. 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 live-
lihood without loss of self-respect or the respect of
the community. Let him try teaching school, Emer-
son would advise; let him farm it a while, 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
sand-paper or lead pencils, by surveying farms,
or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans; his
true vocation being steadily that of the philoso-
pher, the seeker. The type has been preserved,
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
15
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 school-
master, storekeeper, editor, peddler, dentist. He
had traveled in Europe, joined a company of
Fourierists, and lectured on mesmerism. Yet
“ amid all these personal vicissitudes,” Haw-
thorne 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 accom-
panied by material victory as well. These men
got on, by hook or by crook; they asked no
favors ; they paid off their mortgages, and in-
vented machines, and wrote books, and founded
new commonwealths. In war and peace they had
16
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
-
a knack for getting things done, and learning the
rules afterward.
Nor has this restless, inventive, querying, ac-
complishing type of American manhood lost its
prominence in our political and social structure.
The self-made man is still, perhaps, our most re-
presentative 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 in-
stance, 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 case of Judge
Day is by no means unique. 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
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
17
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 temp-
tation 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 apprentice-
ship to his calling, or even that of his training in
some related field of activity, may safely be ig-
nored. 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 ex-
ploitation of the “young writer.” Lack of experi-
ence, of craftsmanship, is actually counted among
a fledgeling author's assets. The curiosity of the
18
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
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 nat-
ural 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 ineffective-
ness. 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. Accord-
.
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
19
ingly, 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 flour-
ished, 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 willing.
ness to “ do something for silver”? The amateur
20
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
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 pic-
tures 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 teachers who walk grace-
fully through the part, but add neither to the do-
main of human knowledge nor to the practical
efficiency of any pupil ?
But the roll-call of these dependents and defec-
tives 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 irre-
traceable 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
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
21
a
Huxley. John Marshall was a professional jurist.
Mr. John Sargent is a professional painter of por-
traits, and Mr. Secretary Hay is a professional
diplomatist.
If the gifted amateur desires to learn his rela-
tive 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 accu-
rately, read the thermometer right; because, in
short, he can depend upon a professional, and can-
not depend upon an amateur.
22
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
a
What is true of the sport, of the art, is even
more invariably true in the field of scientific ef-
fort. 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 con-
fess 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 Ameri-
can 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 Bern-
hard 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 Be-
deutung 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
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
23
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 our-
selves and our indebtedness, at the dawn of the
twentieth 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 profes-
sion. Modern competitive conditions are making
this kind of expert knowledge more and more
essential. The success of German manufactur-
ing chemists, for example, is universally acknow-
ledged to be due to the scientific attainments of
the thousands of young men who enter the manu-
factories from the great technical schools. The
alarm of Englishmen over the recent strides of
Germany in commercial rivalry is due to a dawn-
ing 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
24
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
antagonist; he may not happen to be a “club-
“
able” 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 profes-
sional ? 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
striking 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 com-
monplace to say that without specialized training
and accomplishment the road to most kinds of
professional success is closed. Yet, through bend-
ing one's energies unremittingly upon a particu-
lar task, it often happens that creation narrows
“in man's view," instead of widening. Your
famous expert, as you suddenly discover, is but a
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
25
.
-
segment of a man, — overdeveloped in one direc-
tion, atrophied in all others. His expertness, his
professional functioning, so to speak, is of indis-
putable 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 sta-
tion, and
“She is the second, not the first."
No doubt there is a temptation, in such a com-
26
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
parison 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 ten-
dency, 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 condi-
tions, and increasingly demanded as it must be
while 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 Franken-
stein, 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 profes-
sional 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
-
-
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
27
prejudice which the amateur feels toward the
professional, the more or less veiled hostility be-
tween 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 ac-
tivity 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 ser-
vice, her consular and diplomatic service, will find
himself, not as now, blocked by an amateurish
system of rewards for partisan fealty, but upon
28
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
the road to a genuine professional career. The
hope of society, no doubt, depends largely upon
those men who are seriously devoting their en-
ergies to some form of expert activity. They
are the torch-bearers, the trained runners who
bear the light from stage to stage of the heaven-
beholden 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.
“ Cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker incessanter line;
The din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream."
a
-
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 igno-
rance of the actual world, upon indifference to
international usages and undertakings, upon con-
tempt for the foreigner. What is needed is, in-
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
29
deed, knowledge, and the skill that knowledge
makes possible. The spirit with which we con-
front 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 acknowledg-
ing 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-serv-
ing, his narrowness, his clannish loyalty to his
own department only? How often he lacks im-
agination! How indifferent he may show himself
to the religious and moral passion, to the dreams,
hopes, futilities, regrets of the breathing, bleed-
ing, struggling men and women by his side! It
is not the prize-fighter only who brings profession-
alism into disrepute. The jockey who “pulls” a
horse, the oarsman who “sells" a race, the bicy-
clist who fouls a rival, are condemned even by a
mob of “sporting men.” But the taint of profes-
sionalism clings also to the business man who can
think only of his shop, the scholar who talks
merely of letters, the politician who asks of the
proposed measure,
" What is there in this for
>
30
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
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 com-
plicated 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 !
r 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, sponta-
neity, 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 supple-
ment, rather than to be substituted for, the solid
achievements of professional industry. If we are
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
31
-
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 as-
pire, - 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-sweep-
ing mass, of our vast industrial democracy.
The best evidence that this will happen is the
fact that it is already happening. There are
here and there 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 ac-
cordingly. 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 edu-
cation. Every higher institution of learning in
32
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
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 disci-
plined 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 ex-
pert's instinct for the right method.
But this professional discipline needs temper-
ing by another spirit. The highest service of the
educated man in 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 respon-
siveness that shall keep a man from hardening
into a mere high-geared machine. It is these
qualities that perfect a liberal education and
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
33
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 in-
tellectual, and faith and enthusiasm, sympathy
and imagination, are moral qualities.
Here, for example, 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 sym-
'
pathy enough, moral passion enough, to under-
stand 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,
34
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT
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 suc-
ceed, 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 fail-
ure 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.
-
...
Che Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U.S. A
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
DEC 3 0 1999
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 03054 1919
Yas