{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_19696/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_19696","id":"gutenberg_19696","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19696","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Psychiatry/Psychology","Happiness"],"text":"Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Sankar Viswanathan, and the\nOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n                           THE JOYFUL HEART\n\n\n\n                                  BY\n\n                       ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER\n\n           AUTHOR OF THE MUSICAL AMATEUR, SCUM O' THE EARTH\n           AND OTHER POEMS, ROMANTIC AMERICA, ETC.\n\n\n\n    \"People who are nobly happy constitute the power, the beauty\n    and the foundation of the state.\"\n\n                          JEAN FINOT: _The Science of Happiness._\n\n\n\n\n\n                         BOSTON AND NEW YORK\n                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY\n                    The Riverside Press Cambridge\n                                 1914\n\n\n\n              COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\nTO\n\nMY WIFE\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\nFOREWORD\n\n\nThis is a guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored,\nthe tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed. It is for the use\nof all those whose cup of vitality is not brimming over.\n\nThe world has not yet seen enough of joy. It bears the reputation of\nan elusive sprite with finger always at lip bidding farewell. In\ncertain dark periods, especially in times of international warfare, it\nthreatens to vanish altogether from the earth. It is then the first\nduty of all peaceful folk to find and hold fast to joy, keeping it in\ntrust for their embattled brothers.\n\nEven if this were not their duty as citizens of the world, it would be\ntheir duty as patriots. For Jean Finot is right in declaring that\n\"people who are nobly happy constitute the power, the beauty and the\nfoundation of the state.\"\n\nThis book is a manual of enthusiasm--the power which drives the\nworld--and of those kinds of exuberance (physical, mental and\nspiritual) which can make every moment of every life worth living. It\naims to show how to get the most joy not only from traveling hopefully\ntoward one's goal, but also from the goal itself on arrival there. It\nurges sound business methods in conducting that supreme business, the\ninvestment of one's vitality.\n\nIt would show how one may find happiness all alone with his better\nself, his 'Auto-Comrade'--an accomplishment well-nigh lost in this\ncrowded age. It would show how the gospel of exuberance, by offering\nthe joys of hitherto unsuspected power to the artist and his audience,\nbids fair to lift the arts again to the lofty level of the Periclean\nage. It would show the so-called \"common\" man or woman how to develop\nthat creative sympathy which may make him a 'master by proxy,' and\nthus let him know the conscious happiness of playing an essential part\nin the creation of works of genius. In short, the book tries to show\nhow the cup of joy may not only be kept full for one's personal use,\nbut may also be made hospitably to brim over for others.\n\nTo the _Atlantic Monthly_ thanks are due for permission to reprint\nchapters I, III and IV; to the _North American Review_, for chapter\nVIII; and to the _Century_, for chapters V, VI, IX and X.\n\nR. H. S.\n\nGEEENBUSH, MASS.\n\nAugust, 1914.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\nI.    A DEFENSE OF JOY\n\nII.   THE BRIMMING CUP\n\nIII.  ENTHUSIASM\n\nIV.   A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS\n\nV.    THE AUTO-COMRADE\n\nVI.   VIM AND VISION\n\nVII.  PRINTED JOY\n\nVIII. THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS\n\nIX.   THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC\n\nX. MASTERS BY PROXY\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\nTHE JOYFUL HEART\n\nI\n\nA DEFENSE OF JOY\n\n\nJoy is such stuff as the hinges of Heaven's doors are made of. So our\nfathers believed. So we supposed in childhood. Since then it has\nbecome the literary fashion to oppose this idea. The writers would\nhave us think of joy not as a supernal hinge, but as a pottle of hay,\nhung by a crafty creator before humanity's asinine nose. The donkey is\nthus constantly incited to unrewarded efforts. And when he arrives at\nthe journey's end he is either defrauded of the hay outright, or he\ndislikes it, or it disagrees with him.\n\nRobert Louis Stevenson warns us that \"to travel hopefully is a better\nthing than to arrive,\" beautifully portraying the emptiness and\nillusory character of achievement. And, of those who have attained,\nMr. E. F. Benson exclaims, \"God help them!\" These sayings are typical\nof a widespread literary fashion. Now to slander Mistress Joy to-day\nis a serious matter. For we are coming to realize that she is a far\nmore important person than we had supposed; that she is, in fact, one\nof the chief managers of life. Instead of doing a modest little\nbusiness in an obscure suburb, she has offices that embrace the whole\nfirst floor of humanity's city hall.\n\nOf course I do not doubt that our writer-friends note down the truth\nas they see it. But they see it imperfectly. They merely have a corner\nof one eye on a corner of the truth. Therefore they tell untruths that\nare the falser for being so charmingly and neatly expressed. What they\nsay about joy being the bribe that achievement offers us to get itself\nrealized may be true in a sense. But they are wrong in speaking of the\nbribe as if it were an apple rotten at the core, or a bag of\ncounterfeit coin, or a wisp of artificial hay. It is none of these\nthings. It is sweet and genuine and well worth the necessary effort,\nonce we are in a position to appreciate it at anything like its true\nworth. We must learn not to trust the beautiful writers too\nimplicitly. For there is no more treacherous guide than the consummate\nartist on the wrong track.\n\nThose who decry the joy of achievement are like tyros at skating who\nventure alone upon thin ice, fall down, fall in, and insist on the way\nhome that winter sports have been grossly overestimated. This outcry\nabout men being unable to enjoy what they have attained is a\nhalf-truth which cannot skate two consecutive strokes in the right\ndirection without the support of its better half. And its better half\nis the fact that one may enjoy achievement hugely, provided only he\nwill get himself into proper condition.\n\nOf course I am not for one moment denying that achievement is harder\nto enjoy than the hope of achievement. Undoubtedly the former lacks\nthe glamour of the indistinct, \"that sweet bloom of all that is far\naway.\" But our celebrated writer-friends overlook the fact that\nglamour and \"sweet bloom\" are so much pepsin to help weak stomachs\ndigest strong joy. If you would have the best possible time of it in\nthe world, develop your joy-digesting apparatus to the point where it\ncan, without a qualm, dispose of that tough morsel, the present,\nobvious and attained. There will always be enough of the unachieved at\ntable to furnish balanced rations.\n\n\"God help the attainers!\"--forsooth! Why, the ideas which I have\nquoted, if they were carried to logical lengths, would make heaven a\nfarcical kill-joy, a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable morgue of\ndisappointed hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that the old\nheaven of the Semitic poets was constructed somewhat along these\nlines. But that was no real heaven. The real heaven is a quiet,\nharpless, beautiful place where every one is a heaven-born creator\nand is engaged--not caring in the least for food or sleep--in turning\nout, one after another, the greatest of masterpieces, and enjoying\nthem to the quick, both while they are being done and when they are\nquite achieved.\n\nI would not, however, fall into the opposite error and disparage the\njoy of traveling hopefully. It is doubtless easy to amuse one's self\nin a wayside air-castle of an hundred suites, equipped with\nself-starting servants, a Congressional Library, a National Gallery of\npictures, a Vatican-ful of sculpture, with Hoppe for billiard-marker,\nPaderewski to keep things going in the music-room, Wright as grand\nhereditary master of the hangar, and Miss Annette Kellerman in charge\nof the swimming-pool. I am not denying that such a castle is easier to\nenjoy before the air has been squeezed out of it by the horny clutch\nof reality, which moves it to the journey's end and sets it down with\na jar in its fifty-foot lot, complete with seven rooms and bath, and\nonly half an hour from the depot. But this is not for one moment\nadmitting the contention of the lords of literature that the\nair-castle has a monopoly of joy, while the seven rooms and bath have\na monopoly of disillusionized boredom and anguish of mind. If your\nbefore-mentioned apparatus is only in working order, you can have no\nend of joy out of the cottage. And any morning before breakfast you\ncan build another, and vastly superior, air-castle on the vacant land\nbehind the woodshed.\n\n\"What is all this,\" I heard the reader ask, \"about a joy-digesting\napparatus?\"\n\nIt consists of four parts. Physical exuberance is the first. To a\nconsiderable extent joy depends on an overplus of health. The joy of\nartistic creation, for instance, lies not so intensely and\nintoxicatingly in what you may some time accomplish as in what has\nactually just started into life under your pencil or clayey thumb,\nyour bow or brush. For what you are about to receive, the Lord, as a\nrule, makes you duly thankful. But with the thankfulness is always\nmingled the shadowy apprehension that your powers may fail you when\nnext you wish to use them. Thus the joy of anticipatory creation is\nakin to pain. It holds no such pure bliss as actual creation. When you\nare in full swing, what you have just finished (unless you are\nexhausted) seems to you nearly always the best piece of work that you\nhave ever done. For your critical, inhibitory apparatus is temporarily\nparalyzed by the intoxication of the moment. What makes so many\nartists fail at these times to enjoy a maximum of pleasure and a\nminimum of its opposite, is that they do not train their bodies \"like\na strong man to run a race,\" and make and keep them aboundingly vital.\nThe actual toil takes so much of their meager vitality that they have\ntoo little left with which to enjoy the resulting achievement. If they\nbecome ever so slightly intoxicated over the work, they have a\ndreadful morning after, whose pain they read back into the joy\npreceding. And then they groan out that all is vanity, and slander joy\nby calling it a pottle of hay.\n\nIt takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement is\nsomething finished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished in art, for\ninstance, without re-creating it for yourself. But, though re-creation\ndemands almost as much vital overplus as creation, the layman should\nrealize that he has, as a rule, far more of this overplus than the\npallid, nervous sort of artist. And he should accordingly discount the\nother's lamentations over the vanity of human achievement.\n\nThe reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure in writing, and in having\nwritten, his delicious essays is that he did not know how to take\nproper care of his body. To be extremely antithetical, I, on the other\nhand, take so much pleasure in writing and in having written these\nessays of mine (which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise,\nor brilliant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery,\ndiscouragement, and disillusionment which accompany and follow almost\nevery one of them, and the need of Spartan training for their sake,\nhardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings.\nTraining has meant so much vital overplus to me that I long ago\nspurted and caught up with my pottle of joy. And, finding that it made\na cud of unimagined flavor and durability, I substituted for the\npottle a placard to this effect:\n\nREMEMBER THE RACE!\n\nThis placard, hung always before me, is a reminder that a decent\nrespect for the laws of good sportsmanship requires one to keep in as\nhard condition as possible for the hundred-yard dash called Life. Such\na regimen pays thousands of per cent. in yearly dividends. It allows\none to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather like\nthat which the sprinter enjoys when, after months of flawless\npreparation, he hurls himself through space like some winged creature\ntoo much in love with the earth to leave it; while every drop of his\ntingling blood makes him conscious of endless reserves of vitality.\n\nTingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things into\njoy--even sorrow itself. I wonder if any one seriously doubts that it\nwas just this which was giving Browning's young David such a glorious\ntime of it when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop about \"our\nmanhood's prime vigor\" and \"the wild joys of living.\"\n\nThe physical variety of exuberance, once won, makes easy the winning\nof the mental variety. This, when it is almost isolated from the other\nkinds, is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world of\nabstract thought, or drink delight of battle with your intellectual\npeers, or follow with full understanding the phonographic version of\nsome mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this means work. But if your\nbody is shouting for joy over the mere act of living, mental\ncalisthenics no longer appear so impossibly irksome. And anyway, the\ndiscipline of your physical training has induced your will to put up\nwith a good deal of irksomeness. This is partly because its eye is\nfixed on something beyond the far-off, divine event of achieving\nconcentration on one subject for five minutes without allowing the\nmind to wander from it more than twenty-five times. That something is\na keenness of perception which makes any given fragment of nature or\nhuman nature or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace,\nendlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery--with\npossibilities, even, of a developing imagination. For the\nAuto-Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He can get something\nout of nothing.\n\nAt this stage of your development you will probably discover in\nyourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enable\nyou to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you wander through\nyour mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come upon an ugly intruder\nof a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as\nfear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like, there is only one\nright way to treat it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on the rubbish\nheap as if it were a stinging nettle; and let some harmonious thought\ngrow in its place. There is no more reckless consumer of all kinds of\nexuberance than the discordant thought, and weeding it out saves such\nan amazing quantity of _eau de vie_ wherewith to water the garden of\njoy, that every man may thus be his own Burbank and accomplish marvels\nof mental horticulture.\n\nWhen you have won physical and mental exuberance, you will have\npleased your Auto-Comrade to such an extent that he will most likely\nstartle and delight you with a birthday present as the reward of\nvirtue. Some fine morning you will climb out of the right side of your\nbed and come whistling down to breakfast and find by your plate a neat\npacket of spiritual exuberance with his best wishes. Such a gift is\nwhat the true artist enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and full\nfor a dozen pens or brushes to record. Jeanne d'Arc knew it when the\nmysterious voices spoke to her; and St. John on Patmos; and every true\nlover at certain moments; and each one of us who has ever flung wide\nthe gates of prayer and felt the infinite come flooding in as the\nclean vigor of the tide swirls up through a sour, stagnant marsh; or\nwho at some supreme instant has felt enfolding him, like the\neverlasting arms, a sure conviction of immortality.\n\nNow for purposes of convenience we may speak of these three kinds of\nexuberance as we would speak of different individuals. But in reality\nthey hardly ever exist alone. The physical variety is almost sure to\ninduce the mental and spiritual varieties and to project itself into\nthem. The mental kind looks before and after and warms body and soul\nwith its radiant smile. And even when we are in the throes of a purely\nspiritual love or religious ecstasy, we have a feeling--though\nperhaps it is illusory--that the flesh and the intellect are more\npotent than we knew.\n\nThese, then, constitute the first three parts of the joy-digesting\napparatus. I think there is no need of dwelling on their efficacy in\nhelping one to enjoy achievement. Let us pass, therefore, to the\nfourth and last part, which is self-restraint.\n\nPerhaps the worst charge usually made against achievement is its\nsameness, its dry monotony. On the way to it (the writers say) you are\nconstantly falling in with something new. But, once there, you must\nabandon the variegated delights of yesterday and settle down, to-day\nand forever, to the same old thing. In this connection I recall an\nepigram of Professor Woodrow Wilson's. He was lecturing to us young\nPrincetonians about Gladstone's ability to make any subject of\nabsorbing interest, even a four hours' speech on the budget. \"Young\ngentlemen,\" cried the professor, \"it is not the subject that is dry.\nIt is _you_ that are dry!\" Similarly, it is not achievement that is\ndry; it is the achievers, who fondly suppose that now, having\nachieved, they have no further use for the exuberance of body, mind,\nand spirit, or the self-restraint which helped them toward their goal.\n\nParticularly the self-restraint. One chief reason why the thing\nattained palls so often and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy it\nimmoderately. Why, if Ponce de Leon had found the fountain of youth\nand drunk of it as bibulously as we are apt to guzzle the cup of\nachievement, he would not only have arrested the forward march of\ntime, but would have over-reached himself and slipped backward through\nthe years of his age to become a chronic infant in arms. Even\ntraveling hopefully would pall if one kept at it twenty-four hours a\nday. Just feast on the rich food of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony\nmorning, noon, and night for a few months, and see how you feel. There\nis no other way. Achievement must be moderately indulged in, not made\nthe pretext for a debauch. If one has achieved a new cottage, for\nexample, let him take numerous week-end vacations from it. And let not\nan author sit down and read through his own book the moment it comes\nfrom the binder. A few more months will suffice to blur the memory of\nthose irrevocable, nauseating foundry proofs. If he forbears--instead\nof being sickened by the stuff, no gentle reader, I venture to\npredict, will be more keenly and delicately intrigued by the volume's\nvigors and subtleties.\n\nIf you have recently made a fortune, be sure, in the course of your\nContinental wanderings, to take many a third-class carriage full of\nwitty peasants, and stop at many an \"unpretending\" inn \"Of the White\nHind,\" with bowered rose-garden and bowling-green running down to the\ntrout-filled river, and mine ample hostess herself to make and bring\nyou the dish for which she is famous over half the countryside. Thus\nyou will increase by at least one Baedekerian star-power the luster\nof the next Grand Hotel Royal de l'Univers which may receive you. And\nbe sure to alternate pedestrianism with motoring, and the \"peanut\"\ngallery with the stage-box. Omit not to punctuate with stag vacations\nlong periods of domestic felicity. When Solomon declared that all was\nvanity and vexation of spirit I suspect that he had been more than\nunusually intemperate in frequenting the hymeneal altar.\n\nWhy is it that the young painters, musicians, and playwrights who win\nfame and fortune as heroes in the novels of Mr. E. F. Benson enjoy\nachievement so hugely? Simply because they are exuberant in mind,\nbody, and spirit, and, if not averse to brandy and soda, are in other\nways, at least, paragons of moderation. And yet, in his \"Book of\nMonths,\" Mr. Benson requests God to help those who have attained!\n\nWith this fourfold equipment of the three exuberances and moderation,\nI defy Solomon himself in all his glory not to enjoy the situation\nimmensely and settle down in high good humor and content with the\npaltry few scores of wives already achieved. I defy him not to enjoy\neven his fame.\n\nWe have heard much from the gloomily illustrious about the fraudulent\npromise of fame. At a distance, they admit, it seems like a banquet\nboard spread with a most toothsome feast. But step up to the table.\nAll you find there is dust and ashes, vanity and vexation of spirit\nand a desiccated joint that defies the stoutest carver. If a man holds\nthis view, however, you may be rather sure that he belongs to the\n_bourgeois_ great. For it is just as _bourgeois_ to win fame and then\nnot know what on earth to do with it, as it is to win fortune and then\nnot know what on earth to do with it. The more cultivated a famous man\nis, the more he must enjoy the situation; for along with his dry scrag\nof fame, the more he must have of the sauce which alone makes it\npalatable. The recipe for this sauce runs as follows: to one\namphoraful best physical exuberance add spice of keen perception,\ncream of imagination, and fruits of the spirit. Serve with grain of\nsalt.\n\nThat famous person is sauceless who can, without a tingle of joy,\noverhear the couple in the next steamer-chairs mentioning his name\ncasually to each other as an accepted and honored household word. He\nhas no sauce for his scrag if he, unmoved, can see the face of some\nbeautiful child in the holiday crowd suddenly illuminated by the\npleasure of recognizing him, from his pictures, as the author of her\nfavorite story. He is _bourgeois_ if it gives him no joy when the\nweight of his name swings the beam toward the good cause; or when the\nmail brings luminous gratitude and comprehension from the perfect\nstranger in Topeka or Tokyo. No; fame to the truly cultivated should\nbe fully as enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward fame.\n\nIn certain other cases, indeed, attainment is even more delicious than\nthe hope thereof. Think of the long, cool drink at the New Mexican\npueblo after a day in the incandescent desert, with your tongue\ngradually enlarging itself from thirst. How is it with you, O golfer,\nwhen, even up at the eighteenth, you top into the hazard, make a\ndesperate demonstration with the niblick, and wipe the sand out of\nyour eyes barely in time to see your ball creep across the distant\ngreen and drop into the hole? Has not the new president's aged father\na slightly better time at the inauguration of his dear boy than he had\nat any time during the fifty years of hoping for and predicting that\nconsummation? Does not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly the\ncertainty of having made the world a better place to live in, than he\nhad enjoyed the hope of achieving that desirable end? Can there be any\ncomparison between the joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring, now\nhopefully, now despairingly, to port, and the joys of the same soul\nwhich has at last found a perfect haven in the heart of God?\n\nAnd still the writers go on talking of joy as if it were a pottle of\nhay--a flimsy fraud--and of the satisfaction of attainment as if it\nwere unattainable. Why do they not realize, at least, that their every\nthrill of response to a beautiful melody, their every laugh of\ndelighted comprehension of Hazlitt or Crothers, is in itself\nattainment? The creative appreciator of art is always at his goal. And\nthe much-maligned present is the only time at our disposal in which to\nenjoy the much-advertised future.\n\nToo bad that our literary friends should have gone to extremes on this\npoint! If Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that \"to travel hopefully is\nan easier thing than to arrive,\" he would undoubtedly have hit the\ntruth. If Mr. Benson had said, \"If you attain, God help you bountifully\nto exuberance,\" etc., that would have been unexceptionable. It would\neven have been a more useful--though slightly supererogatory--service,\nto point out for the million-and-first time that achievement is not all\nthat it seems to be from a considerable distance. In other words, that\nthe laws of perspective will not budge. These writers would thus quite\nsufficiently have played dentist to Disappointment and extracted his\nvenomous fangs for us in advance. What the gentlemen really should have\ndone was to perform the dentistry first, reminding us once again that a\npart of attainment is illusory and consists of such stuff as\ndreams--good and bad--are made of. Then, on the other hand, they should\nhave demonstrated attainment's good points, finally leading up to its\nsupreme advantage. This advantage is--its strategic position.\n\nArriving beats hoping to arrive, in this: that while the hoper is so\nkeenly hopeful that he has little attention to spare for anything\nbesides the future, the arriver may take a broader, more leisurely\nsurvey of things. The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. The\nattainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a complete\npanorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover by\nre-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther and\nloftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attacking\nthe week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him\nhis mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, the\nachiever, if his joy-digesting apparatus be working properly, rejoices\nwith exceeding great joy in past, present, and future alike. He has an\nadvantage of three to one over the merely hopeful traveler. And when\nthey meet this is the song he sings:--\n\n    Mistress Joy is at your side\n    Waiting to become a bride.\n\n    Soft! Restrain your jubilation.\n    That ripe mouth may not be kissed\n    Ere you stand examination.\n    Mistress Joy's a eugenist.\n\n    Is your crony Moderation?\n    Do your senses say you sooth?\n    Are your veins the kind that tingle?\n    Is your soul awake in truth?\n\n    If these traits in you commingle\n    Joy no more shall leave you single.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nTHE BRIMMING CUP\n\n\nExuberance is the income yielded by a wise investment of one's\nvitality. On this income, so long as it flows in regularly, the\nmoderate man may live in the Land of the Joyful Heart, incased in\ntriple steel against any arrows of outrageous fortune that happen to\nstray in across the frontier. Immigrants to this land who have no such\nincome are denied admission. They may steam into the country's\nprincipal port, past the great statue of the goddess Joy who holds\naloft a brimming cup in the act of pledging the world. But they are\nput ashore upon a small island for inspection. And so soon as the\ninferior character of their investments becomes known, or their\nrecklessness in eating into their principal, they are deported.\n\nThe contrast between those within the well-guarded gates and those\nwithout is an affecting one. The latter often squander vast fortunes\nin futile attempts to gain a foothold in the country. And they have a\nmiserable time of it. Many of the natives, on the other hand, are so\npoor that they have constantly to fight down the temptation to touch\ntheir principal. But every time they resist, the old miracle happens\nfor them once more: the sheer act of living turns out to be \"paradise\nenow.\"\n\nNow no mere fullness of life will qualify a man for admission to the\nLand of the Joyful Heart. One must have overflowingness of life. In\nhis book \"The Science of Happiness\" Jean Finot declares, that the\n\"disenchantment and the sadness which degenerate into a sort of\npessimistic melancholy are frequently due to the diminution of the\nvital energy. And as pain and sorrow mark the diminution, the joy of\nliving and the upspringing of happiness signify the increase of\nenergy.... By using special instruments, such as the plethysmograph\nof Hallion, the pneumograph of Marey, the sphygmometer of Cheron, and\nso many others which have come in fashion during these latter years,\nwe have succeeded in proving experimentally that joy, sadness, and\npain depend upon our energy.\" To keep exuberant one must possess more\nthan just enough vitality to fill the cup of the present. There must\nbe enough to make it brim over. Real exuberance, however, is not the\nextravagant, jarring sort of thing that some thoughtless persons\nsuppose it to be. The word is not accented on the first syllable.\nIndeed, it might just as well be \"_in_uberance.\" It does not long to\nmake an impression or, in vulgar phrase, to \"get a rise\"; but tends to\nbe self-contained. It is not boisterousness. It is generous and\ninfectious, while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish and\nrepellent. Most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd of\nmummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades. For boisterousness\nis only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the rampage. The royal\nold musician and poet was not filled with this, but with the real\nthing, when he sang:\n\n    \"_He leadeth me beside the still waters.\n    He restoreth my soul ...\n    My cup runneth over._\"\n\nThe merely boisterous man, on the other hand, is a fatuous spendthrift\nof his fortune. He reminds us how close we are of kin to the\nfrolicsome chimpanzee. His attitude was expressed on election night by\na young man of Manhattan who shouted hoarsely to his fellow:\n\n    \"On with the dance; let joy be unrefined!\"\n\nNeither should mere vivacity be mistaken for exuberance. It is no more\nsurely indicative of the latter than is the laugh of a parrot. One of\nthe chief advantages of the Teutonic over the Latin type of man is\nthat the Latin is tempted to waste his precious vital overplus through\na continuous display of vivacity, while the less demonstrative Teuton\nmore easily stores his up for use where it will count. This gives him\nan advantage in such pursuits as athletics and empire-building.\n\nThe more exuberance of all varieties one has stored up in body and\nmind and spirit, the more of it one can bring to bear at the right\nmoment upon the things that count for most in the world--the things\nthat owe to it their lasting worth and their very existence. A little\nof this precious commodity, more or less, is what often makes the\ndifference between the ordinary and the supreme achievement. It is the\nliquid explosive that shatters the final, and most stubborn, barrier\nbetween man and the Infinite. It is what Walt Whitman called \"that\nlast spark, that sharp flash of power, that something or other more\nwhich gives life to all great literature.\"\n\nThe happy man is the one who possesses these three kinds of overplus,\nand whose will is powerful enough to keep them all healthy and to keep\nhim from indulging in their delights intemperately.\n\nIt is a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many do, that such fullness\nof life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back door\nwhen middle age knocks at the front. It is no more bound to go as the\nwrinkles and gray hairs arrive than your income is bound to take wings\ntwo or three score years after the original investment of the\nprincipal. To ascribe it to youth as an exclusive attribute is as\nfatuous as it would be to ascribe a respectable income only to the\nrecent investor.\n\nA red-letter day it will be for us when we realize that exuberance\nrepresents for every one the income from his fund of vitality; that\nwhen one's exuberance is all gone, his income is temporarily\nexhausted; and that he cannot go on living at the same rate without\ntouching the principal. The hard-headed, harder-worked American\nbusiness man is admittedly clever and prudent about money matters. But\nwhen he comes to deal with immensely more important matters such as\nlife, health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. He has not yet\ngrasped the obvious truth that a man's fund of vitality ought to be\nadministered upon at least as sound a business basis as his fund of\ndollars. The principal should not be broken into for living expenses\nduring a term of at least ninety-nine years. (Metchnikoff says that\nthis term is one hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of the\nBulgarian bacillus.) And one should not be content with anything short\nof a substantial rate of interest.\n\nIn one respect this life-business is a simpler thing to manage than\nthe dollar-business. For, in the former, if the interest comes in\nregularly and unimpaired, you may know that the principal is safe,\nwhile in the dollar-business they may be paying your interest out of\nyour principal, and you none the wiser until the crash. But here the\ndifference ceases. For if little or no vital interest comes in, your\ngenerous scale of living is pinched. You may defer the catastrophe a\nlittle by borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate from usurious\nstimulants, giving many pounds of flesh as security. But soon Shylock\nforecloses and you are forced to move with your sufferings to the\nslums and ten-cent lodging-houses of Life. Moreover, you must face a\nbrutal dispossession from even the poor flat or dormitory cot you\nthere occupy--out amid the snows and blasts--\n\n    \"Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form\"\n\nthere to pay slack life's \"arrears of pain, darkness, and cold.\"\n\nThe reason why every day is a joy to the normal child is that he fell\nheir at birth to a fortune of vitality and has not yet had time to\nsquander all his substance in riotous or thoughtless living, or to\noverdraw his account in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one of his\ndays is a joy--that is, except in so far as his elders have impressed\ntheir tired standards of behavior too masterfully upon him. \"Happy as\na child\"--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary. In\norder to remain as happy as this for a century or so, all that a child\nhas to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles, and\nnever overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into the myriad details\nof just how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is no\ndearth of wise books and physicians and \"Masters of the Inn,\"\ncompetent to mark out sound business programs of work, exercise,\nrecreation, and regimen for body, mind, and spirit; while all that you\nmust contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension,\ntime, money, and will-power. You see, I am not a professor of vital\ncommerce and investment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to induce the\nvoters to elect a sound business administration.\n\nI believe that the blessings of climate give us of North America less\nexcuse than most other people for failing to put such an\nadministration into office. It is noteworthy that many of the\nEuropeans who have recently written their impressions of the United\nStates imagine that Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of vitality is\nshared by nearly the whole nation. If it only were! But the fact that\nthese observers think so would seem to confirm our belief that our own\ncup brims over more plentifully than that of Europe. This is probably\ndue to the exhilarating climate which makes America--physically, at\nleast, though not yet economically and socially--the promised land.\n\nOf course I realize the absurdity of urging the great majority of\nhuman beings to keep within their vital incomes. To ask the\noverworked, under-fed, under-rested, under-played, shoddily dressed,\novercrowded masses of humanity why they are not exuberant, is to ask\nagain, with Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving for\nbread do not eat cake. The fact is that to keep within one's income\nto-day, either financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury that\nis absolutely denied to the many. Most men--the rich as well as the\npoor--stumble through life three parts dead. The ruling class, if it\nhad the will and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness of life.\nBut only a comparatively few of the others could, because the world is\nconducted on a principle which makes it even less possible for them to\nstore up a little hoard of vitality in their bodies against a rainy\nday than to store up an overplus of dollars in the savings bank.\n\nI think that this state of things is very different from the one which\nthe fathers contemplated in founding our nation. When they undertook\nto secure for us all \"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,\"\nthey did not mean a bare clinging to existence, liberty to starve, and\nthe pursuit of a nimble happiness by the lame, the halt, and the\nblind. They meant fullness of life, liberty in the broadest sense,\nboth outer and inner, and that almost certain success in the\nattainment of happiness which these two guarantee a man. In a word,\nthe fathers meant to offer us all a good long draft of the brimming\ncup with the full sum of benefits implied by that privilege. For the\nvitalized man possesses real life and liberty, and finds happiness\nusually at his disposal without putting himself to the trouble of\npursuit.\n\nI can imagine the good fathers' chagrin if they are aware to-day of\nhow things have gone on in their republic. Perhaps they realize that\nthe possibility of exuberance has now become a special privilege. And\nif they are still as wise as they once were, they will be doubly\nexasperated by this state of affairs because they will see that it is\nneedless. It has been proved over and over again that modern machinery\nhas removed all real necessity for poverty and overwork. There is\nenough to go 'round. Under a more democratic system we might have\nenough of the necessities and reasonable comforts of life to supply\neach of the hundred million Americans, if every man did no more than a\nwholesome amount of productive labor in a day and had the rest of his\ntime for constructive leisure and real living.\n\nOn the same terms there is likewise enough exuberance to go 'round.\nThe only obstacle to placing it within the reach of all exists in\nmen's minds. Men are still too inert and blindly conservative to stand\nup together and decree that industry shall be no longer conducted for\nthe inordinate profit of the few, but for the use of the many. Until\nthat day comes, the possibility of exuberance will remain a special\nprivilege.\n\nIn the mean while it is too bad that the favored classes do not make\nmore use of this privilege. It is absurd that such large numbers of\nthem are still as far from exuberance as the unprivileged. They keep\nreducing their overplus of vitality to an _under-minus_ of it by too\nmuch work and too foolish play, by plain thinking and high living and\nthe dissipation of maintaining a pace too swift for their as yet\nunadjusted organisms. They keep their house of life always a little\nchilly by opening the windows before the furnace has had a chance to\ntake the chill out of the rooms.\n\nIf we would bring joy to the masses why not first vitalize the\nclasses? If the latter can be led to develop a fondness for that\nbrimming cup which is theirs for the asking, a long step will be taken\ntoward the possibility of overflowing life for all. The classes will\ncome to realize that, even from a selfish point of view, democracy is\ndesirable; that because man is a social animal, the best-being of the\none is inseparable from the best-being of the many; that no one can be\nperfectly exuberant until all are exuberant. Jean Finot is right:\n\"True happiness is so much the greater and deeper in the proportion\nthat it embraces and unites in a fraternal chain more men, more\ncountries, more worlds.\"\n\nBut the classes may also be moved by instincts less selfish. For the\nbrimming cup has this at least in common with the cup that inebriates:\nits possessor is usually filled with a generous--if sometimes\nmaudlin--anxiety to have others enjoy his own form of beverage. The\npresent writer is a case in point. His reason for making this book lay\nin a convivial desire to share with as many as possible the contents\nof a newly acquired brimming cup. Before getting hold of this cup, the\nwriter would have looked with an indifferent and perhaps hostile eye\nupon the proposition to make such a blessing generally available. But\nnow he cannot for the life of him see how any one whose body, mind,\nand spirit are alive and reasonably healthy can help wishing the same\njolly good fortune for all mankind.\n\nHorace Traubel records that the aged Walt Whitman was once talking\nphilosophy with some of his friends when an intensely bored youngster\nslid down from his high chair and remarked to nobody in particular:\n\"There's too much old folk here for me!\"\n\n\"For me, too,\" cried the poet with one of his hearty laughs. \"We are\nall of us a good deal older than we need to be, than we think we are.\nLet's all get young again.\"\n\nEven so! Here's to eternal youth for every one. And here's to the hour\nwhen we may catch the eye of humanity and pledge all brother men in\nthe brimming cup.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nENTHUSIASM\n\n\nEnthusiasm is exuberance-with-a-motive. It is the power that makes the\nworld go 'round. The old Greeks who christened it knew that it was the\ngod-energy in the human machine. Without its driving force nothing\nworth doing has ever been done. It is man's dearest possession. Love,\nfriendship, religion, altruism, devotion to hobby or career--all\nthese, and most of the other good things in life, are forms of\nenthusiasm. A medicine for the most diverse ills, it alleviates both\nthe pains of poverty and the boredom of riches. Apart from it man's\nheart is seldom joyful. Therefore it should be husbanded with zeal and\nspent with wisdom.\n\nTo waste it is folly; to misuse it, disaster. For it is safe to\nutilize this god-energy only in its own proper sphere. Enthusiasm\nmoves the human vessel. To let it move the rudder, too, is criminal\nnegligence. Brahms once made a remark somewhat to this effect: The\nreason why there is so much bad music in the world is that composers\nare in too much of a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, what do\nthey do? Instead of taking it out for a long, cool walk, they sit down\nat once to work it up, but let it work _them_ up instead into an\nabsolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of the\ngoose-quill looks to them like part of a swan-song.\n\nLove is blind, they say. This is an exaggeration. But it is based on\nthe fact that enthusiasm, whether it appears as love, or in any other\nform, always has trouble with its eyes. In its own place it is\nincomparably efficient; only keep it away from the pilot-house!\n\nSince this god-energy is the most precious and important thing that we\nhave, why should our word for its possessor have sunk almost to the\nlevel of a contemptuous epithet? Nine times in ten we apply it to the\nman who allows his enthusiasm to steer his vessel. It would be full as\nlogical to employ the word \"writer\" for one who misuses his literary\ngift in writing dishonest advertisements. When we speak of an\n\"enthusiast\" to-day, we usually mean a person who has all the\nill-judging impulsiveness of a child without its compensating charm,\nand is therefore not to be taken seriously. \"He's only an enthusiast!\"\nThis has been said about Columbus and Christ and every other great man\nwho ever lived.\n\nBut besides its poor sense of distance and direction, men have another\ncomplaint against enthusiasm. They think it insincere on account of\nits capacity for frequent and violent fluctuation in temperature. In\nhis \"Creative Evolution,\" Bergson shows how \"our most ardent\nenthusiasm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally\ncongealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one so\neasily takes the shape of the other, that we might confuse them\ntogether, doubt our own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we did\nnot know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living.\"\n\nThe philosopher then goes on to show how, when we fall into this\nconfusion, we are unjust to enthusiasm, which is the materialization\nof the invisible breath of life itself. It is \"the spirit.\" The action\nit induces is \"the letter.\" These constitute two different and often\nantagonistic movements. The letter kills the spirit. But when this\noccurs we are apt to mistake the slayer for the slain and impute to\nthe ardent spirit all the cold vices of its murderer. Hence, the taint\nof insincerity that seems to hang about enthusiasm is, after all,\nnothing but illusion. To be just we should discount this illusion in\nadvance as the wise man discounts discouragement. And the epithet for\nthe man whose lungs are large with the breath of life should cease to\nbe a term of reproach.\n\nEnthusiasm is the prevailing characteristic of the child and of the\nadult who does memorable things. The two are near of kin and bear a\nfamily resemblance. Youth trails clouds of glory. Glory often trails\nclouds of youth. Usually the eternal man is the eternal boy; and the\nmore of a boy he is, the more of a man. The most conventional-seeming\ngreat men possess as a rule a secret vein of eternal-boyishness. Our\nidea of Brahms, for example, is of a person hopelessly mature and\nrespectable. But we open Kalbeck's new biography and discover him\nclimbing a tree to conduct his chorus while swaying upon a branch; or,\nin his fat forties, playing at frog-catching like a five-year-old.\n\nThe prominent American is no less youthful. Not long ago one of our\ngood gray men of letters was among his children, awaiting dinner and\nhis wife. Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. \"Quick, children!\" he\nexclaimed. \"Here's mother. Let's hide under the table and when she\ncomes in we'll rush out on all-fours and pretend we're bears.\" The\nmaneuver was executed with spirit. At the preconcerted signal, out\nthey all waddled and galumphed with horrid grunts--only to find\nsomething unfamiliar about mother's skirt, and, glancing up, to\ndiscover that it hung upon a strange and terrified guest.\n\nThe biographers have paid too little attention to the god-energy of\ntheir heroes. I think that it should be one of the crowning\nachievements of biography to communicate to the reader certain actual\nvibrations of the enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philosopher\nfor truth; the patriot for his country; the artist for beauty and\nself-expression; the altruist for humanity; the discoverer for\nknowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred soul; the prophet,\nmartyr, or saint for his god.\n\nEvery lover, according to Emerson, is a poet. Not only is this true,\nbut every one of us, when in the sway of any enthusiasm, has in him\nsomething creative. Therefore a record of the most ordinary person's\nenthusiasms should prove as well worth reading as the ordinary record\nwe have of the extraordinary person's life if written with the usual\nneglect of this important subject. Now I should like to try the\nexperiment of sketching in outline a new kind of biography. It would\nconsist entirely of the record of an ordinary person's enthusiasms.\nBut, as I know no other life-story so well as my own, perhaps the\nreader will pardon me for abiding in the first person singular. He may\ngrant pardon the more readily if he realizes the universality of this\noffense among writers. For it is a fact that almost all novels,\nstories, poems, and essays are only more or less cleverly disguised\nautobiography. So here follow some of my enthusiasms in a new\nchapter.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nA CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS\n\n\nI\n\nIn looking back over my own life, a series of enthusiasms would appear\nto stand out as a sort of spinal system, about which are grouped as\ntributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence.\nOr, rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, sparkling stream which\ncarries along and solves and neutralizes, if not sweetens, in its\nimpetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds, such as\nschool, the Puritan Sabbath, boot and hair-brushing, polite and\nunpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and shorter\ncatechists--and so on all the way down between the shores of age to\nthe higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whose\nword is not as good as his bond.\n\nMy first enthusiasm was for good things to eat. It was stimulated by\nthat priceless asset, a virginal palate. But here at once the medium\nof expression fails. For what may words presume to do with the flavor\nof that first dish of oatmeal; with the first pear, grape, watermelon;\nwith the Bohemian roll called _Hooska_, besprinkled with poppy and\nmandragora; or the wondrous dishes which our Viennese cook called\n_Aepfelstrudel_ and _Scheiterhaufen_? The best way for me to express\nmy reaction to each of these delicacies would be to play it on the\n'cello. The next best would be to declare that they tasted somewhat\nbetter than Eve thought the apple was going to taste. But how absurdly\ninadequate this sounds! I suppose the truth is that such enthusiasms\nhave become too utterly congealed in our _blase_ minds when at last\nthese minds have grown mature enough to grasp the principles of\npenmanship. So that whatever has been recorded about the sensations of\nextreme youth is probably all false. Why, even\n\n    \"Heaven lies about us in our infancy,\"--\n\nas Wordsworth revealed in his \"Ode on Immortality.\" And though\nTennyson pointed out that we try to revenge ourselves by lying about\nheaven in our maturity, this does not serve to correct a single one of\ncrabbed age's misapprehensions about youth.\n\nGames next inflamed my fancy. More than dominoes or Halma, lead\nsoldiers appealed to me, and tops, marbles, and battledore and\nshuttlecock. Through tag, fire-engine, pom-pom-pull-away,\nhide-and-seek, baseball, and boxing, I came to tennis, which I knew\ninstinctively was to be my athletic _grand passion_. Perhaps I was\nfirst attracted by the game's constant humor which was forever making\nthe ball imitate or caricature humanity, or beguiling the players to\nact like solemn automata. For children are usually quicker than\ngrown-ups to see these droll resemblances. I came by degrees to like\nthe game's variety, its tense excitement, its beauty of posture and\ncurve. And before long I vaguely felt what I later learned\nconsciously: that tennis is a sure revealer of character. Three sets\nwith a man suffice to give one a working knowledge of his moral\nequipment; six, of his chief mental traits; and a dozen, of that most\nimportant, and usually veiled part of him, his subconscious\npersonality. Young people of opposite sexes are sometimes counseled to\ntake a long railway journey together before deciding on a matrimonial\nmerger. But I would respectfully advise them rather to play \"singles\"\nwith each other before venturing upon a continuous game of doubles.\n\nThe collecting mania appeared some time before tennis. I first\ncollected ferns under a crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon gave\nway to discrimination, which led to picking out a favorite fern. This\nwas chosen, I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feeling. I\ncalled it \"The Alligator\" from its fancied resemblance to my brother's\nalligator-skin traveling-bag. But admiration of this fern brought a\ndawning consciousness that certain natural objects were preferable to\nothers. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collecting\nimpressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance of\nnature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolic\nthing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or\nbest-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also in\neach department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorial\nincense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among shores, those of\nCapri and Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one called Isis as\nseen at dawn from the depths of the Grand Canon.\n\n\nII\n\nNext, I collected postage-stamps. I know that it is customary to-day\nfor writers to sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have forgotten\nits variety and subtlety; its demand on the imagination; how it makes\nhistory and geography live, and initiates one painlessly into the\nmysteries of the currency of all nations. Then what a tonic it is for\nthe memory! Only think of the implications of the annual\nprice-catalogue! Soon after the issue of this work, every collector\nworthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind the\ncurrent market values of thousands of stamps. And he can tell you\noffhand, not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceled\ncondition, but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled,\nunperforated, embossed, rouletted, surcharged with all manner of\ninitials, printed by mistake with the king standing on his head, or\nwater-marked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine of\nEgypt. This feat of memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, for the\nenthusiasm of the normal stamp-collector is so potent that its\nproprietor has only to stand by and let it do all the work.\n\nWe often hear that the wealthy do not enjoy their possessions. This\ndepends entirely upon the wealthy. That some of them enjoy their\ntreasures giddily, madly, my own experience proves. For, as youthful\nstamp-collectors went in those days, I was a philatelic magnate. By\ninheritance, by the ceaseless and passionate trading of duplicates, by\nrummaging in every available attic, by correspondence with a wide\ncircle of foreign missionaries, and by delivering up my whole\nallowance, to the dealers, I had amassed a collection of several\nthousand varieties. Among these were such gems as all of the\ntriangular Cape of Good Hopes, almost all of the early Persians, and\nour own spectacular issue of 1869 unused, including the one on which\nthe silk-stockinged fathers are signing the Declaration of\nIndependence. Such possessions as these I well-nigh worshiped.\n\nEven to-day, after having collected no stamps for a generation, the\nchance sight of an \"approval sheet,\" with its paper-hinged reminders\nof every land, gives me a curious sensation. There visit my spine\nechoes of the thrills that used to course it on similar occasions in\nboyhood. These were the days when my stamps had formed for me mental\npictures--more or less accurate--of each country from Angola to\nZululand, its history, climate, scenery, inhabitants, and rulers. To\npossess its rarest stamp was mysteriously connected in my mind with\nbeing given the freedom of the land itself, and introduced with warm\nrecommendations to its _genius loci_.\n\nEven old circulars issued by dealers, now long gone to stampless\nclimes, have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. I\nprefer those of foreign dealers because their English has the quaint,\nother-world atmosphere of what they dealt in. The other day I found in\nan old scrapbook a circular from Vienna, which annihilated a score of\nyears with its very first words:\n\nCLEARING\n\nOF A LARGE PART OF MY RETAIL DEPOSITORY\n\n     Being lately so much engaged into my wholesale business ... I\n     have made up my mind to sell out a large post of my\n     retail-stamps at under-prices. They are rests of larger\n     collections containing for the most, only older marks and\n     not thrash possibly put together purposedly as they used to\n     be composed by the other dealers and containing therefore\n     mostly but worthless and useless nouveautes of Central\n     America.\n\nBefore continuing this persuasive flow, the dealer inserts a number of\ntestimonials like the following. He calls them:\n\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\n     Sent package having surpassed my expectations I beg to remit\n     by to-days post-office-ordres Mk. 100. Kindly please send me\n     by return of post offered album wanted for retail sale.\n\nG. B.--HANNOVER.\n\nThe dealer now comes to his peroration:\n\n     I beg to call the kind of attention of every buyer to the\n     fact of my selling all these packages and albums with my own\n     loss merely for clearings sake of my retail business and in\n     order to get rid of them as much and as soon as possible.\n     With 25-60 % abatement I give stamps and whole things to\n     societies against four weeks calculation.\n\n     All collectors are bound to oblige themselves by writing\n     contemporaneously with sending in the depository amount to\n     make calculation within a week as latest term.\n\nIt is enough! As I read, the old magic enfolds me, and I am seized\nwith longing to turn myself into a society of collectors and to\nimplore the altruistic dealer \"kindly please\" to send me, at a\nprodigious \"abatement,\" \"stamps and whole things against four weeks\ncalculation.\"\n\n\nIII\n\nThe youngest children of large families are apt to be lonely folk,\nsomewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I was such\na child, blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and rather\ninclined to sedentary joys. Even when I reached the barbaric stage of\nevolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits\nof his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy these in the more\nsophisticated forms natural to a lonely young city-dweller.\n\nWhen stamps had passed their zenith I was filled with a lust for\nslaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I sat\nwatching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of\nthe muddy and torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hoping\nagainst hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and dive\nbeneath the surface of things, into touch with the great living\nrealities. And when the cork finally marked a historic epoch by\nvanishing, and a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was pulled\nin hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest\nold and strong as the race.\n\nBut presently I myself was drawn, like the cork, beneath the\nsuperficial surface of the angler's art. For in the public library I\nchanced on a shelf of books, that told about fishing of a nobler,\njollier, more seductive sort. At once I was consumed with a passion\nfor five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal leaders, double-tapered\ncasting-lines of braided silk, and artificial flies more fair than\nbirds of paradise. Armed in spirit, with all these, I waded the\nstreams of England with kindly old Isaak Walton, and ranged the\nRestigouche with the predecessors of Henry van Dyke. These dreams\nbrought with them a certain amount of satisfaction--about as much\nsatisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party, each\nequipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite. The visions were\npleasant, of course, but they cried out, and made me cry out, for\naction. There were no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, and\nthere was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight. But I did\nwhat I could to be prepared for the blessed hour when we should meet.\nI secured five new subscriptions or so to \"The Boys' Chronicle\" (let\nus call it), and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it would\nhave resolved itself into its elements at sight of a half-pound\ntrout. It was destined, though, never to meet with this embarrassment.\n\nMy casting-line bore a family resemblance to grocery string. My leader\nwas a piece of gut from my brother's 'cello; my flybook, an old\nwallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond my means; and it was\nperplexing to know what to do, until I found a book which said that it\nwas better by far to tie your own flies. With joyful relief I acted on\nthis counsel. Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White Millers\nwith shoe-thread upon cod-hooks. One of these I stained and streaked\nwith my heart's blood into the semblance of a Parmacheene Belle. The\ncanary furnished materials for a Yellow May; a dooryard English\nsparrow, for a Brown Hackle. My masterpiece, the beautiful,\nparti-colored fly known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my sister's\nEaster bonnet.\n\nI covered the points of the hooks with pieces of cork, and fished on\nthe front lawn from morning to night, leaning with difficulty against\nthe thrust of an imaginary torrent. And I never ceased striving to\nmake the three flies straighten out properly as the books directed,\nand fall like thistledown upon the strategic spot where the empty\ntomato can was anchored, and then jiggle appetizingly down over the\nfour-pounder, where he sulked in the deep hole just beyond the\nhydrant.\n\nThe hunting fever was wakened by the need for the Brown Hackle already\nmentioned. But as the choice of weapons and of victims culminated in\nthe air-gun and the sparrow, respectively, my earliest hunting was\nconfined even more closely than my fishing to the library and the\ndense and teeming forests of the imagination.\n\nBut while somewhat handicapped here by the scarcity of ferocious game,\nI was more fortunate in another enthusiasm which attacked me at almost\nthe same time. For however unpropitious the hunting is on any given\npart of the earth's surface, there is everywhere and always an\nabundance of good hidden-treasure-seeking to be had. The garden, the\nattic, the tennis lawn all suffered. And my initiative was\nstrengthened by the discovery of an incomparable book all about a dead\nman's chest, and not only digging for gold in a secret island, but\nfinding it, too, by jingo! and fighting off the mutineers.\n\nThese aspirations naturally led to games of Pirate, or Outlaw, which\nwere handicapped, however, by the scarcity of playmates, and their\ncurious hesitation to serve as victims. As pirates and outlaws are\nwell known to be the most superstitious of creatures, inclining to the\nprimitive in their religious views, we were naturally led into a sort\nof dread enthusiasm for--or enthusiastic dread of--the whole pantheon\nof spooks, sprites, and bugaboos to which savages and children, great\nand small, bow the knee. My dreams at that time ran something like\nthis:\n\n\nPARADISE REVISED\n\n    Playing hymn-tunes day and night\n    On a harp _may_ be all right\n    For the grown-ups; but for me,\n    I do wish that heaven could be\n    Sort o' like a circus, run\n    So a kid could have some fun!\n\n    There I'd not play harps, but horns\n    When I chased the unicorns--\n    Magic tubes with pistons greasy,\n    Slides that pushed and pulled out easy,\n    Cylinders of snaky brass\n    Where the fingers like to fuss,\n    Polished like a looking-glass,\n    Ending in a blunderbuss.\n\n    I would ride a horse of steel\n    Wound up with a ratchet-wheel.\n    Every beast I'd put to rout\n    Like the man I read about.\n    I would singe the leopard's hair,\n    Stalk the vampire and the adder,\n    Drive the werewolf from his lair,\n    Make the mad gorilla madder.\n    Needle-guns my work should do.\n    But, if beasts got closer to,\n    I would pierce them to the marrow\n    With a barbed and poisoned arrow,\n    Or I'd whack 'em on the skull\n    Till my scimiter was dull.\n\n    If these weapons didn't work,\n    With a kris or bowie-knife,\n    Poniard, assegai, or dirk,\n    I would make them beg for life;--\n    Spare them, though, if they'd be good\n    And guard me from what haunts the wood--\n    From those creepy, shuddery sights\n    That come round a fellow nights--\n    Imps that squeak and trolls that prowl,\n    Ghouls, the slimy devil-fowl,\n    Headless goblins with lassoes,\n    Scarlet witches worse than those,\n    Flying dragon-fish that bellow\n    So as most to scare a fellow....\n\n    There, as nearly as I could,\n    I would live like Robin Hood,\n    Taking down the mean and haughty,\n    Getting plunder from the naughty\n    To reward all honest men\n    Who should seek my outlaw's den.\n\n    When I'd wearied of these pleasures\n    I'd go hunt for hidden treasures--\n    In no ordinary way,\n    Pirates' luggers I'd waylay;\n    Board them from my sinking dory,\n    Wade through decks of gore and glory,\n    Drive the fiends, with blazing matchlock,\n    Down below, and snap the hatch-lock.\n\n    Next, I'd scud beneath the sky-land,\n    Sight the hills of Treasure Island,\n    Prowl and peer and prod and prise,\n    Till there burst upon my eyes\n    Just the proper pirate's freight:\n    Gold doubloons and pieces of eight!\n\n    Then--the very best of all--\n    Suddenly a stranger tall\n    Would appear, and I'd forget\n    That we hadn't ever met.\n    And with cap upthrown I'd greet him\n    (Turning from the plunder, yellow)\n    And I'd hurry fast to meet him,\n    For he'd be the very fellow\n    Who, I think, invented fun--\n    Robert Louis Stevenson.\n\nThe enthusiasms of this barbaric period never died. They grew up,\ninstead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now\nthe high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and the\ninexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten\npsychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discovered\nand begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze--why, my\nlife-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden valuables\nin the cellars and attics, the chimney-pieces and desert islands of\nthe mind, and secret attempts to coin them into currency.\n\nAnd so I might go on to tell of my enthusiasms for no end of other\nthings like reading, modeling, folk-lore, cathedrals, writing,\npictures, and the theater. Then there is the long story of that\nenthusiasm called Love, of Friendship its twin, and their elder\nbrother, Religion, and their younger sister, Altruism. And travel and\nadventure and so on. But no! It is, I believe, a misdemeanor to obtain\nattention under false pretenses. If I have caught the reader's eye by\npromising to illustrate in outline a new method of writing\nautobiography, I must not abuse his confidence by putting that method\ninto practice. So, with a regret almost equal to that of Lewis\nCarroll's famous Bellman--\n\n    I skip twenty years--\n\nand close with my latest enthusiasm.\n\n\nIV\n\nConfirmed wanderers that we were, my wife and I had rented a house for\nthe winter in a Massachusetts coast village and had fallen somewhat\nunder the spell of the place. Nevertheless, we had decided to move on\nsoon--to try, in fact, another trip through Italy. Our friendly\nneighbors urged us to buy land up the \"back lane\" instead, and build\nand settle down. We knew nothing of this region, however, and scarcely\nheard them.\n\nBut they were so insistent that one day we ventured up the back lane\nat dusk and began to explore the woods. It grew dark and we thought of\nturning back. Then it began to grow light again. A full moon was\nclimbing up through the maples, inviting further explorations. We\npushed through a dense undergrowth and presently were in a grove of\ngreat white pines. There was a faint sound of running water, and\nsuddenly we came upon an astonishing brook--wide, swift, and musical.\nWe had not suspected the existence of such a brook within a dozen\nleagues. It was over-arched by tall oaks and elms, beeches, tupelos,\nand maples. The moonbeams were dancing in the ripples and on the\nfloating castles of foam.\n\n\"What a place for a study!\"\n\n\"Yes; a log cabin with a big stone fireplace.\"\n\nThe remarks came idly, but our eyes met and held. Moved by one impulse\nwe turned from the stream and remarked what bosh people will sometimes\ntalk, and discussed the coming Italian trip as we moved cautiously\namong the briers. But when we came once more to the veteran pines,\nthey seemed more glamorous than ever in the moonlight, especially one\nthat stood near a large holly, apart from the rest--a three-prong\nlyrical fellow--and his opposite, a burly, thickset archer, bending\nhis long-bow into a most exquisite curve. The fragrant pine needles\nwhispered. The brook lent its faint music.\n\n\"Quick! We had better get away!\"\n\nA forgotten lumber road led us safe from briers up a hill. Out of a\ndense oak grove we suddenly emerged upon the more open crest. Our feet\nsank deep in moss.\n\n\"Look,\" I said.\n\nOver the heads of the high forest trees below shimmered a mile of\nmoonlit marshes, and beyond them a gleam--perhaps from some vessel far\nat sea, perhaps even from a Provincetown lighthouse.\n\n\"Yes, but look!\"\n\nAt a touch I faced around and beheld, crowning the hill, a stately\ncompany of red cedars, comely and dense and mysterious as the\ncypresses of Tivoli, and gloriously drenched in moonlight.\n\n\"But what a place for a house!\"\n\n\"Let's give up Italy,\" was the answer, \"and make this wood our home.\"\n\nBy instinct and training we were two inveterate wanderers. Never had\nwe possessed so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth. But the\nnest-building enthusiasm had us at last. Our hands met in compact. As\nwe strolled reluctantly homeward to a ten-o'clock dinner we talked of\nroad-making, swamps, pneumatic water-systems, the nimbleness of\ndollars, and mountains of other difficulties. And we agreed that the\nonly kind of faith which can easily remove mountains is the faith of\nthe enthusiast.\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nTHE AUTO-COMRADE\n\n\nHuman nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offer\nthe ordinary man a week's vacation all alone, and he will look as\nthough you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing.\n\n\"There are,\" as Ruth Cameron truly observes, \"a great many people to\nwhom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hours\nwith only their own selves for company. To escape that terrible\ncatastrophe, they will make friends with the most fearful bore or read\nthe most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, not\nonly without human companionship, but even without a book or magazine\nwith which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they are\nfairly frantic.\"\n\nIf any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he\nhas not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a\ncondition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife\nand children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this\nepitaph:\n\n              \"Here lies the pod.\n    The Pease are shelled and gone to God.\"\n\nNow, pod-like people such as he are always solitary wherever other\npeople are not; and there is, of course, nothing much more distressing\nthan solitariness. These people, however, fall through sheer ignorance\ninto a confusion of thought. They suppose that solitude and\nsolitariness are the same thing. To the artist in life--to the wise\nkeeper of the joyful heart--there is just one difference between these\ntwo: it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes. For, to\nthe artist in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto-Comrade.\n\nAs it is the Auto-Comrade who makes all the difference, I shall try to\ndescribe his appearance. His eyes are the most arresting part of him.\nThey never peer stupidly through great, thick spectacles of others'\nmaking. They are scarcely ever closed in sleep, and sometimes make\ntheir happiest discoveries during the small hours. These hours are\ntruly small because the Auto-Comrade often turns his eyes into the\nlenses of a moving-picture machine--such an entertaining one that it\ncompresses the hours to seconds. It is through constant, alert use\nthat his eyes have become sharp. They can pierce through the rinds of\nthe toughest personalities, and even penetrate on occasion into the\nfuture. They can also take in whole panoramas of the past in one\nsweeping look. For they are of that \"inner\" variety through which\nWordsworth, winter after winter, used to survey his daffodil-fields.\n\"The bliss of solitude,\" he called them.\n\nThe Auto-Comrade has an adjustable brow. It can be raised high enough\nto hold and reverberate and add rich overtones to, the grandest\nchords of thought ever struck by a Plato, a Buddha, or a Kant. The\nnext instant it may easily be lowered to the point where the ordinary\ncartoon of commerce or the tiny cachinnation of a machine-made\nChesterton paradox will not ring entirely hollow. As for his voice, it\ncan at times be more musical than Melba's or Caruso's. Without being\nraised above a whisper, it can girdle the globe. It can barely breathe\nsome delicious new melody; yet the thing will float forth not only\nundiminished, but gathering beauty, significance, and incisiveness in\nevery land it passes through.\n\nThe Auto-Comrade is an erect, wiry young figure of an athlete. As he\ntrades at the Seven-League Boot and Shoe Concern, it never bothers him\nto accompany you on the longest tramps. His feet simply cannot be\ntired out. As for his hands, they are always alert to give you a lift\nup the rough places on the mountain-side. He has remarkable presence\nof body. In any emergency he is usually the best man on the spot. He\nis at once seer, creator, accomplisher, and present help in time of\ntrouble. But his everyday occupation is that of entertainer. He is the\njoy-bringer--the Prometheus of pleasure. In his vicinity there is no\nsuch thing as ennui or lonesomeness. Emerson wrote:\n\n    \"When I would spend a lonely day\n    Sun and moon are in my way.\"\n\nBut for pals of the Auto-Comrade, not only sun, moon, etc., are in the\nway, but all of his own unlimited resources. For every time and season\nhe has a fittingly varied repertory of entertainment.\n\nNow and again he startles you by the legerdemain feat of snatching\nbrand-new ideas out of the blue, like rabbits out of a hat. While you\nstand at the port-hole of your cabin and watch the rollers rushing\nback to the beloved home-land you are quitting, he marshals your\nfriends and acquaintances into a long line for a word of greeting or a\nrapid-fire chat, just as though you were some idol of the people, and\nwere steaming in past the Statue of Liberty on your way home from\nlionizing and being lionized abroad, and the Auto-Comrade were the\nfactotum at your elbow who asks, \"What name, please?\"\n\nAfter the friends and acquaintances, he even brings up your _betes\nnoires_ and dearest enemies for inspection and comment. Strangely\nenough, viewed in this way, these persons no longer seem so\ncontemptible or pernicious or devilish as they once did. At this point\nyour factotum rubs your eye-glasses bright with the handkerchief he\nalways carries about for slate-cleaning purposes, and lo! you even\nbegin to discover good points about the chaps, hitherto unsuspected.\n\nThen there are always your million-and-one favorite melodies which\nnobody but that all-around musical amateur, the Auto-Comrade, can so\nexquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, blat, or roar. There is also\na universe full of new ones for him to improvise. And he is the\njolliest sort of fellow musician, because, when you play or sing a\nduet with him, you can combine with the exciting give-and-take and\nreciprocal stimulation of the duet, the god-like autocracy of the\nsolo, its opportunity for wide, uninterrupted, uncoerced\nself-expression. Sometimes, however, in the first flush of escape with\nhim to the wilds, you are fain to clap your hand over his mouth in\norder the better to taste the essentially folk-less savor of solitude.\nFor music is a curiously social art, and Browning was more than half\nright when he said, \"Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at\nonce.\"\n\nPerhaps you can find your entertainer a small lump of clay or\nmodeling-wax to thumb into bad caricatures of those you love and good\nones of those you hate, until increasing facility impels him to try\nand model not a Tanagra figurine, for that would be unlike his\noriginal fancy, but a Hoboken figurine, say, or a sketch for some\nElgin (Illinois) marbles.\n\nIf you care anything for poetry and can find him a stub of pencil and\nan unoccupied cuff, he will be most completely in his element; for if\nthere is any one occupation more closely identified with him than\nanother, it is that of poet. And though all Auto-Comrades are not\npoets, all poets are Auto-Comrades. Every poem which has ever thrilled\nthis world or another has been written by the Auto-Comrade of some\nso-called poet. This is one reason why the so-called poets think so\nmuch of their great companions. \"Allons! after the great companions!\"\ncried old Walt to his fellow poets. If he had not overtaken, and held\nfast to, his, we should never have heard the \"Leaves of Grass\"\nwhispering \"one or two indicative words for the future.\" The bards\nhave always obeyed this call. And they have known how to value their\nAuto-Comrades, too. See, for example, what Keats thought of his:\n\n     Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at\n     the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of\n     Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and\n     Sofa stuffed with Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine\n     beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should\n     not feel--or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my\n     Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described,\n     there is a sublimity to welcome me home--The roaring of the\n     wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my\n     Children.... I feel more and more every day, as my\n     imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world\n     alone but in a thousand worlds--No sooner am I alone than\n     shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve\n     my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's\n     body-guard.... I live more out of England than in it. The\n     Mountains of Tartary are a favorite lounge, if I happen to\n     miss the Alleghany ridge, or have no whim for Savoy.\n\nThis last sentence not only reveals the fact that the Auto-Comrade,\nequipped as he is with a wishing-mat, is the very best cicerone in the\nworld, but also that he is the ideal tramping companion. Suppose you\nare mountain-climbing. As you start up into \"nature's observatory,\" he\nkneels in the dust and fastens wings upon your feet. He conveniently\nadjusts a microscope to your hat-brim, and hangs about your neck an\nexcellent telescope. He has enough sense, too, to keep his mouth\nclosed. For, like Hazlitt, he \"can see no wit in walking and talking.\"\nThe joy of existence, you find, rarely tastes more cool and sweet and\nsparkling than when you and your Auto-Comrade make a picnic thus,\nswinging in a basket between you a real, live thought for lunch. On\nsuch a day you come to believe that Keats, on another occasion, must\nhave had his own Auto-Comrade in mind when he remarked to his friend\nSolitude that\n\n                    \"... it sure must be\n    Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,\n    When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.\"\n\nThe Auto-Comrade can sit down with you in thick weather on a barren\nlighthouse rock and give you a breathless day by hanging upon the\nwalls of fog the mellow screeds of old philosophies, and causing to\nmarch and countermarch over against them the scarlet and purple\npageants of history. Hour by hour, too, he will linger with you in\nthe metropolis, that breeder of the densest solitudes--in market or\nterminal, subway, court-room, library, or lobby--and hour by hour\nunlock you those chained books of the soul to which the human\ncountenance offers the master key.\n\nSomething of a sportsman, too, is the Auto-Comrade. He it is who makes\nthe fabulously low score at golf--the kind of score, by the way, that is\nalmost invariably born to blush unseen. And he will uncomplainingly,\neven zestfully, fish from dawn to dusk in a solitude so complete that\nthere is not even a fin to break it. But if there are fish, he finds\nthem. He knows how to make the flies float indefinitely forward through\nyonder narrow opening, and drop, as light as thistledown, in the center\nof the temptingly inaccessible pool. He knows without looking, exactly\nhow thick and how prehensile are the bushes and branches that lie in\nwait for the back cast, and he can calculate to a grain how much urging\nthe reactionary three-pounder and the blest tie that binds him to the\nfour-ounce rod will stand.\n\nHe is one of the handiest possible persons to have along in the woods.\nWhen you take him on a canoe trip with others, and the party comes to\n\"white water,\" he turns out to be a dead shot at rapid-shooting. He is\nsure to know what to do at the supreme moment when you jam your\nsetting-pole immutably between two rocks and, with the alternative of\ntaking a bath, are forced to let go and grab your paddle; and are then\nhung up on a slightly submerged rock at the head of the chief rapid\njust in time to see the rest of the party disappear majestically\naround the lower bend. At such a time, simply look to the\nAuto-Comrade. He will carry you through. Also there is no one like him\nat the moment when, having felled your moose, leaned your rifle\nagainst a tree, and bent down the better to examine him, the creature\nsuddenly comes to life.\n\nIn tennis, when you wake up to find that your racket has just smashed\na lob on the bounce from near the back-net, scoring a clean ace\nbetween your paralyzed opponents, you ought to know that the racket\nwas guided by that superior sportsman; and if you are truly modest,\nyou will admit that your miraculous stop wherewith the team whisked\nthe baseball championship out of the fire in the fourteenth inning was\ndue to his unaided efforts.\n\nThere are other games about which he is not so keen: solitaire, for\ninstance. For solitaire is a social game that soon loses its zest if\nthere be not some devoted friend or relative sitting by and simulating\nthat pleasureable absorption in the performance which you yourself\nonly wish that you could feel.\n\nThis great companion can keep you from being lonely even in a crowd.\nBut there is a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide. Beware how\nyou try to keep him in a crowd of unadulterated human porcupines! You\nknow how the philosopher Schopenhauer once likened average humanity\nto a herd of porcupines on a cold day, who crowd stupidly together for\nwarmth, prick one another with their quills, are mutually repelled,\nforget the incident, grow cold again, and repeat the whole thing _ad\ninfinitum_.\n\nIn other words, the human porcupine is the person considered at the\nbeginning of this one-sided discussion who, to escape the terrible\ncatastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum, will make friends\nwith the most hideous bore. This creature, however, is much more rare\nthan the misanthropic Schopenhauer imagined. It takes a long time to\nfind one among such folk as lumbermen, gypsies, shirt-waist\noperatives, fishermen, masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, and\nteamsters. If the sour philosopher had only had the pleasure of\nknowing those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage by\ncracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never have\nspoken as harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is that\nporcupines are not extremely common among the very \"common\" people.\nIt may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the\nupper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the social\nclimber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he\nscales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to show\nthat our misanthropic philosopher must have moved exclusively in the\nbest circles.\n\nNow, if there is one thing above all others that the Auto-Comrade\ncannot away with, it is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of the\nporcupine. If people have let their minds slump down into\nporcupinishness, or have never taken the trouble to rescue them from\nthat ignominious condition--well, the Auto-Comrade is no snob; when\nall's said, he is a rather democratic sort of chap. But he has to draw\nthe line somewhere, you know, and he really must beg to be excused\nfrom rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for instance, as\nblocks upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday noons. He prefers instead the\nrabble which, on all other noons of the week, blocks the lower end of\nthat variegated thoroughfare.\n\nSuch exclusiveness lays the Auto-Comrade open, of course, to the\ncharge of inhospitality. But \"is not he hospitable,\" asks Thoreau,\n\"who entertains good thoughts?\" Personally, I think he is. And I\nbelieve that this sort of hospitality does more to make the world\nworth living in than much conventional hugging to your bosom of\nporcupines whose language you do not speak, yet with whom it is\nembarrassing to keep silence.\n\nIf the Auto-Comrade mislikes the porcupine, however, the feeling is\nreturned with exorbitant interest. The alleged failings of\nauto-comradeship have always drawn grins, jokes, fleers, and nudges,\nfrom the auto-comradeless. It is time the latter should know that the\njoke is really on him; for he is the most forlorn of mankind. The\nother is never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being one whom \"destiny\nmay not surprise nor death dismay.\" But the porcupine is liable at any\nmoment to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp, hollow\nquills. He finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees that\nthe hermit shall \"find his crowds in solitude\" and never be alone; but\nthat the flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness,\nwhere shall be \"weeping and gnashing of teeth.\"\n\nThe laugh is on the porcupine; but the laugh turns almost into a tear\nwhen one stops to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the poor\nwretch is actually obliged to be near someone else in order to enjoy a\nsense of vitality! In other words, he needs somebody else to do his\nliving for him. He is a vicarious citizen of the world, holding his\nfranchise only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry. All the same, it\nis rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he continues to feel\nquite as contemptuously superior as he usually does. For, the contempt\nof the average porcupine for pals of the Auto-Comrade is akin to the\ncontempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those paltry beings\nwho were called clerks because they possessed the queer, unfashionable\naccomplishment of being able to read and write.\n\nI remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-day\norator at college came when he related how the literary guy and the\ntennis-player were walking one day in the woods, and the literary guy\nsuddenly exclaimed: \"Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be alone.\" Even\napart from the stilted language in which the orator clothed the\nthought of the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, something\nirresistibly comic in such a situation. It is to him as though the\nliterary guy had stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged for\nthe room at Sing Sing already referred to.\n\nIndeed, the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of the\nAuto-Comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and\nwitches--folk, by the way, who probably consorted with spirits no more\nmalign than Auto-Comrades. \"What,\" asked the porcupines of one\nanother, \"can they be doing, all alone there in those solitary huts?\nWhat honest man would live like that? Ah, they must be up to no good.\nThey must be hand in glove with the Evil One. Well, then, away with\nthem to the stake and the river!\"\n\nAs a matter of fact, it probably was not the Evil One that these poor\nfolk were consorting with, but the Good One. For what is a man's\nAuto-Comrade, anyway, but his own soul, or the same thing by what\nother name soever he likes to call it, with which he divides the\npractical, conscious part of his brain, turn and turn about, share and\nshare alike? And what is a man's own soul but a small stream of the\ninfinite, eternal water of life? And what is heaven but a vast harbor\nwhere myriad streams of soul flow down, returning at last to their\nSource in the bliss of perfect reunion? I believe that many a Salem\nwitch was dragged to her death from sanctuary; for church is not\nexclusively connected with stained glass and collection-baskets.\nChurch is also wherever you and your Auto-Comrade can elude the\nstarched throng and fall together, if only for a moment, on your\nknees.\n\nThe Auto-Comrade has much to gain by contrast with one's\nflesh-and-blood associates, especially if this contrast is suddenly\nbrought home to one after a too long separation from him. I shall\nnever forget the thrill that was mine early one morning after two\nmonths of close, uninterrupted communion with one of my best and\ndearest friends. At the very instant when the turn of the road cut off\nthat friend's departing hand-wave, I was aware of a welcoming, almost\nboisterous shout from the hills of dream, and turning quickly, beheld\nmy long-lost Auto-Comrade rushing eagerly down the slopes toward me.\n\nFew joys may compare with the joy of such a sudden unexpected reunion.\nIt is like \"the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.\" No,\nthis simile is too disloyal to my friend. Well, then, it is like a\nbeaker full of the warm South when you are leaving a good beer country\nand are trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next few\nweeks. At any rate, similes or not, there were we two together again\nat last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the\nveranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities\nof the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly\nbirch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the\nAroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling\nto find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly\nsupposed. What gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into\nthe glamorous land of to-morrow! And every other moment these\nrecreative labors would be interrupted while I pressed between the\npages of a notebook some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruply\nfortunate clover which my Auto-Comrade found and turned over to me.\n(Between two of those pages, by the way, I afterwards found the\nargument of this chapter.)\n\nThen, when the effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of its\nfirst, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we did spend over\nthe correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller!\nPassage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over.\nThese we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic\ninsistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash\nof mental steel on mental steel from a different mill. And without\nmaking any one else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuse\nus passionately of reading ahead, we would, on the slightest\nprovocation, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter\nfancy. And we would underline and bracket and side-line and overline\nthe ragged little paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins,\nand dream over its footnotes, to our hearts' content.\n\nSuch experiences, though, are all too rare with me. Why? Because my\nAuto-Comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate with\nme unless I toe his mark.\n\n\"Come,\" I propose to him, \"let us go a journey.\"\n\n\"Hold hard,\" says he, and looks me over appraisingly. \"You know the\nrule of the Auto-Comrades' Union. We are supposed to associate with\nnone but fairly able persons. Are you a fairly able person?\"\n\nIf it turns out that I am not, he goes on a rampage, and begins to\ntalk like an athletic trainer. The first thing he demands is that his\nwould-be associate shall keep on hand a jolly good store of surplus\nvitality. You are expected to supply exuberance to him somewhat as you\nsupply gasolene to your motor. Now, of course, there are in the world\nnot a few invalids and other persons of low physical vitality whose\nAuto-Comrades happen to have sufficient gasolene to keep them both\nrunning, if only on short rations. Most of these cases, however, are\npathological. They have hot-boxes at both ends of the machine, and\ntheir progress is destined all too soon to cease and determine\ndisastrously. The rest of these cases are the rare exceptions which\nprove the rule. For unexuberant yet unpathological pals of the\nAuto-Comrade are as rare as harmonious households in which the efforts\nof a devoted and blissful wife support an able-bodied husband.\n\nThe rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two. \"Learn to\neat balanced rations right,\" thunders the Auto-Comrade, laying down\nthe law; \"exercise, perspire, breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, and\nsleep enough; rule your liver with a rod of iron, don't take drugs or\nnervines, cure sickness beforehand, keep love in your heart, do an\nadult's work in the world, have at least as much fun as you ought to\nhave.\"\n\n\"That,\" he goes on, \"is the way to develop enough physical overplus so\nthat you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction to\nmob-intoxication. And, provided your mind is not in as bad condition\nas your body, this physical overplus will transmute some of itself\ninto mental exuberance. This will enable you to have more fun with\nyour mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. It will\nenable you to look before and after, and purr over what is, as well as\nto discern, with pleasurable longing, what is not, and set forth\nconfidently to capture it.\"\n\nBut if, by any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sort\nof condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow his\nbody to get into, it develops that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby\nbrain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear\nthat he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered\nthe vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands\nof his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one\nreason why so many more Auto-Comrades are to be found in\ncrow's-nests, gypsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper\nFifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying\nmasthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, or even operating a\nrather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence, is better for\nconsecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices, clubs,\ncommittees, servants, dinners, teas, and receptions, to each of which\none is a little late.\n\nIn diffusing knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, this knack of\nconcentration, Arnold Bennett's little books on mental efficiency have\ndone wonders for the art of auto-comradeship. Their popular\npersuasiveness has coaxed thousands on thousands of us to go in for a\nfew minutes' worth of mental calisthenics every day. They have\nactually cajoled us into the painful feat of glancing over a page of a\nbook and then putting it down and trying to retrace the argument in\nmemory. Or they have coaxed us to fix on some subject--any\nsubject--for reflection, and then scourge our straying minds back to\nit at every few steps of the walk to the morning train. And we have\nfound that the mental muscles have responded at once to this\ntreatment. They have hardened under the exercise until being left\nalone has begun to change from confinement in the same cell with that\nworst of enemies who has the right to forge one's own name--into a\njoyful pleasure jaunt with a totally different person who, if not\none's best friend, is at least to be counted on as a trusty,\nentertaining, resourceful, unselfish associate--at times, perhaps, a\nlittle exacting--yet certainly a far more brilliant and generally\nsatisfactory person than his companion.\n\nNo matter what the ignorant or the envious may say, there is nothing\nreally unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of auto-comradeship.\nA few weeks of it bring you back with a fresher, keener appreciation of\nyour other friends and of humanity in general than you had before\nsetting forth. In the continuous performance of the psalm of life such\ncontrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal advantage.\n\nBut auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by the\nmediaeval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintage\nof the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption.\nConsecutive thought, though it is one of man's greatest pleasures, is\nat the same time perhaps the most arduous labor that he can perform.\nAnd after a long period of it, both the Auto-Comrade and his companion\nbecome exhausted and, perforce, less comradely.\n\nBesides the incidental exhaustion, there is another reason why this\nbeatific association must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately,\none's Auto-Comrade is always of the same sex as one's self, and in\nyouth, at least, if the presence of the complementary part of creation\nis long denied, there comes a time when this denial surges higher and\nhigher in subconsciousness, then breaks into consciousness, and keeps\non surging until it deluges all the tranquillities, zests, surprises,\nand excitements of auto-comradeship, and makes them of no effect.\n\nThis is, probably, a wise provision for the salvation of the human\ndigestion. For otherwise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit of\nthe tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship, might thereupon be\ntempted to retire to his hermit's den hard by and endeavor to sustain\nhimself for life on this food alone.\n\nMost of us, however, long before such extremes have been reached, are\nsure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we are\nenjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want someone else to enjoy\nit with.\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\nVIM AND VISION\n\n\nEfficiency is to-day the Hallelujah Chorus of industry. I know a\nmanufacturer who recently read a book on business management.\nStop-watch in hand he then made an exhaustive study of his office\nforce and their every action. After considering the tabulated results\nhe arose, smashed all but one of the many office mirrors, bought\nmodern typewriters, and otherwise eliminated works of supererogation.\nThe sequel is that a dozen stenographers to-day perform the work of\nthe former thirty-two.\n\nThis sort of thing is spreading through the business world and beyond\nit in every direction. Even the artists are studying the bearing of\nindustrial efficiency on the arts of sculpture, music, literature,\narchitecture, and painting. But beyond the card catalogue and the\nfiling cabinet the artists find that this new gospel has little to\noffer them. Their sympathies go out, instead, to a different kind of\nefficiency. The kind that bids fair to shatter their old lives to bits\nand re-mold them nearer to the heart's desire is not industrial but\nhuman. For inspiration it goes back of the age of Brandeis to the age\nof Pericles.\n\nThe enthusiasm for human efficiency is beginning to rival that for\nindustrial efficiency. Preventive medicine, public playgrounds, the\nnew health education, school hygiene, city planning, eugenics, housing\nreform, the child-welfare and country-life movements, the cult of\nexercise and sport--these all are helping to lower the death-rate and\nenrich the life-rate the world over. Health has fought with smoke and\ngerms and is now in the air. It would be strange if the receptive\nnature of the artist should escape the benignant infection.\n\nThere is an excellent reason why human efficiency should appeal less\nto the industrial than to the artistic worlds. Industry has a new\nsupply of human machines always available. Their initial cost is\nnothing. So it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, and install\nfresh ones. Thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in the\nSouthern mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap little boys\nand girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four\nor five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is,\nlike Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It is\ndawning upon him that one chief reason why the old Greeks scaled\nParnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, and\nkept, their human machines in good order for the climb. They trained\nfor the event as an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the Marathon.\nOne other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancient\nGreece is that the non-artists trained also, and thus, through their\nheightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers, became\nmasters by proxy. But that is another chapter.\n\nWhy has art never again reached the Periclean plane? Chiefly because\nthe artist broke training when Greece declined, and has never since\nthen brought his body up to the former level of efficiency.\n\nNow, as the physiological psychologists assure us, the artist needs a\ngenerous overplus of physical vitality. The art-impulse is a\nbrimming-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance. And the\nbest way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain the\nphysical. The artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full as\npossible. He will soon find that he is greater than he knows. He will\ndiscover that he has, until then, been walking the earth more than\nhalf a corpse. With joy he will come to see that living in a glow of\nhealth bears the same relation to merely not being sick that a plunge\nin the cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag in a hall\nbedroom.\n\n\"All through the life of a feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with\nmemory's grave-stones which mark the spots where noble enterprises\nperished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds.\" Thus\nwrote the educator, Horace Mann. And his words apply with special\nforce to the worker in the arts. One should bear in mind that the\nlatter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve-racking, confining,\nexhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But the\nclaims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spare\nintensity. Unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doing\nnothing at all. And to do his utmost he must keep his body in that\nsupremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending to\ndestroy. The one lasting solution is for him to reduce his working\ntime to a safe maximum and increase his recreation and sleeping-time\nto a safe minimum, and to train \"without haste, without rest.\"\n\n\"The first requisite to great intellectuality in a man is to be a\ngood animal,\" says Maxim the inventor. Hamerton, in his best-known\nbook, offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of the\nfirst essentials of genius; and shows how triumphant a part it played\nin the careers of such mighty men of intellectual valor as Leonardo da\nVinci, Kant, Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott.\n\nIs the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessary\nto the artist? Then let him read biography and note the paralyzing\neffect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and three\nquarter wellness. He will see that, as a rule, the masters have done\ntheir most telling and lasting work with the tides of physical vim at\nflood. For the genius is no Joshua. He cannot make the sun of the mind\nand the moon of the spirit stand still while the tides of health are\nebbing seaward. Indeed biography should not be necessary to convince\nthe fair-minded reader. Autobiography should answer. Just let him\nglance back over his own experience and say whether he has not\nthought his deepest thoughts and performed his most brilliant deeds\nunder the intoxication of a stimulant no less heady than that of\nexuberant health.\n\nThere is, of course, the vexed question of the sickly genius. My\npersonal belief is firm that, as a rule, he has won his triumphs\n_despite_ bad health, and not--as some like to imagine--because of bad\nhealth. To this rule there are a few often cited exceptions. Now, no\none can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer in\nthe works of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. The white plague\nis a powerful mental stimulant. It is a double-distilled extract of\nbaseless optimism. But this optimism, like that resulting from other\nstimulants, is dearly bought. Its shrift is too short. And let nobody\nforget that for each variety of pathological optimism and brilliance\nand beauty there are ninety and nine corresponding sorts of\npathological pessimism and dullness and ugliness induced by disorders\nof the liver, heart, stomach, brain, skin, and so on without end.\n\nThe thing for artists to do is to find out what physical conditions\nmake for the best art in the long run, and then secure these\nconditions in as short a run as possible. If tuberculosis makes for\nit, then by all means let those of us who are sincerely devoted to art\nbe inoculated without delay. If the family doctor refuses to oblige,\nall we have to do is to avoid fresh air, kiss indiscriminately,\npractice a systematic neglect of colds, and frequent the subway during\nrush hours. If alcohol makes for the best art, let us forthwith be\nadmitted to the bar--the stern judgment bar where each solitary\ndrinker is arraigned. For it is universally admitted that in art,\nquality is more important than quantity. \"If that powerful corrosive,\nalcohol, only makes us do a little first-class work, what matter if it\ncorrode us to death immediately afterwards? We shall have had our\nday.\" Thus many a gallant soul argues. But is there not another ideal\nwhich is as far above mere quality as quality is above mere quantity?\nI think there is. It is quantity of quality. And quantity of quality\nis exactly the thing that cannot brook the corrosiveness of powerful\nstimulants.\n\nI am not satisfied, however, that stimulants make entirely for the\nfine quality of even the short shrift. To my ear, tubercular optimism,\nwhen thumped on the chest, sounds a bit hollow. It does not ring quite\nas true as healthy optimism because one feels in the long run its\nautomatic, pathological character. Thus tubercular, alcoholized, and\ndrugged art may often be recognized by its somewhat artificial,\nunhuman, abnormal quality. I believe that if the geniuses who have\ndone their work under the influence of these stimulants had, instead,\ntrained sound bodies as for an Olympic victory, the arts would to-day\nbe the richer in quantity of quality. On this point George Meredith\nwrote a trenchant word in a letter to W. G. Collins:\n\n     I think that the notion of drinking any kind of alcohol as a\n     stimulant for intellectual work can have entered the minds\n     of those only who snatch at the former that they may\n     conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants\n     may refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body\n     after labor of brain; they do not help it--not even in the\n     lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert\n     vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them,\n     are but flashy, trashy stuff--or exhibitions of the\n     prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind\n     which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the\n     few at all eminent, who wrote after drinking.\n\nTo reinforce the opinion of the great Englishman I cannot forbear\ngiving that of an equally great American:\n\n     Never [wrote Emerson] can any advantage be taken of nature\n     by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence\n     of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or\n     of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple\n     soul in a clean and chaste body.... The poet's habit of\n     living should be set on so low a key that the common\n     influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be\n     the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his\n     inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.\n\nIn other words, the artist should keep himself in a condition so fit\nas to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance. But this should\nalways flow as freely as beer at a college reunion. And there should\nalways be plenty in reserve. It were well to consider whether there is\nnot some connection between decadent art and decadent bodies. A friend\nof mine recently attended a meeting of decadent painters and reported\nthat he could not find a chin or a forehead in the room.\n\nOne reason why so many of the world's great since Greece have\nneglected to store up an overplus of vitality is that exercise is\nwell-nigh indispensable thereto; and exercise has not seemed to them\nsufficiently dignified. We are indebted to the dark ages for this dull\nsuperstition. It was then that the monasteries built gloomy granite\ngreenhouses for the flower of the world's intellect, that it might\ndeteriorate in the darkness and perish without reproducing its kind.\nThe monastic system held the body a vile thing, and believed that to\ndevelop and train it was beneath the dignity of the spiritually elect.\nSo flagellation was substituted for perspiration, much as, in the\nOrient, scent is substituted for soap--and with no more satisfactory\nresult. This false notion of dignity has since then, by keeping men\nout of flannels, gymnasium suits, running-tights, and overalls,\nperformed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mind\nand stunting the fruit trees of the spirit.\n\nTo-day, however, we are escaping from the old superstition. We begin\nto see that there is no complete dignity for man without a dignified\nphysique; and that there is no physical dignity to compare with that\nof the hard-trained athlete. True, he who trains can hardly keep up\nthe old-time pose of the grand old man or the grand young man. He must\nperforce be more human and natural. But this sort of grandeur is now\ngoing out of fashion. And its absence must show to advantage in his\nwork.\n\nAs a rule the true artist is a most devoted and self-sacrificing\nperson. Ever since the piping times of Pericles he has usually been\nwilling to sacrifice to the demands of his art most of the things he\nenjoys excepting poor health. Wife, children, friends, credit--all may\ngo by the board. But his poor health he addresses with solemn,\nscriptural loyalty: \"Whither thou goest I will go: and where thou\nlodgest I will lodge. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I\nbe buried.\" Not that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor health.\nBut he most thoroughly enjoys a number of its causes. Sitting up too\nlate at night is what he enjoys; smoking too much, drinking too much,\nyielding to the exhausting sway of the divine efflatus for longer\nhours at a time than he has any business to, bolting unbalanced meals,\nand so on.\n\nBut the artist is finding out that poor health is the very first\nenjoyment which he ought to sacrifice; that the sacrifice is by no\nmeans as heroic as it appears; and that, once it is accomplished, the\nodds are that all the other things he thought he must offer up may be\nadded unto him through his own increased efficiency.\n\nNo doubt, all this business of regimen, of constant alertness and\npetty self-sacrifice, is bound to grow irksome before it settles down\nin life and becomes habitual. But what does a little irksomeness\ncount--or even a great deal of irksomeness--as against the long, deep\nthrill of doing better than you thought you ever knew how--of going\nfrom strength to strength and creating that which will elevate and\ndelight mankind long after the pangs of installing regimen are\nforgotten and you have once and for all broken training and laid you\ndown to sleep over?\n\nThe reason why great men and women are so often cynical about their\nown success is this: they have been so immoderate in their enjoyment\nof poor health that when the hour of victory comes, they lack the\nexuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring of\nachievement or of any other pleasure. I believe that the successful\ninvalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthy\nfailure about his failure. The latter is usually an optimist. But this\nis a hard belief to substantiate. For the perfectly healthy failure\ndoes not grow on every bush.\n\nIf only the physical conscientiousness of the Greeks had never been\nallowed to die out, the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer,\nfairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, we shall never be able to\nreckon up our losses in genius: in Shakespeares whose births were\nfrustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possible\nparents; in Schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causes\nbefore they had delivered a note of their message; in Giorgiones whom\na suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have their\nwork cheapened and curtailed. What overwhelming losses has art not\nsustained by having the ranks of its artists and their most creative\naudiences decimated by the dullness of mediocre health! It is hard to\nendure the thought of what the geniuses of the modern world might have\nbeen able to accomplish if only they had lived and trained like\nathletes and been treated with a small part of the practical\nconsideration and live sympathy which humanity bestows on a favorite\nball-player or prize-fighter.\n\nTo-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed against\nthe truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the\nmother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only the\nstepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves that\nsickness and morbidity are good for the arts, just as they delightedly\nembrace the conviction, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life of\nharassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the\ntrue poet. The circumstance that this belief runs clean counter to the\nshowing of history does not embarrass them. Convinced against their\nwill, most people are of the same opinion still. And they\nenthusiastically assault and batter any one who points out the truth,\nas I shall endeavor to do in chapter eight.\n\nEven if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as little as\na century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If Richard\nWagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching\ncold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary places\nto overlook in \"The Ring,\" and would, instead, have three or four more\nimmortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to\nwrite. One hates to think what Poe might have done in literature if he\nhad taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket.\nTuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said so\nbefore the death of Keats!...\n\nIt makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in a\nstuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how the\nsole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game\nof _l'hombre_ with the philosopher Schelling. And then he wondered\nwhy he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever\ncatching cold (_einen starken Schnupfen_); and why his head was so\nthick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. In his\ncorrespondence with Goethe it is exasperating to observe that these\ngreat poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight change\nof temperature or humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdraw\ntheir health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it would\nhave been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made\nthem health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows of\noutrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourish\ninspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case their\npublished works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the\nmasterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of\ntheir _Saemmtliche Werke_ than they do. And the second part of \"Faust\"\nwould not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom\nhaving wings to match those of the spirit.\n\n    \"Ach! zu des Geistes Fluegeln wird so leicht\n    Kein korperlicher Fluegel sich gesellen.\"\n\nSome of the most opulent and powerful spirits ever seen on earth have\nscarcely done more than indicate what kind of birthrights they\nbartered away for a mess of pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased to\nwrite poetry after thirty because, by dissipating his overplus of\nlife, he had too grievously wronged what he described as\n\n     \"This body that does me grievous wrong.\"\n\nAfter all, there are comparatively few masters, since the glory that\nwas Greece, who have not half buried their talents in the earthy\ndarkness of mediocre health. When we survey the army of modern genius,\nhow little of the sustained ring and resilience and triumphant\nimmortal youth of real exuberance do we find there! Instead of a band\nof sound, alert, well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit,\nbehold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along with\nlack-luster eyes, or eyes bright with the luster of fever. And the\npeople whom they serve are not entirely free from blame. They have\nneglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks, or put shirts on their\nbacks. As for footgear, it is the usual campaign army shoe, made of\nblotting paper--the shoe that left red marks behind it at Valley Forge\nand Gettysburg and San Juan Hill. I believe that a better time is\ncoming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn.\nFor we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if the\nartist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able to\nrun--not alone with patience, but also with the brilliance born of\nabounding vitality--the race that is set before him. This dawning\nbelief is the greatest hope of modern art.\n\nIt does one good to see how artists, here, there, and everywhere, are\nbeginning to grow enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodily\nefficiency, and physically to \"revive the just designs of Greece.\" The\nencouraging thing is that the true artist who once finds what an\nimpulse is given his work by rigorous training, is never content to\nslump back to his former vegetative, death-in-life existence. His\ndaily prayer has been said in a single line by a recent American poet:\n\n    \"Life, grant that we may live until we die.\"\n\nIn every way the artist finds himself the gainer by cutting down his\nhours of work to the point where he never loses his reserve of energy.\nHe now is beginning to take absolute--not merely relative--vacations,\nand more of them. For he remembers that no man's work--not even\nRembrandt's or Beethoven's or Shakespeare's--is ever _too_ good; and\nthat every hour of needed rest or recreation makes the ensuing work\nbetter. It is being borne in on the artist that a health-book like\nFisher's \"Making Life Worth While\" is of as much professional value to\nhim as many a treatise on the practice of his craft. Insight into the\nphysiological basis of his life-work can save the artist, it seems,\nfrom those periods of black despair which he once used to employ in\nrunning his head against a concrete wall, and raging impotently\nbecause he could not butt through. Now, instead of laying his futility\nto a mysteriously malignant fate, or to the persecution of secret\nenemies, he is likely to throw over stimulants and late hours and take\nto the open road, the closed squash-court, and the sleeping-porch. And\npresently armies cannot withhold him from joyful, triumphant labor.\n\nThe artist is finding that exuberance, this Open Sesame to the things\nthat count, may not be won without the friendly collaboration of the\npores; and that two birds of paradise may be killed with one stone\n(which is precious above rubies) by giving the mind fun while one\ngives the pores occupation. Sport is this precious stone. There is, of\ncourse, something to be said for sportless exercise. It is fairly\ngood for the artist to perform solemn antics in a gymnasium class, to\ngesture impassionedly with dumb-bells, and tread the mill of the\ncircular running-track. But it is far better for him to go in with\nequal energy for exercise which, while developing the body, re-creates\nthe mind and spirit. That kind of exercise is best, in my opinion,\nwhich offers plenty of variety and humor and the excitement of\ncompetition. I mean games like tennis, baseball, handball, golf,\nlacrosse, and polo, and sports like swift-water canoeing and\nfly-fishing, boxing, and fencing. These take the mind of the artist\nquite away from its preoccupations and then restore it to them, unless\nhe has taken too much of a good thing, with a fresh viewpoint and a\nzest for work.\n\nSport is one of the chief makers of exuberance because of its purging,\nexhilarating, and constructive effects on body, mind, and spirit. So\nmany contemporary artists are being converted to sport that the\nartistic type seems to be changing under our eyes. It was only\nyesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, or\nmusic was a sickly, morbid, anaemic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at\nsight by the average man, and a shining mark for all the cast-off wit\nof the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in \"Patience.\" He\nwas a \"foot-in-the-grave young man,\" or a \"_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young\nman.\" He was\n\n    \"A most intense young man,\n    A soulful-eyed young man.\n    An ultra-poetical, superaesthetical, Out-of-the-way young man.\"\n\nTo-day, what a change! Where is this young man? Most of his ilk have\naccompanied the snows of yester-year. And a goodly proportion of those\nwho make merry in their room are sure-eyed, well set-up, ruddy,\nmuscular chaps, about whom the average man may jeer and quote\nslanderous doggerel only at his peril. But somehow or other the\naverage man likes this new type better and does not want to jeer at\nhim, but goes and buys his work instead.\n\nFaint though distinct, one begins to hear the new note of exuberance\nspreading through the arts. On canvas it registers the fact that the\npainters are migrating in hordes to live most of the year in the open\ncountry. It vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musical\nperformer like Willeke, the 'cellist. Like a starter's pistol it\nsounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like John\nMasefield and Alfred Noyes. One has only to compare the overflowing\nlife and sanity of workers like these with the condition of the\nordinary \"Out-of-the-way young man\" to see what a gulf yawns between\nexuberance and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a state\nsomewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity. And I believe that as\nyet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physical\nrenaissance. Wait until this new religion of exuberance is a few\ngenerations older and eugenics has said her say!\n\nCuriously enough, the decadent artists who pride themselves on their\nextreme modernity are the ones who now seem to cling with the most\nreactionary grip to the old-fashioned, invertebrate type of physique.\nThe rest are in a fair way to undergo such a change as came to Queed,\nthe sedentary hero of Mr. Harrison's novel, when he took up boxing. As\nsport and the artists come closer together, they should have a good\neffect on one another. The artists will doubtless make sport more\nformful, rhythmical, and beautiful. Sport, on the other hand, ought\nbefore long to influence the arts by making sportsmen of the artists.\n\nNow good sportsmanship is composed of fairness, team-work, the grace\nof a good loser, the grace of a good winner, modesty, and gameness.\nThe first two of these amount to an equitable passion for a fair field\nand no favor, and a willingness to subordinate star-play, or personal\ngain, to team-play, or communal gain. Together they imply a feeling\nfor true democracy. To be converted to the religion of sportsmanship\nmeans to become more socially minded. I think it is more than a\ncoincidence that at the moment when the artists are turning to sport,\ntheir work is taking on the brotherly tone of democracy. The call of\nbrotherhood is to-day one of the chief preoccupations of poetry, the\ndrama, ideal sculpture, and mural decoration. For this rapid change I\nshould not wonder if the democracy of sportsmanship were in part\nresponsible.\n\nThe third element of sportsmanship is the grace of a good loser.\nArtists to-day are better losers than were the \"foot-in-the-grave\nyoung men.\" Among them one now finds less and less childish petulance,\noutspoken jealousy of others' success, and apology for their own\nfailure. Some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering that\nthe good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat. And\nthey are importing these manly tactics into the game of art. It has\nnot taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who\nhides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They are\nimpressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading\nthe less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair as\nchess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recent\nchess match between Lasker and Capablanca:\n\n     Illness shall not interfere with the playing of any game, on\n     the ground that it is the business of the players so to\n     train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect\n     condition; and it is their duty, which by this rule is\n     enforced, to study their health and live accordingly.\n\nThe fourth factor of sportsmanship is the grace of a good winner. It\nwould seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep from\ngloating over his vanquished rival, but also to be generous and\nminimize his own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did all the\napologizing. To-day less apologizing is done by the failure and more\nby the success. The master in art is learning modesty, and from whom\nbut the master in sport? There are in the arts to-day fewer\nmegalomaniacs and persons afflicted with delusions of grandeur than\nthere were among the \"_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young men.\" Sport has made\nthem more normal spiritually, while making them more normal\nphysically. It has kept them younger. Old age has been attacked and\ndriven back all along the line. One reason why we no longer have so\nmany grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead\nwe have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir\nMitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary\nfossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of\nprogress. \"If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion,\"\nwrites Bourne in \"Youth,\" \"can, by caring for the physical basis, keep\nthemselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up with\nitself and becoming contemporaneous.\"\n\nGameness is the final factor of good sportsmanship. In the matter of\ngameness, I grant that sport has little to teach the successful\nartist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency--in\nshort, the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts. It\ntakes the Browning spirit of those who\n\n    \"fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.\"\n\nIt takes the typical Anglo-Saxon gameness of Johnny Armstrong of the\nold ballad:\n\n    \"Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all.\n    I am a little hurt, but I am not slain;\n    I will lay me down for to bleed a while,\n    And then I'll rise and fight with you again.'\"\n\nYes, but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have not\nyet succeeded--perhaps for want of these very qualities? I believe\nthat a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship, acting upon a newly\ndeveloped body, will presently bring to many a disheartened struggler\njust that increment of resilient gameness which will mean success\ninstead of failure.\n\nThus, while our artists show a tendency to hark back to the Greek\nphysical ideal, they are not harking backward but forward when they\nyield to the mental and spiritual influences of sportsmanship. For\nthis spirit was unknown to the ancient world. Until yesterday art and\nsportsmanship never met. But now that they are mating I am confident\nthat there will come of this union sons and daughters who shall\njoyfully obey the summons that is still ringing down to us over the\nheads of the anaemic contemporaries of the exuberant old sportsman,\nWalt Whitman:\n\n    \"Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!\n    Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,\n    But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than\n        before known,\n    Arouse! for you must justify me.\"\n\n\n\n\nVII\n\nPRINTED JOY\n\n     _The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than\n     anything else in life._\n\nRALPH WALDO EMERSON.\n\n\nAmerica is trying to emerge from the awkward age. Its body is\nfull-grown. Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. What\ndoes this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most\nneeds contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, the\nwisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with\npoetry's profound, spiritual insights.\n\nThe promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly this\nto-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed\nup in that curious symbol which appears over the letter _n_ in the\nword \"canon.\" A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of the\nAmerican poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point\nabout the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell\ninto a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive\nso rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. This\nrenaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority of\nreaders and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let us\nglance at a few of the more popular explanations.\n\nMany say that poetry declined in America because we turned ourselves\ninto a nation of entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is true,\nhow do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds and\nwaterfalls, for groves of ancient trees, national parks, and\ncity-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annual\nexpenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the\nFatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing\ncondition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly\nmaterialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a\nhigh world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original,\nmost significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive\nlandscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no\nutterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras,\nthat produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury,\nFrench, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than Wall\nStreet's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers of\nNew York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, Bar\nHarbor's Building of Arts, West Point, and Princeton University. It is\nplain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism.\n\nOther philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetry\nwas the fault of the poets themselves. Popular interest slackened,\nthey say, because the art first degenerated. Now an obvious answer to\nthis is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become,\nmen may always turn, if they will, to those dead poets of old who live\nforever on their shelves. But let us grant for the sake of argument\nthat any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect\npoetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recall\nthe situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic\nappreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, and\nWhitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment,\nand the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was the\nrare genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-day\nthe most popular of our poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was in\nhis prime. Thus it appears that public appreciation, and not creative\npower, was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of the\nParnassian hill. Not until then did the poet come \"tumbling after.\"\n\nMoreover, in the light of modern aesthetic psychology, this seems the\nmore natural order of events. It takes two to make a work of art: one\nto produce, one to appreciate. The creative appreciator is a\ncorrelative of all artistic expression. It is almost impossible for\nthe artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphere\nexhaled by the ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the callous, or\nthe actively hostile. It follows that the demand for poetry is created\nno more by the supply than the supply is created by the demand. Thus\nthe general indifference to this one department of American art was\n_not_ primarily caused by the degenerating supply.\n\nThe decline and fall of our poetic empire have yet other Gibbons who\nsay that our civilization suddenly changed from the country to the\nurban type, and that our love of poetry began to disappear\nsimultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and the\nmushroom growth of the large cities. So far I agree; but not with\ntheir reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities are\nsuch dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymous\nonly with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germans\ncall the \"heaven-scratcher,\" with elevated railways, \"sand hogs,\"\nwhirring factories, and alleys reeking with the so-called \"dregs\" of\nEurope. They claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar creed of the\nmodern city is epitomized by such things as a certain signboard in New\nYork, which offers a typically neo-urban solution of the old problem,\n\"What is art?\"\n                     ---------------\n                    | PARAGON PANTS |\n                    |    ARE ART    |\n                     ---------------\n\nthe board declares. And this, they say, is about as poetic as a large\ncity ever becomes.\n\nNow let us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of Mr.\nJames Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almost\ncompletely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and\nthe slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced\nstraight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty\nshimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the\nbuilders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly\nhurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play\nwith elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and\nglorious a battlefield as any Tours or Gettysburg of them all. And the\ndingy, battered old \"L\" train, as it clatters through the East Side\nearly on \"morose, gray Monday morning,\" becomes a divine chariot\n\n    \"winging through Deeps of the Lord with its eighty Earth-anchored\n        Souls.\"\n\nOh, yes; there is \"God's plenty\" of poetry in these sights and sounds,\nif only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness.\nBut there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawn\nfrom the city by him who, instead of thus straitly confining his gaze\nto any one aspect of urban life, is able to see it steadily and see it\nwhole, with its subtle _nuances_ and its over-powering dramatic\ncontrasts--as a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, might see\nit if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold's\nsculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuous\nbeauty. What \"songs greater than before known\" might such a poet not\nsing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxon\nculture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of\nSt. Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored life of all\nsoutheastern Europe surging about that slender iron fence--children of\nthe blood of Chopin and Tschaikowsky; of Gutenberg, Kossuth, and\nNapoleon; of Isaiah and Plato, Leonardo and Dante--with the wild\nstrains of the gypsy orchestra floating across Second Avenue, and to\nthe southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of builders\nclambering on the cupola of a neighboring Giotto's tower built of\nsteel? Who dares say that the city is unpoetic? _It is one of the most\npoetic places on earth._\n\nThese, then, are the chief explanations which have been offered us\nto-day of the historic decline of the American poetry-lover. We weigh\nthem, and find them wanting. Why? Because they have sought, like\nradiographers, far beneath the surface; whereas the real trouble has\nbeen only skin deep. I shall try to show the nature of this trouble;\nand how, by beginning to cure it, we have already brought on a poetic\nrenaissance.\n\nMost of us who care for poetry frequently have one experience in\ncommon. During our summer vacations in the country we suddenly\nre-discover the well-thumbed \"Golden Treasury\" of Palgrave, and the\n\"Oxford Book of Verse\" which have been so unaccountably neglected\nduring the city winter. We wander farther into the poetic fields and\nrevel in Keats and Shakespeare. We may even attempt once more to get\nbeyond the first book of the \"Faerie Queene,\" or fumble again at the\ncombination lock which seems to guard the meaning of the second part\nof \"Faust.\" And we find these occupations so invigorating and joyful\nthat we model and cast an iron resolution to the effect that this\nwinter, whatever betide, we will read a little poetry every day, or\nevery week, as the case may be. On that we plunge back into the\nbeautiful, poetic, inspiring city, and adhere to our poetry-reading\nprogram--for exactly a fortnight. Then, unaccountably, our resolve\nbegins to slacken. We cannot seem to settle our minds to ordered\nrhythms \"where more is meant than meets the ear.\" Our resolve\ncollapses. Once again Palgrave is covered with dust. But vacation time\nreturns. After a few days in green pastures and beside still waters\nthe soul suddenly turns like a homing-pigeon to poetry. And the old,\nperplexing cycle begins anew.\n\nA popular magazine once sent a certain young writer and ardent\namateur of poetry on a long journey through the Middle West. He took\nbut one book in his bag. It was by Whitman (the poet of cities, mark).\nAnd he determined to read it every evening in his bedroom after the\ntoils of the day. The first part of the trip ran in the country.\n\"Afoot and light-hearted\" he took to the open road every morning, and\nreveled every evening in such things as \"Manahatta,\" \"The Song of\nJoys,\" and \"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.\" Then he carried his poet of\ncities to a city. But the two would have nothing to do with one\nanother. And to the traveler's perplexity, a place no larger than\nColumbus, Ohio, put a violent end to poetry on that trip.\n\nIn our day most poetry-lovers have had such experiences. These have\nbeen hard to explain, however, only because their cause has been\nprobed for too profoundly. _The chief cause of the decline of poetry\nwas not spiritual but physical._ Cities are not unpoetic in spirit. It\nis only in the physical sense that Emerson's warning is true: \"If\nthou fill thy brain with Boston and New York ... thou shalt find no\nradiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods.\" The\ntrouble was this: that the modern type of city, when it started into\nbeing, back in the seventies, began to take from men, and to use up,\nthat margin of nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of vitality of\nwhich so much has already been said in this book, and which is always\nneeded for the true appreciation of poetry. Grant Allen has shown that\nman, when he is conscious of a superfluity of sheer physical strength,\ngives himself to play; and in like manner, when he is conscious of a\nsuperfluity of receptive power, _which has a physical basis_, he gives\nhimself to art.\n\nNow, though all of the arts demand of their appreciators this overplus\nof nervous energy (and Heaven knows perfectly well how inadequate a\nsupply is offered up to music and the arts of design!), yet the\nappreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands this\nbloom on the cheek of existence. For poetry, with quite as much of\nemotional demand as the others, combines a considerably greater and\nmore persistent intellectual demand, involving an unusual amount of\nphysical wear and tear. Hence, in an era of overstrain, poetry is the\nfirst of the arts to suffer.\n\nMost lovers of poetry must realize, when they come to consider it,\nthat their pleasure in verse rises and falls, like the column of\nmercury in a barometer, with the varying levels of their physical\noverplus. Physical overplus, however, is the thing which life in a\nmodern city is best calculated to keep down.\n\nSurely it was no mere coincidence that, back there in the seventies,\njust at the edge of the poetic decline, city life began to grow so\nimmoderately in volume and to be \"speeded up\" and \"noised up\" so\nabruptly that it took our bodies by surprise. This process has kept on\nso furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able to\ncatch up. No large number have yet succeeded in readjusting\nthemselves completely to the new pace of the city. And this continues\nto exact from most of us more nervous energy than any life may, which\nwould keep us at our best. Hence, until we have succeeded either in\naccomplishing the readjustment, or in spending more time in the\ncountry, the appreciation of poetry has continued to suffer.\n\nEven in the country, it is, of course, perfectly true that life spins\nfaster now than it used to--what with telephones and inter-urban\ntrolleys, the motor, and the R.F.D. But this rural progress has\narrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powers\nof readjustment. When we go from city to country we recede to a rate\nof living with which our nervous systems can comfortably fall in, and\nstill control for the use of the mind and spirit a margin of that\ndelicious vital bloom which resembles the ring of the overtones in\nsome beautiful voice.\n\nBut how is it practicable to keep this margin in the city, when the\nroar of noisy traffic over noisy pavements, the shrieks of newsboy and\npeddler, the all-pervading chronic excitement, the universal\nobligation to \"step lively,\" even at a funeral, are every instant\nlaying waste our conscious or unconscious powers? How are we to give\nthe life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin is\nforever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due to\nlack of sleep, unhygienic surroundings, constant interruption (or the\nexpectation thereof), and the impossibility of relaxation owing to the\nnever-ending excitement and interest and sexual stimulus of the great\nhuman pageant--its beauty and suggestiveness?\n\nApart from the general destruction of the margin of energy, one\nspecial thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry is\nto keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of the\nimportance of the present moment. We might call this sense the\njournalistic spirit of the city. How many typical metropolitans one\nknows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whatever\nis just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire,\nor a neuraesthete--if one may coin a word--who perceives a spider on\nher collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of\ncourse, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our\ninnumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely in\nthe present minute, and often in the very most sensational second of\nthat minute, that one grows impatient of the \"olds,\" and comes to\nregard a constantly renewed and increased dose of \"news\" as the only\npresent help in a chronic time of trouble. This is a kind of mental\ndrug-habit. And its origin is physical. It is a morbid condition\ninduced by the over-paced life of cities.\n\nLong before the rise of the modern city--indeed, more than a century\nago--Goethe, who was considerably more than a century ahead of his\nage, wrote to Schiller from Frankfort of the journalistic spirit of\ncities and its relation to poetry:\n\n     It seems to me very remarkable how things stand with the\n     people of a large city. They live in a constant delirium of\n     getting and consuming, and the thing we call atmosphere can\n     neither be brought to their attention nor communicated to\n     them. All recreations, even the theater, must be mere\n     distractions; and the great weakness of the reading public\n     for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that\n     the former always, and the latter generally, brings\n     distraction into the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I\n     have noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions--or at\n     least in so far as they _are_ poetic--which seems to me to\n     follow quite naturally from these very causes. Poetry\n     requires, yes, it absolutely commands, concentration. It\n     isolates man against his own will. It forces itself upon him\n     again and again; and is as uncomfortable a possession as a\n     too constant mistress.\n\nIf this reporter's attitude of mind was so rampant in cultivated urban\nGermany a century ago as to induce \"a sort of dislike of poetic\nproductions,\" what sort of dislike of them must it not be inducing\nto-day? For the appreciation of poetry cannot live under the same\nroof with the journalistic spirit. The art needs long, quiet vistas\nbackward and forward, such as are to be had daily on one of those\n\"lone heaths\" where Hazlitt used to love to stalk ideas, but such as\nare not to be met with in Times Square or the Subway.\n\nThe joyful side of the situation is that this need is being met. A few\nyears ago the city dwellers of America began to return to nature. The\nmovement spread until every one who could afford it, habitually fled\nfrom the city for as long a summer outing as possible. More and more\npeople learned the delightful sport of turning an abandoned farm into\na year-round country estate. The man who was tied to a city office\nformed the commuting habit, thus keeping his wife and children\npermanently away from the wear and tear of town. The suburban area was\nimmensely increased by the rapid spread of motoring.\n\nThus, it was recently made possible for hundreds of thousands of\nAmericans to live, at least a considerable part of the year, where\nthey could hoard up an overplus of vitality. The result was that these\nwell-vitalized persons, whenever they returned to the city, were\nbetter able to stand--and adjust themselves to--the severe urban pace,\nthan were the fagged city people. It was largely by the impact of this\nnew vitality that the city was roused to the importance of physical\nefficiency, so that it went in for parks, gymnasia, baths, health and\nwelfare campaigns, athletic fields, playgrounds, Boy Scouts, Campfire\nGirls, and the like.\n\nThere are signs everywhere that we Americans have, by wise living,\nbegun to win back the exuberance which we lost at the rise of the\nmodern city. One of the surest indications of this is the fact that\nthe nation has suddenly begun to read poetry again, very much as the\nexhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns again to his Palgrave\nduring the third week of vacation. In returning to neglected nature we\nare returning to the most neglected of the arts. The renaissance of\npoetry is here. And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore begin to\nvie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists. Moreover this\nis only the beginning. Aviation has come and is reminding us of the\nancient prophecy of H. G. Wells that the suburbs of a city like New\nYork will now soon extend from Washington to Albany. Urban centers are\nbeing diffused fast; but social-mindedness is being diffused faster.\nMen are wishing more and more to share with each brother man the\nbrimming cup of life. Aircraft and true democracy are on the way to\nbear all to the land of perpetual exuberance. And on their wings the\npoet will again mount to that height of authority and esteem from\nwhich, in the healthful, athletic days of old, Homer and Sophocles\ndominated the minds and spirits of their fellow-men. That is to\nsay--he will mount if we let him. In the following chapter I shall\nendeavor to show why the American poet has as yet scarcely begun to\nshare in the poetry-renaissance.\n\n\n\n\nVIII\n\nTHE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS\n\n     _Nothing probably is more dangerous for the human race than\n     science without poetry, civilization without culture._\n\nHOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.\n\n     _A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is\n     a joke._\n\nMAX EASTMAN.\n\n\nIn the last two chapters we have seen the contemporary master of\nvarious arts, and the reader of poetry, engaged in cultivating the\njoyful heart. But there is one artist who has not yet been permitted\nto join in this agreeable pastime. He is the American poet. And as his\ninclusion would be an even more joyful thing for his land than for\nhimself, this book may not ignore him.\n\nThe American poet has not yet begun to keep pace with the\npoetry-lovers' renaissance. He is no very arresting figure; and\ntherefore you, reader, are already considering a skip to chapter nine.\nWell, if you are no more interested in him or his possibilities than\nis the average American consumer of British poetry--I counsel you by\nall means to skip in peace. But if you are one of the few who discern\nthe promise of a vast power latent in the American poet, and would\ngladly help in releasing this power for the good of the race, I can\nshow you what is the matter with him and what to do about it.\n\nWhy has the present renaissance of the poetry-lover not brought with\nit a renaissance of the American poet? Almost every reason but the\ntrue one has been given. The true reason is that our poets are tired.\nThey became exhausted a couple of generations ago; and we have kept\nthem in this condition ever since. In the previous chapter we saw how\ncity life began abruptly to be speeded up in the seventies. At that\ntime the poet--like almost every one else in the city--was unable to\nreadjust his body at once to the new pace. He was like a six-day\nbicycle racer who should be lapped in a sudden and continued sprint.\nThat sprint is still going on. Never again has the American poet felt\nthe abounding energy with which he began. And never has he overtaken\nthe leaders.\n\nThe reason why the poet is tired is that he lives in the over-paced\ncity. The reason why he lives in the city is that he is chained to it\nby the nature of his hack-work. And the reason for the hack-work is\nthat the poet is the only one of all the artists whose art almost\nnever offers him a living. He alone is forced to earn in other ways\nthe luxury of performing his appointed task in the world. For, as\nGoethe once observed, \"people are so used to regarding poetic talent\nas a free gift of the gods that they think the poet should be as\nfree-handed with the public as the gods have been with him.\"\n\nThe poet is tired. Great art, however, is not the product of\nexhaustion, but of exuberance. It will have none of the skimmed milk\nof mere existence. Nothing less than the thick, pure cream of\nabounding vitality will do. The exhausted artist has but three\ncourses open to him: either to stimulate himself into a counterfeit,\nand suicidally brief, exuberance; or to relapse into mediocrity; or to\ngain a healthy fullness of life.\n\nIn the previous chapter it was shown why poetry demands more\nimperatively than any other art, that the appreciator shall bring to\nit a margin of vitality. For a like reason poetry makes this same\ninordinate demand upon its maker. It insists that he shall keep\nhimself even more keenly alive than the maker of music or sculpture,\npainting or architecture. This is the reason why, in the present era\nof overstrain, the poet's art has been so swift to succumb and so slow\nto recuperate.\n\nThe poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able to\nreadjust his body to the pace of modern urban life, so that he may\nlive among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations and\nstill keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into his\npoems. Under these new and strenuous conditions, very little real\npoetry has been written in our cities. American poets, despite their\ngenuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amid\nits turmoil, have almost invariably done the best of their actually\ncreative work during the random moments that could be snatched in wood\nand meadow, by weedy marsh or rocky headland. To his friends it was\ntouching to see with what wistfulness Richard Watson Gilder used to\nseek his farm at Tyringham for a day or two of poetry after a\nfortnight of furious office life. Even Walt Whitman--poet of cities\nthat he was--had to retire \"precipitate\" from his beloved Manahatta in\norder fitly to celebrate her perfections. In fact, Stedman was perhaps\nthe only one of our more important singers at the close of the century\nwho could do his best work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to the\npoet: \"Thou shalt lie close hid with Nature, and canst not be afforded\nto the Capitol or the Exchange.\" But it is pleasant to recall how\neven that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in the\npeace of the country.\n\nOne reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women--and\nespecially of unmarried women--among our poetic leaders is, I think,\nto be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the\nmeans of living for a generous portion of the year that vital,\nunstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an\nantecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that,\naccording to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English\nwriters live far from the town. Most of the more promising American\npoets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do\nwith the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the\ntwentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their\npotential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on\ntheir own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the\nlarge cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness\ninto which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced.\nSuch harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for\npublishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it\nthat the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a\nbull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of a\ndray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to make\nup in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city does\nnot consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with his\nprobably inadequate physique, chafes against the hack-work and yields\nto the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him.\nThen, after yielding, he chafes again, and more bitterly, at his\nfaint, imperfect expression of these dreams, recognizing in despair\nthat he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuous\nlife about him. So he burns the torch of life at both ends, and the\nsuperhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle.\nThen suddenly the light fails altogether.\n\nThose poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to do\neven a small amount of steady, fine-grained work in the city. The rest\nare as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarred\nfrom learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil. In\nher autobiography Miss Jane Addams speaks some luminous words about\nthe state of society which forces finely organized artistic talent\ninto the wearing struggle for mere existence. She refers to it as \"one\nof the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this\nmost precious human faculty, this consummate possession of all\ncivilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be\ntreasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost.\"\n\nI wonder if we have ever stopped to ask ourselves why so many of our\nmore recent poets have died young. Was it the hand of God, or the\neffort to do the work of two in a hostile environment, that struck\ndown before their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, Edward Rowland\nSill, Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, William\nVaughn Moody, and the like? These were poets whom we bound to the\nstrenuous city, or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much of\ntheir vitality. An old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius\n\"will out.\" This is true, but only in a sadder sense than the stupidly\nproverbial one. As a matter of fact, the light of genius is all too\neasily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of\nAmerica are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as\nan unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy\nplant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have\nyet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an\nindestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually\ndemands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really\nexcellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and\nproduce the finest possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormous\nsolicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that\ntrouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his\nbest work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize\nthat the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in\neven the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble \"as the\nsparks to fly upward.\" They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of\ngeniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that their\nown real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have too little\nadversity to contend with, but lest he have too much.\n\nWe have heard not a little about the conservation of land, ore, wood,\nand water. The poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort of\nconservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college.\nI mean the conservation of energy. Our poetry will never emerge from\nthe dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to\novertake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it--or\nuntil we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable part\nof every year to the country--the place where the poet belongs.\n\nIt is true that the masters of the other arts have not fared any too\nwell at our hands; but they do not need help as badly by far as the\npoets need it. What with commissions and sales, scholarships,\nfellowships, and substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors and\narchitects and even the musicians have, broadly speaking, been able to\nlearn and practise their art in that peace and security which is\nwell-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productive\nmastery. They have usually been able to spend more of the year in the\ncountry than the poet. And even when bound as fast as he to the city,\nthey have not been forced to choose between burning the candle at\nboth ends or abandoning their art.\n\nBut for some recondite reason--perhaps because this art cannot be\ntaught at all--it has always been an accepted American conviction that\npoetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue\nby highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and\nfaculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout\nwith the wolf on the threshold--a most practical, philistine wolf,\nmoreover, which never heard of rhyme or rhythm, and whose whole\nacquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiarity\nwith frayed masculine and feminine endings.\n\nAs a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably\nbeen obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard\naffair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go\nout and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave\nlittle Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on\ncrusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of\nour verse \"jest growed,\" like Topsy. And the resulting state of things\nhas but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets\nspend their days in correcting encyclopaedia proof, or clerking, or\nrunning, notebook in hand, to fires--inheres in the eternal fitness of\nthings.\n\nBergson says in \"Creative Evolution,\" that \"an intelligence which\nreflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over\nand above practically useful efforts.\" Does it not follow that when we\nmake the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort of\nrunning to fires, we prevent him from enjoying the very advantage\nwhich made man a reflective being, to say nothing of a poet?\n\nPerhaps we have never yet realized that this attitude of ours would\nturn poetic success into a question of the survival of that paradox,\nthe commercially shrewd poet, or of the poet who by some happy\naccident of birth or marriage has been given an income, or of that\nprodigy of versatility who, in our present stage of civilization,\nbesides being mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's calling, is\nalso physically fit to bear the strain of doing two men's work; or,\nperhaps we had better say, three men's--for simply being a good poet\nis about as nerve-consuming an occupation as any two ordinary men\ncould support in common--and the third would have to run to fires for\nthe first two.\n\nIt is natural to the character of the American business man to declare\nthat the professional poet has no reason for existence _qua_ poet\nunless he can make his art support him. But let the business man bear\nin mind that if he had the power to enforce such a condition, he would\nbe practically annihilating the art. For it is literally true that, if\nplays were excluded, it would take not even a five-foot shelf to\ncontain all the first-rate poetry which was ever written by poets in a\nstate of poetic self-support. \"Could a man live by it,\" the author of\n\"The Deserted Village\" once wrote to Henry Goldsmith, \"it were not\nunpleasant employment to be a poet.\" Alas, the fatal condition! For\nthe art itself has almost never fed and clothed its devotee--at least\nuntil his best creative days are done and he has become a \"grand old\nman.\" More often the poet has attained not even this reward.\nWordsworth's lines on Chatterton have a wider application:\n\n    \"What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow--\n    Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find\n    Whose footsteps mark the music of mankind!\n    'T was his to lend a life: 't was Man's to borrow:\n    'T was his to make, but not to share, the morrow.\"\n\nThose who insist upon judging the art of poetry on the hard American\n\"cash basis\" ought to be prepared, for the sake of consistency, to\napply the same criterion as well to colleges, public schools, symphony\norchestras, institutions for scientific research, missions,\nsettlements, libraries, and all other unlucrative educational\nenterprises. With inexorable logic they should be prepared to insist\nthat people really do not desire or need knowledge or any sort of\nuplift because they are not prepared to pay its full cost. It is\nprecisely this sort of logic which would treat the Son of Man if He\nshould appear among us, to a bench in Bryant Park, and a place in the\nbread-line, and send the mounted police to ride down his socialistic\nmeetings in Union Square. No! poetry and most other forms of higher\neducation have always had to be subsidized--and probably always will.\nWhen wisely subsidized, however, this art is very likely to repay its\nsupport in princely fashion. In fact, I know of no other investment\nto-day that would bid fair to bring us in so many thousand per cent.\nof return as a small fresh-air fund for poets.\n\nWe Americans are rather apt to complain of the comparatively poor,\nunoriginal showing which our poets have as yet made among those of\nother civilized nations. We are quietly disgusted that only two of\nall our bards have ever made their work forcibly felt in Europe; and\nthat neither Poe nor Whitman has ever profoundly influenced the great\nmasses of his own people.\n\nDespite our splendid inheritance, our richly mingled blood, our\nincomparably stimulating New World atmosphere, why has our poetry made\nsuch a meager showing among the nations? The chief reason is obvious.\n_We have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were working\nfor us._ True, we have the reputation of being an open-handed, even an\nextravagantly generous folk. But thriftiness in small things often\ngoes with an extravagant disposition, much as manifestations of piety\noften accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placed\noutside the edifice. We have spent millions on bronze and marble\nbook-palaces which shall house the works of the poets. We have spent\nmore millions on universities which shall teach these works. But as\nfor making it possible for our few real poets to produce works, and\ncompletely fulfill their priceless functions, we have always satisfied\nourselves by decreeing: \"Let there be a sound cash basis.\"\n\nSo it came to pass that when the first exuberant, pioneer\nenergy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormal\ntype of city life, it became no longer possible for the poets to put\nas much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines, after they had\ntoilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders.\nFor often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer\nvitality. And how did we treat them from the first? In the old days we\nset Longfellow and Lowell at one of the most exhausting of\nprofessions--teaching. We made Emerson do one-night lecture-stands all\nwinter long in the West--sometimes for five dollars a lecture and feed\nfor his horse. We made Bryant ruin a gift as elemental as\nWordsworth's, in journalism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours of\nthe day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices and drink. We made\nWhitman drive nails, set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau in\nWashington, from which he was dismissed for writing the most original\nand the most poetic of American books. Later he was rescued from want\nonly by the humiliation of a public European subscription. Lanier we\nallowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill himself so\nfast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing the\nflute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing\n\"Sunrise\" until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips. And\nthis was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry of\nreproach:\n\n    \"Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,\n    But cannot dream us bread?\"\n\nWith Lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-up\nprocess began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland Sill we did away\nwith in his early prime through journalism and teaching. We curbed\nand pinched and stunted the promising art of Richard Watson Gilder by\npiling upon him several men's editorial work. We created a poetic\nresemblance between Arthur Upson and the hero of \"The Divine Fire\" by\nemploying him in a bookstore. We made William Vaughn Moody teach in a\ncity environment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later set the hand\nthat gave us \"An Ode in Time of Hesitation\" to the building of popular\nmelodrama. These are only a tithe of the things that we have done to\nthe hardiest of those benefactors of ours:\n\n    \"The poets, who on earth have made us heirs\n    Of truth and pure delight.\"\n\nIt is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those less sturdy ones who\nhave remained mute, inglorious Miltons for lack of a little practical\nappreciation and a small part of a small fresh-air fund.\n\nSo far as I know, Thomas Bailey Aldrich is the only prominent figure\namong the poets of our elder generations who was given the means of\ndevoting himself entirely to his art. And even _his_ fortune was not\nleft to him by his practical, poetry-loving friend until so late in\nthe day that his creative powers had already begun to decline through\nage and over-much magazine editing.\n\nMore than almost any other civilized nation we have earned Allen\nUpward's reproach in \"The New Word\":\n\n     There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, in his march\n     upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard\n     and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main\n     body. Humanity condemns equally those who are too good for\n     it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the\n     stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut\n     down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the\n     prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve\n     side by side.... Literature is the chief ornament of\n     humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier\n     than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead,\n     and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel.... England\n     will always have fifteen thousand a year for some\n     respectable clergyman; she will never have it for Shelley.\n\nYes, but how incomparably better England has treated her poets than\nAmerica has treated hers! What convenient little plums, as De Quincey\nsomewhat wistfully remarked, were always being found for Wordsworth\njust at the psychological moment; and they were not withheld,\nmoreover, until he was full of years and honors. Indeed, we owe this\npoet to the poet-by-proxy of whom Wordsworth wrote, in \"The Prelude\":\n\n    \"He deemed that my pursuits and labours, lay\n    Apart from all that leads to wealth, or even\n    A necessary maintenance insures\n    Without some hazard to the finer sense.\"\n\nHow tenderly the frail bodies of Coleridge and of Francis Thompson\nwere cared for by their appreciators. How potently the Civil List and\nthe laureateship have helped a long, if most uneven, line of England's\nsingers. Over against our solitary ageing Aldrich, how many great\nEnglish poets like Byron, Keats, the Brownings, Tennyson, and\nSwinburne have found themselves with small but independent incomes,\nfree to give their whole unembarrassed souls and all that in them was\nto their art. And all this since the close of the age of patronage!\n\nWhy have we never had a Wordsworth, or a Browning? For one thing,\nbecause this nation of philanthropists has been too thoughtless to\nfound the small fellowship in creative poetry which might have freed a\nWordsworth of ours from communion with a cash-book to wander chanting\nhis new-born lines among the dreamy Adirondack lakes or the frowning\nSierras; or that might have sought out our Browning in his grocery\nstore and built him a modest retreat among the Thousand Islands. If\nnot too thoughtless to act thus, we have been too timid. We have been\ntoo much afraid of encouraging weaklings by mistake. We have been, in\nfact, more afraid of encouraging a single mediocre poet than of\nneglecting a score of Shelleys. But we should remember that even if\nthe weak are encouraged with the strong, no harm is done.\n\nIt can not be too strongly insisted upon that the poor and mediocre\nverse which has always been produced by every age is practically\ninnocuous. It hurts only the publishers who are constantly being\nimportuned to print the stuff, and the distinguished men and women who\nare burdened with presentation copies or requests for criticism. These\nunfortunates all happen to be capable of emitting loud and\nauthoritative cries of distress about the menace of bad poets. But we\nshould discount these cries one hundred per cent. For nobody else is\nhurt by the bad poets, because nobody else pays the slightest\nattention to them. Time and their own \"inherent perishableness\" soon\nremove all traces of the poetasters. It were better to help hundreds\nof them than to risk the loss of one new Shelley. And do we realize\nhow many Shelleys we may actually have lost already? I think it\npossible that we may have had more than one such potential singer to\nwhom we never allowed any leisure or sympathy or margin of vitality to\nturn into poetry. Perhaps there is more grim truth than humor in Mark\nTwain's vision of heaven where Captain Stormfield saw a poet as great\nas Shakespeare who hailed, I think, from Tennessee. The reason why the\nworld had never heard of him was that his neighbors in Tennessee had\nregarded him as eccentric and had ridden him out of town on a rail and\nassisted his departure to a more congenial clime above.\n\nWe complain that we have had no poet to rank with England's greatest.\nI fear that it would have been useless for us to have had such a\nperson. We probably would not have known what to do with him.\n\nI realize that mine is not the popular side of this question and that\nan occasional poet with an income may be found who will even argue\nagainst giving incomes to other poets. Mr. Aldrich, for instance,\nwrote, after coming into his inheritance:\n\n    \"A man should live in a garret aloof,\n      And have few friends, and go poorly clad,\n    With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof,\n      To keep the goddess constant and glad.\"\n\nBut a friend of Mr. Aldrich's, one of his poetic peers, has assured me\nthat it was not the poet's freedom from financial cares at all, but\npremature age, instead, that made his goddess of poesy fickle after\nthe advent of the pitifully belated fortune. Mr. Stedman spoke a far\ntruer word on this subject. \"Poets,\" he said, \"in spite of the\nproverb, sing best when fed by wage or inheritance.\" \"'Tis the\nconvinced belief of mankind,\" wrote Francis Thompson with a sardonic\nsmile, \"that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if the\nAlmighty had constructed him like certain rudimentarily vocal dolls.\"\n\"No artist,\" declares Arnold Bennett, \"was ever assisted in his career\nby the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by economic\ninferiority.\" And Bliss Carman speaks out loud and bold: \"The best\npoets who have come to maturity have always had some means of\nlivelihood at their command. The idea that any sort of artist or\nworkman is all the better for being doomed to a life of penurious\nworry, is such a silly old fallacy, one wonders it could have\npersisted so long.\" The wolf may be splendid at suckling journalism\nand various other less inspired sorts of writing, but she is a\nferocious old stepmother to poetry.\n\nThere are some who snatch eagerly at any argument in support of the\nexisting order, and who triumphantly point out the number of good\npoems that have been written under \"seemingly\" adverse conditions. But\nthey do not stop to consider how much better these poems might have\nbeen made under \"seemingly\" favorable conditions. Percy Mackaye is\nright in declaring that the few singers left to English poetry after\nour \"wholesale driving-out and killing-out of poets ... are of two\nsorts: those with incomes and those without. Among the former are\nfound most of the excellent names in English poetry, a fact which is\nhardly a compliment to our civilization.\"\n\nWould that one of those excellent philanthropists who has grown so\naccustomed to giving a million to libraries and universities that the\nact has become slightly mechanical--might realize that he has, with\nall his generosity, made no provision as yet for helping one of the\nmost indispensable of all educational institutions--the poet. Would\nthat he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive\nfrom the universities--places whose conservative formalism is even\ndangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with\nall the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is\ndistressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow,\noverdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luring\nthem on with the glitter of cash prizes. One shudders to think of all\nthe fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctant\nyoung dry-as-dusts while they are preparing to pack still tighter the\nalready overcrowded ranks of \"professors of English literature\"--whose\nprofession, as Gerald Stanley Lee justly remarks, is founded on the\nstriking principle that a very great book can be taught by a very\nlittle man. This is a department of human effort which, as now usually\nconducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry.\nWhy endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of the\nclass of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should we\nthink of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to be\npenniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested,\ninstead, in a few more professors of Victorian literature?\n\nWhy should not a few thousands out of the millions we spend on\neducation be used to found fellowships of creative poetry? These would\nnot be given at first to those who wish to learn to write poetry; for\nthe first thousands would be far too precious for use in any such\nwild-cat speculations. They would be devoted, rather, to poets of\nproved quality, who have already, somehow, learned their art, and who\nask no more wondrous boon from life than fresh air and time to regain\nand keep that necessary margin of vitality which must go to the making\nof genuine poetry.\n\nI would not have the incumbent of such a fellowship, however, deprived\nsuddenly of all outer incentives for effort. The abrupt transition\nfrom constant worry and war among his members to an absolutely\nunclouded life of pure vocation-following might be almost too violent\na shock, and unsettle him and injure his productivity for a time.\n\nThe award of such a fellowship must not, of course, involve the least\nhint of charity or coercion. It should be offered and accepted as an\nhonor, not as a donation. The yearly income should, in my opinion, be\nsmall. It should be such a sum as would almost, but not quite, support\nthe incumbent very simply in the country, and still allow for books\nand an occasional trip to town. In some cases an income of a thousand\ndollars, supplemented by the little that poetry earns and possibly by\na random article or story in the magazines, would enable a poet to\nlead a life of the largest effectiveness.\n\nIt is my belief that almost any genuine poet who is now kept in the\nwhirl by economic reasons and thus debarred from the free practice of\nhis calling would gladly relinquish even a large salary and reduce his\nlife to simple terms to gain the inestimable privilege of devoting\nhimself wholly to his art before the golden bowl is broken. Many of\nthose who are in intimate touch with the poets of America to-day could\nshow any philanthropist how to do his land and the world more actual,\nvisible, immediate good by devoting a thousand dollars to poetry, than\nby allowing an hundred times that sum to slip into the ordinary\nwell-worn grooves of philanthropy.\n\nSome years ago a _questionnaire_ was submitted to various literary men\nby a poetry-lover who hoped to induce a wealthy friend to subsidize\npoets of promise in case these literary leaders approved the plan.\nWhile the younger writers warmly favored the idea, a few of the older\nones discouraged it. These were, in all cases, men who had made a\nfinancial success in more lucrative branches of literature than\npoetry; and it was natural for the veterans, who had brawnily\nstruggled through the burden and heat of the day, to look with the\nunsympathetic eye of the sturdy upon those frailer ones of the rising\ngeneration who perhaps might, without assistance, be eliminated in the\nrough-and-tumble of the literary market-place. Of course it was but\nhuman for the veterans to insist that any real genius among their\nyouthful competitors \"would out,\" and that any assistance would but\nmake life too soft for the youngsters, and go to swell the growing\n\"menace\" of bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors of natural\nselection. No doubt the generation of writers older than Wordsworth\nquite innocently uttered these very same sentiments in voices of deep\nauthority when it was proposed to offer this young person a chance to\ncompose in peace. No. One fears that the attitude of these veterans\nwas not wholly judicial. But then, why should any haphazard group of\ncreative artists be expected to be judicial, anyway? One might as\nreasonably go to the Louvre for classes in conic sections, or to the\nGarden of the Gods for instruction in Rabbinical theology.\n\nFew supporters of the general plan, on the other hand, were wholly in\nfavor of all the measures proposed for carrying it out. Some of the\nmost telling criticisms went to show that while poets of undoubted\nability ought to be helped, the method of their selection offers a\ngrave difficulty. H. G. Wells, who heartily approved the main idea,\nbrought out the fact that it would never do to leave the choice to a\njury, as no jury would ever have voted for half of the great poets who\nhave perished miserably. Juries are much too conventionally minded.\nFor they are public functionaries; or, if not that, at least they feel\nself-consciously as if they were going to be held publicly\nresponsible, and are apt to bring extremely conventional, and perhaps\npriggish, standards to bear upon their choice. \"They invariably become\ntimid and narrow,\" wrote Mr. Wells, \"and seek refuge in practical,\nacademic, and moral tests that invariably exclude the real men of\ngenius.\"\n\nPrizes and competitions were considered equally ill-advised methods of\nselection. It is significant that these methods are now being rapidly\ndropped in the fields of sculpture and architecture. For the mere\nthought of a competition is a thing essentially antagonistic to the\ncreative impulse; and talent is likely to acquit itself better than\ngenius in such a struggle. The idea of a poetic competition is a relic\nof a pioneer mode of thought. Mr. Wells concluded that the decision\nshould be made by the individual. But I cannot agree with him that\nthat same individual should be the donor of the fellowship. It seems\nto me that this would-be savior of our American poetry should select\nthe best judge of poets and poetry that he can discover and be guided\nby his advice.\n\nOn general principles, there are several things that this judge should\n_not_ be. He should not be a professor of English, because of the\nprofessor's usual bias toward the academic. Besides, these fellowships\nought not in any way to be associated with institutions of\nlearning--places which are apt to fetter poets and surround them with\nan atmosphere hostile to the creative impulse. Neither should this\nmomentous decision be left to editors or publishers, because they are\nusually suffering from literary indigestion caused by skimming too\nmany manuscripts too fast, and because, at any rate, they ordinarily\npay little attention to poetry and hold it commercially \"in one grand\ndespise.\" Nor should the normal type of poet be chosen as judge to\ndecide this question. For the poet is apt to have a narrow, one-sided\nview of the field. He has probably developed his own distinctive style\nand personality at the expense of artistic catholicity and kindly\nbreadth of critical judgment. The creative and the critical faculties\nare usually as distinct and as mutually exclusive spheres as that of\nthe impassioned, partisan lawyer and the cool, impartial judge.\n\nTo whom, then, should the decision be left? It should, in my opinion,\nbe left to a real _judge_--to some broad, keen critic of poetry with a\nclear, unbiased contemporary view of the whole domain of the art. It\nmatters not whether he is professional or amateur, so he is untouched\nby academicism and has not done so much reading or writing as to\nimpair his mental digestion and his clarity of vision. Care, of\ncourse, would have to be used in safeguarding the critic-judge against\nundue pressure in favor of this candidate or that; and in safeguarding\nthe incumbent of the fellowship from yet more insidious influences.\nFor the apparently liberated poet would merely have exchanged prisons\nif he learned that the founder of the fellowship wished to dictate\nwhat sort of poetry he should write.\n\nThe idea of poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps may\nsound. It is no mere empirical theory. Americans ought to be proud to\nknow that, in a modest way, it has recently been tried here, and is\nproving a success. I am told that already two masters of poetry have\nbeen presented to us as free workers in their art by two Boston\nphilanthropists, and have been enabled to accomplish some of their\nbest work through such fellowships as are here advocated. This fact\nshould put cities like New York, Pittsburg, and Chicago on their\nmettle. For they must realize that Boston, with her quiet,\nslow-moving, Old-World pace, has not done to poetry a tithe of the\nharm that her more energetic neighbors have, and should therefore not\nbe suffered to bear the entire brunt of the expiation.\n\nMen say that money cannot buy a joyful heart. But next to writing a\ngreat poem, I can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than to know\nthat a thousand of my dollars had enabled an imprisoned genius to\nshake from his shoes the dust of a city office and go for a year to\n\"God's outdoors,\" there to free his system of some of the beauty that\nhad chokingly accumulated there until it had grown an almost\nintolerable pain. What joy to know that my fellowship had given men\nthe modern New World \"Hyperion,\" or \"Prelude,\" or \"Ring and the Book\"!\nAnd even if that whole year resulted in nothing more than a \"Skylark,\"\nor a \"Rabbi Ben Ezra,\" or a \"Crossing the Bar\"--could one possibly\nconsider such a result in the same thought-wave with dollars and\ncents?\n\nBut this thousand dollars might do something even better than help\nproduce counterparts of famous poems created in other times and lands.\nIt might actually secure the inestimable boon of a year's leisure, a\nprocession of peaceful vistas, and a brimming cup for one of that \"new\nbrood\" of \"poets to come\" which Walt Whitman so confidently counted\nupon to 'justify him and answer what he was for.' This handful of gold\nmight make it possible for one of these new poets to come into his\nown, and ours, at once, and in his own person accomplish that fusion,\nso devoutly to be wished, of those diverse factors of the greatest\npoetry which have existed among us thus far only in awful\nisolation--the possession of this one and that of our chief singers.\n\nHow fervently we poetry-lovers wish that one of the captains of\nindustry would feel impelled to put his hand into his pocket--if only\ninto his watch-pocket--or adorn his last testament with a modest\ncodicil! It would be such poetic justice if one of those who have\nprospered through the very speeding-up process which has so seriously\ncrippled our poetry, should devote to its service a small tithe of\nwhat he has won from poetry's loss--and thus hasten our renaissance of\nsingers, and bring a new dawn, 'brighter than before known,' out of\nthe dusk of the poets.\n\n\n\n\nIX\n\nTHE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC\n\n\nI wonder if any other invention has ever, in such a brief time, made\nso many joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical music. It has\nbrought light, peace, gladness, and the gift of self-expression to\nevery third or fourth flat, villa, and lonely farmhouse in the land.\nIts voice has literally gone out through all the earth, and with a\nswiftness more like that of light than of sound.\n\nOnly yesterday we were marveling at the discovery of the larger\nmagazine audience. Until then we had never dreamed of addressing\nmillions of fellow creatures at one time, as the popular magazine now\ndoes. Imagine the astonished delight of Plato or Cervantes, Poe or\nDickens, if they had been given in one week an audience equivalent in\nnumber to five thousand readers a year for ten centuries! Dickens\nwould have called it, I think, \"immortality-while-you-wait.\" Yet this\nsort of immortality was recently placed at the immediate disposal of\nthe ordinary writer.\n\nThe miracle was unique in history. But it did not long remain so. Not\ncontent with raining this wonder upon us, history at once poured down\na greater. One morning we awoke to find a new and still vaster medium\nof expression, a medium whose globe-girdling voice was to that of the\nfive-million reader magazine as the roar of Niagara to the roar of a\nPhiladelphia trolley-car. To-day, from wherever civilized man has\nobtained even a temporary foothold, there arise without ceasing the\naccents of mechanical music, which talk persuasively to all in a\nlanguage so universal that even the beasts understand it and cock\napplauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while the\nmagazine writers now address the million, the composers and singers\nand players make their bows to the billion.\n\nTheir omnipresence is astonishing. They are the last to bid you\nfarewell when you leave civilization. They are the first to greet you\non your return. When I canoed across the wild Allagash country, I was\nsped from Moosehead Lake by Caruso, received with open arms at the\nhalfway house by the great-hearted Plancon, and welcomed to Fort Kent\nby Sousa and his merry men. With Schumann-Heinck, Melba, and\nTetrazzini I once camped in the heart of the Sierras. When I persisted\nto the uttermost secret corner of the Dolomites, I found myself\nanticipated by Kreisler and his fiddle. They tell me that the portly\nVictor Herbert has even penetrated with his daring orchestra through\ndarkest Africa and gone on to arrange a special benefit, in his home\ntown, for the dalai-lama of Tibet.\n\nOne of the most promising things about mechanical music is this: No\nmatter what kind of music or quality of performance it offers you,\nyou presently long for something a little better--unless your\ndevelopment has been arrested. It makes small difference in this\nrespect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happen\nto own. It may be the phonograph. It may be the kind of automatic\npiano which accurately reproduces the performances of the master\npianists. It may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies you\nwith technic ready-made, and allows you to throw your own soul into\nthe music, whether you have ever taken lessons or not. Or it may be a\ncombination of the last two. The influence of these machines is\nprogressive. It stands for evolution rather than for devolution or\nrevolution.\n\nOften, however, the evolution seems to progress by sheer accident.\nThis is the way the accident is likely to happen. Jones is buying\nrecords for the family phonograph. One may judge of his particular\nstage of musical evolution by his purchases, which are: \"Meet me in\nSt. Louis, Louis,\" \"Dance of the Honey Bells,\" \"Hello Central, Give me\nHeaven,\" \"Fashion Plate March,\" and \"I Know that I'll be Happy when I\nDie.\" He also notices in the catalogue a piece called \"Tannhaeuser\nMarch,\" and, after some hesitation, buys this as well, because the\nname sounds so much like his favorite brand of beer that he suspects\nit to be music of a convivial nature--a medley of drinking-songs,\nperhaps.\n\nBut that evening in the parlor it does not seem much like beer. When\nthe Mephisto Military Band strikes it up--far from seeming in the\nleast alcoholic, it exhilarates nobody. So Jones inters it in the\ndarkest corner of the music-cabinet. And the family devote themselves\nto the cake-walks and comic medleys, the fandangoes and tangos, the\nxylophone solos, the shakedowns and break-downs and the rags and\ntatters of their collection until they have thoroughly exhausted the\ndelights thereof. Then, having had time to forget somewhat the\nflatness of \"Tannhaeuser,\" and for want of anything better to do, they\ntake out the despised record, dust it, and insert it into the machine.\nBut this time, curiously enough, the thing does not sound quite so\nflat. After repeated playings, it even begins to rival the \"Fashion\nPlate March\" in its appeal. And it keeps on growing in grace until\nwithin a year the \"Fashion Plate March\" is as obsolete as fashion\nplates have a habit of growing within a year, while \"Tannhaeuser\" has\nwon the distinction of being the best-wearing record in the cabinet.\n\nThen it begins to occur to the Jones family that there must be two\nkinds of musical food: candy and staples. Candy, like the \"Fashion\nPlate March,\" tastes wonderfully sweet to the unsophisticated palate\nas it goes down; but it is easy to take too much. And the cheaper the\ncandy, the swifter the consequent revulsion of feeling. As for the\nstaples, there is nothing very piquant about their flavor; but if they\nare of first quality, and if one keeps his appetite healthy, one\nseems to enjoy them more and more and to thrive on them three times a\nday.\n\nAccordingly, Jones is commissioned, when next he visits the\nmusic-store, to get a few more records like \"Tannhaeuser.\" On this\noccasion, he may even be rash enough to experiment with a Schubert\nmarch, or a Weber overture, or one of the more popular movements of a\nBeethoven sonata. And so the train of evolution will rush onward,\nbearing the Joneses with it until fashion-plate marches are things of\nthe misty, backward horizon, and the family has, by little and little,\ncome to know and love the whole blessed field of classical music. And\nthey have found that the word \"classical\" is not a synonym for\ndry-rot, but that it simply means the music that wears best.\n\nHowever the glorious mistake may occur, it is being made by someone\nevery hour. By such hooks and crooks as these, good music is finding\nits way into more and more homes. Although its true \"classical\"\nnature is detected at the first trial, it is not thrown away, because\nit cost good money. It is put away and bides its time; and some day\nthe surprising fact that it has wearing qualities is bound to be\ndiscovered. To those who believe in the law of musical evolution, and\nwho realize that mechanical music has reached the wide world, and is\neven beginning to penetrate into the public library, the possibility\nof these happy accidents means a sure and swift general development in\nthe appreciation of the best music.\n\nThose who know that man's musical taste tends to grow better and not\nworse, know also that _any_ music is better than no music. A\nmechanical instrument which goes is better than a new concert grand\npiano that remains shut.\n\n\"Canned music may not be the highest form of art,\" the enthusiast will\nsay with a needless air of half apology, half defiance, \"but I enjoy\nit no end.\" And then he will go on to tell how the parlor melodeon\nhad gathered dust for years until it was given in part exchange for a\npiano-player. And now the thing is the joy of the family, and the home\nis filled with color and effervescence, and every one's head is filled\nwith at least a rudiment of living, growing musical culture.\n\nThe fact is, the piano-player is turning thousands of supposedly\nhumdrum, prosaic people into musical enthusiasts, to their own immense\nsurprise. Many of these people are actually taking lessons in the\nsubtle art of manipulating the machine. They are spending more money\nthan they can afford on vast collections of rolls. They are going more\nand more to every important concert for hints on interpretation.\nBetter still, the most musical among them are being piqued, by the\ncombined merits and defects of the machine, into learning to play an\n_un_mechanical instrument for the joy of feeling less mechanism\ninterposed between themselves and \"the real thing.\"\n\nMachinery has already done as much for the true spirit of music as the\n\"safe and sane\" movement has done for the true spirit of the Fourth of\nJuly. Both have shifted the emphasis from brute noise and fireworks to\nmore spiritual considerations. The piano-player has done a great deal\nto cheapen the glamour of mere technical display on the part of the\nvirtuosi and to redeem us from the thralldom of the school of Liszt.\nOur admiration for musical gymnastics and tight-rope balancing is now\nleaking away so fast through the perforations of the paper rolls that\nthe kind of display-piece known as the concerto is going out of\nfashion. The only sort of concerto destined to keep our favor is, I\nimagine, that of the Schumann or Brahms type, which depends for its\neffect not at all on display, but on sound musicianship alone. The\nvirtuoso is destined soon to leave the circus business and bid a long\nfarewell to his late colleagues, the sword-swallower, the trapeze\nartist, the strong man, the fat lady, the contortionist, and the\ngentleman who conducts the shell-and-pea game. For presently the only\nthing that will be able to entice people to concerts will be the soul\nof music. Its body will be a perfectly commonplace affair.\n\nMany a good musician fears, I know, that machine-made music will not\nstop with annihilating vulgar display, but will do to death all\nprofessional music as well. This fear is groundless. Mechanical\ninstruments will no more drive the good pianist or violinist or\n'cellist out of his profession than the public library, as many once\nfeared, will drive the bookseller out of business. For the library,\nafter persuading people to read, has taught them how much pleasure may\nbe had from owning a book, with the privilege of marking it and\nscribbling one's own ideas on the margins, and not having to rush it\nback to headquarters at inopportune moments and pay to a stern young\nwoman a fine of eight cents. Likewise people are eventually led to\nrealize that the joy of passively absorbing the product of phonograph\nor electric piano contrasts with the higher joy of listening\ncreatively to music which the hearer helps to make, in the same way\nthat borrowing a book of Browning contrasts with owning a book of\nBrowning. I believe that, just as the libraries are yearly educating\nhosts of book-buyers, so mechanical music is cooeperating with\nevolution to swell the noble army of those who support concerts and\ngive private musicales.\n\nOf course there is no denying that the existence of music-making\nmachinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talented\nfollowers of the muse of strumming, scraping, screeching, and\nblatting. This is because the soul of music is not in them. And in\nstriving to reproduce its body, they perceive how hopeless it is to\ncompete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product. In\nlike manner, the invention of canned meats doubtless discouraged many\nminor cooks from further struggles with their craft. But these\nlosses, I, for one, cannot bring myself to mourn.\n\nWhat seems a sounder complaint is that the phonograph, because it\nreproduces with equal readiness music and the spoken word, may become\nan effective instrument of satire in the hands of the clever\nphilistine. Let me illustrate. To the Jones collection of records,\nshortly after \"Tannhaeuser\" began to win its way, there was added a\nreactionary \"comic\" record entitled \"Maggie Clancy's New Piano.\" In\nthe record Maggie begins playing \"Tannhaeuser\" very creditably on her\nnew instrument. Presently the voice of old Clancy is heard from\nanother room calling, \"Maggie!\" The music goes on. There is a\n_crescendo_ series of calls. The piano stops.\n\n\"Yes, Father?\"\n\n\"Maggie, is the new pianny broke?\"\n\n\"No, Father; I was merely playing Wagner.\"\n\nOld Clancy meditates a moment; then, with a gentleness of touch that\nmight turn a New York music critic green with envy, he replies: \"Oh,\nI thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the parlor stove.\"\n\nRecords like these have power to retard and roughen the otherwise\nsmooth course of a family's musical evolution; but they are usually\nunable to arrest it. In general I think that such satires may fortify\nthe elder generation in its conservative mistrust of classical music.\nBut if they are only heard often enough by the young, I believe that\nthe sympathies of the latter will end in chiming with the taste of the\nenlightened Maggie rather than with that of her father.\n\nUntil recently a graver charge against the phonograph has been that it\nwas so much better adapted for reproducing song than pure instrumental\nmusic that it was tending to identify the art of music in the minds of\nmost men with song alone. This tendency was dangerous. For song is not\nall of music, nor even its most important part. The voice is naturally\nmore limited in range, technic, and variety of color than many\nanother instrument. And it is artificially handicapped by the rather\nabsurd custom which forces the singer to drag in poetry (much to the\nlatter's disadvantage), and therewith distract his own attention and\nthat of his audience from the music.\n\nThe fact remains that one art at a time is none too easy for even the\nmost perfect medium of expression to cope with. To make a somewhat\nless than perfect instrument like the human voice, cope always with\ntwo simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music has\nnot yet emerged from its teens. This is one reason why most song is as\nyet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach is, as a rule, forced to\nexceed its grasp. Also the accident of having a fine voice usually\ndetermines a singer's career, though a perfect vocal organ does not\nnecessarily imply a musical nature. The best voices, in fact, often\nbelong, by some contrariety of fate, to the worst musicians. For these\nand other reasons, there is less of the true spirit of music to be\nheard from vocal cords than from the cords and reeds and brazen tubes\nof piano, organ, string quartet, and orchestra. Thus, when the\nphonograph threatened to identify song with music in general, it\nthreatened to give the art a setback and make the singer the\narch-enemy of the wider musical culture. Fortunately the phonograph\nnow gives promise of averting this peril by bringing up its\nreproduction of absolute music near to its vocal standard.\n\nAnother charge against most machine-made music is its unhuman\naccuracy. The phonograph companies seldom give out a record which is\nnot practically perfect in technic and intonation. As for the\nmechanical piano, there is no escape from the certainty of just what\nnotes are coming next--that is, if little Johnnie has not been editing\nthe paper record with his father's leather-punch. Therefore one grows\nafter a while to long for a few of those deviations from mathematical\nprecision which imply human frailty and lovableness. One reason why\nthe future is veiled from us is that it is so painful to be certain\nthat one's every prediction is coming true.\n\nA worse trouble with the phonograph is that it seems to leave out of\naccount that essential part of every true musical performance, the\ncreative listener. A great many phonograph records sound as though the\nrecorder had been performing to an audience no more spiritually\nresonant than the four walls of a factory. I think that the makers of\nanother kind of mechanical instrument must have realized this\noversight on the part of the phonograph manufacturer. I mean the sort\nof electric piano which faithfully reproduces every _nuance_ of the\nmaster pianists. Many of the records of this marvelous instrument\nsound as though the recording-room of the factory had been \"papered\"\nwith creative listeners who cooeperated mightily with the master on the\nstage. Would that the phonographers might take the hint!\n\nBut no matter how effectively the creative listener originally\ncooeperates with the maker of this kind of record, the electric piano\ndoes not appeal as strongly to the creative listener in his home as\ndoes the less perfect but more impressionable piano-player, which\nresponds like a cycle to pedal and brake. For the records of the\nphonograph and of the electric piano, once they are made, are made.\nThereafter they are as insensible to influence as the laws of the\nMedes and Persians. They do not admit the audience to an active,\ninfluential part in the performance. But such a part in the\nperformance is exactly what the true listener demands as his\ndemocratic right. And rather than be balked of it, he turns to the\nless sophisticated mechanism of the piano-player. This, at least,\nresponds to his control.\n\nUndeniably, though, even the warmest enthusiasts for the piano-player\ncome in time to realize that their machine has distinct limitations;\nthat it is better suited to certain pieces than to others. They find\nthat music may be performed on it with the more triumphant success\nthe less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of an\narabesque. The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops or switching\nlevers, cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life.\nThe disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands to\nbe filled with soul, the thinner and more ghost-like it comes forth.\nThe less intimately human the music, the more satisfactorily it\nemerges. For example, the performer is stirred by the \"Tannhaeuser\nMarch,\" as rendered by himself, with its flourish of trumpets and its\ngeneral hurrah-boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the\n\"Evening Star\" from the same opera. For this, in passing through the\npiano-player, is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis. The\nsinger is no longer Scotti or Bispham, but Herschel or Laplace. The\noperator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart--but if he has\nany real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack\nin this sort of music. So for the present, while confidently awaiting\nthe invention of an improved piano-player, which shall give equally\nfree expression to every mood and tense of the human spirit--the\noperator learns to avoid the very soulful things as much as is\npracticable.\n\nAt this stage of his development he usually begins to crave that\nsupreme kind of music which demands a perfect balance of the\nintellectual, the sensuous, and the emotional. So he goes more often\nto concerts where such music is given. Saturated with it, he returns\nto his piano-player and plays the concert all over again. And his\nimagination is now so full of the emotional side of what he has just\nheard and is re-hearing, that he easily discounts the obvious\nshortcomings of the mechanical instrument. This is an excellent way of\ngetting the most from music. One should not, as many do, take it from\nthe piano-player before the concert and then go with its somewhat\nstereotyped accents so fixed in the mind as to obscure the heart of\nthe performance. Rather, in preparation, let the score be silently\nglanced through. Leave wide the doors of the soul for the precious\nspiritual part of the music to enter in and take possession. After\nthis happens, use mechanical music to renew your memories of the\nconcert, just as you would use a catalogue illustrated with etchings\nin black and white, to renew your memory of an exhibition of\npaintings.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe supreme mission of mechanical music is its direct educational\nmission. By this I mean something more than its educational mission to\nthe many thousands of grown men and women whose latent interest in\nmusic it is suddenly awakening. I have in mind the girls and boys of\nthe rising generation. If people can only hear enough good music when\nthey are young, without having it forcibly fed to them, they are\nalmost sure to care for it when they come to years of discretion. The\nreason why America is not more musical is that we men and women of\nto-day did not yesterday, as children, hear enough good music. Our\nparents probably could not afford it. It was then a luxury, implying\nexpensive concert tickets or an elaborate musical training for someone\nin the family.\n\nThe invention of mechanical instruments ended this state of affairs\nforever by suddenly making the best music as inexpensive as the worst.\nThere exists no longer any financial reason why most children should\nnot grow up in an atmosphere of the best music. And I believe that so\nsoon as parents learn how to educate their children through the\nphonograph or the mechanical piano, the world will realize with a\nstart that the invention of these things is doing more for musical\nculture than the invention of printing did for literary culture.\n\nWe must bear in mind, however, that the invention of mechanical\ninstruments has come far earlier in the history of music than the\ninvention of printing came in the history of literature. Music is the\nyoungest of the fine arts. It is in somewhat the same stage of\ndevelopment to-day that literature was in the time of Homer. It is in\nthe age of oral--and aural--tradition. Most people still take in music\nthrough their ears alone. For all that the invention of note-printing\nmeans to them as enjoyers of music, they might almost as well be\nliving aeons before Gutenberg. Musically speaking, they belong to the\nHomeric age.\n\nNow the entrance of mechanical music upon the scene is making men\ndepend on their ears more than ever. It is intensifying and speeding\nup this age of oral tradition. But in so doing, I believe that it is\nbound to shorten this age also, on the principle that the faster you\ngo the sooner you arrive. Thus, machinery is hastening us toward the\ntime when the person of ordinary culture will no more depend on his\nears alone for the enjoyment of music than he now depends on his ears\nalone for the enjoyment of Shakespeare.\n\nThanks to machine-made music, the day is coming the sooner when we\nshall behold, as neighbors in the ordinary bookcase, such pairs of\ncounterparts as Milton and Bach, Beethoven and Shakespeare, Loeffler\nand Maeterlinck, Byron and Tschaikowsky, Mendelssohn and Longfellow,\nNietzsche and Richard Strauss. Browning will stand up cheek by jowl\nwith his one true affinity, Brahms. And the owner will sit by the\nquiet hearth reading to himself with equal fluency and joy from\nSchubert and Keats.\n\n\n\n\nX\n\nMASTERS BY PROXY\n\n     _It is only in a surrounding of personalities that\n     personalities can as such make themselves seen and heard._\n\nHOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.\n\n\nBetween many of my readers and the joyful heart there seems to stand\nbut a single obstacle--their lack of creativeness. They feel that they\ncould live and die happy if only they might become responsible for the\ncreation of something which would remain to bless mankind after they\nare gone. But as it is, how can they have the joyful heart when they\nare continually being tortured by regret because God did not make\nmasters of them?\n\nOne is sad because he is not a master of poetry. He never sees A, his\ngolden-tongued friend, without a pang very like the envy of a\nchildless man for a happy father. But he has no suspicion that he is\npartly responsible for A's poetic excellence. Another thinks her life\na mistake because the Master of all good workmen did not make her a\nsculptor. Yet all the while she is lavishing unawares upon her brother\nor son or husband the very stuff that art is made of. Others are\ninconsolable because no fairy wand at their birth destined them for\nmen of original action, for discoverers in science, pianists,\nstatesmen, or actors; for painters, philosophers, inventors, or\narchitects of temples or of religions.\n\nNow my task in this last chapter is a more delightful one than if I\nwere the usual solicitor of fiction, come to inform the\npoor-but-honest newsboy that he is a royal duke. It is my privilege to\ncomfort many of the comfortless by revealing to them how and why they\nare--or may be--masters of an art as indispensable as the arts which\nthey now regard so wistfully. I mean the art of master-making--the art\nof being a master by proxy.\n\nTo be specific, let us single out one of the arts and see what it\nmeans to master it by proxy. Suppose we consider the simple case of\nexecutive music. In a book called \"The Musical Amateur\" I have tried\nto prove (more fully than is here possible) that the reproduction of\nmusic is a social act. It needs two: one to perform, one to\nappreciate. Both are almost equally essential to a good performance.\nThe man who appreciates a musical phrase unconsciously imitates it\nwith almost imperceptible contractions of throat or lips. These\ncontractions represent an incipient singing or whistling. Motions\nsimilar to these, and probably more fully developed, are made at the\nsame time by his mind and his spirit. The whole man actually feels his\nway, physically and psychically, into the heart of the music. He is\nturned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contribution\nof emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy to\nthe performer. When a violinist and a listener of the right sort meet\nfor musical purposes, this is what happens. The violinist happens to\nbe in the mood for playing. This means that he has feelings which\ndemand expression. These his bow releases. The music strikes the\nlistener, sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board, and\nrouses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist. Enriched by\nthis new contribution, the emotional complex resounds back to the\nviolinist, intensifying his original \"feeling-state.\" In its\nheightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator, \"and so on,\nback and forth, growing in stimulating power at each recoil. The whole\nprocess is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis, with the opponents\nclosing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster\nwith every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure.\n'Social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing.\" This,\nbriefly told, is what passes between the player of music and his\ncreative listener.\n\nIn application this principle does not by any means stop with\nperforming or composing music or with the fine arts. It goes on to\nembrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the\nfiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not too\nmuch to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself\nadequately expressed without the cooeperation of this social resonance,\nwithout the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognized\npartners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy.\n\nThanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few who\nunderstand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your\nown thankworthiness. Our children shall rise up and call you blessed.\nFor in your quiet way, you have helped to create the world's\ncreators--the preachers, prophets, captains, artists, discoverers, and\nseers of the ages. To these, you, unrecognized and unawares, have been\nproviding the very sinews of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality,\nand insight.\n\nWhat made the game of art so brilliant in the age of Pericles? It was\nnot star playing by individuals. It was steady, consistent team-work\nby the many. Almost every one of the Athenians who were not masters\nwere masters by proxy. In \"The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century\"\nChamberlain holds that Greek culture derived its incomparable charm\nfrom \"a peculiar harmony of greatness\"; and that \"if our poets are not\nin every respect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, that is not\nthe fault of their talent, but of those who surround them.\" Only\nimagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean atmosphere!\nIt must have been as exhilarating as coasting down into the Yosemite\nValley with John Muir on an avalanche of snow.\n\nBut even in that enlightened age the master received all the credit\nfor every achievement, and his creative appreciator none at all. And\nso it has been ever since that particular amoeba which was destined\nfor manhood had a purse made up for him and was helped upon the train\nof evolution by his less fortunate and more self-effacing friends who\nwere destined to remain amoebae; because the master by proxy is such\na retiring, unspectacular sort of person that he has never caught the\npopular imagination or found any one to sing his praises. But if he\nshould ever resent this neglect and go on strike, we should realize\nthat without him progress is impossible. For the real lords of\ncreation are not always the apparent lords. We should bear in mind\nthat the most important part of many a throne is not the red velvet\nseat, the back of cloth of gold, or the onyx arms that so sumptuously\naccommodate the awe and majesty of acknowledged kings. Neither is it\nthe seed-pearl canopy that intercepts a too searching light from\nmajesty's complexion. It is a certain little filigreed hole in the\nthrone-back which falls conveniently close to the sovereign's ear when\nhe leans back between the periods of the wise, beauteous, and\nthrilling address to his subjects.\n\nFor doubled up in a dark, close box behind the chair of state is a\nhumble, drab individual who, from time to time, applies his mouth to\nthe wrong side of the filigreed hole and whispers things. If he were\nvisible at all, he would look like the absurd prompter under the hood\nat the opera. He is not a famous person. Most people are so ignorant\nof his very existence that he might be pardoned for being an agnostic\nabout it himself. The few others know little and care less. Only two\nor three of the royal family are aware of his name and real function.\nThey refer to him as M. Power-Behind-the-Throne, Master-by-Proxy of\nState.\n\nThere is one sign by which masters by proxy may be detected wherever\nmet. They are people whose presence is instantly invigorating. Before\nyou can make out the color of their eyes you begin to feel that you\nare greater than you know. It is as if they wore diffused about them\nauras so extensive and powerful that entering these auras was\nequivalent to giving your soul electric massage. You do not have to\ntouch the hem of their garments nor even see them. The auras penetrate\na brick wall as a razor penetrates Swiss cheese. And if you are\nfortunate enough to be on the other side of the partition, you become\naware with a thrill that \"virtue,\" in the beautiful, Biblical sense of\nthe word, has gone out of somebody and into you.\n\nIf ever I return to live in a city apartment (which may the gods\nforfend!) I shall this time select the apartment with almost sole\nreference to what comes through the walls. I shall enter one of those\ntypical New York piles which O. Henry described as \"paved with Parian\nmarble in the entrance-hall, and cobblestones above the first floor,\"\nand my inquiry will be focused on things far other than Parian marble\nand cobblestones. I shall walk about the rooms and up and down the\nbowling-alleys of halls trying to make myself as sensitive to\nimpressions as are the arms of the divining-rod man during his solemn\nparade with the wand of witch-hazel. And when I feel \"virtue\" from the\nnext apartment streaming through the partition, there will I instantly\ngive battle to the agent and take up my abode. And this though it be\nup six flights of cobblestones, without elevator, without closet-room,\nwith a paranoiac for janitor, and radiators whose musical performance\nall the day long would make a Cleveland boiler factory pale with envy.\nFor none of these things would begin to offset the privilege of living\nbeside a red-letter wall whose influence should be as benignly\nconstructive as Richard Washburn Child's \"Blue Wall\" was malignly\ndestructive.\n\nTo-day I should undoubtedly be much more of a person if I had once had\nthe pleasure of living a wall away from Richard Watson Gilder. He was\na true master by proxy. For he was a vastly more creative person than\nhis published writings will ever accredit him with being. Not only\nwith his pen, but also with his whole self he went about doing good.\n\"Virtue\" fairly streamed from him all the time. Those bowed shoulders\nand deep-set, kindly eyes would emerge from the inner sanctum of the\n\"Century\" office. In three short sentences he would reject the story\nwhich had cost you two years of labor and travail. But all the time\nthe fatal words were getting themselves uttered, so much \"virtue\" was\npassing from him into you that you would turn from his presence\nexhilarated, uplifted, and while treading higher levels for the next\nweek, would produce a check-bearing tale. The check, however, would\nnot bring you a tithe of the \"virtue\" that the great editor's personal\nrebuff had brought.\n\nBut more than to any editor, writers look to their readers for\nsupport, especially to their unknown correspondents--postal and\npsychic. Leonard Merrick has so finely expressed the attitude of many\nwriters that I cannot forbear giving his words to his \"public\":\n\n     I have thought of you so often and wanted to win a smile\n     from you; you don't realize how I have longed to meet\n     you--to listen to you, to have you lift the veil that hides\n     your mind from me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I\n     caught a glimpse of you; I can't explain--the poise of the\n     head, a look in the eyes, there was something that hinted it\n     was You. And in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed\n     that you would recognize me; but you said no word--you\n     passed, a secret from me still. To yourself where you are\n     sitting you are just a charming woman with \"a local\n     habitation and a name\"; but to me you are not Miss or Madam,\n     not M. or N.--you are a Power, and I have sought you by a\n     name you have not heard--you are my Public. And O my Lady, I\n     am speaking to you! I feel your presence in my senses,\n     though you are far away and I can't hear your answer.... It\n     is as if I had touched your hand across the page.\n\nThere are probably more masters by proxy to be found among the world's\nmothers than in any other class. The profession of motherhood is such\na creative one, and demands so constant an outgo of unselfish\nsympathy, that a mother's technic as silent partner is usually kept in\na highly efficient state. And occasionally a mother of a genius\ndeserves as much credit for him spiritually as physically. Think of\nFrau Goethe, for example.\n\nMany a genius attains a commanding position largely through the happy\nchance of meeting many powerful masters by proxy and through his happy\nfacility for taking and using whatever creativeness these have to\noffer. Genius has been short-sightedly defined as \"an infinite\ncapacity for taking pains.\" Galton more truthfully holds that the\ntriune factors of genius are industry, enthusiasm, and ability. Now if\nwe were to insist, as so many do, on making a definition out of a\nsingle one of these factors to the neglect of the others, we should\ncome perhaps nearer the mark by saying that genius is an infinite\ncapacity for taking others' pains. But all such definings are absurd.\nFor the genius absorbs and alchemizes not only the industry of his\nsilent partners, but also their ability and enthusiasm. Their\nenthusiasm is fortunately contained in a receptacle as generous as\nPhilemon's famous pitcher. And the harder the genius tries to pour it\nempty, the more the sparkling liquid bubbles up inside. The\ntransaction is like \"the quality of mercy\"--\n\n    \"It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.\"\n\nThe ability to receive as well as give this sort of help varies widely\nwith the individual. Some geniuses of large psychic power are able\ninstantly to seize out of any crowd whatever creativeness there is in\nit. These persons are spiritual giants. Their strength is as the\nstrength of ten because their grasp is sure. They are such stuff as\nShakespeares are made of.\n\nOthers are not psychically gifted. They can absorb creativeness only\nfrom their nearest and dearest, in the most favoring environment, and\nonly after the current has been seriously depleted by wastage in\ntransmission. But these are the two extremes. They are as rare as\nextremes usually are.\n\nIn general I believe that genius, though normally capable of drawing\ncreativeness from a number of different sources, has as a rule\ndepended largely on the collaboration of one chief master by proxy.\nThis idea gazes wide-eyed down a fascinating vista of speculation.\nWho, for instance, was Lincoln's silent partner? the power behind the\nthrone of Charlemagne? Buddha's better self? Who were the secret\ncommanders of Grant, Wellington, and Caesar? Who was Moliere's hidden\nprompter? the conductor of the orchestra called Beethoven? the psychic\ncomrade of Columbus?\n\nI do not know. For history has never commemorated, as such, the\nmasters by proxy with honor due, or indeed with any honor or\nremembrance at all. It will take centuries to explore the past with\nthe sympathetic eye and the understanding heart in order to discover\nwhat great tombs we have most flagrantly neglected.\n\nAlready we can single out a few of them. The time is coming when\nmusic-lovers will never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place of\nWagner without making another to the grave of Mathilde Wesendonk,\nwhose \"virtue\" breathed into \"Tristan and Isolde\" the breath of life.\nWe shall not much longer neglect the tomb of Charles Darwin's father,\nwho, by making the evolutionist financially independent, gave his\nservices to the world. Nor shall we disregard the memory of that other\nCharles-Darwin-by-proxy--his wife. For her tireless comradeship and\ndevotion and freely lavished vitality were an indispensable reservoir\nof strength to the great invalid. Without it the world would never\nhave had the \"Origin of Species\" or the \"Descent of Man.\"\n\nOther instances throng to mind. I have small doubt that Charles Eliot\nNorton was the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell; Ste.\nClare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim and Billroth of Brahms, and\nDorothy Wordsworth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, I had no\nsooner noted down the last of these names than I came upon this\nsentence in Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: \"How much that we call\nWordsworth himself was Dorothy to begin with.\" And soon after, I found\nthese words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim with the score of\nhis second \"Serenade\": \"Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it\nis very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, that\nmusic sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or two\npeople whom one loves as I love you?\" The impressionable Charles Lamb\nmust have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlitt\nwrote: \"He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your\ncompany, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is the creature of\nsympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of\nhim.\"\n\nPerhaps the most creative master by proxy I have ever known was the\nwife of one of our ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experience\nthe elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses of\nchampagne, with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. I\nshould not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due as\nmuch to her creativeness as to his own.\n\nIt sometimes happens that the most potent masters in their own right\nare also the most potent masters by proxy. They grind out more power\nthan they can consume in their own particular mill-of-the-gods. I am\ninclined to think that Sir Humphry Davy was one of these. He was the\ndiscoverer of chlorine and laughing-gas, and the inventor of the\nminer's safety lamp. He was also the _deus ex machina_ who rescued\nFaraday from the bookbinder's bench, made him the companion of his\ntravels, and incidentally poured out the overplus of his own creative\nenergy upon the youth who has recently been called \"perhaps the most\nremarkable discoverer of the nineteenth century.\" Schiller was another\nof these. \"In more senses than one your sympathy is fruitful,\" wrote\nGoethe to him during the composition of \"Faust.\"\n\nIndeed, the greatest Master known to history was first and foremost a\nmaster by proxy. It was He who declared that we all are \"members one\nof another.\" Writing nothing Himself, He inspired others to write\nthousands of immortal books. He was unskilled as painter, or sculptor,\nor architect; yet the greatest canvases, marbles, and cathedrals since\nHe trod the earth have sprung directly from his influence. He was no\nmusician.\n\n     \"His song was only living aloud.\"\n\nBut that silent song was the direct inspiration of much of the\nsublimest music of the centuries to come. And so we might go on and on\nabout this Master of all vicarious masters.\n\nYet it is a strange and touching thing to note that even his exuberant\ncreativeness sometimes needed the refreshment of silent partners. When\nHe was at last to perform a great action in his own right He looked\nabout for support and found a master by proxy in Mary, the sister of\nthe practical Martha. But when He turned for help in uttermost need\nto his best-beloved disciples He found them only negative, destructive\ninfluences. This accounts for the anguish of his reproach: \"Could ye\nnot watch with me one hour?\"\n\nHaving never been properly recognized as such, the world's masters by\nproxy have never yet been suitably rewarded. Now the world is\nconvinced that its acknowledged masters deserve more of a feast at\nlife's surprise party than they can bring along for themselves in\ntheir own baskets. So the world bows them to the places of honor at\nthe banquet board. True, the invitation sometimes comes so late that\nthe master has long since devoured everything in his basket and is\ndead of starvation. But that makes not the slightest difference to\nhumanity, which will take no refusal, and props the cynically amused\nskeleton up at the board next the toastmaster. My point is, however,\nthat humanity is often forehanded enough with its invitations to give\nthe masters a charming time of it before they, too, into the dust\ndescend, _sans_ wine, _sans_ song, etc. But I do not know that it has\never yet consciously bidden a master by proxy--as such--to the feast.\nAnd I contend that if a man's deserts are to be measured at all by his\ncreativeness, then the great masters by proxy deserve seats well up\nabove the salt.\n\nFor is it any less praiseworthy to make a master than to make a\nmasterpiece? I grant that the masterpiece is the more sudden and\ndramatic in appearing and can be made immediate use of, whereas the\nmaster is slowly formed, and even then turns out unsatisfactory in\nmany ways. He is apt to be that well-known and inconvenient sort of\nperson who, when he comes in out of the rain to dress for his wedding,\nabstractedly prepares to retire instead, and then, still more\nabstractedly, puts his umbrella to bed and stands himself in the\ncorner. All the same, it is no less divine to create a master by slow,\nlaborious methods than to snatch a masterpiece apparently out of\nnothing-at-all. In the eye of the evolutionist, man is not of any the\nless value because he was made by painful degrees instead of having\nbeen produced, a perfect gentleman, out of the void somewhat as the\nmagician brings forth from the empty saucepan an omelette, containing\na live pigeon with the loaned wedding-ring in its beak.\n\nThe master-makers have long been expending their share of the power.\nIt is high time they were enjoying their share of the glory. What an\nunconscionable leveling up and down there will presently be when it\ndawns upon humanity what a large though inglorious share it has been\nhaving in the spiritually creative work of the world! In that day the\nseats of the mighty individualists of science, industry, politics, and\ndiscovery; of religion and its ancient foe ecclesiasticism; of\neconomy, the arts and philosophy, will all be taken down a peg by the\nsame knowledge that shall exalt \"them of low degree.\"\n\nI can imagine how angrily ruffled the sallow shade of Arthur\nSchopenhauer will become at the dawn of this spiritual Commune. When\nthe first full notes of the soul's \"Marseillaise\" burst upon his\nirritable eardrums, I can hear above them his savage snarl. I can see\nhis malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearned\nincrement of fame with some of those _Mitmenschen_ whom he, like a bad\nSamaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil of\nvitriol and the sour wine of sadness. And how like red-ragged\nturkey-cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napoleon will puff out when\nrequired to stand and deliver some of their precious credit!\n\nThere will be compensations, though, to the genius who, safely dead,\nfeels himself suddenly despoiled of a fullness of fame which he had\ncounted on enjoying in _saecula saeculorum_. When he comes to balance\nthings up, perhaps he will not, after all, find the net loss so\nserious. Though he lose some credit for his successes, he will also\nlose some discredit for his failures. Humanity will recognize that\nwhile the good angels of genius are the masters by proxy, the bad\nangels of genius exert an influence as negative and destructive as the\ninfluence of the others is positive and constructive.\n\nHow jolly it will be, for all but the bad angels, when we can assign\nto them such failures as Browning's \"The Inn Album\"; Davy's contention\nthat iodine was not an element, and Luther's savage hounding of the\nnobles upon the wretched peasants who had risen in revolt under his\nown inspiration. But enough of the bad angels! Let us inter them with\nthis epitaph: \"They did their worst; devils could do no more.\"\n\nTurn we to the bright side of the situation. How delighted Keats will\nbe when at last the world develops a little sense of proportion, and\nafter first neglecting and then over-praising him, finally proposes to\ngive poor old Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine Sir William\nHerschel's pleasure when his beloved sister Caroline begins to\nreceive her full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough his morbidness\nand improvise a Slavic Hallelujah Chorus when his unseen patroness\ncomes into her own. It is true that the world has already given her\nmemory two fingers and a perfunctory \"thank ye.\" This was for putting\nher purse at Tschaikowsky's disposal, thus making it possible for him\nto write a few immortal compositions instead of teaching mortals the\npiano in a maddening conservatory. But now, glory! hallelujah! the\nworld is soon going to render her honor long overdue for the spiritual\nsupport which so ably reinforced the financial.\n\nAnd Sir Thomas More, that early socialist--imagine his elation! For he\nwill regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the man\nin the pre-Elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadily\napproaching the golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir Thomas knows\nthat our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too little\ndemocratic. We have been over-inclined, with the aristocratic\nCarlyle, to see all history as a procession of a few transcendent\nmasters surrounded, preceded, and followed by enormous herds of abject\nand quite insignificant slaves. Between these slaves and the masters,\nthere is, in the old view, about as much similarity as exists in the\nchild's imagination between the overwhelming dose of castor oil and\nthe single pluperfect chocolate drop whereby the dose is supposed to\nbe made endurable. Already the idea is beginning to glimmer that\nheroic stuff is far more evenly distributed throughout the throng than\nwe had supposed.\n\nIt is, of course, very meet and very right and our bounden duty to\nadmire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to\nrevere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less\nessential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the\nhorse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their\nadmiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the\nvery existence of its patient and unself-conscious propeller.\n\nIt is especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of the\nmaster by proxy just now, when the movement for the socialization of\nthe world, after so many ineffectual centuries, is beginning to engage\nthe serious attention of mankind. Thus far, one of the chief\nreactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men are\nso shockingly unequal. And the reactionaries have called us to witness\nthe gulf that yawns, for example, between the god-like individualist,\nYsaye, and the worm-like little factory girl down there in the\naudience balanced on the edge of the seat and listening to the\nviolin--her rapt soul sitting in her eyes. Now, however, we know that,\nbut for the wireless tribute of creativeness that flashes up to the\nmonarch of tone from that \"rapt soul\" and others as humble and as\nrapt--the king of fiddlers would then and there be obliged to lay down\nhis horsehair scepter and abdicate.\n\nWe have reached a stage of social evolution where it is high time that\none foolish old fallacy should share the fate of the now partially\ndiscredited belief that \"genius will out\" in spite of man or devil.\nThis fallacy is the supposition that man's creativeness is to be\nmeasured solely by its visible, audible, or tangible results.\nBrowning's old Rabbi made a shrewd commentary on this question when he\ndeclared:\n\n    \"Not on the vulgar mass\n    Called 'work,' must sentence pass,\n    Things done that took the eye and had the price....\n    But all the world's coarse thumb\n    And finger failed to plumb....\n    Thoughts hardly to be packed\n    Into a narrow act,\n    Fancies that broke through language and escaped:\n    All I could never be,\n    All men ignored in me,\n    This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.\"\n\nYes, we are being slowly socialized, even to our way of regarding\ngenius; and this has been until now the last unchallenged stronghold\nof individualism. We perceive that even there individualism must no\nlonger be allowed to have it all its own way. After a century we are\nbeginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially minded\nEnglish poet when he sang:\n\n    \"Nothing in the world is single,\n    All things by a law divine\n    In one another's being mingle.\"\n\nTo-day we have in library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible\nrecords of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we\nare to possess--thanks to Edison and the cinematographers--intangible\nrecords--or at least suggestions--of the modest creativeness of our\nmasters by proxy. Some day every son with this inspiring sort of\nmother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords,\nof perpetuating her voice, her changing look, her walk, her tender\nsmile. Thus he may keep at least a gleam of her essential creativeness\nalways at hand for help in the hour of need.\n\nI would give almost anything if I could have in a storage battery\nbeside me now some of the electric current that was forever flowing\nout of my own mother, or out of Richard Watson Gilder, or out of Hayd\nSampson, a glorious old \"inglorious Milton\" of a master by proxy whom\nI once found toiling in a small livery-stable in Minnesota. My faith\nis firm that some such miracle will one day be performed. And in our\nirreverent, Yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of the\nmaster by proxy--\"canned virtue.\" In that event the twenty-first\ncenturion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or for\na God-forsaken environment without a supply of \"canned virtue\" than of\nstarting for one of the poles equipped with only a pocketful of\npemmican.\n\nThere is a grievous amount of latent master-making talent spoiling\nto-day for want of development. Many an one feels creative energy\ncrying aloud within himself for vicarious spiritual expression. He\nwould be a master by proxy, yet is at a loss how to learn. Him I\nwould recommend to try learning the easiest form of the art. Let him\nresolve to become a creative listener to music. Once he is able to\ninfluence reproducers of art like pianists and singers, he can then\nbegin groping by analogy toward the more difficult art of influencing\ndirectly the world's creators. But even if he finds himself quite\nlacking in creativeness, he can still be a silent partner of genius if\nhe will relax purse-strings, or cause them to be relaxed, for the\nfounding of creative fellowships.\n\nI do not know if ever yet in the history of the planet the mighty\nforce which resides in the masters by proxy has been systematically\nused. I am sure it has never been systematically conserved, and that\nit is one of the least understood and least developed of earth's\nnatural resources. One of our next long steps forward should be along\nthis line of the conservation of \"virtue.\" The last physical frontier\nhas practically been passed. Now let us turn to the undiscovered\ncontinents of soul which have so long been awaiting their Columbuses\nand Daniel Boones, their country-life commissions and conferences of\ngovernors.\n\nWhen the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall grow\naware of your possibilities, and take your light from under the\nbushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at your\nelbow, or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumbling\ngenius, or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master--our\ncivilization will take a mighty step towards God.\n\nTry it, my masters!\n\nTHE END\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\nBy Robert Haven Schauffler\n\nTHE JOYFUL HEART.\nSCUM O' THE EARTH AND OTHER POEMS.\nTHE MUSICAL AMATEUR.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY\n\nBOSTON AND NEW YORK\n\n       *       *       *       *       *","title":"The Joyful Heart","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":41051}