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THE JOYFUL HEART
BY
ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER
AUTHOR OF THE MUSICAL AMATEUR, SCUM O' THE EARTH
AND OTHER POEMS, ROMANTIC AMERICA, ETC.
"People who are nobly happy constitute the power, the beauty
and the foundation of the state."
JEAN FINOT: _The Science of Happiness._
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER
* * * * *
TO
MY WIFE
* * * * *
FOREWORD
This is a guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored,
the tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed. It is for the use
of all those whose cup of vitality is not brimming over.
The world has not yet seen enough of joy. It bears the reputation of
an elusive sprite with finger always at lip bidding farewell. In
certain dark periods, especially in times of international warfare, it
threatens to vanish altogether from the earth. It is then the first
duty of all peaceful folk to find and hold fast to joy, keeping it in
trust for their embattled brothers.
Even if this were not their duty as citizens of the world, it would be
their duty as patriots. For Jean Finot is right in declaring that
"people who are nobly happy constitute the power, the beauty and the
foundation of the state."
This book is a manual of enthusiasm--the power which drives the
world--and of those kinds of exuberance (physical, mental and
spiritual) which can make every moment of every life worth living. It
aims to show how to get the most joy not only from traveling hopefully
toward one's goal, but also from the goal itself on arrival there. It
urges sound business methods in conducting that supreme business, the
investment of one's vitality.
It would show how one may find happiness all alone with his better
self, his 'Auto-Comrade'--an accomplishment well-nigh lost in this
crowded age. It would show how the gospel of exuberance, by offering
the joys of hitherto unsuspected power to the artist and his audience,
bids fair to lift the arts again to the lofty level of the Periclean
age. It would show the so-called "common" man or woman how to develop
that creative sympathy which may make him a 'master by proxy,' and
thus let him know the conscious happiness of playing an essential part
in the creation of works of genius. In short, the book tries to show
how the cup of joy may not only be kept full for one's personal use,
but may also be made hospitably to brim over for others.
To the _Atlantic Monthly_ thanks are due for permission to reprint
chapters I, III and IV; to the _North American Review_, for chapter
VIII; and to the _Century_, for chapters V, VI, IX and X.
R. H. S.
GEEENBUSH, MASS.
August, 1914.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
I. A DEFENSE OF JOY
II. THE BRIMMING CUP
III. ENTHUSIASM
IV. A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS
V. THE AUTO-COMRADE
VI. VIM AND VISION
VII. PRINTED JOY
VIII. THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS
IX. THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC
X. MASTERS BY PROXY
* * * * *
THE JOYFUL HEART
I
A DEFENSE OF JOY
Joy is such stuff as the hinges of Heaven's doors are made of. So our
fathers believed. So we supposed in childhood. Since then it has
become the literary fashion to oppose this idea. The writers would
have us think of joy not as a supernal hinge, but as a pottle of hay,
hung by a crafty creator before humanity's asinine nose. The donkey is
thus constantly incited to unrewarded efforts. And when he arrives at
the journey's end he is either defrauded of the hay outright, or he
dislikes it, or it disagrees with him.
Robert Louis Stevenson warns us that "to travel hopefully is a better
thing than to arrive," beautifully portraying the emptiness and
illusory character of achievement. And, of those who have attained,
Mr. E. F. Benson exclaims, "God help them!" These sayings are typical
of a widespread literary fashion. Now to slander Mistress Joy to-day
is a serious matter. For we are coming to realize that she is a far
more important person than we had supposed; that she is, in fact, one
of the chief managers of life. Instead of doing a modest little
business in an obscure suburb, she has offices that embrace the whole
first floor of humanity's city hall.
Of course I do not doubt that our writer-friends note down the truth
as they see it. But they see it imperfectly. They merely have a corner
of one eye on a corner of the truth. Therefore they tell untruths that
are the falser for being so charmingly and neatly expressed. What they
say about joy being the bribe that achievement offers us to get itself
realized may be true in a sense. But they are wrong in speaking of the
bribe as if it were an apple rotten at the core, or a bag of
counterfeit coin, or a wisp of artificial hay. It is none of these
things. It is sweet and genuine and well worth the necessary effort,
once we are in a position to appreciate it at anything like its true
worth. We must learn not to trust the beautiful writers too
implicitly. For there is no more treacherous guide than the consummate
artist on the wrong track.
Those who decry the joy of achievement are like tyros at skating who
venture alone upon thin ice, fall down, fall in, and insist on the way
home that winter sports have been grossly overestimated. This outcry
about men being unable to enjoy what they have attained is a
half-truth which cannot skate two consecutive strokes in the right
direction without the support of its better half. And its better half
is the fact that one may enjoy achievement hugely, provided only he
will get himself into proper condition.
Of course I am not for one moment denying that achievement is harder
to enjoy than the hope of achievement. Undoubtedly the former lacks
the glamour of the indistinct, "that sweet bloom of all that is far
away." But our celebrated writer-friends overlook the fact that
glamour and "sweet bloom" are so much pepsin to help weak stomachs
digest strong joy. If you would have the best possible time of it in
the world, develop your joy-digesting apparatus to the point where it
can, without a qualm, dispose of that tough morsel, the present,
obvious and attained. There will always be enough of the unachieved at
table to furnish balanced rations.
"God help the attainers!"--forsooth! Why, the ideas which I have
quoted, if they were carried to logical lengths, would make heaven a
farcical kill-joy, a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable morgue of
disappointed hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that the old
heaven of the Semitic poets was constructed somewhat along these
lines. But that was no real heaven. The real heaven is a quiet,
harpless, beautiful place where every one is a heaven-born creator
and is engaged--not caring in the least for food or sleep--in turning
out, one after another, the greatest of masterpieces, and enjoying
them to the quick, both while they are being done and when they are
quite achieved.
I would not, however, fall into the opposite error and disparage the
joy of traveling hopefully. It is doubtless easy to amuse one's self
in a wayside air-castle of an hundred suites, equipped with
self-starting servants, a Congressional Library, a National Gallery of
pictures, a Vatican-ful of sculpture, with Hoppe for billiard-marker,
Paderewski to keep things going in the music-room, Wright as grand
hereditary master of the hangar, and Miss Annette Kellerman in charge
of the swimming-pool. I am not denying that such a castle is easier to
enjoy before the air has been squeezed out of it by the horny clutch
of reality, which moves it to the journey's end and sets it down with
a jar in its fifty-foot lot, complete with seven rooms and bath, and
only half an hour from the depot. But this is not for one moment
admitting the contention of the lords of literature that the
air-castle has a monopoly of joy, while the seven rooms and bath have
a monopoly of disillusionized boredom and anguish of mind. If your
before-mentioned apparatus is only in working order, you can have no
end of joy out of the cottage. And any morning before breakfast you
can build another, and vastly superior, air-castle on the vacant land
behind the woodshed.
"What is all this," I heard the reader ask, "about a joy-digesting
apparatus?"
It consists of four parts. Physical exuberance is the first. To a
considerable extent joy depends on an overplus of health. The joy of
artistic creation, for instance, lies not so intensely and
intoxicatingly in what you may some time accomplish as in what has
actually just started into life under your pencil or clayey thumb,
your bow or brush. For what you are about to receive, the Lord, as a
rule, makes you duly thankful. But with the thankfulness is always
mingled the shadowy apprehension that your powers may fail you when
next you wish to use them. Thus the joy of anticipatory creation is
akin to pain. It holds no such pure bliss as actual creation. When you
are in full swing, what you have just finished (unless you are
exhausted) seems to you nearly always the best piece of work that you
have ever done. For your critical, inhibitory apparatus is temporarily
paralyzed by the intoxication of the moment. What makes so many
artists fail at these times to enjoy a maximum of pleasure and a
minimum of its opposite, is that they do not train their bodies "like
a strong man to run a race," and make and keep them aboundingly vital.
The actual toil takes so much of their meager vitality that they have
too little left with which to enjoy the resulting achievement. If they
become ever so slightly intoxicated over the work, they have a
dreadful morning after, whose pain they read back into the joy
preceding. And then they groan out that all is vanity, and slander joy
by calling it a pottle of hay.
It takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement is
something finished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished in art, for
instance, without re-creating it for yourself. But, though re-creation
demands almost as much vital overplus as creation, the layman should
realize that he has, as a rule, far more of this overplus than the
pallid, nervous sort of artist. And he should accordingly discount the
other's lamentations over the vanity of human achievement.
The reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure in writing, and in having
written, his delicious essays is that he did not know how to take
proper care of his body. To be extremely antithetical, I, on the other
hand, take so much pleasure in writing and in having written these
essays of mine (which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise,
or brilliant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery,
discouragement, and disillusionment which accompany and follow almost
every one of them, and the need of Spartan training for their sake,
hardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings.
Training has meant so much vital overplus to me that I long ago
spurted and caught up with my pottle of joy. And, finding that it made
a cud of unimagined flavor and durability, I substituted for the
pottle a placard to this effect:
REMEMBER THE RACE!
This placard, hung always before me, is a reminder that a decent
respect for the laws of good sportsmanship requires one to keep in as
hard condition as possible for the hundred-yard dash called Life. Such
a regimen pays thousands of per cent. in yearly dividends. It allows
one to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather like
that which the sprinter enjoys when, after months of flawless
preparation, he hurls himself through space like some winged creature
too much in love with the earth to leave it; while every drop of his
tingling blood makes him conscious of endless reserves of vitality.
Tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things into
joy--even sorrow itself. I wonder if any one seriously doubts that it
was just this which was giving Browning's young David such a glorious
time of it when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop about "our
manhood's prime vigor" and "the wild joys of living."
The physical variety of exuberance, once won, makes easy the winning
of the mental variety. This, when it is almost isolated from the other
kinds, is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world of
abstract thought, or drink delight of battle with your intellectual
peers, or follow with full understanding the phonographic version of
some mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this means work. But if your
body is shouting for joy over the mere act of living, mental
calisthenics no longer appear so impossibly irksome. And anyway, the
discipline of your physical training has induced your will to put up
with a good deal of irksomeness. This is partly because its eye is
fixed on something beyond the far-off, divine event of achieving
concentration on one subject for five minutes without allowing the
mind to wander from it more than twenty-five times. That something is
a keenness of perception which makes any given fragment of nature or
human nature or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace,
endlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery--with
possibilities, even, of a developing imagination. For the
Auto-Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He can get something
out of nothing.
At this stage of your development you will probably discover in
yourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enable
you to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you wander through
your mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come upon an ugly intruder
of a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as
fear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like, there is only one
right way to treat it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on the rubbish
heap as if it were a stinging nettle; and let some harmonious thought
grow in its place. There is no more reckless consumer of all kinds of
exuberance than the discordant thought, and weeding it out saves such
an amazing quantity of _eau de vie_ wherewith to water the garden of
joy, that every man may thus be his own Burbank and accomplish marvels
of mental horticulture.
When you have won physical and mental exuberance, you will have
pleased your Auto-Comrade to such an extent that he will most likely
startle and delight you with a birthday present as the reward of
virtue. Some fine morning you will climb out of the right side of your
bed and come whistling down to breakfast and find by your plate a neat
packet of spiritual exuberance with his best wishes. Such a gift is
what the true artist enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and full
for a dozen pens or brushes to record. Jeanne d'Arc knew it when the
mysterious voices spoke to her; and St. John on Patmos; and every true
lover at certain moments; and each one of us who has ever flung wide
the gates of prayer and felt the infinite come flooding in as the
clean vigor of the tide swirls up through a sour, stagnant marsh; or
who at some supreme instant has felt enfolding him, like the
everlasting arms, a sure conviction of immortality.
Now for purposes of convenience we may speak of these three kinds of
exuberance as we would speak of different individuals. But in reality
they hardly ever exist alone. The physical variety is almost sure to
induce the mental and spiritual varieties and to project itself into
them. The mental kind looks before and after and warms body and soul
with its radiant smile. And even when we are in the throes of a purely
spiritual love or religious ecstasy, we have a feeling--though
perhaps it is illusory--that the flesh and the intellect are more
potent than we knew.
These, then, constitute the first three parts of the joy-digesting
apparatus. I think there is no need of dwelling on their efficacy in
helping one to enjoy achievement. Let us pass, therefore, to the
fourth and last part, which is self-restraint.
Perhaps the worst charge usually made against achievement is its
sameness, its dry monotony. On the way to it (the writers say) you are
constantly falling in with something new. But, once there, you must
abandon the variegated delights of yesterday and settle down, to-day
and forever, to the same old thing. In this connection I recall an
epigram of Professor Woodrow Wilson's. He was lecturing to us young
Princetonians about Gladstone's ability to make any subject of
absorbing interest, even a four hours' speech on the budget. "Young
gentlemen," cried the professor, "it is not the subject that is dry.
It is _you_ that are dry!" Similarly, it is not achievement that is
dry; it is the achievers, who fondly suppose that now, having
achieved, they have no further use for the exuberance of body, mind,
and spirit, or the self-restraint which helped them toward their goal.
Particularly the self-restraint. One chief reason why the thing
attained palls so often and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy it
immoderately. Why, if Ponce de Leon had found the fountain of youth
and drunk of it as bibulously as we are apt to guzzle the cup of
achievement, he would not only have arrested the forward march of
time, but would have over-reached himself and slipped backward through
the years of his age to become a chronic infant in arms. Even
traveling hopefully would pall if one kept at it twenty-four hours a
day. Just feast on the rich food of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
morning, noon, and night for a few months, and see how you feel. There
is no other way. Achievement must be moderately indulged in, not made
the pretext for a debauch. If one has achieved a new cottage, for
example, let him take numerous week-end vacations from it. And let not
an author sit down and read through his own book the moment it comes
from the binder. A few more months will suffice to blur the memory of
those irrevocable, nauseating foundry proofs. If he forbears--instead
of being sickened by the stuff, no gentle reader, I venture to
predict, will be more keenly and delicately intrigued by the volume's
vigors and subtleties.
If you have recently made a fortune, be sure, in the course of your
Continental wanderings, to take many a third-class carriage full of
witty peasants, and stop at many an "unpretending" inn "Of the White
Hind," with bowered rose-garden and bowling-green running down to the
trout-filled river, and mine ample hostess herself to make and bring
you the dish for which she is famous over half the countryside. Thus
you will increase by at least one Baedekerian star-power the luster
of the next Grand Hotel Royal de l'Univers which may receive you. And
be sure to alternate pedestrianism with motoring, and the "peanut"
gallery with the stage-box. Omit not to punctuate with stag vacations
long periods of domestic felicity. When Solomon declared that all was
vanity and vexation of spirit I suspect that he had been more than
unusually intemperate in frequenting the hymeneal altar.
Why is it that the young painters, musicians, and playwrights who win
fame and fortune as heroes in the novels of Mr. E. F. Benson enjoy
achievement so hugely? Simply because they are exuberant in mind,
body, and spirit, and, if not averse to brandy and soda, are in other
ways, at least, paragons of moderation. And yet, in his "Book of
Months," Mr. Benson requests God to help those who have attained!
With this fourfold equipment of the three exuberances and moderation,
I defy Solomon himself in all his glory not to enjoy the situation
immensely and settle down in high good humor and content with the
paltry few scores of wives already achieved. I defy him not to enjoy
even his fame.
We have heard much from the gloomily illustrious about the fraudulent
promise of fame. At a distance, they admit, it seems like a banquet
board spread with a most toothsome feast. But step up to the table.
All you find there is dust and ashes, vanity and vexation of spirit
and a desiccated joint that defies the stoutest carver. If a man holds
this view, however, you may be rather sure that he belongs to the
_bourgeois_ great. For it is just as _bourgeois_ to win fame and then
not know what on earth to do with it, as it is to win fortune and then
not know what on earth to do with it. The more cultivated a famous man
is, the more he must enjoy the situation; for along with his dry scrag
of fame, the more he must have of the sauce which alone makes it
palatable. The recipe for this sauce runs as follows: to one
amphoraful best physical exuberance add spice of keen perception,
cream of imagination, and fruits of the spirit. Serve with grain of
salt.
That famous person is sauceless who can, without a tingle of joy,
overhear the couple in the next steamer-chairs mentioning his name
casually to each other as an accepted and honored household word. He
has no sauce for his scrag if he, unmoved, can see the face of some
beautiful child in the holiday crowd suddenly illuminated by the
pleasure of recognizing him, from his pictures, as the author of her
favorite story. He is _bourgeois_ if it gives him no joy when the
weight of his name swings the beam toward the good cause; or when the
mail brings luminous gratitude and comprehension from the perfect
stranger in Topeka or Tokyo. No; fame to the truly cultivated should
be fully as enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward fame.
In certain other cases, indeed, attainment is even more delicious than
the hope thereof. Think of the long, cool drink at the New Mexican
pueblo after a day in the incandescent desert, with your tongue
gradually enlarging itself from thirst. How is it with you, O golfer,
when, even up at the eighteenth, you top into the hazard, make a
desperate demonstration with the niblick, and wipe the sand out of
your eyes barely in time to see your ball creep across the distant
green and drop into the hole? Has not the new president's aged father
a slightly better time at the inauguration of his dear boy than he had
at any time during the fifty years of hoping for and predicting that
consummation? Does not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly the
certainty of having made the world a better place to live in, than he
had enjoyed the hope of achieving that desirable end? Can there be any
comparison between the joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring, now
hopefully, now despairingly, to port, and the joys of the same soul
which has at last found a perfect haven in the heart of God?
And still the writers go on talking of joy as if it were a pottle of
hay--a flimsy fraud--and of the satisfaction of attainment as if it
were unattainable. Why do they not realize, at least, that their every
thrill of response to a beautiful melody, their every laugh of
delighted comprehension of Hazlitt or Crothers, is in itself
attainment? The creative appreciator of art is always at his goal. And
the much-maligned present is the only time at our disposal in which to
enjoy the much-advertised future.
Too bad that our literary friends should have gone to extremes on this
point! If Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that "to travel hopefully is
an easier thing than to arrive," he would undoubtedly have hit the
truth. If Mr. Benson had said, "If you attain, God help you bountifully
to exuberance," etc., that would have been unexceptionable. It would
even have been a more useful--though slightly supererogatory--service,
to point out for the million-and-first time that achievement is not all
that it seems to be from a considerable distance. In other words, that
the laws of perspective will not budge. These writers would thus quite
sufficiently have played dentist to Disappointment and extracted his
venomous fangs for us in advance. What the gentlemen really should have
done was to perform the dentistry first, reminding us once again that a
part of attainment is illusory and consists of such stuff as
dreams--good and bad--are made of. Then, on the other hand, they should
have demonstrated attainment's good points, finally leading up to its
supreme advantage. This advantage is--its strategic position.
Arriving beats hoping to arrive, in this: that while the hoper is so
keenly hopeful that he has little attention to spare for anything
besides the future, the arriver may take a broader, more leisurely
survey of things. The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. The
attainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a complete
panorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover by
re-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther and
loftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attacking
the week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him
his mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, the
achiever, if his joy-digesting apparatus be working properly, rejoices
with exceeding great joy in past, present, and future alike. He has an
advantage of three to one over the merely hopeful traveler. And when
they meet this is the song he sings:--
Mistress Joy is at your side
Waiting to become a bride.
Soft! Restrain your jubilation.
That ripe mouth may not be kissed
Ere you stand examination.
Mistress Joy's a eugenist.
Is your crony Moderation?
Do your senses say you sooth?
Are your veins the kind that tingle?
Is your soul awake in truth?
If these traits in you commingle
Joy no more shall leave you single.
II
THE BRIMMING CUP
Exuberance is the income yielded by a wise investment of one's
vitality. On this income, so long as it flows in regularly, the
moderate man may live in the Land of the Joyful Heart, incased in
triple steel against any arrows of outrageous fortune that happen to
stray in across the frontier. Immigrants to this land who have no such
income are denied admission. They may steam into the country's
principal port, past the great statue of the goddess Joy who holds
aloft a brimming cup in the act of pledging the world. But they are
put ashore upon a small island for inspection. And so soon as the
inferior character of their investments becomes known, or their
recklessness in eating into their principal, they are deported.
The contrast between those within the well-guarded gates and those
without is an affecting one. The latter often squander vast fortunes
in futile attempts to gain a foothold in the country. And they have a
miserable time of it. Many of the natives, on the other hand, are so
poor that they have constantly to fight down the temptation to touch
their principal. But every time they resist, the old miracle happens
for them once more: the sheer act of living turns out to be "paradise
enow."
Now no mere fullness of life will qualify a man for admission to the
Land of the Joyful Heart. One must have overflowingness of life. In
his book "The Science of Happiness" Jean Finot declares, that the
"disenchantment and the sadness which degenerate into a sort of
pessimistic melancholy are frequently due to the diminution of the
vital energy. And as pain and sorrow mark the diminution, the joy of
living and the upspringing of happiness signify the increase of
energy.... By using special instruments, such as the plethysmograph
of Hallion, the pneumograph of Marey, the sphygmometer of Cheron, and
so many others which have come in fashion during these latter years,
we have succeeded in proving experimentally that joy, sadness, and
pain depend upon our energy." To keep exuberant one must possess more
than just enough vitality to fill the cup of the present. There must
be enough to make it brim over. Real exuberance, however, is not the
extravagant, jarring sort of thing that some thoughtless persons
suppose it to be. The word is not accented on the first syllable.
Indeed, it might just as well be "_in_uberance." It does not long to
make an impression or, in vulgar phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends to
be self-contained. It is not boisterousness. It is generous and
infectious, while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish and
repellent. Most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd of
mummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades. For boisterousness
is only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the rampage. The royal
old musician and poet was not filled with this, but with the real
thing, when he sang:
"_He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul ...
My cup runneth over._"
The merely boisterous man, on the other hand, is a fatuous spendthrift
of his fortune. He reminds us how close we are of kin to the
frolicsome chimpanzee. His attitude was expressed on election night by
a young man of Manhattan who shouted hoarsely to his fellow:
"On with the dance; let joy be unrefined!"
Neither should mere vivacity be mistaken for exuberance. It is no more
surely indicative of the latter than is the laugh of a parrot. One of
the chief advantages of the Teutonic over the Latin type of man is
that the Latin is tempted to waste his precious vital overplus through
a continuous display of vivacity, while the less demonstrative Teuton
more easily stores his up for use where it will count. This gives him
an advantage in such pursuits as athletics and empire-building.
The more exuberance of all varieties one has stored up in body and
mind and spirit, the more of it one can bring to bear at the right
moment upon the things that count for most in the world--the things
that owe to it their lasting worth and their very existence. A little
of this precious commodity, more or less, is what often makes the
difference between the ordinary and the supreme achievement. It is the
liquid explosive that shatters the final, and most stubborn, barrier
between man and the Infinite. It is what Walt Whitman called "that
last spark, that sharp flash of power, that something or other more
which gives life to all great literature."
The happy man is the one who possesses these three kinds of overplus,
and whose will is powerful enough to keep them all healthy and to keep
him from indulging in their delights intemperately.
It is a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many do, that such fullness
of life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back door
when middle age knocks at the front. It is no more bound to go as the
wrinkles and gray hairs arrive than your income is bound to take wings
two or three score years after the original investment of the
principal. To ascribe it to youth as an exclusive attribute is as
fatuous as it would be to ascribe a respectable income only to the
recent investor.
A red-letter day it will be for us when we realize that exuberance
represents for every one the income from his fund of vitality; that
when one's exuberance is all gone, his income is temporarily
exhausted; and that he cannot go on living at the same rate without
touching the principal. The hard-headed, harder-worked American
business man is admittedly clever and prudent about money matters. But
when he comes to deal with immensely more important matters such as
life, health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. He has not yet
grasped the obvious truth that a man's fund of vitality ought to be
administered upon at least as sound a business basis as his fund of
dollars. The principal should not be broken into for living expenses
during a term of at least ninety-nine years. (Metchnikoff says that
this term is one hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of the
Bulgarian bacillus.) And one should not be content with anything short
of a substantial rate of interest.
In one respect this life-business is a simpler thing to manage than
the dollar-business. For, in the former, if the interest comes in
regularly and unimpaired, you may know that the principal is safe,
while in the dollar-business they may be paying your interest out of
your principal, and you none the wiser until the crash. But here the
difference ceases. For if little or no vital interest comes in, your
generous scale of living is pinched. You may defer the catastrophe a
little by borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate from usurious
stimulants, giving many pounds of flesh as security. But soon Shylock
forecloses and you are forced to move with your sufferings to the
slums and ten-cent lodging-houses of Life. Moreover, you must face a
brutal dispossession from even the poor flat or dormitory cot you
there occupy--out amid the snows and blasts--
"Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form"
there to pay slack life's "arrears of pain, darkness, and cold."
The reason why every day is a joy to the normal child is that he fell
heir at birth to a fortune of vitality and has not yet had time to
squander all his substance in riotous or thoughtless living, or to
overdraw his account in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one of his
days is a joy--that is, except in so far as his elders have impressed
their tired standards of behavior too masterfully upon him. "Happy as
a child"--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary. In
order to remain as happy as this for a century or so, all that a child
has to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles, and
never overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into the myriad details
of just how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is no
dearth of wise books and physicians and "Masters of the Inn,"
competent to mark out sound business programs of work, exercise,
recreation, and regimen for body, mind, and spirit; while all that you
must contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension,
time, money, and will-power. You see, I am not a professor of vital
commerce and investment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to induce the
voters to elect a sound business administration.
I believe that the blessings of climate give us of North America less
excuse than most other people for failing to put such an
administration into office. It is noteworthy that many of the
Europeans who have recently written their impressions of the United
States imagine that Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of vitality is
shared by nearly the whole nation. If it only were! But the fact that
these observers think so would seem to confirm our belief that our own
cup brims over more plentifully than that of Europe. This is probably
due to the exhilarating climate which makes America--physically, at
least, though not yet economically and socially--the promised land.
Of course I realize the absurdity of urging the great majority of
human beings to keep within their vital incomes. To ask the
overworked, under-fed, under-rested, under-played, shoddily dressed,
overcrowded masses of humanity why they are not exuberant, is to ask
again, with Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving for
bread do not eat cake. The fact is that to keep within one's income
to-day, either financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury that
is absolutely denied to the many. Most men--the rich as well as the
poor--stumble through life three parts dead. The ruling class, if it
had the will and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness of life.
But only a comparatively few of the others could, because the world is
conducted on a principle which makes it even less possible for them to
store up a little hoard of vitality in their bodies against a rainy
day than to store up an overplus of dollars in the savings bank.
I think that this state of things is very different from the one which
the fathers contemplated in founding our nation. When they undertook
to secure for us all "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,"
they did not mean a bare clinging to existence, liberty to starve, and
the pursuit of a nimble happiness by the lame, the halt, and the
blind. They meant fullness of life, liberty in the broadest sense,
both outer and inner, and that almost certain success in the
attainment of happiness which these two guarantee a man. In a word,
the fathers meant to offer us all a good long draft of the brimming
cup with the full sum of benefits implied by that privilege. For the
vitalized man possesses real life and liberty, and finds happiness
usually at his disposal without putting himself to the trouble of
pursuit.
I can imagine the good fathers' chagrin if they are aware to-day of
how things have gone on in their republic. Perhaps they realize that
the possibility of exuberance has now become a special privilege. And
if they are still as wise as they once were, they will be doubly
exasperated by this state of affairs because they will see that it is
needless. It has been proved over and over again that modern machinery
has removed all real necessity for poverty and overwork. There is
enough to go 'round. Under a more democratic system we might have
enough of the necessities and reasonable comforts of life to supply
each of the hundred million Americans, if every man did no more than a
wholesome amount of productive labor in a day and had the rest of his
time for constructive leisure and real living.
On the same terms there is likewise enough exuberance to go 'round.
The only obstacle to placing it within the reach of all exists in
men's minds. Men are still too inert and blindly conservative to stand
up together and decree that industry shall be no longer conducted for
the inordinate profit of the few, but for the use of the many. Until
that day comes, the possibility of exuberance will remain a special
privilege.
In the mean while it is too bad that the favored classes do not make
more use of this privilege. It is absurd that such large numbers of
them are still as far from exuberance as the unprivileged. They keep
reducing their overplus of vitality to an _under-minus_ of it by too
much work and too foolish play, by plain thinking and high living and
the dissipation of maintaining a pace too swift for their as yet
unadjusted organisms. They keep their house of life always a little
chilly by opening the windows before the furnace has had a chance to
take the chill out of the rooms.
If we would bring joy to the masses why not first vitalize the
classes? If the latter can be led to develop a fondness for that
brimming cup which is theirs for the asking, a long step will be taken
toward the possibility of overflowing life for all. The classes will
come to realize that, even from a selfish point of view, democracy is
desirable; that because man is a social animal, the best-being of the
one is inseparable from the best-being of the many; that no one can be
perfectly exuberant until all are exuberant. Jean Finot is right:
"True happiness is so much the greater and deeper in the proportion
that it embraces and unites in a fraternal chain more men, more
countries, more worlds."
But the classes may also be moved by instincts less selfish. For the
brimming cup has this at least in common with the cup that inebriates:
its possessor is usually filled with a generous--if sometimes
maudlin--anxiety to have others enjoy his own form of beverage. The
present writer is a case in point. His reason for making this book lay
in a convivial desire to share with as many as possible the contents
of a newly acquired brimming cup. Before getting hold of this cup, the
writer would have looked with an indifferent and perhaps hostile eye
upon the proposition to make such a blessing generally available. But
now he cannot for the life of him see how any one whose body, mind,
and spirit are alive and reasonably healthy can help wishing the same
jolly good fortune for all mankind.
Horace Traubel records that the aged Walt Whitman was once talking
philosophy with some of his friends when an intensely bored youngster
slid down from his high chair and remarked to nobody in particular:
"There's too much old folk here for me!"
"For me, too," cried the poet with one of his hearty laughs. "We are
all of us a good deal older than we need to be, than we think we are.
Let's all get young again."
Even so! Here's to eternal youth for every one. And here's to the hour
when we may catch the eye of humanity and pledge all brother men in
the brimming cup.
III
ENTHUSIASM
Enthusiasm is exuberance-with-a-motive. It is the power that makes the
world go 'round. The old Greeks who christened it knew that it was the
god-energy in the human machine. Without its driving force nothing
worth doing has ever been done. It is man's dearest possession. Love,
friendship, religion, altruism, devotion to hobby or career--all
these, and most of the other good things in life, are forms of
enthusiasm. A medicine for the most diverse ills, it alleviates both
the pains of poverty and the boredom of riches. Apart from it man's
heart is seldom joyful. Therefore it should be husbanded with zeal and
spent with wisdom.
To waste it is folly; to misuse it, disaster. For it is safe to
utilize this god-energy only in its own proper sphere. Enthusiasm
moves the human vessel. To let it move the rudder, too, is criminal
negligence. Brahms once made a remark somewhat to this effect: The
reason why there is so much bad music in the world is that composers
are in too much of a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, what do
they do? Instead of taking it out for a long, cool walk, they sit down
at once to work it up, but let it work _them_ up instead into an
absolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of the
goose-quill looks to them like part of a swan-song.
Love is blind, they say. This is an exaggeration. But it is based on
the fact that enthusiasm, whether it appears as love, or in any other
form, always has trouble with its eyes. In its own place it is
incomparably efficient; only keep it away from the pilot-house!
Since this god-energy is the most precious and important thing that we
have, why should our word for its possessor have sunk almost to the
level of a contemptuous epithet? Nine times in ten we apply it to the
man who allows his enthusiasm to steer his vessel. It would be full as
logical to employ the word "writer" for one who misuses his literary
gift in writing dishonest advertisements. When we speak of an
"enthusiast" to-day, we usually mean a person who has all the
ill-judging impulsiveness of a child without its compensating charm,
and is therefore not to be taken seriously. "He's only an enthusiast!"
This has been said about Columbus and Christ and every other great man
who ever lived.
But besides its poor sense of distance and direction, men have another
complaint against enthusiasm. They think it insincere on account of
its capacity for frequent and violent fluctuation in temperature. In
his "Creative Evolution," Bergson shows how "our most ardent
enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally
congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one so
easily takes the shape of the other, that we might confuse them
together, doubt our own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we did
not know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living."
The philosopher then goes on to show how, when we fall into this
confusion, we are unjust to enthusiasm, which is the materialization
of the invisible breath of life itself. It is "the spirit." The action
it induces is "the letter." These constitute two different and often
antagonistic movements. The letter kills the spirit. But when this
occurs we are apt to mistake the slayer for the slain and impute to
the ardent spirit all the cold vices of its murderer. Hence, the taint
of insincerity that seems to hang about enthusiasm is, after all,
nothing but illusion. To be just we should discount this illusion in
advance as the wise man discounts discouragement. And the epithet for
the man whose lungs are large with the breath of life should cease to
be a term of reproach.
Enthusiasm is the prevailing characteristic of the child and of the
adult who does memorable things. The two are near of kin and bear a
family resemblance. Youth trails clouds of glory. Glory often trails
clouds of youth. Usually the eternal man is the eternal boy; and the
more of a boy he is, the more of a man. The most conventional-seeming
great men possess as a rule a secret vein of eternal-boyishness. Our
idea of Brahms, for example, is of a person hopelessly mature and
respectable. But we open Kalbeck's new biography and discover him
climbing a tree to conduct his chorus while swaying upon a branch; or,
in his fat forties, playing at frog-catching like a five-year-old.
The prominent American is no less youthful. Not long ago one of our
good gray men of letters was among his children, awaiting dinner and
his wife. Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. "Quick, children!" he
exclaimed. "Here's mother. Let's hide under the table and when she
comes in we'll rush out on all-fours and pretend we're bears." The
maneuver was executed with spirit. At the preconcerted signal, out
they all waddled and galumphed with horrid grunts--only to find
something unfamiliar about mother's skirt, and, glancing up, to
discover that it hung upon a strange and terrified guest.
The biographers have paid too little attention to the god-energy of
their heroes. I think that it should be one of the crowning
achievements of biography to communicate to the reader certain actual
vibrations of the enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philosopher
for truth; the patriot for his country; the artist for beauty and
self-expression; the altruist for humanity; the discoverer for
knowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred soul; the prophet,
martyr, or saint for his god.
Every lover, according to Emerson, is a poet. Not only is this true,
but every one of us, when in the sway of any enthusiasm, has in him
something creative. Therefore a record of the most ordinary person's
enthusiasms should prove as well worth reading as the ordinary record
we have of the extraordinary person's life if written with the usual
neglect of this important subject. Now I should like to try the
experiment of sketching in outline a new kind of biography. It would
consist entirely of the record of an ordinary person's enthusiasms.
But, as I know no other life-story so well as my own, perhaps the
reader will pardon me for abiding in the first person singular. He may
grant pardon the more readily if he realizes the universality of this
offense among writers. For it is a fact that almost all novels,
stories, poems, and essays are only more or less cleverly disguised
autobiography. So here follow some of my enthusiasms in a new
chapter.
IV
A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS
I
In looking back over my own life, a series of enthusiasms would appear
to stand out as a sort of spinal system, about which are grouped as
tributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence.
Or, rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, sparkling stream which
carries along and solves and neutralizes, if not sweetens, in its
impetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds, such as
school, the Puritan Sabbath, boot and hair-brushing, polite and
unpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and shorter
catechists--and so on all the way down between the shores of age to
the higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whose
word is not as good as his bond.
My first enthusiasm was for good things to eat. It was stimulated by
that priceless asset, a virginal palate. But here at once the medium
of expression fails. For what may words presume to do with the flavor
of that first dish of oatmeal; with the first pear, grape, watermelon;
with the Bohemian roll called _Hooska_, besprinkled with poppy and
mandragora; or the wondrous dishes which our Viennese cook called
_Aepfelstrudel_ and _Scheiterhaufen_? The best way for me to express
my reaction to each of these delicacies would be to play it on the
'cello. The next best would be to declare that they tasted somewhat
better than Eve thought the apple was going to taste. But how absurdly
inadequate this sounds! I suppose the truth is that such enthusiasms
have become too utterly congealed in our _blasé_ minds when at last
these minds have grown mature enough to grasp the principles of
penmanship. So that whatever has been recorded about the sensations of
extreme youth is probably all false. Why, even
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"--
as Wordsworth revealed in his "Ode on Immortality." And though
Tennyson pointed out that we try to revenge ourselves by lying about
heaven in our maturity, this does not serve to correct a single one of
crabbed age's misapprehensions about youth.