University of Virginia Library

XII
The Tyranny of Talent

We come into life handicapped by many a tyranny, but by none heavier than the insolence of that particular ability packed into our still imperfect cranium. Although one may observe in rare individuals the exhibition of a fine independence that from infancy to age consistently refuses to develop the dominance of some obvious talent, for the most part we yield to the conventional views that defy such despotism, and to our own delight in that little toy, success, which the autocrat dangles before our eyes. The only people never disillusioned are the unsuccessful. Every time we succeed we take a tuck in a dream. Of all domains, the most desirable is the kingdom of dreams, and the only people who never lose it, who, rather, reinherit it from day to day, are the people who consistently and conscientiously fail.

There are, however, only an enviable few of us who are not able to do some one thing well. It does not need, of course, to be anything notable. We need not be the fools of

fame, in order to taste all the depths of success. We may merely be able to tie up parcels with neatness and dispatch,—rest assured we shall be enforced to tie up everybody's parcels until we totter into our graves. Most households can boast a member with an ability to find things; the demands upon the time and the resourcefulness of such a professional finder prevent her ever finding peace (a finder is, of course, always feminine). One could multiply indefinitely examples from immediate experience that prove the argument for inefficiency.

The tyranny of talent has beset our path with many little proverbs that bark at our lagging heels. "Nothing succeeds like success" has hounded many a man to a desolate eminence. "Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well" is a maxim that we allow to control our activities as thoroughly as we refuse to allow it to convince our intelligence: for obviously whatever is worth doing is not worth doing well; on the one hand the statement may authorize a wasteful and indiscriminate energy; and, far worse, it is manifestly false, because everything that gives you joy is worth doing, and ten to one the thing that gives you most joy in the doing, is the thing that you do very ill indeed.

Superficially considered, success appears to be a consequence of self-expression necessarily gratifying; intimately experienced, success is found to be a consequence of self-repression most painful. The trouble is that one never knows in time. Often one goes gambolling into success unwittingly as a young animal, only to have one's first joyous neigh, or bray, of achievement cut short by feeling sudden hands bind one to a treadmill—the treadmill that impels one to grind out similar achievements, tramp-tramp-tramp, all the rest of one's life. The worst is that no one ever suspects the excellently efficient middle-aged nag of still sniffing a larking canter through the mad spring meadows of the unattempted. Our best friends suppose the treadmill contents us. Yet we are always cherishing our own little dreams of a medium of expression better suited to our individuality than that skill with which nature has endowed us. Browning acknowledges the phenomenon in "One Word More," in noting the dissatisfaction of the artist with his proper medium:—

"Does he paint? He fain would write a poem,—
Does he write? He fain would paint a picture,
Put to proof art alien to the artist's,
Once and only once, and for one only,
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow."

The psychological experience described is more fundamental than its application in the poem merely to love and a lady.

The harshness of a controlling talent is severe in restricting us not alone to what we can do well, but to what we can do best. If we paint, we must not only not write a poem, but we must not attempt a picture different from our best; if we write, we must continue to write in the type and the tone of our first successful experiment. The chef may long to be an astronomer, but not only must he stick to his flesh-pots, but if, in the gusto of some early egg-beating, he has stumbled upon the omelet superlative, he must continue to furnish the world with omelets, no matter if eggs become for him an utter banality, and no matter how his fancy be seething with voluptuous dishes of air-drawn cabbage, or super-sheep.

The world is too much against us if we try to lay down the burdens the task-master Talent has imposed. The successful man belongs to the public: he no longer belongs to himself. Talent, tried and proved and acclaimed, is too strong for us; we continue its savorless round, against all our inward protest. We are its slaves, and through the amiability ineradicable in most bosoms, the slaves

also of our admiring kinsfolk and friends and public; most of all, perhaps, the slaves of our own self-doubt, for possibly after all they are right, possibly we are justly the chattels of Talent, and not of that whispered self of the air, taunting, teasing us, "What you have done is sordid, is savorless! Come with me to attempt the unexplored!" This desire denied is both acknowledgment that all our lordly labeled triumphs may have had a false acclaim, and is also a protest against all mundane and mortal valuations. Our unshackled ego, scorning things done that took the eye and had the price, seems to have the truer voice. Is not art itself the assurance that we are no petty slaves of efficiency, but heirs of a serene domain where the unaccomplished is forever the only thing worth accomplishing?