f males
from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has not
merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter
before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is
outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the
human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the
main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs
the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed
can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go
beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but
in one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go
beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short; the astronomer
cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way.
All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and
seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down different
paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;
there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be
specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind
be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be
monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman
and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has
decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism
shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and
wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few
sad and certain things.

But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense)
must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the
frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be
partly a one-idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man--and he is
flung naked into the fight. The world's demand comes to him direct; to
his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say)
give "his best"; and what a small part of a man "his best" is! His
second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin
he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is