A Person of Quality

Such a person is not content to dedicate his life to small purposes. He has quality in his ambition. He does not strive to amass stuff to feed his vanity, but does his best to become somebody who is esteemed. He wishes to be, not merely to appear, the best; for this is the mark of quality. The person of quality realizes that there is something beyond success: it is excellence. One may be successful in the eyes of the world without touching the Golden Fleece of excellence, for excellence Reprinted by permission from The Royal Bank of Canada Monthly Letter, April, 1967. is in the person and is not con ferred by the greatness of the office he holds. It is typified in what the goddess Athene said of Ulysses, that in him "deed and word notably marched together to their deliberate end." It is people,. of excellence who build greatly and lastingly. Egypt had millions of people living on the world's most fertile soil and Athens had 200,000 living on a rocky plain, yet the Egypt of that day is remembered for Cleopatra while Athens is imperishable in the minds of men.

Our idea of excellence cannot be limited to this, that, or the other area of human activity. Excellence is a thing in itself, embracing many kinds of achievement at many levels. There is excellence in ab stract intellectual activity, in art, in music, in managerial functions, in craftsmanship at the work bench, in technical skill, and in human relations. 481 482 THE FREEMAN August Only by being a person of the highest quality that it is possible for him to become can a man at tain happiness, because happiness lies in the active exercise of his vital powers along the lines of excellence in a life affording scope for their development. He must, of course, be competent, but ex cellence rises above that. Character We mass-produce almost every thing in this country, but we can not mass-produce character, be cause that is a matter of personal identity. It belongs to those who have found the part they are to play; who are doing the work for which they are best endowed; who are satisfied that they are fill ing a vital need; who are meeting their obligations and standing up to their tasks.

Such people willingly learn whatever they need to know to perform their role; they discipline their passing impulses so as to keep them from getting in the way of proper performance, and they do their jobs better than is needed just to "get by." Character is a positive thing. It is not protected innocence, but practiced virtue; it is not fear of vice, but love of excellence. Character takes no account of what you are thought to be, but what you are. You have your own laws and court to judge you, and these persuade you to be what you would like to seem. Character is having an inner light and the cour age to follow its dictates: as Shakespeare put it: . . . to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. People need something to be lieve in. Scientific discoveries may shake the world, but principles of behavior give it stability.

To have a set of principles is not at all to become a starry-eyed dreamer, but a person who knows simply and convincingly what he is here for. There are certain things one has .to believe in, or civilization .will die - permanent truths which, though they have their roots in the far past, are important for the present. Finally, in this array of the com ponents of quality, consider great mindedness. Here is the ornament of all the other virtues. It makes them better, and it cannot exist without them. A person who has once perceived, however tempo rarily and however fleetingly, what makes greatness of spirit, cannot be happy if he. allows. himself to be petty or self-centered, or to fall short of the best that he has it in him to be.

1967 A PERSON OF QUALITY 483 Craftsmanship There are sound standards of craftsmanship in every calling artists have to meet them, as do carpenters, lawyers, stenogra phers, operators of bulldozers, sur geons, business managers, and stonemasons. Every honest calling, every walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy, based upon excellence of performance. The person of quality will take delight in craftsmanship, whether he be building a birdhouse or writ ing a novel or planning a business deal. He is impelled by his prin ciples to do well habitually what it is his job to do. That means patient thoroughness. This is not, as some avant-garde people would have us believe, anti pathetic to expressive individual ity. Craftsmanship is a means to ward competent expression rather than a brake upon it. It does not imply a sophisticated as opposed to an imaginative approach, nor slick work as opposed to clumsy work. It does mean that here is attention to details, fundamental integrity in the work, and evi dence that the workman knew what he was doing and carefully applied his skill to the task.

Motive and Ambition To seek quality in his work and his life a person must have a substantial motive. One pities the man or woman whose obsessive dream is not improvement toward excellence but escape from actuali ties and responsibilities. Such peo ple must feel unwanted, unused, and purposeless, and that is one of life's greatest sufferings. It is the anguish of empty and sterile lives, far more than any economic condition or political in justice, that drives men and wom en to demonstrate and demand instead of studying and earning. The man of quality will wish to have his journey through life leave some traces. Captain James Cook, whose voyage of discovery carried him to Canada's West Coast in 1778, said: "I had am bition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go." John Milton said he was prompted to "leave some thing so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography that he had made up his mind to make a contribu tion to his subject.

These men sought and found problems to be solved. They were positive. It isn't enough to be against error and ignorance: that leaves the impression that error and ignorance are the active forces in the world while we are a form less mass opposing them. Instead of denouncing or denying what 484 THE FREEMAN August others bring forth as the truth, great men offer their own truth. A motive needs to be a sincere, deeply felt, urge to find meaning in life - relevance, significance, and usefulness. Without such a goal, life becomes drab and hum drum. The man of quality lifts his head above the crowd to see a horizon fitting his abilities. He teaches his imagination to play with future possibilities, and bends his back to the immediate task that will contribute toward their coming true. There is noth ing paltry about the man who is struggling, not to be great or to hobnob with the great, but to be greater than he is.

Some people are misled from their search for personal quality by skepticism. They encourage themselves to say: "Why should I do any more work than is neces sary to get a passing mark or the going rate of pay?" People are not roused to seek excellence by ease or pleasure or any other sug ar-plum. Perhaps there are some who are content to try for noth ing more than being units in an assembly line, but even they must have moments of uneasiness in which they regret the oppor tunities they have spurned to be come something better. To push up from colorless medi ocrity toward superiority is the way of the person of quality. All satisfying human life proceeds along this line of action - from below up, from minus to plus. To be successfully what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is true ambition. In choosing an aim, we should make sure that the ultimate value of it will offset the inevitable dis comfort and trouble that go along with accomplishment of anything worth while. Success has terms which must be met. It demands that we sacrifice secondary things, however delightful they may ap pear, and that we are prepared to get some splinters in our hands while climbing the ladder.

Sense of Values This, of course, requires that we develop a sense of the values of things. Every thoughtful person who has reached the age of twenty or twenty-five will realize that his mind has produced for him a cer tain set of views as to the condi tions of life and the purpose of his existence. These should be re viewed from time to time, and re vised upward in the light of ex perience. A sense of values is a personal thing, not to be measured by a yardstick common to all humani ty. In applying it to our special cases we learn to tell truth from false hood, fact from opinion, the real from the phony, and the beauti1967 A PERSON OF QUALITY 485 ful from the tawdry. We develop consciousness, enabling us to dis criminate the quality of things. We learn that everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it, and we ask before making a choice: "What is the price 1" This is a question of deep seri 0usness' and sometimes it demands courage in the asking and in the answering. Finding the point at which a value begins to totter is an authoritative guide as to how high you really rank it.

Look for the major character istics, without being misled by the unlimited number of peripheral and secondary features. If you are weighing the value to you of a color television set against that of a chrome-encrusted car, that is simple and there are few factors; but if you are measuring the value of an extended education against the immediate attractiveness of a job, you can reach a reasonable decision only after considering the conditions under which you wish to live far in the future. What is the paramount thing 1 To elevate your thinking above the immediate and consider what is best in the long run. In making choices one needs to have a concern for excellence and a devotion to standards. There is real pleasure in setting standards and then living up to them. Even if there were no Grand Assize before which at the end we shall be summoned to tell what we have done with our talents, there is al ways the looking glass in which we are our own judges.

Most people would benefit - al though it seems to be an old-fash ioned idea - by having a little book in which they kept notes of their aspirations. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor for twenty years, kept one. After at taining almost the highest form of human existence, the union of statesman and philosopher in one man, he left to us a book of medi tations. It is a collection of max ims and exhortations written when he felt especially alone and needed bracing up to keep him on the road he had chosen. Such a practice will help us to pass safely through the processes of surmise, guess, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, partial illumi nation, and hypothesis, into cer tainty and conviction. Things Needed Among the things needed by the person in search of excellence are these: a wide view, curiosity, cour age, self-discipline, enthusiasm, and energy. Having a wide view does not only include seeing things near and far in proper perspective, though .that is very important. It requires broad training in funda486 THE FREEMAN August mental principles. Specialization is vitally important in the modern world, but it is unfortunately true that for many individuals speciali zation is a dead end rather than an avenue to deeper and broader understanding. The person seek ing excellence will realize that this need not be so, and he will respond to the challenge to prevent its happening to him.

The key positions in all walks of life will go to those who are educated broadly, in a balanced way. Only they have the depth of judgment, the sense of proportion, and the large-minded comprehen sion to handle big affairs. One needs the curiosity to look below the surface of things. It is curiosity that has led to every scientific advance, and through it man has risen to the high level of philosophy and the meaning of things. Curiosity is followed by re search. You get hold of an idea and nurse it to life with persistent patience. You separate your key thoughts from a hundred and one irrelevancies. You sift through a haystack and find the pin, but you do not stop there. You look closely enough to see the Lord's Prayer inscribed on the head of it. That little extra piece of applied effort counts mightily in turning curi osity into something that is re warding. This process gives you faith in the validity of your judgment, which is the backbone of courage.