To the gifted soul that is born in England,what is the career,then,that will carry him,amid le Olympic dust,up to the immortal gods?For his country's sake,that it may lose the service he was born capable of doing it;for his own sake,that his life be choked and perverted,and his light from Heaven be changed into lightning from the Other Place,--it is essential that there be such a career.The country that can offer career in that case,is a doomed country;nay it is already a dead country:it has secured the ban of Heaven upon it;will have Heaven's light,will have the Other Place's lightning;and may consider itself as appointed to expire,in frightful coughings of street musketry or otherwise,on a set day,and to be in the eye of law dead.In country is there some career,inviting to it either the le Hero,or the tough Greek of the Lower Empire:which of the two do your careers invite?There is question more important.The kind of careers you offer in countries still living,determines with perfect exactness the kind of the life that is in them,--whether it is natural blessed life,or galvanic accursed ditto,and likewise what degree of strength is in the same.
Our English careers to born genius are twofold.There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms,which are very many among us;and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions,Medicine,Law (under which we may include Politics),and the Church.Your born genius,therefore,will first have to ask himself,Whether he can hold his tongue or can?True,all human talent,especially all deep talent,is a talent to do ,and is intrinsically of silent nature;inaudible,like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies,of which it is an incarnated fraction.All real talent,I fancy,would much rather,if it listened only to Nature's monitions,express itself in rhythmic facts than in melodious words,which latter at best,where they are good for anything,are only a feeble echo and shadow or foreshadow of the former.But talents differ much in this of power to be silent;and circumstances,of position,opportunity and such like,modify them still more;--and Nature's monitions,oftenest quite drowned in foreign hearsays,are by means the only ones listened to in deciding!--The Industrialisms are all of silent nature;and some of them are heroic and eminently human;others,again,we may call unheroic,eminently human:beaverish rather,but still honest;some are even vulpine ,altogether inhuman and dishonest.Your born genius must make his choice.
If a soul is born with divine intelligence,and has its lips touched with hallowed fire,in consecration for high enterprises under the sun,this young soul will find the question asked of him by England every hour and moment:"Canst thou turn thy human intelligence into the beaver sort,and make honest contrivance,and accumulation of capital by it?If so,do it;and avoid the vulpine kind,which I don't recommend.Honest triumphs in engineering and machinery await thee;scrip awaits thee,commercial successes,kingship in the counting-room,on the stock-exchange;--thou shalt be the envy of surrounding flunkies,and collect into a heap more gold than a dray-horse can draw."--"Gold,so much gold?"answers the ingenuous soul,with visions of the envy of surrounding flunkies dawning on him;and in very many cases decides that he will contract himself into beaverism,and with such a horse-draught of gold,emblem of a never-imagined success in beaver heroism,strike the surrounding flunkies yellow.
This is our common course;this is in some sort open to every creature,what we call the beaver career;perhaps more open in England,taking in America too,than it ever was in any country before.And,truly,good consequences follow out of it:who can be blind to them?Half of a most excellent and opulent result is realized to us in this way;baleful only when it sets up (as too often )for being the whole result.A half-result which will be blessed and heavenly so soon as the other half is had,--namely wisdom to guide the first half.Let us ho all honest human power of contrivance in its degree.The beaver intellect,so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine,and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest ""is truly respectable to me;and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have kn,has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning,agricultural,commercial,mechanical,or otherwise industrial friends,who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state.
If a man can keep his intellect silent,and make it even into honest beaverism,several very manful moralities,in danger of wreck on other courses,may comport well with that,and give it a genuine and partly human character;and I will tell him,in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism,and make honest money with it.If indeed he could become a heroic industrial,and have a life "eminently human"!But that is easy at present.Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls,who have to seek a career for themselves,go this beaver road.
Whereby the first half-result,national wealth namely,is plentifully realized;and only the second half,or wisdom to guide it,is dreadfully behindhand.