Essay No. 24
Thoroughness
BY
The Rev. H. B. Gray, D.D.
(Late Warden of Bradfield College, Berks.)
IN an age when life was simple, and when personal safety was less secure than at present, men learned to depend on themselves, and to lean very little on other people. The result was thoroughness in aim and act. In our own day, when life is complex, and when Society implies the dependence of each on the other, men have gradually lost that capacity for being thorough which has marked the greatest lives in all history.
It was a Preacher of old time who gave the in-junction : "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
A modern Statesman has bequeathed to our own nation the same principle : " Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well."
If modern society has lost that capacity, it has lost also with it the capacity for producing a breed of great men.
And if this assumption be true, it is specially applicable to modern youth of both sexes. It is
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difficult enough in any case for a boy or girl, from the very incompleteness of their character, to be thorough. For in what are called our moral move-ments, there are two parts which prompt us to speak and to act. They are : (1) the will; (2) the intellect. Now it is quite possible for a boy or girl to have a good will, and yet not possess a sufficient intellect to be thorough. Thoroughness requires imagination and intellect as well as good will.
That fact is seen often in uneducated persons who are grown up. Whenever we get into contact with them, we find there is something lacking in them which we ourselves who are educated possess in greater measure, however imperfectly. They have not the power to be thorough. They put out as it were a little finger to the work which they have to do, or, at any rate, only half their manhood. But they are unable (to use a popular phrase) to "put their whole back " into anything. And so they com¬paratively fail. They cannot become leaders of men.
There is an old saying that "genius is the tran-scendent capacity for taking trouble "—a saying not true if it merely means doggedly working mechanic¬ally through the daily routine of life's duties, but most true if it means (1) the ability to picture before¬hand all those details which are essential to the success of the project at which we aim, and, added to that (2), the force of character determining us to carry out all these details to reach the end in view.
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That is true thoroughness—which is only the Saxon word for penetration—the ability to foresee and to act on our foresight. There is a story of the mighty hunter, who, when asked how he managed to accomplish seemingly most impossible leaps, replied : "I throw my heart over, and my horse follows." There was a subtle underlying truth there; he was able to picture beforehand, and his will was such that he made his picture a fact.
On the other hand, the story from the Bible of the old dying prophet Elisha and his interview with the weakling King of Israel, Joash, will be remem-bered.
A thorough man, even in death forgetful of him¬self, but mindful of his country, the prophet told the king " to smite upon the ground," implying that, if he did so strongly enough, he would stamp out his country's foes—the Syrians. A thorough man would have continued repeating the symbolical act. But the feeble ruler "smote thrice and stayed."
"And the man of God was wroth with him, and said : ' Thou shouldst have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst con¬sumed it; whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.'
What Joash lacked was thoroughness. It was beyond the -powers of his character to do his duty thoroughly.
And this is the text of my leaflet
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Thoroughness, never the leading feature in the character of the young, has to be enforced by precept and by example.
Now it is to be feared that the modern theory of training boys and girls, so far from tending to develop this quality, is calculated to retard it.
Doubtless in many ways the life of youth has been made more pure, more happy, and more gentle by our modern educationists. The roughness and neglect which were the environment of many who were boys in the 'fifties and 'sixties of the last century have given place to another treatment, where fatherly, and even grandmotherly, care has been bestowed by the teacher on the pupil, and where the weakling is protected against himself. It is no longer a case of the survival of the fittest and the sub¬mergence of the unfit.
All this is very excellent. But I am convinced that there has been a serious corresponding loss. Our modern system has shown now for many years (specially in our Preparatory Schools) a tendency to "nurse boys into nothingness."
Their bodily, mental, and moral wants are so excessively cared for by their elders that the young have lost individuality ; they have been so much accustomed to have everything done for them in every department of life, that they seem to have lost the power to do much by and for themselves. In fact, they have lost the power of initiative, and therefore
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the sense of individual responsibility. Selfishness and lassitude have been the result, instead of the energy which characterised some former generations.
Bolstered up in every conceivable way, boys have lost a sense of modest independence, and gained a ludicrously disproportionate sense of their own importance.
It is not only foreign nations that have observed and criticised this in the modern young Englishman, but our own flesh and blood—New Zealanders, Aus¬tralians, and Canadians, who see us far more clearly than we see ourselves, and who ridicule and abomi¬nate the extraordinary swagger which the young Englishman sometimes assumes out of all proportion to his true worth, and our Colonial friends teach him some rude lessons in proper behaviour when the tender nursling of modern English education comes into their midst.
Now the contention of this leaflet is that all this false and sham self-assertion is the deadly foe of real thoroughness. Not to enlarge on the other causes which have limited the conception of patriotism among the young—the craze for gladiatorial games, and for selfish amusements which narrow the sense of love of country into a parochial, or at most pro¬vincial, sentiment—the selfishness of the youth of the present day (stimulated from the cradle upwards) has had a serious effect on the spirit of the race, and seems likely, if no reaction be aroused, to stifle all
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the finer and more forceful sentiments which once made the nation great.
But (that I may bear directly on my theme) this organised selfishness is, I conceive, the very antithesis of thoroughness in life. To be thorough, in any wide sense, we must enlarge our sympathies, and let them have free play on the wide circles of the world in which we live.
This kind of teaching seems (to one, at least, who has been watching for the last forty years the "signs of the times") the least observable feature in modern education, and yet the most indispensable factor in the personality of anyone who undertakes the vast responsibility of being a leader of the young, and who has it, therefore, within his power to make or to mar the future destinies of our race and of the Empire at large.
We do not want Professors, nor Nurses, but MEN for this supremely important task.
It will perhaps not be thought presumptuous to add a closing word for the guidance of those Parents and Teachers whose fate it is to wrestle with weak and flabby youthfulness in either sex :
(1) Let the lessons, whether from book or from the mouth of the Teacher, be short, but insist always on the completion of the task.
(2) Let there be no "soft options," i.e. a con-
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cession to the sloppy desire of the child to learn or to do what is easiest.
(3) On the other hand, let there be no continued brain pressure in one direction. Rapid changes in work are physiologically wholesome for the young.
(4) As a rule, do not be afraid of over-exercising his or her varied energies. Want of occupation engenders lassitude of physical and moral fibre.
Children, like the young in lower stages of creation, are ever on the move to construct or to destroy.
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