followed certain general lines and kept within certain general limits in
doing its work. The people who lived on the great plains of Central Asia
worked in a different temper and with wide divergence of manner from the
people who lived on the banks of the Nile; and the Jew, the Greek, and the
Roman showed their racial differences as distinctly in the form and
quality of their work as in the temper of their mind and character. And
thus, on a great historical scale, the significance of work as an
expression of character is unmistakably disclosed.

In this sense work is practically inclusive of every force and kind of
life since every real worker puts into it all that is most distinctive in
his nature. The moral quality contributes sincerity, veracity, solidity of
structure; the intellectual quality is disclosed in order, lucidity, and
grasp of thought; the artistic quality is seen in symmetry proportion,
beauty of construction and of detail; the spiritual quality is revealed in
depth of insight and the scope of relationships brought into view between
the specific work and the world in which it is done. In work of the finer
order, dealing with the more impressionable material, there are
discoverable not only the character and quality of the worker, but the
conditions under which he lives; the stage of civilisation, the vigour or
languor of vital energy, the richness or poverty of social life, the
character of the soil and of the landscape, the pallor or the bloom of
vegetation, the shining or the veiling of the skies. So genuinely and
deeply does a man put himself into the thing he does that whatever affects
him affects it, and all that flows into him of spiritual, human, and
natural influence flows into and is conserved by it. A bit of work of the
highest quality is a key to a man's life because it is the product of that
life, and it brings to light that which is hidden in the man as truly as
the flower lays bare to the sun that which was folded in the seed. What a
man does is, therefore, an authentic revelation of what he is, and by