To you who are beginning the work of life, the mastery of technique may seem a comparatively unimportant matter.  You recognize its necessity, of course, but you think of it as something of a mechanical nature,—­an integral part of the day’s work, but uninviting in itself,—­something to be reduced as rapidly as possible to the plane of automatism and dismissed from the mind.  I believe that you will outgrow this notion.  As you go on with your work, as you increase in skill, ever and ever the fascination of its technique will take a stronger and stronger hold upon you.  This is the great saving principle of our workaday life.  This is the factor that keeps the toiler free from the deadening effects of mechanical routine.  It is the factor that keeps the farmer at his plow, the artisan at his bench, the lawyer at his desk, the artist at his palette.

I once worked for a man who had accumulated a large fortune.  At the age of seventy-five he divided this fortune among his children, intending to retire; but he could find pleasure and comfort only in the routine of business.  In six months he was back in his office.  He borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars on his past reputation and started in to have some fun.  I was his only employee at the time, and I sat across the big double desk from him, writing his letters and keeping his accounts.  He would sit for hours, planning for the establishment of some industry or running out the lines that would entangle some old adversary.  I did not stay with him very long, but before I left, he had a half-dozen thriving industries on his hands, and when he died three years later he had accumulated another fortune of over a million dollars.

That is an example of what I mean by the fascination that the technique of one’s craft may come to possess.  It is the joy of doing well the work that you know how to do.  The finer points of technique,—­those little things that seem so trivial in themselves and yet which mean everything to skill and efficiency,—­what pride the competent artisan or the master artist takes in these!  How he delights to revel in the jargon of his craft!  How he prides himself in possessing the knowledge and the technical skill that are denied the layman!

I am aware that I am somewhat unorthodox in urging this view of your work upon you.  Teachers have been encouraged to believe that details are not only unimportant but stultifying,—­that teaching ability is a function of personality, and not a product of a technique that must be acquired through the strenuous discipline of experience.  One of the most skillful teachers of my acquaintance is a woman down in the grades.  I have watched her work for days at a time, striving to learn its secret.  I can find nothing there that is due to genius,—­unless we accept George Eliot’s definition of genius as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline.  That teacher’s success, by her own statement, is due to a mastery of technique, gained through successive