to the industrial than to the artistic worlds. Industry has a new
supply of human machines always available. Their initial cost is
nothing. So it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, and install
fresh ones. Thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in the
Southern mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap little boys
and girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four
or five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is,
like Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It is
dawning upon him that one chief reason why the old Greeks scaled
Parnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, and
kept, their human machines in good order for the climb. They trained
for the event as an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the Marathon.
One other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancient
Greece is that the non-artists trained also, and thus, through their
heightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers, became
masters by proxy. But that is another chapter.
Why has art never again reached the Periclean plane? Chiefly because
the artist broke training when Greece declined, and has never since
then brought his body up to the former level of efficiency.
Now, as the physiological psychologists assure us, the artist needs a
generous overplus of physical vitality. The art-impulse is a
brimming-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance. And the
best way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain the
physical. The artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full as
possible. He will soon find that he is greater than he knows. He will
discover that he has, until then, been walking the earth more than
half a corpse. With joy he will come to see that living in a glow of
health bears the same relation to merely not being sick that a plunge
in the cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag in a hall
bedroom.
"All through the life of a feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with
memory's grave-stones which mark the spots where noble enterprises
perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds." Thus
wrote the educator, Horace Mann. And his words apply with special
force to the worker in the arts. One should bear in mind that the
latter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve-racking, confining,
exhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But the
claims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spare
intensity. Unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doing
nothing at all. And to do his utmost he must keep his body in that
supremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending to
destroy. The one lasting solution is for him to reduce his working
time to a safe maximum and increase his recreation and sleeping-time
to a safe minimum, and to train "without haste, without rest."
"The first requisite to great intellectuality in a man is to be a
good animal," says Maxim the inventor. Hamerton, in his best-known
book, offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of the
first essentials of genius; and shows how triumphant a part it played
in the careers of such mighty men of intellectual valor as Leonardo da
Vinci, Kant, Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott.
Is the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessary
to the artist? Then let him read biography and note the paralyzing
effect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and three
quarter wellness. He will see that, as a rule, the masters have done
their most telling and lasting work with the tides of physical vim at
flood. For the genius is no Joshua. He cannot make the sun of the mind
and the moon of the spirit stand still while the tides of health are
ebbing seaward. Indeed biography should not be necessary to convince
the fair-minded reader. Autobiography should answer. Just let him
glance back over his own experience and say whether he has not
thought his deepest thoughts and performed his most brilliant deeds
under the intoxication of a stimulant no less heady than that of
exuberant health.
There is, of course, the vexed question of the sickly genius. My
personal belief is firm that, as a rule, he has won his triumphs
_despite_ bad health, and not--as some like to imagine--because of bad
health. To this rule there are a few often cited exceptions. Now, no
one can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer in
the works of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. The white plague
is a powerful mental stimulant. It is a double-distilled extract of
baseless optimism. But this optimism, like that resulting from other
stimulants, is dearly bought. Its shrift is too short. And let nobody
forget that for each variety of pathological optimism and brilliance
and beauty there are ninety and nine corresponding sorts of
pathological pessimism and dullness and ugliness induced by disorders
of the liver, heart, stomach, brain, skin, and so on without end.
The thing for artists to do is to find out what physical conditions
make for the best art in the long run, and then secure these
conditions in as short a run as possible. If tuberculosis makes for
it, then by all means let those of us who are sincerely devoted to art
be inoculated without delay. If the family doctor refuses to oblige,
all we have to do is to avoid fresh air, kiss indiscriminately,
practice a systematic neglect of colds, and frequent the subway during
rush hours. If alcohol makes for the best art, let us forthwith be
admitted to the bar--the stern judgment bar where each solitary
drinker is arraigned. For it is universally admitted that in art,
quality is more important than quantity. "If that powerful corrosive,
alcohol, only makes us do a little first-class work, what matter if it
corrode us to death immediately afterwards? We shall have had our
day." Thus many a gallant soul argues. But is there not another ideal
which is as far above mere quality as quality is above mere quantity?
I think there is. It is quantity of quality. And quantity of quality
is exactly the thing that cannot brook the corrosiveness of powerful
stimulants.
I am not satisfied, however, that stimulants make entirely for the
fine quality of even the short shrift. To my ear, tubercular optimism,
when thumped on the chest, sounds a bit hollow. It does not ring quite
as true as healthy optimism because one feels in the long run its
automatic, pathological character. Thus tubercular, alcoholized, and
drugged art may often be recognized by its somewhat artificial,
unhuman, abnormal quality. I believe that if the geniuses who have
done their work under the influence of these stimulants had, instead,
trained sound bodies as for an Olympic victory, the arts would to-day
be the richer in quantity of quality. On this point George Meredith
wrote a trenchant word in a letter to W. G. Collins:
I think that the notion of drinking any kind of alcohol as a
stimulant for intellectual work can have entered the minds
of those only who snatch at the former that they may
conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants
may refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body
after labor of brain; they do not help it--not even in the
lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert
vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them,
are but flashy, trashy stuff--or exhibitions of the
prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind
which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the
few at all eminent, who wrote after drinking.
To reinforce the opinion of the great Englishman I cannot forbear
giving that of an equally great American:
Never [wrote Emerson] can any advantage be taken of nature
by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence
of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or
of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple
soul in a clean and chaste body.... The poet's habit of
living should be set on so low a key that the common
influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be
the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his
inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.
In other words, the artist should keep himself in a condition so fit
as to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance. But this should
always flow as freely as beer at a college reunion. And there should
always be plenty in reserve. It were well to consider whether there is
not some connection between decadent art and decadent bodies. A friend
of mine recently attended a meeting of decadent painters and reported
that he could not find a chin or a forehead in the room.
One reason why so many of the world's great since Greece have
neglected to store up an overplus of vitality is that exercise is
well-nigh indispensable thereto; and exercise has not seemed to them
sufficiently dignified. We are indebted to the dark ages for this dull
superstition. It was then that the monasteries built gloomy granite
greenhouses for the flower of the world's intellect, that it might
deteriorate in the darkness and perish without reproducing its kind.
The monastic system held the body a vile thing, and believed that to
develop and train it was beneath the dignity of the spiritually elect.
So flagellation was substituted for perspiration, much as, in the
Orient, scent is substituted for soap--and with no more satisfactory
result. This false notion of dignity has since then, by keeping men
out of flannels, gymnasium suits, running-tights, and overalls,
performed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mind
and stunting the fruit trees of the spirit.
To-day, however, we are escaping from the old superstition. We begin
to see that there is no complete dignity for man without a dignified
physique; and that there is no physical dignity to compare with that
of the hard-trained athlete. True, he who trains can hardly keep up
the old-time pose of the grand old man or the grand young man. He must
perforce be more human and natural. But this sort of grandeur is now
going out of fashion. And its absence must show to advantage in his
work.
As a rule the true artist is a most devoted and self-sacrificing
person. Ever since the piping times of Pericles he has usually been
willing to sacrifice to the demands of his art most of the things he
enjoys excepting poor health. Wife, children, friends, credit--all may
go by the board. But his poor health he addresses with solemn,
scriptural loyalty: "Whither thou goest I will go: and where thou
lodgest I will lodge. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I
be buried." Not that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor health.
But he most thoroughly enjoys a number of its causes. Sitting up too
late at night is what he enjoys; smoking too much, drinking too much,
yielding to the exhausting sway of the divine efflatus for longer
hours at a time than he has any business to, bolting unbalanced meals,
and so on.
But the artist is finding out that poor health is the very first
enjoyment which he ought to sacrifice; that the sacrifice is by no
means as heroic as it appears; and that, once it is accomplished, the
odds are that all the other things he thought he must offer up may be
added unto him through his own increased efficiency.
No doubt, all this business of regimen, of constant alertness and
petty self-sacrifice, is bound to grow irksome before it settles down
in life and becomes habitual. But what does a little irksomeness
count--or even a great deal of irksomeness--as against the long, deep
thrill of doing better than you thought you ever knew how--of going
from strength to strength and creating that which will elevate and
delight mankind long after the pangs of installing regimen are
forgotten and you have once and for all broken training and laid you
down to sleep over?
The reason why great men and women are so often cynical about their
own success is this: they have been so immoderate in their enjoyment
of poor health that when the hour of victory comes, they lack the
exuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring of
achievement or of any other pleasure. I believe that the successful
invalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthy
failure about his failure. The latter is usually an optimist. But this
is a hard belief to substantiate. For the perfectly healthy failure
does not grow on every bush.
If only the physical conscientiousness of the Greeks had never been
allowed to die out, the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer,
fairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, we shall never be able to
reckon up our losses in genius: in Shakespeares whose births were
frustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possible
parents; in Schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causes
before they had delivered a note of their message; in Giorgiones whom
a suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have their
work cheapened and curtailed. What overwhelming losses has art not
sustained by having the ranks of its artists and their most creative
audiences decimated by the dullness of mediocre health! It is hard to
endure the thought of what the geniuses of the modern world might have
been able to accomplish if only they had lived and trained like
athletes and been treated with a small part of the practical
consideration and live sympathy which humanity bestows on a favorite
ball-player or prize-fighter.
To-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed against
the truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the
mother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only the
stepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves that
sickness and morbidity are good for the arts, just as they delightedly
embrace the conviction, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life of
harassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the
true poet. The circumstance that this belief runs clean counter to the
showing of history does not embarrass them. Convinced against their
will, most people are of the same opinion still. And they
enthusiastically assault and batter any one who points out the truth,
as I shall endeavor to do in chapter eight.
Even if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as little as
a century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If Richard
Wagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching
cold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary places
to overlook in "The Ring," and would, instead, have three or four more
immortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to
write. One hates to think what Poe might have done in literature if he
had taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket.
Tuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said so
before the death of Keats!...
It makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in a
stuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how the
sole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game
of _l'hombre_ with the philosopher Schelling. And then he wondered
why he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever
catching cold (_einen starken Schnupfen_); and why his head was so
thick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. In his
correspondence with Goethe it is exasperating to observe that these
great poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight change
of temperature or humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdraw
their health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it would
have been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made
them health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows of
outrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourish
inspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case their
published works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the
masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of
their _Sämmtliche Werke_ than they do. And the second part of "Faust"
would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom
having wings to match those of the spirit.
"Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht
Kein korperlicher Flügel sich gesellen."
Some of the most opulent and powerful spirits ever seen on earth have
scarcely done more than indicate what kind of birthrights they
bartered away for a mess of pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased to
write poetry after thirty because, by dissipating his overplus of
life, he had too grievously wronged what he described as
"This body that does me grievous wrong."
After all, there are comparatively few masters, since the glory that
was Greece, who have not half buried their talents in the earthy
darkness of mediocre health. When we survey the army of modern genius,
how little of the sustained ring and resilience and triumphant
immortal youth of real exuberance do we find there! Instead of a band
of sound, alert, well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit,
behold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along with
lack-luster eyes, or eyes bright with the luster of fever. And the
people whom they serve are not entirely free from blame. They have
neglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks, or put shirts on their
backs. As for footgear, it is the usual campaign army shoe, made of
blotting paper--the shoe that left red marks behind it at Valley Forge
and Gettysburg and San Juan Hill. I believe that a better time is
coming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn.
For we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if the
artist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able to
run--not alone with patience, but also with the brilliance born of
abounding vitality--the race that is set before him. This dawning
belief is the greatest hope of modern art.
It does one good to see how artists, here, there, and everywhere, are
beginning to grow enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodily
efficiency, and physically to "revive the just designs of Greece." The
encouraging thing is that the true artist who once finds what an
impulse is given his work by rigorous training, is never content to
slump back to his former vegetative, death-in-life existence. His
daily prayer has been said in a single line by a recent American poet:
"Life, grant that we may live until we die."
In every way the artist finds himself the gainer by cutting down his
hours of work to the point where he never loses his reserve of energy.
He now is beginning to take absolute--not merely relative--vacations,
and more of them. For he remembers that no man's work--not even
Rembrandt's or Beethoven's or Shakespeare's--is ever _too_ good; and
that every hour of needed rest or recreation makes the ensuing work
better. It is being borne in on the artist that a health-book like
Fisher's "Making Life Worth While" is of as much professional value to
him as many a treatise on the practice of his craft. Insight into the
physiological basis of his life-work can save the artist, it seems,
from those periods of black despair which he once used to employ in
running his head against a concrete wall, and raging impotently
because he could not butt through. Now, instead of laying his futility
to a mysteriously malignant fate, or to the persecution of secret
enemies, he is likely to throw over stimulants and late hours and take
to the open road, the closed squash-court, and the sleeping-porch. And
presently armies cannot withhold him from joyful, triumphant labor.
The artist is finding that exuberance, this Open Sesame to the things
that count, may not be won without the friendly collaboration of the
pores; and that two birds of paradise may be killed with one stone
(which is precious above rubies) by giving the mind fun while one
gives the pores occupation. Sport is this precious stone. There is, of
course, something to be said for sportless exercise. It is fairly
good for the artist to perform solemn antics in a gymnasium class, to
gesture impassionedly with dumb-bells, and tread the mill of the
circular running-track. But it is far better for him to go in with
equal energy for exercise which, while developing the body, re-creates
the mind and spirit. That kind of exercise is best, in my opinion,
which offers plenty of variety and humor and the excitement of
competition. I mean games like tennis, baseball, handball, golf,
lacrosse, and polo, and sports like swift-water canoeing and
fly-fishing, boxing, and fencing. These take the mind of the artist
quite away from its preoccupations and then restore it to them, unless
he has taken too much of a good thing, with a fresh viewpoint and a
zest for work.
Sport is one of the chief makers of exuberance because of its purging,
exhilarating, and constructive effects on body, mind, and spirit. So
many contemporary artists are being converted to sport that the
artistic type seems to be changing under our eyes. It was only
yesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, or
music was a sickly, morbid, anæmic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at
sight by the average man, and a shining mark for all the cast-off wit
of the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in "Patience." He
was a "foot-in-the-grave young man," or a "_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young
man." He was
"A most intense young man,
A soulful-eyed young man.
An ultra-poetical, superæsthetical, Out-of-the-way young man."
To-day, what a change! Where is this young man? Most of his ilk have
accompanied the snows of yester-year. And a goodly proportion of those
who make merry in their room are sure-eyed, well set-up, ruddy,
muscular chaps, about whom the average man may jeer and quote
slanderous doggerel only at his peril. But somehow or other the
average man likes this new type better and does not want to jeer at
him, but goes and buys his work instead.
Faint though distinct, one begins to hear the new note of exuberance
spreading through the arts. On canvas it registers the fact that the
painters are migrating in hordes to live most of the year in the open
country. It vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musical
performer like Willeke, the 'cellist. Like a starter's pistol it
sounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like John
Masefield and Alfred Noyes. One has only to compare the overflowing
life and sanity of workers like these with the condition of the
ordinary "Out-of-the-way young man" to see what a gulf yawns between
exuberance and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a state
somewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity. And I believe that as
yet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physical
renaissance. Wait until this new religion of exuberance is a few
generations older and eugenics has said her say!
Curiously enough, the decadent artists who pride themselves on their
extreme modernity are the ones who now seem to cling with the most
reactionary grip to the old-fashioned, invertebrate type of physique.
The rest are in a fair way to undergo such a change as came to Queed,
the sedentary hero of Mr. Harrison's novel, when he took up boxing. As
sport and the artists come closer together, they should have a good
effect on one another. The artists will doubtless make sport more
formful, rhythmical, and beautiful. Sport, on the other hand, ought
before long to influence the arts by making sportsmen of the artists.
Now good sportsmanship is composed of fairness, team-work, the grace
of a good loser, the grace of a good winner, modesty, and gameness.
The first two of these amount to an equitable passion for a fair field
and no favor, and a willingness to subordinate star-play, or personal
gain, to team-play, or communal gain. Together they imply a feeling
for true democracy. To be converted to the religion of sportsmanship
means to become more socially minded. I think it is more than a
coincidence that at the moment when the artists are turning to sport,
their work is taking on the brotherly tone of democracy. The call of
brotherhood is to-day one of the chief preoccupations of poetry, the
drama, ideal sculpture, and mural decoration. For this rapid change I
should not wonder if the democracy of sportsmanship were in part
responsible.