THE JOYFUL HEART

 BY

 ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER

 AUTHOR OF THE MUSICAL AMATEUR, SCUM O' THE EARTH AND OTHER POEMS, ROMANTIC AMERICA, ETC. 

 "People who are nobly happy constitute the power, the beauty and the foundation of the state. "

 JEAN FINOT: _The Science of Happiness. _

 BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1914

 COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER

 * * * * *

TO

MY WIFE

 * * * * *

FOREWORD

This is a guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored, the tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed. It is for the useof all those whose cup of vitality is not brimming over. 

The world has not yet seen enough of joy. It bears the reputation ofan elusive sprite with finger always at lip bidding farewell. Incertain dark periods, especially in times of international warfare, itthreatens to vanish altogether from the earth. It is then the firstduty of all peaceful folk to find and hold fast to joy, keeping it intrust for their embattled brothers. 

Even if this were not their duty as citizens of the world, it would betheir duty as patriots. For Jean Finot is right in declaring that"people who are nobly happy constitute the power, the beauty and thefoundation of the state. "

This book is a manual of enthusiasm--the power which drives theworld--and of those kinds of exuberance (physical, mental andspiritual) which can make every moment of every life worth living. Itaims to show how to get the most joy not only from traveling hopefullytoward one's goal, but also from the goal itself on arrival there. Iturges sound business methods in conducting that supreme business, theinvestment of one's vitality. 

It would show how one may find happiness all alone with his betterself, his 'Auto-Comrade'--an accomplishment well-nigh lost in thiscrowded age. It would show how the gospel of exuberance, by offeringthe joys of hitherto unsuspected power to the artist and his audience, bids fair to lift the arts again to the lofty level of the Pericleanage. It would show the so-called "common" man or woman how to developthat creative sympathy which may make him a 'master by proxy, ' andthus let him know the conscious happiness of playing an essential partin the creation of works of genius. In short, the book tries to showhow the cup of joy may not only be kept full for one's personal use, but may also be made hospitably to brim over for others. 

To the _Atlantic Monthly_ thanks are due for permission to reprintchapters I, III and IV; to the _North American Review_, for chapterVIII; and to the _Century_, for chapters V, VI, IX and X. 

R. H. S. 

GEEENBUSH, MASS. 

August, 1914. 

 * * * * *

CONTENTS

I. A DEFENSE OF JOY

II. THE BRIMMING CUP

III. ENTHUSIASM

IV. A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS

V. THE AUTO-COMRADE

VI. VIM AND VISION

VII. PRINTED JOY

VIII. THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS

IX. THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC

X. MASTERS BY PROXY

 * * * * *

THE JOYFUL HEART

I

A DEFENSE OF JOY

Joy is such stuff as the hinges of Heaven's doors are made of. So ourfathers believed. So we supposed in childhood. Since then it hasbecome the literary fashion to oppose this idea. The writers wouldhave us think of joy not as a supernal hinge, but as a pottle of hay, hung by a crafty creator before humanity's asinine nose. The donkey isthus constantly incited to unrewarded efforts. And when he arrives atthe journey's end he is either defrauded of the hay outright, or hedislikes it, or it disagrees with him. 

Robert Louis Stevenson warns us that "to travel hopefully is a betterthing than to arrive, " beautifully portraying the emptiness andillusory character of achievement. And, of those who have attained, Mr. E. F. Benson exclaims, "God help them!" These sayings are typicalof a widespread literary fashion. Now to slander Mistress Joy to-dayis a serious matter. For we are coming to realize that she is a farmore important person than we had supposed; that she is, in fact, oneof the chief managers of life. Instead of doing a modest littlebusiness in an obscure suburb, she has offices that embrace the wholefirst floor of humanity's city hall. 

Of course I do not doubt that our writer-friends note down the truthas they see it. But they see it imperfectly. They merely have a cornerof one eye on a corner of the truth. Therefore they tell untruths thatare the falser for being so charmingly and neatly expressed. What theysay about joy being the bribe that achievement offers us to get itselfrealized may be true in a sense. But they are wrong in speaking of thebribe as if it were an apple rotten at the core, or a bag ofcounterfeit coin, or a wisp of artificial hay. It is none of thesethings. It is sweet and genuine and well worth the necessary effort, once we are in a position to appreciate it at anything like its trueworth. We must learn not to trust the beautiful writers tooimplicitly. For there is no more treacherous guide than the consummateartist on the wrong track. 

Those who decry the joy of achievement are like tyros at skating whoventure alone upon thin ice, fall down, fall in, and insist on the wayhome that winter sports have been grossly overestimated. This outcryabout men being unable to enjoy what they have attained is ahalf-truth which cannot skate two consecutive strokes in the rightdirection without the support of its better half. And its better halfis the fact that one may enjoy achievement hugely, provided only hewill get himself into proper condition. 

Of course I am not for one moment denying that achievement is harderto enjoy than the hope of achievement. Undoubtedly the former lacksthe glamour of the indistinct, "that sweet bloom of all that is faraway. " But our celebrated writer-friends overlook the fact thatglamour and "sweet bloom" are so much pepsin to help weak stomachsdigest strong joy. If you would have the best possible time of it inthe world, develop your joy-digesting apparatus to the point where itcan, without a qualm, dispose of that tough morsel, the present, obvious and attained. There will always be enough of the unachieved attable to furnish balanced rations. 

"God help the attainers!"--forsooth! Why, the ideas which I havequoted, if they were carried to logical lengths, would make heaven afarcical kill-joy, a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable morgue ofdisappointed hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that the oldheaven of the Semitic poets was constructed somewhat along theselines. But that was no real heaven. The real heaven is a quiet, harpless, beautiful place where every one is a heaven-born creatorand is engaged--not caring in the least for food or sleep--in turningout, one after another, the greatest of masterpieces, and enjoyingthem to the quick, both while they are being done and when they arequite achieved. 

I would not, however, fall into the opposite error and disparage thejoy of traveling hopefully. It is doubtless easy to amuse one's selfin a wayside air-castle of an hundred suites, equipped withself-starting servants, a Congressional Library, a National Gallery ofpictures, a Vatican-ful of sculpture, with Hoppe for billiard-marker, Paderewski to keep things going in the music-room, Wright as grandhereditary master of the hangar, and Miss Annette Kellerman in chargeof the swimming-pool. I am not denying that such a castle is easier toenjoy before the air has been squeezed out of it by the horny clutchof reality, which moves it to the journey's end and sets it down witha jar in its fifty-foot lot, complete with seven rooms and bath, andonly half an hour from the depot. But this is not for one momentadmitting the contention of the lords of literature that theair-castle has a monopoly of joy, while the seven rooms and bath havea monopoly of disillusionized boredom and anguish of mind. If yourbefore-mentioned apparatus is only in working order, you can have noend of joy out of the cottage. And any morning before breakfast youcan build another, and vastly superior, air-castle on the vacant landbehind the woodshed. 

"What is all this, " I heard the reader ask, "about a joy-digestingapparatus?"

It consists of four parts. Physical exuberance is the first. To aconsiderable extent joy depends on an overplus of health. The joy ofartistic creation, for instance, lies not so intensely andintoxicatingly in what you may some time accomplish as in what hasactually just started into life under your pencil or clayey thumb, your bow or brush. For what you are about to receive, the Lord, as arule, makes you duly thankful. But with the thankfulness is alwaysmingled the shadowy apprehension that your powers may fail you whennext you wish to use them. Thus the joy of anticipatory creation isakin to pain. It holds no such pure bliss as actual creation. When youare in full swing, what you have just finished (unless you areexhausted) seems to you nearly always the best piece of work that youhave ever done. For your critical, inhibitory apparatus is temporarilyparalyzed by the intoxication of the moment. What makes so manyartists fail at these times to enjoy a maximum of pleasure and aminimum of its opposite, is that they do not train their bodies "likea strong man to run a race, " and make and keep them aboundingly vital. The actual toil takes so much of their meager vitality that they havetoo little left with which to enjoy the resulting achievement. If theybecome ever so slightly intoxicated over the work, they have adreadful morning after, whose pain they read back into the joypreceding. And then they groan out that all is vanity, and slander joyby calling it a pottle of hay. 

It takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement issomething finished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished in art, forinstance, without re-creating it for yourself. But, though re-creationdemands almost as much vital overplus as creation, the layman shouldrealize that he has, as a rule, far more of this overplus than thepallid, nervous sort of artist. And he should accordingly discount theother's lamentations over the vanity of human achievement. 

The reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure in writing, and in havingwritten, his delicious essays is that he did not know how to takeproper care of his body. To be extremely antithetical, I, on the otherhand, take so much pleasure in writing and in having written theseessays of mine (which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise, or brilliant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery, discouragement, and disillusionment which accompany and follow almostevery one of them, and the need of Spartan training for their sake, hardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings. Training has meant so much vital overplus to me that I long agospurted and caught up with my pottle of joy. And, finding that it madea cud of unimagined flavor and durability, I substituted for thepottle a placard to this effect:

REMEMBER THE RACE!

This placard, hung always before me, is a reminder that a decentrespect for the laws of good sportsmanship requires one to keep in ashard condition as possible for the hundred-yard dash called Life. Sucha regimen pays thousands of per cent. In yearly dividends. It allowsone to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather likethat which the sprinter enjoys when, after months of flawlesspreparation, he hurls himself through space like some winged creaturetoo much in love with the earth to leave it; while every drop of histingling blood makes him conscious of endless reserves of vitality. 

Tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things intojoy--even sorrow itself. I wonder if any one seriously doubts that itwas just this which was giving Browning's young David such a glorioustime of it when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop about "ourmanhood's prime vigor" and "the wild joys of living. "

The physical variety of exuberance, once won, makes easy the winningof the mental variety. This, when it is almost isolated from the otherkinds, is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world ofabstract thought, or drink delight of battle with your intellectualpeers, or follow with full understanding the phonographic version ofsome mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this means work. But if yourbody is shouting for joy over the mere act of living, mentalcalisthenics no longer appear so impossibly irksome. And anyway, thediscipline of your physical training has induced your will to put upwith a good deal of irksomeness. This is partly because its eye isfixed on something beyond the far-off, divine event of achievingconcentration on one subject for five minutes without allowing themind to wander from it more than twenty-five times. That something isa keenness of perception which makes any given fragment of nature orhuman nature or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace, endlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery--withpossibilities, even, of a developing imagination. For theAuto-Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He can get somethingout of nothing. 

At this stage of your development you will probably discover inyourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enableyou to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you wander throughyour mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come upon an ugly intruderof a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such asfear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like, there is only oneright way to treat it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on the rubbishheap as if it were a stinging nettle; and let some harmonious thoughtgrow in its place. There is no more reckless consumer of all kinds ofexuberance than the discordant thought, and weeding it out saves suchan amazing quantity of _eau de vie_ wherewith to water the garden ofjoy, that every man may thus be his own Burbank and accomplish marvelsof mental horticulture. 

When you have won physical and mental exuberance, you will havepleased your Auto-Comrade to such an extent that he will most likelystartle and delight you with a birthday present as the reward ofvirtue. Some fine morning you will climb out of the right side of yourbed and come whistling down to breakfast and find by your plate a neatpacket of spiritual exuberance with his best wishes. Such a gift iswhat the true artist enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and fullfor a dozen pens or brushes to record. Jeanne d'Arc knew it when themysterious voices spoke to her; and St. John on Patmos; and every truelover at certain moments; and each one of us who has ever flung widethe gates of prayer and felt the infinite come flooding in as theclean vigor of the tide swirls up through a sour, stagnant marsh; orwho at some supreme instant has felt enfolding him, like theeverlasting arms, a sure conviction of immortality. 

Now for purposes of convenience we may speak of these three kinds ofexuberance as we would speak of different individuals. But in realitythey hardly ever exist alone. The physical variety is almost sure toinduce the mental and spiritual varieties and to project itself intothem. The mental kind looks before and after and warms body and soulwith its radiant smile. And even when we are in the throes of a purelyspiritual love or religious ecstasy, we have a feeling--thoughperhaps it is illusory--that the flesh and the intellect are morepotent than we knew. 

These, then, constitute the first three parts of the joy-digestingapparatus. I think there is no need of dwelling on their efficacy inhelping one to enjoy achievement. Let us pass, therefore, to thefourth and last part, which is self-restraint. 

Perhaps the worst charge usually made against achievement is itssameness, its dry monotony. On the way to it (the writers say) you areconstantly falling in with something new. But, once there, you mustabandon the variegated delights of yesterday and settle down, to-dayand forever, to the same old thing. In this connection I recall anepigram of Professor Woodrow Wilson's. He was lecturing to us youngPrincetonians about Gladstone's ability to make any subject ofabsorbing interest, even a four hours' speech on the budget. "Younggentlemen, " cried the professor, "it is not the subject that is dry. It is _you_ that are dry!" Similarly, it is not achievement that isdry; it is the achievers, who fondly suppose that now, havingachieved, they have no further use for the exuberance of body, mind, and spirit, or the self-restraint which helped them toward their goal. 

Particularly the self-restraint. One chief reason why the thingattained palls so often and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy itimmoderately. Why, if Ponce de Leon had found the fountain of youthand drunk of it as bibulously as we are apt to guzzle the cup ofachievement, he would not only have arrested the forward march oftime, but would have over-reached himself and slipped backward throughthe years of his age to become a chronic infant in arms. Eventraveling hopefully would pall if one kept at it twenty-four hours aday. Just feast on the rich food of Beethoven's Fifth Symphonymorning, noon, and night for a few months, and see how you feel. Thereis no other way. Achievement must be moderately indulged in, not madethe pretext for a debauch. If one has achieved a new cottage, forexample, let him take numerous week-end vacations from it. And let notan author sit down and read through his own book the moment it comesfrom the binder. A few more months will suffice to blur the memory ofthose irrevocable, nauseating foundry proofs. If he forbears--insteadof being sickened by the stuff, no gentle reader, I venture topredict, will be more keenly and delicately intrigued by the volume'svigors and subtleties. 

If you have recently made a fortune, be sure, in the course of yourContinental wanderings, to take many a third-class carriage full ofwitty peasants, and stop at many an "unpretending" inn "Of the WhiteHind, " with bowered rose-garden and bowling-green running down to thetrout-filled river, and mine ample hostess herself to make and bringyou the dish for which she is famous over half the countryside. Thusyou will increase by at least one Baedekerian star-power the lusterof the next Grand Hotel Royal de l'Univers which may receive you. Andbe sure to alternate pedestrianism with motoring, and the "peanut"gallery with the stage-box. Omit not to punctuate with stag vacationslong periods of domestic felicity. When Solomon declared that all wasvanity and vexation of spirit I suspect that he had been more thanunusually intemperate in frequenting the hymeneal altar. 

Why is it that the young painters, musicians, and playwrights who winfame and fortune as heroes in the novels of Mr. E. F. Benson enjoyachievement so hugely? Simply because they are exuberant in mind, body, and spirit, and, if not averse to brandy and soda, are in otherways, at least, paragons of moderation. And yet, in his "Book ofMonths, " Mr. Benson requests God to help those who have attained!

With this fourfold equipment of the three exuberances and moderation, I defy Solomon himself in all his glory not to enjoy the situationimmensely and settle down in high good humor and content with thepaltry few scores of wives already achieved. I defy him not to enjoyeven his fame. 

We have heard much from the gloomily illustrious about the fraudulentpromise of fame. At a distance, they admit, it seems like a banquetboard spread with a most toothsome feast. But step up to the table. All you find there is dust and ashes, vanity and vexation of spiritand a desiccated joint that defies the stoutest carver. If a man holdsthis view, however, you may be rather sure that he belongs to the_bourgeois_ great. For it is just as _bourgeois_ to win fame and thennot know what on earth to do with it, as it is to win fortune and thennot know what on earth to do with it. The more cultivated a famous manis, the more he must enjoy the situation; for along with his dry scragof fame, the more he must have of the sauce which alone makes itpalatable. The recipe for this sauce runs as follows: to oneamphoraful best physical exuberance add spice of keen perception, cream of imagination, and fruits of the spirit. Serve with grain ofsalt. 

That famous person is sauceless who can, without a tingle of joy, overhear the couple in the next steamer-chairs mentioning his namecasually to each other as an accepted and honored household word. Hehas no sauce for his scrag if he, unmoved, can see the face of somebeautiful child in the holiday crowd suddenly illuminated by thepleasure of recognizing him, from his pictures, as the author of herfavorite story. He is _bourgeois_ if it gives him no joy when theweight of his name swings the beam toward the good cause; or when themail brings luminous gratitude and comprehension from the perfectstranger in Topeka or Tokyo. No; fame to the truly cultivated shouldbe fully as enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward fame. 

In certain other cases, indeed, attainment is even more delicious thanthe hope thereof. Think of the long, cool drink at the New Mexicanpueblo after a day in the incandescent desert, with your tonguegradually enlarging itself from thirst. How is it with you, O golfer, when, even up at the eighteenth, you top into the hazard, make adesperate demonstration with the niblick, and wipe the sand out ofyour eyes barely in time to see your ball creep across the distantgreen and drop into the hole? Has not the new president's aged fathera slightly better time at the inauguration of his dear boy than he hadat any time during the fifty years of hoping for and predicting thatconsummation? Does not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly thecertainty of having made the world a better place to live in, than hehad enjoyed the hope of achieving that desirable end? Can there be anycomparison between the joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring, nowhopefully, now despairingly, to port, and the joys of the same soulwhich has at last found a perfect haven in the heart of God?

And still the writers go on talking of joy as if it were a pottle ofhay--a flimsy fraud--and of the satisfaction of attainment as if itwere unattainable. Why do they not realize, at least, that their everythrill of response to a beautiful melody, their every laugh ofdelighted comprehension of Hazlitt or Crothers, is in itselfattainment? The creative appreciator of art is always at his goal. Andthe much-maligned present is the only time at our disposal in which toenjoy the much-advertised future. 

Too bad that our literary friends should have gone to extremes on thispoint! If Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that "to travel hopefully isan easier thing than to arrive, " he would undoubtedly have hit thetruth. If Mr. Benson had said, "If you attain, God help you bountifullyto exuberance, " etc. , that would have been unexceptionable. It wouldeven have been a more useful--though slightly supererogatory--service, to point out for the million-and-first time that achievement is not allthat it seems to be from a considerable distance. In other words, thatthe laws of perspective will not budge. These writers would thus quitesufficiently have played dentist to Disappointment and extracted hisvenomous fangs for us in advance. What the gentlemen really should havedone was to perform the dentistry first, reminding us once again that apart of attainment is illusory and consists of such stuff asdreams--good and bad--are made of. Then, on the other hand, they shouldhave demonstrated attainment's good points, finally leading up to itssupreme advantage. This advantage is--its strategic position. 

Arriving beats hoping to arrive, in this: that while the hoper is sokeenly hopeful that he has little attention to spare for anythingbesides the future, the arriver may take a broader, more leisurelysurvey of things. The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. Theattainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a completepanorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover byre-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther andloftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attackingthe week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving himhis mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, theachiever, if his joy-digesting apparatus be working properly, rejoiceswith exceeding great joy in past, present, and future alike. He has anadvantage of three to one over the merely hopeful traveler. And whenthey meet this is the song he sings:--

 Mistress Joy is at your side Waiting to become a bride. 

 Soft! Restrain your jubilation. That ripe mouth may not be kissed Ere you stand examination. Mistress Joy's a eugenist. 

 Is your crony Moderation? Do your senses say you sooth? Are your veins the kind that tingle? Is your soul awake in truth?

 If these traits in you commingle Joy no more shall leave you single. 

II

THE BRIMMING CUP

Exuberance is the income yielded by a wise investment of one'svitality. On this income, so long as it flows in regularly, themoderate man may live in the Land of the Joyful Heart, incased intriple steel against any arrows of outrageous fortune that happen tostray in across the frontier. Immigrants to this land who have no suchincome are denied admission. They may steam into the country'sprincipal port, past the great statue of the goddess Joy who holdsaloft a brimming cup in the act of pledging the world. But they areput ashore upon a small island for inspection. And so soon as theinferior character of their investments becomes known, or theirrecklessness in eating into their principal, they are deported. 

The contrast between those within the well-guarded gates and thosewithout is an affecting one. The latter often squander vast fortunesin futile attempts to gain a foothold in the country. And they have amiserable time of it. Many of the natives, on the other hand, are sopoor that they have constantly to fight down the temptation to touchtheir principal. But every time they resist, the old miracle happensfor them once more: the sheer act of living turns out to be "paradiseenow. "

Now no mere fullness of life will qualify a man for admission to theLand of the Joyful Heart. One must have overflowingness of life. Inhis book "The Science of Happiness" Jean Finot declares, that the"disenchantment and the sadness which degenerate into a sort ofpessimistic melancholy are frequently due to the diminution of thevital energy. And as pain and sorrow mark the diminution, the joy ofliving and the upspringing of happiness signify the increase ofenergy.... By using special instruments, such as the plethysmographof Hallion, the pneumograph of Marey, the sphygmometer of Cheron, andso many others which have come in fashion during these latter years, we have succeeded in proving experimentally that joy, sadness, andpain depend upon our energy. " To keep exuberant one must possess morethan just enough vitality to fill the cup of the present. There mustbe enough to make it brim over. Real exuberance, however, is not theextravagant, jarring sort of thing that some thoughtless personssuppose it to be. The word is not accented on the first syllable. Indeed, it might just as well be "_in_uberance. " It does not long tomake an impression or, in vulgar phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends tobe self-contained. It is not boisterousness. It is generous andinfectious, while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish andrepellent. Most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd ofmummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades. For boisterousnessis only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the rampage. The royalold musician and poet was not filled with this, but with the realthing, when he sang:

 "_He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul ... My cup runneth over. _"

The merely boisterous man, on the other hand, is a fatuous spendthriftof his fortune. He reminds us how close we are of kin to thefrolicsome chimpanzee. His attitude was expressed on election night bya young man of Manhattan who shouted hoarsely to his fellow:

 "On with the dance; let joy be unrefined!"

Neither should mere vivacity be mistaken for exuberance. It is no moresurely indicative of the latter than is the laugh of a parrot. One ofthe chief advantages of the Teutonic over the Latin type of man isthat the Latin is tempted to waste his precious vital overplus througha continuous display of vivacity, while the less demonstrative Teutonmore easily stores his up for use where it will count. This gives himan advantage in such pursuits as athletics and empire-building. 

The more exuberance of all varieties one has stored up in body andmind and spirit, the more of it one can bring to bear at the rightmoment upon the things that count for most in the world--the thingsthat owe to it their lasting worth and their very existence. A littleof this precious commodity, more or less, is what often makes thedifference between the ordinary and the supreme achievement. It is theliquid explosive that shatters the final, and most stubborn, barrierbetween man and the Infinite. It is what Walt Whitman called "thatlast spark, that sharp flash of power, that something or other morewhich gives life to all great literature. "

The happy man is the one who possesses these three kinds of overplus, and whose will is powerful enough to keep them all healthy and to keephim from indulging in their delights intemperately. 

It is a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many do, that such fullnessof life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back doorwhen middle age knocks at the front. It is no more bound to go as thewrinkles and gray hairs arrive than your income is bound to take wingstwo or three score years after the original investment of theprincipal. To ascribe it to youth as an exclusive attribute is asfatuous as it would be to ascribe a respectable income only to therecent investor. 

A red-letter day it will be for us when we realize that exuberancerepresents for every one the income from his fund of vitality; thatwhen one's exuberance is all gone, his income is temporarilyexhausted; and that he cannot go on living at the same rate withouttouching the principal. The hard-headed, harder-worked Americanbusiness man is admittedly clever and prudent about money matters. Butwhen he comes to deal with immensely more important matters such aslife, health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. He has not yetgrasped the obvious truth that a man's fund of vitality ought to beadministered upon at least as sound a business basis as his fund ofdollars. The principal should not be broken into for living expensesduring a term of at least ninety-nine years. (Metchnikoff says thatthis term is one hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of theBulgarian bacillus. ) And one should not be content with anything shortof a substantial rate of interest. 

In one respect this life-business is a simpler thing to manage thanthe dollar-business. For, in the former, if the interest comes inregularly and unimpaired, you may know that the principal is safe, while in the dollar-business they may be paying your interest out ofyour principal, and you none the wiser until the crash. But here thedifference ceases. For if little or no vital interest comes in, yourgenerous scale of living is pinched. You may defer the catastrophe alittle by borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate from usuriousstimulants, giving many pounds of flesh as security. But soon Shylockforecloses and you are forced to move with your sufferings to theslums and ten-cent lodging-houses of Life. Moreover, you must face abrutal dispossession from even the poor flat or dormitory cot youthere occupy--out amid the snows and blasts--

 "Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form"

there to pay slack life's "arrears of pain, darkness, and cold. "

The reason why every day is a joy to the normal child is that he fellheir at birth to a fortune of vitality and has not yet had time tosquander all his substance in riotous or thoughtless living, or tooverdraw his account in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one of hisdays is a joy--that is, except in so far as his elders have impressedtheir tired standards of behavior too masterfully upon him. "Happy asa child"--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary. Inorder to remain as happy as this for a century or so, all that a childhas to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles, andnever overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into the myriad detailsof just how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is nodearth of wise books and physicians and "Masters of the Inn, "competent to mark out sound business programs of work, exercise, recreation, and regimen for body, mind, and spirit; while all that youmust contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension, time, money, and will-power. You see, I am not a professor of vitalcommerce and investment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to induce thevoters to elect a sound business administration. 

I believe that the blessings of climate give us of North America lessexcuse than most other people for failing to put such anadministration into office. It is noteworthy that many of theEuropeans who have recently written their impressions of the UnitedStates imagine that Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of vitality isshared by nearly the whole nation. If it only were! But the fact thatthese observers think so would seem to confirm our belief that our owncup brims over more plentifully than that of Europe. This is probablydue to the exhilarating climate which makes America--physically, atleast, though not yet economically and socially--the promised land. 

Of course I realize the absurdity of urging the great majority ofhuman beings to keep within their vital incomes. To ask theoverworked, under-fed, under-rested, under-played, shoddily dressed, overcrowded masses of humanity why they are not exuberant, is to askagain, with Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving forbread do not eat cake. The fact is that to keep within one's incometo-day, either financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury thatis absolutely denied to the many. Most men--the rich as well as thepoor--stumble through life three parts dead. The ruling class, if ithad the will and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness of life. But only a comparatively few of the others could, because the world isconducted on a principle which makes it even less possible for them tostore up a little hoard of vitality in their bodies against a rainyday than to store up an overplus of dollars in the savings bank. 

I think that this state of things is very different from the one whichthe fathers contemplated in founding our nation. When they undertookto secure for us all "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, "they did not mean a bare clinging to existence, liberty to starve, andthe pursuit of a nimble happiness by the lame, the halt, and theblind. They meant fullness of life, liberty in the broadest sense, both outer and inner, and that almost certain success in theattainment of happiness which these two guarantee a man. In a word, the fathers meant to offer us all a good long draft of the brimmingcup with the full sum of benefits implied by that privilege. For thevitalized man possesses real life and liberty, and finds happinessusually at his disposal without putting himself to the trouble ofpursuit. 

I can imagine the good fathers' chagrin if they are aware to-day ofhow things have gone on in their republic. Perhaps they realize thatthe possibility of exuberance has now become a special privilege. Andif they are still as wise as they once were, they will be doublyexasperated by this state of affairs because they will see that it isneedless. It has been proved over and over again that modern machineryhas removed all real necessity for poverty and overwork. There isenough to go 'round. Under a more democratic system we might haveenough of the necessities and reasonable comforts of life to supplyeach of the hundred million Americans, if every man did no more than awholesome amount of productive labor in a day and had the rest of histime for constructive leisure and real living. 

On the same terms there is likewise enough exuberance to go 'round. The only obstacle to placing it within the reach of all exists inmen's minds. Men are still too inert and blindly conservative to standup together and decree that industry shall be no longer conducted forthe inordinate profit of the few, but for the use of the many. Untilthat day comes, the possibility of exuberance will remain a specialprivilege. 

In the mean while it is too bad that the favored classes do not makemore use of this privilege. It is absurd that such large numbers ofthem are still as far from exuberance as the unprivileged. They keepreducing their overplus of vitality to an _under-minus_ of it by toomuch work and too foolish play, by plain thinking and high living andthe dissipation of maintaining a pace too swift for their as yetunadjusted organisms. They keep their house of life always a littlechilly by opening the windows before the furnace has had a chance totake the chill out of the rooms. 

If we would bring joy to the masses why not first vitalize theclasses? If the latter can be led to develop a fondness for thatbrimming cup which is theirs for the asking, a long step will be takentoward the possibility of overflowing life for all. The classes willcome to realize that, even from a selfish point of view, democracy isdesirable; that because man is a social animal, the best-being of theone is inseparable from the best-being of the many; that no one can beperfectly exuberant until all are exuberant. Jean Finot is right:"True happiness is so much the greater and deeper in the proportionthat it embraces and unites in a fraternal chain more men, morecountries, more worlds. "

But the classes may also be moved by instincts less selfish. For thebrimming cup has this at least in common with the cup that inebriates:its possessor is usually filled with a generous--if sometimesmaudlin--anxiety to have others enjoy his own form of beverage. Thepresent writer is a case in point. His reason for making this book layin a convivial desire to share with as many as possible the contentsof a newly acquired brimming cup. Before getting hold of this cup, thewriter would have looked with an indifferent and perhaps hostile eyeupon the proposition to make such a blessing generally available. Butnow he cannot for the life of him see how any one whose body, mind, and spirit are alive and reasonably healthy can help wishing the samejolly good fortune for all mankind. 

Horace Traubel records that the aged Walt Whitman was once talkingphilosophy with some of his friends when an intensely bored youngsterslid down from his high chair and remarked to nobody in particular:"There's too much old folk here for me!"

"For me, too, " cried the poet with one of his hearty laughs. "We areall of us a good deal older than we need to be, than we think we are. Let's all get young again. "

Even so! Here's to eternal youth for every one. And here's to the hourwhen we may catch the eye of humanity and pledge all brother men inthe brimming cup. 

III

ENTHUSIASM

Enthusiasm is exuberance-with-a-motive. It is the power that makes theworld go 'round. The old Greeks who christened it knew that it was thegod-energy in the human machine. Without its driving force nothingworth doing has ever been done. It is man's dearest possession. Love, friendship, religion, altruism, devotion to hobby or career--allthese, and most of the other good things in life, are forms ofenthusiasm. A medicine for the most diverse ills, it alleviates boththe pains of poverty and the boredom of riches. Apart from it man'sheart is seldom joyful. Therefore it should be husbanded with zeal andspent with wisdom. 

To waste it is folly; to misuse it, disaster. For it is safe toutilize this god-energy only in its own proper sphere. Enthusiasmmoves the human vessel. To let it move the rudder, too, is criminalnegligence. Brahms once made a remark somewhat to this effect: Thereason why there is so much bad music in the world is that composersare in too much of a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, what dothey do? Instead of taking it out for a long, cool walk, they sit downat once to work it up, but let it work _them_ up instead into anabsolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of thegoose-quill looks to them like part of a swan-song. 

Love is blind, they say. This is an exaggeration. But it is based onthe fact that enthusiasm, whether it appears as love, or in any otherform, always has trouble with its eyes. In its own place it isincomparably efficient; only keep it away from the pilot-house!

Since this god-energy is the most precious and important thing that wehave, why should our word for its possessor have sunk almost to thelevel of a contemptuous epithet? Nine times in ten we apply it to theman who allows his enthusiasm to steer his vessel. It would be full aslogical to employ the word "writer" for one who misuses his literarygift in writing dishonest advertisements. When we speak of an"enthusiast" to-day, we usually mean a person who has all theill-judging impulsiveness of a child without its compensating charm, and is therefore not to be taken seriously. "He's only an enthusiast!"This has been said about Columbus and Christ and every other great manwho ever lived. 

But besides its poor sense of distance and direction, men have anothercomplaint against enthusiasm. They think it insincere on account ofits capacity for frequent and violent fluctuation in temperature. Inhis "Creative Evolution, " Bergson shows how "our most ardententhusiasm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturallycongealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one soeasily takes the shape of the other, that we might confuse themtogether, doubt our own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we didnot know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living. "

The philosopher then goes on to show how, when we fall into thisconfusion, we are unjust to enthusiasm, which is the materializationof the invisible breath of life itself. It is "the spirit. " The actionit induces is "the letter. " These constitute two different and oftenantagonistic movements. The letter kills the spirit. But when thisoccurs we are apt to mistake the slayer for the slain and impute tothe ardent spirit all the cold vices of its murderer. Hence, the taintof insincerity that seems to hang about enthusiasm is, after all, nothing but illusion. To be just we should discount this illusion inadvance as the wise man discounts discouragement. And the epithet forthe man whose lungs are large with the breath of life should cease tobe a term of reproach. 

Enthusiasm is the prevailing characteristic of the child and of theadult who does memorable things. The two are near of kin and bear afamily resemblance. Youth trails clouds of glory. Glory often trailsclouds of youth. Usually the eternal man is the eternal boy; and themore of a boy he is, the more of a man. The most conventional-seeminggreat men possess as a rule a secret vein of eternal-boyishness. Ouridea of Brahms, for example, is of a person hopelessly mature andrespectable. But we open Kalbeck's new biography and discover himclimbing a tree to conduct his chorus while swaying upon a branch; or, in his fat forties, playing at frog-catching like a five-year-old. 

The prominent American is no less youthful. Not long ago one of ourgood gray men of letters was among his children, awaiting dinner andhis wife. Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. "Quick, children!" heexclaimed. "Here's mother. Let's hide under the table and when shecomes in we'll rush out on all-fours and pretend we're bears. " Themaneuver was executed with spirit. At the preconcerted signal, outthey all waddled and galumphed with horrid grunts--only to findsomething unfamiliar about mother's skirt, and, glancing up, todiscover that it hung upon a strange and terrified guest. 

The biographers have paid too little attention to the god-energy oftheir heroes. I think that it should be one of the crowningachievements of biography to communicate to the reader certain actualvibrations of the enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philosopherfor truth; the patriot for his country; the artist for beauty andself-expression; the altruist for humanity; the discoverer forknowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred soul; the prophet, martyr, or saint for his god. 

Every lover, according to Emerson, is a poet. Not only is this true, but every one of us, when in the sway of any enthusiasm, has in himsomething creative. Therefore a record of the most ordinary person'senthusiasms should prove as well worth reading as the ordinary recordwe have of the extraordinary person's life if written with the usualneglect of this important subject. Now I should like to try theexperiment of sketching in outline a new kind of biography. It wouldconsist entirely of the record of an ordinary person's enthusiasms. But, as I know no other life-story so well as my own, perhaps thereader will pardon me for abiding in the first person singular. He maygrant pardon the more readily if he realizes the universality of thisoffense among writers. For it is a fact that almost all novels, stories, poems, and essays are only more or less cleverly disguisedautobiography. So here follow some of my enthusiasms in a newchapter. 

IV

A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS

I

In looking back over my own life, a series of enthusiasms would appearto stand out as a sort of spinal system, about which are grouped astributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence. Or, rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, sparkling stream whichcarries along and solves and neutralizes, if not sweetens, in itsimpetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds, such asschool, the Puritan Sabbath, boot and hair-brushing, polite andunpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and shortercatechists--and so on all the way down between the shores of age tothe higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whoseword is not as good as his bond. 

My first enthusiasm was for good things to eat. It was stimulated bythat priceless asset, a virginal palate. But here at once the mediumof expression fails. For what may words presume to do with the flavorof that first dish of oatmeal; with the first pear, grape, watermelon;with the Bohemian roll called _Hooska_, besprinkled with poppy andmandragora; or the wondrous dishes which our Viennese cook called_Aepfelstrudel_ and _Scheiterhaufen_? The best way for me to expressmy reaction to each of these delicacies would be to play it on the'cello. The next best would be to declare that they tasted somewhatbetter than Eve thought the apple was going to taste. But how absurdlyinadequate this sounds! I suppose the truth is that such enthusiasmshave become too utterly congealed in our _blasé_ minds when at lastthese minds have grown mature enough to grasp the principles ofpenmanship. So that whatever has been recorded about the sensations ofextreme youth is probably all false. Why, even

 "Heaven lies about us in our infancy, "--

as Wordsworth revealed in his "Ode on Immortality. " And thoughTennyson pointed out that we try to revenge ourselves by lying aboutheaven in our maturity, this does not serve to correct a single one ofcrabbed age's misapprehensions about youth. 

Games next inflamed my fancy. More than dominoes or Halma, leadsoldiers appealed to me, and tops, marbles, and battledore andshuttlecock. Through tag, fire-engine, pom-pom-pull-away, hide-and-seek, baseball, and boxing, I came to tennis, which I knewinstinctively was to be my athletic _grand passion_. Perhaps I wasfirst attracted by the game's constant humor which was forever makingthe ball imitate or caricature humanity, or beguiling the players toact like solemn automata. For children are usually quicker thangrown-ups to see these droll resemblances. I came by degrees to likethe game's variety, its tense excitement, its beauty of posture andcurve. And before long I vaguely felt what I later learnedconsciously: that tennis is a sure revealer of character. Three setswith a man suffice to give one a working knowledge of his moralequipment; six, of his chief mental traits; and a dozen, of that mostimportant, and usually veiled part of him, his subconsciouspersonality. Young people of opposite sexes are sometimes counseled totake a long railway journey together before deciding on a matrimonialmerger. But I would respectfully advise them rather to play "singles"with each other before venturing upon a continuous game of doubles. 

The collecting mania appeared some time before tennis. I firstcollected ferns under a crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon gaveway to discrimination, which led to picking out a favorite fern. Thiswas chosen, I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feeling. Icalled it "The Alligator" from its fancied resemblance to my brother'salligator-skin traveling-bag. But admiration of this fern brought adawning consciousness that certain natural objects were preferable toothers. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collectingimpressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance ofnature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolicthing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme orbest-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also ineach department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorialincense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among shores, those ofCapri and Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one called Isis asseen at dawn from the depths of the Grand Cañon. 

II

Next, I collected postage-stamps. I know that it is customary to-dayfor writers to sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have forgottenits variety and subtlety; its demand on the imagination; how it makeshistory and geography live, and initiates one painlessly into themysteries of the currency of all nations. Then what a tonic it is forthe memory! Only think of the implications of the annualprice-catalogue! Soon after the issue of this work, every collectorworthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind thecurrent market values of thousands of stamps. And he can tell youoffhand, not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceledcondition, but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled, unperforated, embossed, rouletted, surcharged with all manner ofinitials, printed by mistake with the king standing on his head, orwater-marked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine ofEgypt. This feat of memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, for theenthusiasm of the normal stamp-collector is so potent that itsproprietor has only to stand by and let it do all the work. 

We often hear that the wealthy do not enjoy their possessions. Thisdepends entirely upon the wealthy. That some of them enjoy theirtreasures giddily, madly, my own experience proves. For, as youthfulstamp-collectors went in those days, I was a philatelic magnate. Byinheritance, by the ceaseless and passionate trading of duplicates, byrummaging in every available attic, by correspondence with a widecircle of foreign missionaries, and by delivering up my wholeallowance, to the dealers, I had amassed a collection of severalthousand varieties. Among these were such gems as all of thetriangular Cape of Good Hopes, almost all of the early Persians, andour own spectacular issue of 1869 unused, including the one on whichthe silk-stockinged fathers are signing the Declaration ofIndependence. Such possessions as these I well-nigh worshiped. 

Even to-day, after having collected no stamps for a generation, thechance sight of an "approval sheet, " with its paper-hinged remindersof every land, gives me a curious sensation. There visit my spineechoes of the thrills that used to course it on similar occasions inboyhood. These were the days when my stamps had formed for me mentalpictures--more or less accurate--of each country from Angola toZululand, its history, climate, scenery, inhabitants, and rulers. Topossess its rarest stamp was mysteriously connected in my mind withbeing given the freedom of the land itself, and introduced with warmrecommendations to its _genius loci_. 

Even old circulars issued by dealers, now long gone to stamplessclimes, have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. Iprefer those of foreign dealers because their English has the quaint, other-world atmosphere of what they dealt in. The other day I found inan old scrapbook a circular from Vienna, which annihilated a score ofyears with its very first words:

CLEARING

OF A LARGE PART OF MY RETAIL DEPOSITORY

 Being lately so much engaged into my wholesale business ... I have made up my mind to sell out a large post of my retail-stamps at under-prices. They are rests of larger collections containing for the most, only older marks and not thrash possibly put together purposedly as they used to be composed by the other dealers and containing therefore mostly but worthless and useless nouveautés of Central America. 

Before continuing this persuasive flow, the dealer inserts a number oftestimonials like the following. He calls them:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 Sent package having surpassed my expectations I beg to remit by to-days post-office-ordres Mk. 100. Kindly please send me by return of post offered album wanted for retail sale. 

G. B. --HANNOVER. 

The dealer now comes to his peroration:

 I beg to call the kind of attention of every buyer to the fact of my selling all these packages and albums with my own loss merely for clearings sake of my retail business and in order to get rid of them as much and as soon as possible. With 25-60 % abatement I give stamps and whole things to societies against four weeks calculation. 

 All collectors are bound to oblige themselves by writing contemporaneously with sending in the depository amount to make calculation within a week as latest term. 

It is enough! As I read, the old magic enfolds me, and I am seizedwith longing to turn myself into a society of collectors and toimplore the altruistic dealer "kindly please" to send me, at aprodigious "abatement, " "stamps and whole things against four weekscalculation. "

III

The youngest children of large families are apt to be lonely folk, somewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I was sucha child, blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and ratherinclined to sedentary joys. Even when I reached the barbaric stage ofevolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuitsof his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy these in the moresophisticated forms natural to a lonely young city-dweller. 

When stamps had passed their zenith I was filled with a lust forslaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I satwatching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths ofthe muddy and torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hopingagainst hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and divebeneath the surface of things, into touch with the great livingrealities. And when the cork finally marked a historic epoch byvanishing, and a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was pulledin hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquestold and strong as the race. 

But presently I myself was drawn, like the cork, beneath thesuperficial surface of the angler's art. For in the public library Ichanced on a shelf of books, that told about fishing of a nobler, jollier, more seductive sort. At once I was consumed with a passionfor five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal leaders, double-taperedcasting-lines of braided silk, and artificial flies more fair thanbirds of paradise. Armed in spirit, with all these, I waded thestreams of England with kindly old Isaak Walton, and ranged theRestigouche with the predecessors of Henry van Dyke. These dreamsbrought with them a certain amount of satisfaction--about as muchsatisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party, eachequipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite. The visions werepleasant, of course, but they cried out, and made me cry out, foraction. There were no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, andthere was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight. But I didwhat I could to be prepared for the blessed hour when we should meet. I secured five new subscriptions or so to "The Boys' Chronicle" (letus call it), and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it wouldhave resolved itself into its elements at sight of a half-poundtrout. It was destined, though, never to meet with this embarrassment. 

My casting-line bore a family resemblance to grocery string. My leaderwas a piece of gut from my brother's 'cello; my flybook, an oldwallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond my means; and it wasperplexing to know what to do, until I found a book which said that itwas better by far to tie your own flies. With joyful relief I acted onthis counsel. Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White Millerswith shoe-thread upon cod-hooks. One of these I stained and streakedwith my heart's blood into the semblance of a Parmacheene Belle. Thecanary furnished materials for a Yellow May; a dooryard Englishsparrow, for a Brown Hackle. My masterpiece, the beautiful, parti-colored fly known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my sister'sEaster bonnet. 

I covered the points of the hooks with pieces of cork, and fished onthe front lawn from morning to night, leaning with difficulty againstthe thrust of an imaginary torrent. And I never ceased striving tomake the three flies straighten out properly as the books directed, and fall like thistledown upon the strategic spot where the emptytomato can was anchored, and then jiggle appetizingly down over thefour-pounder, where he sulked in the deep hole just beyond thehydrant. 

The hunting fever was wakened by the need for the Brown Hackle alreadymentioned. But as the choice of weapons and of victims culminated inthe air-gun and the sparrow, respectively, my earliest hunting wasconfined even more closely than my fishing to the library and thedense and teeming forests of the imagination. 

But while somewhat handicapped here by the scarcity of ferocious game, I was more fortunate in another enthusiasm which attacked me at almostthe same time. For however unpropitious the hunting is on any givenpart of the earth's surface, there is everywhere and always anabundance of good hidden-treasure-seeking to be had. The garden, theattic, the tennis lawn all suffered. And my initiative wasstrengthened by the discovery of an incomparable book all about a deadman's chest, and not only digging for gold in a secret island, butfinding it, too, by jingo! and fighting off the mutineers. 

These aspirations naturally led to games of Pirate, or Outlaw, whichwere handicapped, however, by the scarcity of playmates, and theircurious hesitation to serve as victims. As pirates and outlaws arewell known to be the most superstitious of creatures, inclining to theprimitive in their religious views, we were naturally led into a sortof dread enthusiasm for--or enthusiastic dread of--the whole pantheonof spooks, sprites, and bugaboos to which savages and children, greatand small, bow the knee. My dreams at that time ran something likethis:

PARADISE REVISED

 Playing hymn-tunes day and night On a harp _may_ be all right For the grown-ups; but for me, I do wish that heaven could be Sort o' like a circus, run So a kid could have some fun!

 There I'd not play harps, but horns When I chased the unicorns-- Magic tubes with pistons greasy, Slides that pushed and pulled out easy, Cylinders of snaky brass Where the fingers like to fuss, Polished like a looking-glass, Ending in a blunderbuss. 

 I would ride a horse of steel Wound up with a ratchet-wheel. Every beast I'd put to rout Like the man I read about. I would singe the leopard's hair, Stalk the vampire and the adder, Drive the werewolf from his lair, Make the mad gorilla madder. Needle-guns my work should do. But, if beasts got closer to, I would pierce them to the marrow With a barbed and poisoned arrow, Or I'd whack 'em on the skull Till my scimiter was dull. 

 If these weapons didn't work, With a kris or bowie-knife, Poniard, assegai, or dirk, I would make them beg for life;-- Spare them, though, if they'd be good And guard me from what haunts the wood-- From those creepy, shuddery sights That come round a fellow nights-- Imps that squeak and trolls that prowl, Ghouls, the slimy devil-fowl, Headless goblins with lassoes, Scarlet witches worse than those, Flying dragon-fish that bellow So as most to scare a fellow.... 

 There, as nearly as I could, I would live like Robin Hood, Taking down the mean and haughty, Getting plunder from the naughty To reward all honest men Who should seek my outlaw's den. 

 When I'd wearied of these pleasures I'd go hunt for hidden treasures-- In no ordinary way, Pirates' luggers I'd waylay; Board them from my sinking dory, Wade through decks of gore and glory, Drive the fiends, with blazing matchlock, Down below, and snap the hatch-lock. 

 Next, I'd scud beneath the sky-land, Sight the hills of Treasure Island, Prowl and peer and prod and prise, Till there burst upon my eyes Just the proper pirate's freight: Gold doubloons and pieces of eight!

 Then--the very best of all-- Suddenly a stranger tall Would appear, and I'd forget That we hadn't ever met. And with cap upthrown I'd greet him (Turning from the plunder, yellow) And I'd hurry fast to meet him, For he'd be the very fellow Who, I think, invented fun-- Robert Louis Stevenson. 

The enthusiasms of this barbaric period never died. They grew up, instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are nowthe high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and theinexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgottenpsychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discoveredand begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze--why, mylife-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden valuablesin the cellars and attics, the chimney-pieces and desert islands ofthe mind, and secret attempts to coin them into currency. 

And so I might go on to tell of my enthusiasms for no end of otherthings like reading, modeling, folk-lore, cathedrals, writing, pictures, and the theater. Then there is the long story of thatenthusiasm called Love, of Friendship its twin, and their elderbrother, Religion, and their younger sister, Altruism. And travel andadventure and so on. But no! It is, I believe, a misdemeanor to obtainattention under false pretenses. If I have caught the reader's eye bypromising to illustrate in outline a new method of writingautobiography, I must not abuse his confidence by putting that methodinto practice. So, with a regret almost equal to that of LewisCarroll's famous Bellman--

 I skip twenty years--

and close with my latest enthusiasm. 

IV

Confirmed wanderers that we were, my wife and I had rented a house forthe winter in a Massachusetts coast village and had fallen somewhatunder the spell of the place. Nevertheless, we had decided to move onsoon--to try, in fact, another trip through Italy. Our friendlyneighbors urged us to buy land up the "back lane" instead, and buildand settle down. We knew nothing of this region, however, and scarcelyheard them. 

But they were so insistent that one day we ventured up the back laneat dusk and began to explore the woods. It grew dark and we thought ofturning back. Then it began to grow light again. A full moon wasclimbing up through the maples, inviting further explorations. Wepushed through a dense undergrowth and presently were in a grove ofgreat white pines. There was a faint sound of running water, andsuddenly we came upon an astonishing brook--wide, swift, and musical. We had not suspected the existence of such a brook within a dozenleagues. It was over-arched by tall oaks and elms, beeches, tupelos, and maples. The moonbeams were dancing in the ripples and on thefloating castles of foam. 

"What a place for a study!"

"Yes; a log cabin with a big stone fireplace. "

The remarks came idly, but our eyes met and held. Moved by one impulsewe turned from the stream and remarked what bosh people will sometimestalk, and discussed the coming Italian trip as we moved cautiouslyamong the briers. But when we came once more to the veteran pines, they seemed more glamorous than ever in the moonlight, especially onethat stood near a large holly, apart from the rest--a three-pronglyrical fellow--and his opposite, a burly, thickset archer, bendinghis long-bow into a most exquisite curve. The fragrant pine needleswhispered. The brook lent its faint music. 

"Quick! We had better get away!"

A forgotten lumber road led us safe from briers up a hill. Out of adense oak grove we suddenly emerged upon the more open crest. Our feetsank deep in moss. 

"Look, " I said. 

Over the heads of the high forest trees below shimmered a mile ofmoonlit marshes, and beyond them a gleam--perhaps from some vessel farat sea, perhaps even from a Provincetown lighthouse. 

"Yes, but look!"

At a touch I faced around and beheld, crowning the hill, a statelycompany of red cedars, comely and dense and mysterious as thecypresses of Tivoli, and gloriously drenched in moonlight. 

"But what a place for a house!"

"Let's give up Italy, " was the answer, "and make this wood our home. "

By instinct and training we were two inveterate wanderers. Never hadwe possessed so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth. But thenest-building enthusiasm had us at last. Our hands met in compact. Aswe strolled reluctantly homeward to a ten-o'clock dinner we talked ofroad-making, swamps, pneumatic water-systems, the nimbleness ofdollars, and mountains of other difficulties. And we agreed that theonly kind of faith which can easily remove mountains is the faith ofthe enthusiast. 

V

THE AUTO-COMRADE

Human nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offerthe ordinary man a week's vacation all alone, and he will look asthough you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing. 

"There are, " as Ruth Cameron truly observes, "a great many people towhom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hourswith only their own selves for company. To escape that terriblecatastrophe, they will make friends with the most fearful bore or readthe most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, notonly without human companionship, but even without a book or magazinewith which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they arefairly frantic. "

If any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that hehas not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate acondition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wifeand children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it thisepitaph:

 "Here lies the pod. The Pease are shelled and gone to God. "

Now, pod-like people such as he are always solitary wherever otherpeople are not; and there is, of course, nothing much more distressingthan solitariness. These people, however, fall through sheer ignoranceinto a confusion of thought. They suppose that solitude andsolitariness are the same thing. To the artist in life--to the wisekeeper of the joyful heart--there is just one difference between thesetwo: it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes. For, tothe artist in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto-Comrade. 

As it is the Auto-Comrade who makes all the difference, I shall try todescribe his appearance. His eyes are the most arresting part of him. They never peer stupidly through great, thick spectacles of others'making. They are scarcely ever closed in sleep, and sometimes maketheir happiest discoveries during the small hours. These hours aretruly small because the Auto-Comrade often turns his eyes into thelenses of a moving-picture machine--such an entertaining one that itcompresses the hours to seconds. It is through constant, alert usethat his eyes have become sharp. They can pierce through the rinds ofthe toughest personalities, and even penetrate on occasion into thefuture. They can also take in whole panoramas of the past in onesweeping look. For they are of that "inner" variety through whichWordsworth, winter after winter, used to survey his daffodil-fields. "The bliss of solitude, " he called them. 

The Auto-Comrade has an adjustable brow. It can be raised high enoughto hold and reverberate and add rich overtones to, the grandestchords of thought ever struck by a Plato, a Buddha, or a Kant. Thenext instant it may easily be lowered to the point where the ordinarycartoon of commerce or the tiny cachinnation of a machine-madeChesterton paradox will not ring entirely hollow. As for his voice, itcan at times be more musical than Melba's or Caruso's. Without beingraised above a whisper, it can girdle the globe. It can barely breathesome delicious new melody; yet the thing will float forth not onlyundiminished, but gathering beauty, significance, and incisiveness inevery land it passes through. 

The Auto-Comrade is an erect, wiry young figure of an athlete. As hetrades at the Seven-League Boot and Shoe Concern, it never bothers himto accompany you on the longest tramps. His feet simply cannot betired out. As for his hands, they are always alert to give you a liftup the rough places on the mountain-side. He has remarkable presenceof body. In any emergency he is usually the best man on the spot. Heis at once seer, creator, accomplisher, and present help in time oftrouble. But his everyday occupation is that of entertainer. He is thejoy-bringer--the Prometheus of pleasure. In his vicinity there is nosuch thing as ennui or lonesomeness. Emerson wrote:

 "When I would spend a lonely day Sun and moon are in my way. "

But for pals of the Auto-Comrade, not only sun, moon, etc. , are in theway, but all of his own unlimited resources. For every time and seasonhe has a fittingly varied repertory of entertainment. 

Now and again he startles you by the legerdemain feat of snatchingbrand-new ideas out of the blue, like rabbits out of a hat. While youstand at the port-hole of your cabin and watch the rollers rushingback to the beloved home-land you are quitting, he marshals yourfriends and acquaintances into a long line for a word of greeting or arapid-fire chat, just as though you were some idol of the people, andwere steaming in past the Statue of Liberty on your way home fromlionizing and being lionized abroad, and the Auto-Comrade were thefactotum at your elbow who asks, "What name, please?"

After the friends and acquaintances, he even brings up your _bêtesnoires_ and dearest enemies for inspection and comment. Strangelyenough, viewed in this way, these persons no longer seem socontemptible or pernicious or devilish as they once did. At this pointyour factotum rubs your eye-glasses bright with the handkerchief healways carries about for slate-cleaning purposes, and lo! you evenbegin to discover good points about the chaps, hitherto unsuspected. 

Then there are always your million-and-one favorite melodies whichnobody but that all-around musical amateur, the Auto-Comrade, can soexquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, blat, or roar. There is alsoa universe full of new ones for him to improvise. And he is thejolliest sort of fellow musician, because, when you play or sing aduet with him, you can combine with the exciting give-and-take andreciprocal stimulation of the duet, the god-like autocracy of thesolo, its opportunity for wide, uninterrupted, uncoercedself-expression. Sometimes, however, in the first flush of escape withhim to the wilds, you are fain to clap your hand over his mouth inorder the better to taste the essentially folk-less savor of solitude. For music is a curiously social art, and Browning was more than halfright when he said, "Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled atonce. "

Perhaps you can find your entertainer a small lump of clay ormodeling-wax to thumb into bad caricatures of those you love and goodones of those you hate, until increasing facility impels him to tryand model not a Tanagra figurine, for that would be unlike hisoriginal fancy, but a Hoboken figurine, say, or a sketch for someElgin (Illinois) marbles. 

If you care anything for poetry and can find him a stub of pencil andan unoccupied cuff, he will be most completely in his element; for ifthere is any one occupation more closely identified with him thananother, it is that of poet. And though all Auto-Comrades are notpoets, all poets are Auto-Comrades. Every poem which has ever thrilledthis world or another has been written by the Auto-Comrade of someso-called poet. This is one reason why the so-called poets think somuch of their great companions. "Allons! after the great companions!"cried old Walt to his fellow poets. If he had not overtaken, and heldfast to, his, we should never have heard the "Leaves of Grass"whispering "one or two indicative words for the future. " The bardshave always obeyed this call. And they have known how to value theirAuto-Comrades, too. See, for example, what Keats thought of his:

 Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should not feel--or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home--The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children.... I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds--No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard.... I live more out of England than in it. The Mountains of Tartary are a favorite lounge, if I happen to miss the Alleghany ridge, or have no whim for Savoy. 

This last sentence not only reveals the fact that the Auto-Comrade, equipped as he is with a wishing-mat, is the very best cicerone in theworld, but also that he is the ideal tramping companion. Suppose youare mountain-climbing. As you start up into "nature's observatory, " hekneels in the dust and fastens wings upon your feet. He convenientlyadjusts a microscope to your hat-brim, and hangs about your neck anexcellent telescope. He has enough sense, too, to keep his mouthclosed. For, like Hazlitt, he "can see no wit in walking and talking. "The joy of existence, you find, rarely tastes more cool and sweet andsparkling than when you and your Auto-Comrade make a picnic thus, swinging in a basket between you a real, live thought for lunch. Onsuch a day you come to believe that Keats, on another occasion, musthave had his own Auto-Comrade in mind when he remarked to his friendSolitude that

 "... It sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. "

The Auto-Comrade can sit down with you in thick weather on a barrenlighthouse rock and give you a breathless day by hanging upon thewalls of fog the mellow screeds of old philosophies, and causing tomarch and countermarch over against them the scarlet and purplepageants of history. Hour by hour, too, he will linger with you inthe metropolis, that breeder of the densest solitudes--in market orterminal, subway, court-room, library, or lobby--and hour by hourunlock you those chained books of the soul to which the humancountenance offers the master key. 

Something of a sportsman, too, is the Auto-Comrade. He it is who makesthe fabulously low score at golf--the kind of score, by the way, that isalmost invariably born to blush unseen. And he will uncomplainingly, even zestfully, fish from dawn to dusk in a solitude so complete thatthere is not even a fin to break it. But if there are fish, he findsthem. He knows how to make the flies float indefinitely forward throughyonder narrow opening, and drop, as light as thistledown, in the centerof the temptingly inaccessible pool. He knows without looking, exactlyhow thick and how prehensile are the bushes and branches that lie inwait for the back cast, and he can calculate to a grain how much urgingthe reactionary three-pounder and the blest tie that binds him to thefour-ounce rod will stand. 

He is one of the handiest possible persons to have along in the woods. When you take him on a canoe trip with others, and the party comes to"white water, " he turns out to be a dead shot at rapid-shooting. He issure to know what to do at the supreme moment when you jam yoursetting-pole immutably between two rocks and, with the alternative oftaking a bath, are forced to let go and grab your paddle; and are thenhung up on a slightly submerged rock at the head of the chief rapidjust in time to see the rest of the party disappear majesticallyaround the lower bend. At such a time, simply look to theAuto-Comrade. He will carry you through. Also there is no one like himat the moment when, having felled your moose, leaned your rifleagainst a tree, and bent down the better to examine him, the creaturesuddenly comes to life. 

In tennis, when you wake up to find that your racket has just smasheda lob on the bounce from near the back-net, scoring a clean acebetween your paralyzed opponents, you ought to know that the racketwas guided by that superior sportsman; and if you are truly modest, you will admit that your miraculous stop wherewith the team whiskedthe baseball championship out of the fire in the fourteenth inning wasdue to his unaided efforts. 

There are other games about which he is not so keen: solitaire, forinstance. For solitaire is a social game that soon loses its zest ifthere be not some devoted friend or relative sitting by and simulatingthat pleasureable absorption in the performance which you yourselfonly wish that you could feel. 

This great companion can keep you from being lonely even in a crowd. But there is a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide. Beware howyou try to keep him in a crowd of unadulterated human porcupines! Youknow how the philosopher Schopenhauer once likened average humanityto a herd of porcupines on a cold day, who crowd stupidly together forwarmth, prick one another with their quills, are mutually repelled, forget the incident, grow cold again, and repeat the whole thing _adinfinitum_. 

In other words, the human porcupine is the person considered at thebeginning of this one-sided discussion who, to escape the terriblecatastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum, will make friendswith the most hideous bore. This creature, however, is much more rarethan the misanthropic Schopenhauer imagined. It takes a long time tofind one among such folk as lumbermen, gypsies, shirt-waistoperatives, fishermen, masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, andteamsters. If the sour philosopher had only had the pleasure ofknowing those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage bycracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never havespoken as harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is thatporcupines are not extremely common among the very "common" people. It may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which theupper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the socialclimber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as hescales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to showthat our misanthropic philosopher must have moved exclusively in thebest circles. 

Now, if there is one thing above all others that the Auto-Comradecannot away with, it is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of theporcupine. If people have let their minds slump down intoporcupinishness, or have never taken the trouble to rescue them fromthat ignominious condition--well, the Auto-Comrade is no snob; whenall's said, he is a rather democratic sort of chap. But he has to drawthe line somewhere, you know, and he really must beg to be excusedfrom rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for instance, asblocks upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday noons. He prefers instead therabble which, on all other noons of the week, blocks the lower end ofthat variegated thoroughfare. 

Such exclusiveness lays the Auto-Comrade open, of course, to thecharge of inhospitality. But "is not he hospitable, " asks Thoreau, "who entertains good thoughts?" Personally, I think he is. And Ibelieve that this sort of hospitality does more to make the worldworth living in than much conventional hugging to your bosom ofporcupines whose language you do not speak, yet with whom it isembarrassing to keep silence. 

If the Auto-Comrade mislikes the porcupine, however, the feeling isreturned with exorbitant interest. The alleged failings ofauto-comradeship have always drawn grins, jokes, fleers, and nudges, from the auto-comradeless. It is time the latter should know that thejoke is really on him; for he is the most forlorn of mankind. Theother is never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being one whom "destinymay not surprise nor death dismay. " But the porcupine is liable at anymoment to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp, hollowquills. He finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees thatthe hermit shall "find his crowds in solitude" and never be alone; butthat the flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness, where shall be "weeping and gnashing of teeth. "

The laugh is on the porcupine; but the laugh turns almost into a tearwhen one stops to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the poorwretch is actually obliged to be near someone else in order to enjoy asense of vitality! In other words, he needs somebody else to do hisliving for him. He is a vicarious citizen of the world, holding hisfranchise only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry. All the same, itis rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he continues to feelquite as contemptuously superior as he usually does. For, the contemptof the average porcupine for pals of the Auto-Comrade is akin to thecontempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those paltry beingswho were called clerks because they possessed the queer, unfashionableaccomplishment of being able to read and write. 

I remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-dayorator at college came when he related how the literary guy and thetennis-player were walking one day in the woods, and the literary guysuddenly exclaimed: "Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be alone. " Evenapart from the stilted language in which the orator clothed thethought of the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, somethingirresistibly comic in such a situation. It is to him as though theliterary guy had stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged forthe room at Sing Sing already referred to. 

Indeed, the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of theAuto-Comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers andwitches--folk, by the way, who probably consorted with spirits no moremalign than Auto-Comrades. "What, " asked the porcupines of oneanother, "can they be doing, all alone there in those solitary huts?What honest man would live like that? Ah, they must be up to no good. They must be hand in glove with the Evil One. Well, then, away withthem to the stake and the river!"

As a matter of fact, it probably was not the Evil One that these poorfolk were consorting with, but the Good One. For what is a man'sAuto-Comrade, anyway, but his own soul, or the same thing by whatother name soever he likes to call it, with which he divides thepractical, conscious part of his brain, turn and turn about, share andshare alike? And what is a man's own soul but a small stream of theinfinite, eternal water of life? And what is heaven but a vast harborwhere myriad streams of soul flow down, returning at last to theirSource in the bliss of perfect reunion? I believe that many a Salemwitch was dragged to her death from sanctuary; for church is notexclusively connected with stained glass and collection-baskets. Church is also wherever you and your Auto-Comrade can elude thestarched throng and fall together, if only for a moment, on yourknees. 

The Auto-Comrade has much to gain by contrast with one'sflesh-and-blood associates, especially if this contrast is suddenlybrought home to one after a too long separation from him. I shallnever forget the thrill that was mine early one morning after twomonths of close, uninterrupted communion with one of my best anddearest friends. At the very instant when the turn of the road cut offthat friend's departing hand-wave, I was aware of a welcoming, almostboisterous shout from the hills of dream, and turning quickly, beheldmy long-lost Auto-Comrade rushing eagerly down the slopes toward me. 

Few joys may compare with the joy of such a sudden unexpected reunion. It is like "the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land. " No, this simile is too disloyal to my friend. Well, then, it is like abeaker full of the warm South when you are leaving a good beer countryand are trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next fewweeks. At any rate, similes or not, there were we two together againat last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on theveranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuositiesof the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostlybirch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of theAroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chucklingto find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidlysupposed. What gilded forest trails were those which we blazed intothe glamorous land of to-morrow! And every other moment theserecreative labors would be interrupted while I pressed between thepages of a notebook some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruplyfortunate clover which my Auto-Comrade found and turned over to me. (Between two of those pages, by the way, I afterwards found theargument of this chapter. )

Then, when the effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of itsfirst, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we did spend overthe correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller!Passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over. These we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmaticinsistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clashof mental steel on mental steel from a different mill. And withoutmaking any one else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuseus passionately of reading ahead, we would, on the slightestprovocation, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitterfancy. And we would underline and bracket and side-line and overlinethe ragged little paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins, and dream over its footnotes, to our hearts' content. 

Such experiences, though, are all too rare with me. Why? Because myAuto-Comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate withme unless I toe his mark. 

"Come, " I propose to him, "let us go a journey. "

"Hold hard, " says he, and looks me over appraisingly. "You know therule of the Auto-Comrades' Union. We are supposed to associate withnone but fairly able persons. Are you a fairly able person?"

If it turns out that I am not, he goes on a rampage, and begins totalk like an athletic trainer. The first thing he demands is that hiswould-be associate shall keep on hand a jolly good store of surplusvitality. You are expected to supply exuberance to him somewhat as yousupply gasolene to your motor. Now, of course, there are in the worldnot a few invalids and other persons of low physical vitality whoseAuto-Comrades happen to have sufficient gasolene to keep them bothrunning, if only on short rations. Most of these cases, however, arepathological. They have hot-boxes at both ends of the machine, andtheir progress is destined all too soon to cease and determinedisastrously. The rest of these cases are the rare exceptions whichprove the rule. For unexuberant yet unpathological pals of theAuto-Comrade are as rare as harmonious households in which the effortsof a devoted and blissful wife support an able-bodied husband. 

The rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two. "Learn toeat balanced rations right, " thunders the Auto-Comrade, laying downthe law; "exercise, perspire, breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, andsleep enough; rule your liver with a rod of iron, don't take drugs ornervines, cure sickness beforehand, keep love in your heart, do anadult's work in the world, have at least as much fun as you ought tohave. "

"That, " he goes on, "is the way to develop enough physical overplus sothat you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction tomob-intoxication. And, provided your mind is not in as bad conditionas your body, this physical overplus will transmute some of itselfinto mental exuberance. This will enable you to have more fun withyour mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. It willenable you to look before and after, and purr over what is, as well asto discern, with pleasurable longing, what is not, and set forthconfidently to capture it. "

But if, by any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sortof condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow hisbody to get into, it develops that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabbybrain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clearthat he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet masteredthe vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demandsof his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is onereason why so many more Auto-Comrades are to be found incrow's-nests, gypsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upperFifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swayingmasthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, or even operating arather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence, is better forconsecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices, clubs, committees, servants, dinners, teas, and receptions, to each of whichone is a little late. 

In diffusing knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, this knack ofconcentration, Arnold Bennett's little books on mental efficiency havedone wonders for the art of auto-comradeship. Their popularpersuasiveness has coaxed thousands on thousands of us to go in for afew minutes' worth of mental calisthenics every day. They haveactually cajoled us into the painful feat of glancing over a page of abook and then putting it down and trying to retrace the argument inmemory. Or they have coaxed us to fix on some subject--anysubject--for reflection, and then scourge our straying minds back toit at every few steps of the walk to the morning train. And we havefound that the mental muscles have responded at once to thistreatment. They have hardened under the exercise until being leftalone has begun to change from confinement in the same cell with thatworst of enemies who has the right to forge one's own name--into ajoyful pleasure jaunt with a totally different person who, if notone's best friend, is at least to be counted on as a trusty, entertaining, resourceful, unselfish associate--at times, perhaps, alittle exacting--yet certainly a far more brilliant and generallysatisfactory person than his companion. 

No matter what the ignorant or the envious may say, there is nothingreally unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of auto-comradeship. A few weeks of it bring you back with a fresher, keener appreciation ofyour other friends and of humanity in general than you had beforesetting forth. In the continuous performance of the psalm of life suchcontrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal advantage. 

But auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by themediæval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintageof the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption. Consecutive thought, though it is one of man's greatest pleasures, isat the same time perhaps the most arduous labor that he can perform. And after a long period of it, both the Auto-Comrade and his companionbecome exhausted and, perforce, less comradely. 

Besides the incidental exhaustion, there is another reason why thisbeatific association must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately, one's Auto-Comrade is always of the same sex as one's self, and inyouth, at least, if the presence of the complementary part of creationis long denied, there comes a time when this denial surges higher andhigher in subconsciousness, then breaks into consciousness, and keepson surging until it deluges all the tranquillities, zests, surprises, and excitements of auto-comradeship, and makes them of no effect. 

This is, probably, a wise provision for the salvation of the humandigestion. For otherwise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit ofthe tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship, might thereupon betempted to retire to his hermit's den hard by and endeavor to sustainhimself for life on this food alone. 

Most of us, however, long before such extremes have been reached, aresure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we areenjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want someone else to enjoyit with. 

VI

VIM AND VISION

Efficiency is to-day the Hallelujah Chorus of industry. I know amanufacturer who recently read a book on business management. Stop-watch in hand he then made an exhaustive study of his officeforce and their every action. After considering the tabulated resultshe arose, smashed all but one of the many office mirrors, boughtmodern typewriters, and otherwise eliminated works of supererogation. The sequel is that a dozen stenographers to-day perform the work ofthe former thirty-two. 

This sort of thing is spreading through the business world and beyondit in every direction. Even the artists are studying the bearing ofindustrial efficiency on the arts of sculpture, music, literature, architecture, and painting. But beyond the card catalogue and thefiling cabinet the artists find that this new gospel has little tooffer them. Their sympathies go out, instead, to a different kind ofefficiency. The kind that bids fair to shatter their old lives to bitsand re-mold them nearer to the heart's desire is not industrial buthuman. For inspiration it goes back of the age of Brandeis to the ageof Pericles. 

The enthusiasm for human efficiency is beginning to rival that forindustrial efficiency. Preventive medicine, public playgrounds, thenew health education, school hygiene, city planning, eugenics, housingreform, the child-welfare and country-life movements, the cult ofexercise and sport--these all are helping to lower the death-rate andenrich the life-rate the world over. Health has fought with smoke andgerms and is now in the air. It would be strange if the receptivenature of the artist should escape the benignant infection. 

There is an excellent reason why human efficiency should appeal lessto the industrial than to the artistic worlds. Industry has a newsupply of human machines always available. Their initial cost isnothing. So it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, and installfresh ones. Thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in theSouthern mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap little boysand girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average fouror five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is, like Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It isdawning upon him that one chief reason why the old Greeks scaledParnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, andkept, their human machines in good order for the climb. They trainedfor the event as an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the Marathon. One other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancientGreece is that the non-artists trained also, and thus, through theirheightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers, becamemasters by proxy. But that is another chapter. 

Why has art never again reached the Periclean plane? Chiefly becausethe artist broke training when Greece declined, and has never sincethen brought his body up to the former level of efficiency. 

Now, as the physiological psychologists assure us, the artist needs agenerous overplus of physical vitality. The art-impulse is abrimming-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance. And thebest way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain thephysical. The artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full aspossible. He will soon find that he is greater than he knows. He willdiscover that he has, until then, been walking the earth more thanhalf a corpse. With joy he will come to see that living in a glow ofhealth bears the same relation to merely not being sick that a plungein the cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag in a hallbedroom. 

"All through the life of a feeble-bodied man, his path is lined withmemory's grave-stones which mark the spots where noble enterprisesperished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds. " Thuswrote the educator, Horace Mann. And his words apply with specialforce to the worker in the arts. One should bear in mind that thelatter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve-racking, confining, exhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But theclaims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spareintensity. Unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doingnothing at all. And to do his utmost he must keep his body in thatsupremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending todestroy. The one lasting solution is for him to reduce his workingtime to a safe maximum and increase his recreation and sleeping-timeto a safe minimum, and to train "without haste, without rest. "

"The first requisite to great intellectuality in a man is to be agood animal, " says Maxim the inventor. Hamerton, in his best-knownbook, offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of thefirst essentials of genius; and shows how triumphant a part it playedin the careers of such mighty men of intellectual valor as Leonardo daVinci, Kant, Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott. 

Is the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessaryto the artist? Then let him read biography and note the paralyzingeffect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and threequarter wellness. He will see that, as a rule, the masters have donetheir most telling and lasting work with the tides of physical vim atflood. For the genius is no Joshua. He cannot make the sun of the mindand the moon of the spirit stand still while the tides of health areebbing seaward. Indeed biography should not be necessary to convincethe fair-minded reader. Autobiography should answer. Just let himglance back over his own experience and say whether he has notthought his deepest thoughts and performed his most brilliant deedsunder the intoxication of a stimulant no less heady than that ofexuberant health. 

There is, of course, the vexed question of the sickly genius. Mypersonal belief is firm that, as a rule, he has won his triumphs_despite_ bad health, and not--as some like to imagine--because of badhealth. To this rule there are a few often cited exceptions. Now, noone can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer inthe works of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. The white plagueis a powerful mental stimulant. It is a double-distilled extract ofbaseless optimism. But this optimism, like that resulting from otherstimulants, is dearly bought. Its shrift is too short. And let nobodyforget that for each variety of pathological optimism and brillianceand beauty there are ninety and nine corresponding sorts ofpathological pessimism and dullness and ugliness induced by disordersof the liver, heart, stomach, brain, skin, and so on without end. 

The thing for artists to do is to find out what physical conditionsmake for the best art in the long run, and then secure theseconditions in as short a run as possible. If tuberculosis makes forit, then by all means let those of us who are sincerely devoted to artbe inoculated without delay. If the family doctor refuses to oblige, all we have to do is to avoid fresh air, kiss indiscriminately, practice a systematic neglect of colds, and frequent the subway duringrush hours. If alcohol makes for the best art, let us forthwith beadmitted to the bar--the stern judgment bar where each solitarydrinker is arraigned. For it is universally admitted that in art, quality is more important than quantity. "If that powerful corrosive, alcohol, only makes us do a little first-class work, what matter if itcorrode us to death immediately afterwards? We shall have had ourday. " Thus many a gallant soul argues. But is there not another idealwhich is as far above mere quality as quality is above mere quantity?I think there is. It is quantity of quality. And quantity of qualityis exactly the thing that cannot brook the corrosiveness of powerfulstimulants. 

I am not satisfied, however, that stimulants make entirely for thefine quality of even the short shrift. To my ear, tubercular optimism, when thumped on the chest, sounds a bit hollow. It does not ring quiteas true as healthy optimism because one feels in the long run itsautomatic, pathological character. Thus tubercular, alcoholized, anddrugged art may often be recognized by its somewhat artificial, unhuman, abnormal quality. I believe that if the geniuses who havedone their work under the influence of these stimulants had, instead, trained sound bodies as for an Olympic victory, the arts would to-daybe the richer in quantity of quality. On this point George Meredithwrote a trenchant word in a letter to W. G. Collins:

 I think that the notion of drinking any kind of alcohol as a stimulant for intellectual work can have entered the minds of those only who snatch at the former that they may conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants may refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body after labor of brain; they do not help it--not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff--or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the few at all eminent, who wrote after drinking. 

To reinforce the opinion of the great Englishman I cannot forbeargiving that of an equally great American:

 Never [wrote Emerson] can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.... The poet's habit of living should be set on so low a key that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. 

In other words, the artist should keep himself in a condition so fitas to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance. But this shouldalways flow as freely as beer at a college reunion. And there shouldalways be plenty in reserve. It were well to consider whether there isnot some connection between decadent art and decadent bodies. A friendof mine recently attended a meeting of decadent painters and reportedthat he could not find a chin or a forehead in the room. 

One reason why so many of the world's great since Greece haveneglected to store up an overplus of vitality is that exercise iswell-nigh indispensable thereto; and exercise has not seemed to themsufficiently dignified. We are indebted to the dark ages for this dullsuperstition. It was then that the monasteries built gloomy granitegreenhouses for the flower of the world's intellect, that it mightdeteriorate in the darkness and perish without reproducing its kind. The monastic system held the body a vile thing, and believed that todevelop and train it was beneath the dignity of the spiritually elect. So flagellation was substituted for perspiration, much as, in theOrient, scent is substituted for soap--and with no more satisfactoryresult. This false notion of dignity has since then, by keeping menout of flannels, gymnasium suits, running-tights, and overalls, performed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mindand stunting the fruit trees of the spirit. 

To-day, however, we are escaping from the old superstition. We beginto see that there is no complete dignity for man without a dignifiedphysique; and that there is no physical dignity to compare with thatof the hard-trained athlete. True, he who trains can hardly keep upthe old-time pose of the grand old man or the grand young man. He mustperforce be more human and natural. But this sort of grandeur is nowgoing out of fashion. And its absence must show to advantage in hiswork. 

As a rule the true artist is a most devoted and self-sacrificingperson. Ever since the piping times of Pericles he has usually beenwilling to sacrifice to the demands of his art most of the things heenjoys excepting poor health. Wife, children, friends, credit--all maygo by the board. But his poor health he addresses with solemn, scriptural loyalty: "Whither thou goest I will go: and where thoulodgest I will lodge. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will Ibe buried. " Not that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor health. But he most thoroughly enjoys a number of its causes. Sitting up toolate at night is what he enjoys; smoking too much, drinking too much, yielding to the exhausting sway of the divine efflatus for longerhours at a time than he has any business to, bolting unbalanced meals, and so on. 

But the artist is finding out that poor health is the very firstenjoyment which he ought to sacrifice; that the sacrifice is by nomeans as heroic as it appears; and that, once it is accomplished, theodds are that all the other things he thought he must offer up may beadded unto him through his own increased efficiency. 

No doubt, all this business of regimen, of constant alertness andpetty self-sacrifice, is bound to grow irksome before it settles downin life and becomes habitual. But what does a little irksomenesscount--or even a great deal of irksomeness--as against the long, deepthrill of doing better than you thought you ever knew how--of goingfrom strength to strength and creating that which will elevate anddelight mankind long after the pangs of installing regimen areforgotten and you have once and for all broken training and laid youdown to sleep over?

The reason why great men and women are so often cynical about theirown success is this: they have been so immoderate in their enjoymentof poor health that when the hour of victory comes, they lack theexuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring ofachievement or of any other pleasure. I believe that the successfulinvalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthyfailure about his failure. The latter is usually an optimist. But thisis a hard belief to substantiate. For the perfectly healthy failuredoes not grow on every bush. 

If only the physical conscientiousness of the Greeks had never beenallowed to die out, the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer, fairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, we shall never be able toreckon up our losses in genius: in Shakespeares whose births werefrustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possibleparents; in Schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causesbefore they had delivered a note of their message; in Giorgiones whoma suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have theirwork cheapened and curtailed. What overwhelming losses has art notsustained by having the ranks of its artists and their most creativeaudiences decimated by the dullness of mediocre health! It is hard toendure the thought of what the geniuses of the modern world might havebeen able to accomplish if only they had lived and trained likeathletes and been treated with a small part of the practicalconsideration and live sympathy which humanity bestows on a favoriteball-player or prize-fighter. 

To-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed againstthe truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is themother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only thestepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves thatsickness and morbidity are good for the arts, just as they delightedlyembrace the conviction, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life ofharassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to thetrue poet. The circumstance that this belief runs clean counter to theshowing of history does not embarrass them. Convinced against theirwill, most people are of the same opinion still. And theyenthusiastically assault and batter any one who points out the truth, as I shall endeavor to do in chapter eight. 

Even if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as little asa century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If RichardWagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catchingcold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary placesto overlook in "The Ring, " and would, instead, have three or four moreimmortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time towrite. One hates to think what Poe might have done in literature if hehad taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket. Tuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said sobefore the death of Keats!... 

It makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in astuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how thesole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn gameof _l'hombre_ with the philosopher Schelling. And then he wonderedwhy he could not get on with his writing and why he was forevercatching cold (_einen starken Schnupfen_); and why his head was sothick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. In hiscorrespondence with Goethe it is exasperating to observe that thesegreat poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight changeof temperature or humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdrawtheir health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it wouldhave been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have madethem health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows ofoutrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourishinspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case theirpublished works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but themasterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion oftheir _Sämmtliche Werke_ than they do. And the second part of "Faust"would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldomhaving wings to match those of the spirit. 

 "Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht Kein korperlicher Flügel sich gesellen. "

Some of the most opulent and powerful spirits ever seen on earth havescarcely done more than indicate what kind of birthrights theybartered away for a mess of pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased towrite poetry after thirty because, by dissipating his overplus oflife, he had too grievously wronged what he described as

 "This body that does me grievous wrong. "

After all, there are comparatively few masters, since the glory thatwas Greece, who have not half buried their talents in the earthydarkness of mediocre health. When we survey the army of modern genius, how little of the sustained ring and resilience and triumphantimmortal youth of real exuberance do we find there! Instead of a bandof sound, alert, well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit, behold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along withlack-luster eyes, or eyes bright with the luster of fever. And thepeople whom they serve are not entirely free from blame. They haveneglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks, or put shirts on theirbacks. As for footgear, it is the usual campaign army shoe, made ofblotting paper--the shoe that left red marks behind it at Valley Forgeand Gettysburg and San Juan Hill. I believe that a better time iscoming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn. For we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if theartist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able torun--not alone with patience, but also with the brilliance born ofabounding vitality--the race that is set before him. This dawningbelief is the greatest hope of modern art. 

It does one good to see how artists, here, there, and everywhere, arebeginning to grow enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodilyefficiency, and physically to "revive the just designs of Greece. " Theencouraging thing is that the true artist who once finds what animpulse is given his work by rigorous training, is never content toslump back to his former vegetative, death-in-life existence. Hisdaily prayer has been said in a single line by a recent American poet:

 "Life, grant that we may live until we die. "

In every way the artist finds himself the gainer by cutting down hishours of work to the point where he never loses his reserve of energy. He now is beginning to take absolute--not merely relative--vacations, and more of them. For he remembers that no man's work--not evenRembrandt's or Beethoven's or Shakespeare's--is ever _too_ good; andthat every hour of needed rest or recreation makes the ensuing workbetter. It is being borne in on the artist that a health-book likeFisher's "Making Life Worth While" is of as much professional value tohim as many a treatise on the practice of his craft. Insight into thephysiological basis of his life-work can save the artist, it seems, from those periods of black despair which he once used to employ inrunning his head against a concrete wall, and raging impotentlybecause he could not butt through. Now, instead of laying his futilityto a mysteriously malignant fate, or to the persecution of secretenemies, he is likely to throw over stimulants and late hours and taketo the open road, the closed squash-court, and the sleeping-porch. Andpresently armies cannot withhold him from joyful, triumphant labor. 

The artist is finding that exuberance, this Open Sesame to the thingsthat count, may not be won without the friendly collaboration of thepores; and that two birds of paradise may be killed with one stone(which is precious above rubies) by giving the mind fun while onegives the pores occupation. Sport is this precious stone. There is, ofcourse, something to be said for sportless exercise. It is fairlygood for the artist to perform solemn antics in a gymnasium class, togesture impassionedly with dumb-bells, and tread the mill of thecircular running-track. But it is far better for him to go in withequal energy for exercise which, while developing the body, re-createsthe mind and spirit. That kind of exercise is best, in my opinion, which offers plenty of variety and humor and the excitement ofcompetition. I mean games like tennis, baseball, handball, golf, lacrosse, and polo, and sports like swift-water canoeing andfly-fishing, boxing, and fencing. These take the mind of the artistquite away from its preoccupations and then restore it to them, unlesshe has taken too much of a good thing, with a fresh viewpoint and azest for work. 

Sport is one of the chief makers of exuberance because of its purging, exhilarating, and constructive effects on body, mind, and spirit. Somany contemporary artists are being converted to sport that theartistic type seems to be changing under our eyes. It was onlyyesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, ormusic was a sickly, morbid, anæmic, peculiar specimen, distrusted atsight by the average man, and a shining mark for all the cast-off witof the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in "Patience. " Hewas a "foot-in-the-grave young man, " or a "_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ youngman. " He was

 "A most intense young man, A soulful-eyed young man. An ultra-poetical, superæsthetical, Out-of-the-way young man. "

To-day, what a change! Where is this young man? Most of his ilk haveaccompanied the snows of yester-year. And a goodly proportion of thosewho make merry in their room are sure-eyed, well set-up, ruddy, muscular chaps, about whom the average man may jeer and quoteslanderous doggerel only at his peril. But somehow or other theaverage man likes this new type better and does not want to jeer athim, but goes and buys his work instead. 

Faint though distinct, one begins to hear the new note of exuberancespreading through the arts. On canvas it registers the fact that thepainters are migrating in hordes to live most of the year in the opencountry. It vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musicalperformer like Willeke, the 'cellist. Like a starter's pistol itsounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like JohnMasefield and Alfred Noyes. One has only to compare the overflowinglife and sanity of workers like these with the condition of theordinary "Out-of-the-way young man" to see what a gulf yawns betweenexuberance and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a statesomewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity. And I believe that asyet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physicalrenaissance. Wait until this new religion of exuberance is a fewgenerations older and eugenics has said her say!

Curiously enough, the decadent artists who pride themselves on theirextreme modernity are the ones who now seem to cling with the mostreactionary grip to the old-fashioned, invertebrate type of physique. The rest are in a fair way to undergo such a change as came to Queed, the sedentary hero of Mr. Harrison's novel, when he took up boxing. Assport and the artists come closer together, they should have a goodeffect on one another. The artists will doubtless make sport moreformful, rhythmical, and beautiful. Sport, on the other hand, oughtbefore long to influence the arts by making sportsmen of the artists. 

Now good sportsmanship is composed of fairness, team-work, the graceof a good loser, the grace of a good winner, modesty, and gameness. The first two of these amount to an equitable passion for a fair fieldand no favor, and a willingness to subordinate star-play, or personalgain, to team-play, or communal gain. Together they imply a feelingfor true democracy. To be converted to the religion of sportsmanshipmeans to become more socially minded. I think it is more than acoincidence that at the moment when the artists are turning to sport, their work is taking on the brotherly tone of democracy. The call ofbrotherhood is to-day one of the chief preoccupations of poetry, thedrama, ideal sculpture, and mural decoration. For this rapid change Ishould not wonder if the democracy of sportsmanship were in partresponsible. 

The third element of sportsmanship is the grace of a good loser. Artists to-day are better losers than were the "foot-in-the-graveyoung men. " Among them one now finds less and less childish petulance, outspoken jealousy of others' success, and apology for their ownfailure. Some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering thatthe good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat. Andthey are importing these manly tactics into the game of art. It hasnot taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself whohides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They areimpressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invadingthe less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair aschess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recentchess match between Lasker and Capablanca:

 Illness shall not interfere with the playing of any game, on the ground that it is the business of the players so to train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect condition; and it is their duty, which by this rule is enforced, to study their health and live accordingly. 

The fourth factor of sportsmanship is the grace of a good winner. Itwould seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep fromgloating over his vanquished rival, but also to be generous andminimize his own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did all theapologizing. To-day less apologizing is done by the failure and moreby the success. The master in art is learning modesty, and from whombut the master in sport? There are in the arts to-day fewermegalomaniacs and persons afflicted with delusions of grandeur thanthere were among the "_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young men. " Sport has madethem more normal spiritually, while making them more normalphysically. It has kept them younger. Old age has been attacked anddriven back all along the line. One reason why we no longer have somany grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Insteadwe have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. WeirMitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionaryfossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future ofprogress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion, "writes Bourne in "Youth, " "can, by caring for the physical basis, keepthemselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up withitself and becoming contemporaneous. "

Gameness is the final factor of good sportsmanship. In the matter ofgameness, I grant that sport has little to teach the successfulartist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency--inshort, the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts. Ittakes the Browning spirit of those who

 "fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake. "

It takes the typical Anglo-Saxon gameness of Johnny Armstrong of theold ballad:

 "Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all. I am a little hurt, but I am not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed a while, And then I'll rise and fight with you again. '"

Yes, but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have notyet succeeded--perhaps for want of these very qualities? I believethat a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship, acting upon a newlydeveloped body, will presently bring to many a disheartened strugglerjust that increment of resilient gameness which will mean successinstead of failure. 

Thus, while our artists show a tendency to hark back to the Greekphysical ideal, they are not harking backward but forward when theyyield to the mental and spiritual influences of sportsmanship. Forthis spirit was unknown to the ancient world. Until yesterday art andsportsmanship never met. But now that they are mating I am confidentthat there will come of this union sons and daughters who shalljoyfully obey the summons that is still ringing down to us over theheads of the anæmic contemporaries of the exuberant old sportsman, Walt Whitman:

 "Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. "

VII

PRINTED JOY

 _The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than anything else in life. _

RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

America is trying to emerge from the awkward age. Its body isfull-grown. Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. Whatdoes this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it mostneeds contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, thewisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme withpoetry's profound, spiritual insights. 

The promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly thisto-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summedup in that curious symbol which appears over the letter _n_ in theword "cañon. " A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of theAmerican poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high pointabout the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fellinto a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to reviveso rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. Thisrenaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority ofreaders and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let usglance at a few of the more popular explanations. 

Many say that poetry declined in America because we turned ourselvesinto a nation of entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is true, how do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds andwaterfalls, for groves of ancient trees, national parks, andcity-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annualexpenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, theFatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishingcondition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelesslymaterialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such ahigh world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original, most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestivelandscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is noutterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras, that produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury, French, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than WallStreet's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers ofNew York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, BarHarbor's Building of Arts, West Point, and Princeton University. It isplain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism. 

Other philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetrywas the fault of the poets themselves. Popular interest slackened, they say, because the art first degenerated. Now an obvious answer tothis is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become, men may always turn, if they will, to those dead poets of old who liveforever on their shelves. But let us grant for the sake of argumentthat any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effectpoetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recallthe situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poeticappreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, andWhitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment, and the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was therare genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-daythe most popular of our poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was inhis prime. Thus it appears that public appreciation, and not creativepower, was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of theParnassian hill. Not until then did the poet come "tumbling after. "

Moreover, in the light of modern æsthetic psychology, this seems themore natural order of events. It takes two to make a work of art: oneto produce, one to appreciate. The creative appreciator is acorrelative of all artistic expression. It is almost impossible forthe artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphereexhaled by the ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the callous, orthe actively hostile. It follows that the demand for poetry is createdno more by the supply than the supply is created by the demand. Thusthe general indifference to this one department of American art was_not_ primarily caused by the degenerating supply. 

The decline and fall of our poetic empire have yet other Gibbons whosay that our civilization suddenly changed from the country to theurban type, and that our love of poetry began to disappearsimultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and themushroom growth of the large cities. So far I agree; but not withtheir reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities aresuch dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymousonly with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germanscall the "heaven-scratcher, " with elevated railways, "sand hogs, "whirring factories, and alleys reeking with the so-called "dregs" ofEurope. They claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar creed of themodern city is epitomized by such things as a certain signboard in NewYork, which offers a typically neo-urban solution of the old problem, "What is art?" --------------- | PARAGON PANTS | | ARE ART | ---------------

the board declares. And this, they say, is about as poetic as a largecity ever becomes. 

Now let us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of Mr. James Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almostcompletely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, andthe slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has piercedstraight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beautyshimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of thebuilders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantlyhurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at playwith elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim andglorious a battlefield as any Tours or Gettysburg of them all. And thedingy, battered old "L" train, as it clatters through the East Sideearly on "morose, gray Monday morning, " becomes a divine chariot

 "winging through Deeps of the Lord with its eighty Earth-anchored Souls. "

Oh, yes; there is "God's plenty" of poetry in these sights and sounds, if only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness. But there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawnfrom the city by him who, instead of thus straitly confining his gazeto any one aspect of urban life, is able to see it steadily and see itwhole, with its subtle _nuances_ and its over-powering dramaticcontrasts--as a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, might seeit if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold'ssculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuousbeauty. What "songs greater than before known" might such a poet notsing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxonculture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity ofSt. Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored life of allsoutheastern Europe surging about that slender iron fence--children ofthe blood of Chopin and Tschaikowsky; of Gutenberg, Kossuth, andNapoleon; of Isaiah and Plato, Leonardo and Dante--with the wildstrains of the gypsy orchestra floating across Second Avenue, and tothe southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of buildersclambering on the cupola of a neighboring Giotto's tower built ofsteel? Who dares say that the city is unpoetic? _It is one of the mostpoetic places on earth. _

These, then, are the chief explanations which have been offered usto-day of the historic decline of the American poetry-lover. We weighthem, and find them wanting. Why? Because they have sought, likeradiographers, far beneath the surface; whereas the real trouble hasbeen only skin deep. I shall try to show the nature of this trouble;and how, by beginning to cure it, we have already brought on a poeticrenaissance. 

Most of us who care for poetry frequently have one experience incommon. During our summer vacations in the country we suddenlyre-discover the well-thumbed "Golden Treasury" of Palgrave, and the"Oxford Book of Verse" which have been so unaccountably neglectedduring the city winter. We wander farther into the poetic fields andrevel in Keats and Shakespeare. We may even attempt once more to getbeyond the first book of the "Faërie Queene, " or fumble again at thecombination lock which seems to guard the meaning of the second partof "Faust. " And we find these occupations so invigorating and joyfulthat we model and cast an iron resolution to the effect that thiswinter, whatever betide, we will read a little poetry every day, orevery week, as the case may be. On that we plunge back into thebeautiful, poetic, inspiring city, and adhere to our poetry-readingprogram--for exactly a fortnight. Then, unaccountably, our resolvebegins to slacken. We cannot seem to settle our minds to orderedrhythms "where more is meant than meets the ear. " Our resolvecollapses. Once again Palgrave is covered with dust. But vacation timereturns. After a few days in green pastures and beside still watersthe soul suddenly turns like a homing-pigeon to poetry. And the old, perplexing cycle begins anew. 

A popular magazine once sent a certain young writer and ardentamateur of poetry on a long journey through the Middle West. He tookbut one book in his bag. It was by Whitman (the poet of cities, mark). And he determined to read it every evening in his bedroom after thetoils of the day. The first part of the trip ran in the country. "Afoot and light-hearted" he took to the open road every morning, andreveled every evening in such things as "Manahatta, " "The Song ofJoys, " and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. " Then he carried his poet ofcities to a city. But the two would have nothing to do with oneanother. And to the traveler's perplexity, a place no larger thanColumbus, Ohio, put a violent end to poetry on that trip. 

In our day most poetry-lovers have had such experiences. These havebeen hard to explain, however, only because their cause has beenprobed for too profoundly. _The chief cause of the decline of poetrywas not spiritual but physical. _ Cities are not unpoetic in spirit. Itis only in the physical sense that Emerson's warning is true: "Ifthou fill thy brain with Boston and New York ... Thou shalt find noradiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods. " Thetrouble was this: that the modern type of city, when it started intobeing, back in the seventies, began to take from men, and to use up, that margin of nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of vitality ofwhich so much has already been said in this book, and which is alwaysneeded for the true appreciation of poetry. Grant Allen has shown thatman, when he is conscious of a superfluity of sheer physical strength, gives himself to play; and in like manner, when he is conscious of asuperfluity of receptive power, _which has a physical basis_, he giveshimself to art. 

Now, though all of the arts demand of their appreciators this overplusof nervous energy (and Heaven knows perfectly well how inadequate asupply is offered up to music and the arts of design!), yet theappreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands thisbloom on the cheek of existence. For poetry, with quite as much ofemotional demand as the others, combines a considerably greater andmore persistent intellectual demand, involving an unusual amount ofphysical wear and tear. Hence, in an era of overstrain, poetry is thefirst of the arts to suffer. 

Most lovers of poetry must realize, when they come to consider it, that their pleasure in verse rises and falls, like the column ofmercury in a barometer, with the varying levels of their physicaloverplus. Physical overplus, however, is the thing which life in amodern city is best calculated to keep down. 

Surely it was no mere coincidence that, back there in the seventies, just at the edge of the poetic decline, city life began to grow soimmoderately in volume and to be "speeded up" and "noised up" soabruptly that it took our bodies by surprise. This process has kept onso furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able tocatch up. No large number have yet succeeded in readjustingthemselves completely to the new pace of the city. And this continuesto exact from most of us more nervous energy than any life may, whichwould keep us at our best. Hence, until we have succeeded either inaccomplishing the readjustment, or in spending more time in thecountry, the appreciation of poetry has continued to suffer. 

Even in the country, it is, of course, perfectly true that life spinsfaster now than it used to--what with telephones and inter-urbantrolleys, the motor, and the R. F. D. But this rural progress hasarrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powersof readjustment. When we go from city to country we recede to a rateof living with which our nervous systems can comfortably fall in, andstill control for the use of the mind and spirit a margin of thatdelicious vital bloom which resembles the ring of the overtones insome beautiful voice. 

But how is it practicable to keep this margin in the city, when theroar of noisy traffic over noisy pavements, the shrieks of newsboy andpeddler, the all-pervading chronic excitement, the universalobligation to "step lively, " even at a funeral, are every instantlaying waste our conscious or unconscious powers? How are we to givethe life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin isforever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due tolack of sleep, unhygienic surroundings, constant interruption (or theexpectation thereof), and the impossibility of relaxation owing to thenever-ending excitement and interest and sexual stimulus of the greathuman pageant--its beauty and suggestiveness?

Apart from the general destruction of the margin of energy, onespecial thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry isto keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of theimportance of the present moment. We might call this sense thejournalistic spirit of the city. How many typical metropolitans oneknows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whateveris just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire, or a neuræsthete--if one may coin a word--who perceives a spider onher collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, ofcourse, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of ourinnumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely inthe present minute, and often in the very most sensational second ofthat minute, that one grows impatient of the "olds, " and comes toregard a constantly renewed and increased dose of "news" as the onlypresent help in a chronic time of trouble. This is a kind of mentaldrug-habit. And its origin is physical. It is a morbid conditioninduced by the over-paced life of cities. 

Long before the rise of the modern city--indeed, more than a centuryago--Goethe, who was considerably more than a century ahead of hisage, wrote to Schiller from Frankfort of the journalistic spirit ofcities and its relation to poetry:

 It seems to me very remarkable how things stand with the people of a large city. They live in a constant delirium of getting and consuming, and the thing we call atmosphere can neither be brought to their attention nor communicated to them. All recreations, even the theater, must be mere distractions; and the great weakness of the reading public for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that the former always, and the latter generally, brings distraction into the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I have noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions--or at least in so far as they _are_ poetic--which seems to me to follow quite naturally from these very causes. Poetry requires, yes, it absolutely commands, concentration. It isolates man against his own will. It forces itself upon him again and again; and is as uncomfortable a possession as a too constant mistress. 

If this reporter's attitude of mind was so rampant in cultivated urbanGermany a century ago as to induce "a sort of dislike of poeticproductions, " what sort of dislike of them must it not be inducingto-day? For the appreciation of poetry cannot live under the sameroof with the journalistic spirit. The art needs long, quiet vistasbackward and forward, such as are to be had daily on one of those"lone heaths" where Hazlitt used to love to stalk ideas, but such asare not to be met with in Times Square or the Subway. 

The joyful side of the situation is that this need is being met. A fewyears ago the city dwellers of America began to return to nature. Themovement spread until every one who could afford it, habitually fledfrom the city for as long a summer outing as possible. More and morepeople learned the delightful sport of turning an abandoned farm intoa year-round country estate. The man who was tied to a city officeformed the commuting habit, thus keeping his wife and childrenpermanently away from the wear and tear of town. The suburban area wasimmensely increased by the rapid spread of motoring. 

Thus, it was recently made possible for hundreds of thousands ofAmericans to live, at least a considerable part of the year, wherethey could hoard up an overplus of vitality. The result was that thesewell-vitalized persons, whenever they returned to the city, werebetter able to stand--and adjust themselves to--the severe urban pace, than were the fagged city people. It was largely by the impact of thisnew vitality that the city was roused to the importance of physicalefficiency, so that it went in for parks, gymnasia, baths, health andwelfare campaigns, athletic fields, playgrounds, Boy Scouts, CampfireGirls, and the like. 

There are signs everywhere that we Americans have, by wise living, begun to win back the exuberance which we lost at the rise of themodern city. One of the surest indications of this is the fact thatthe nation has suddenly begun to read poetry again, very much as theexhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns again to his Palgraveduring the third week of vacation. In returning to neglected nature weare returning to the most neglected of the arts. The renaissance ofpoetry is here. And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore begin tovie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists. Moreover thisis only the beginning. Aviation has come and is reminding us of theancient prophecy of H. G. Wells that the suburbs of a city like NewYork will now soon extend from Washington to Albany. Urban centers arebeing diffused fast; but social-mindedness is being diffused faster. Men are wishing more and more to share with each brother man thebrimming cup of life. Aircraft and true democracy are on the way tobear all to the land of perpetual exuberance. And on their wings thepoet will again mount to that height of authority and esteem fromwhich, in the healthful, athletic days of old, Homer and Sophoclesdominated the minds and spirits of their fellow-men. That is tosay--he will mount if we let him. In the following chapter I shallendeavor to show why the American poet has as yet scarcely begun toshare in the poetry-renaissance. 

VIII

THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS

 _Nothing probably is more dangerous for the human race than science without poetry, civilization without culture. _

HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN. 

 _A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke. _

MAX EASTMAN. 

In the last two chapters we have seen the contemporary master ofvarious arts, and the reader of poetry, engaged in cultivating thejoyful heart. But there is one artist who has not yet been permittedto join in this agreeable pastime. He is the American poet. And as hisinclusion would be an even more joyful thing for his land than forhimself, this book may not ignore him. 

The American poet has not yet begun to keep pace with thepoetry-lovers' renaissance. He is no very arresting figure; andtherefore you, reader, are already considering a skip to chapter nine. Well, if you are no more interested in him or his possibilities thanis the average American consumer of British poetry--I counsel you byall means to skip in peace. But if you are one of the few who discernthe promise of a vast power latent in the American poet, and wouldgladly help in releasing this power for the good of the race, I canshow you what is the matter with him and what to do about it. 

Why has the present renaissance of the poetry-lover not brought withit a renaissance of the American poet? Almost every reason but thetrue one has been given. The true reason is that our poets are tired. They became exhausted a couple of generations ago; and we have keptthem in this condition ever since. In the previous chapter we saw howcity life began abruptly to be speeded up in the seventies. At thattime the poet--like almost every one else in the city--was unable toreadjust his body at once to the new pace. He was like a six-daybicycle racer who should be lapped in a sudden and continued sprint. That sprint is still going on. Never again has the American poet feltthe abounding energy with which he began. And never has he overtakenthe leaders. 

The reason why the poet is tired is that he lives in the over-pacedcity. The reason why he lives in the city is that he is chained to itby the nature of his hack-work. And the reason for the hack-work isthat the poet is the only one of all the artists whose art almostnever offers him a living. He alone is forced to earn in other waysthe luxury of performing his appointed task in the world. For, asGoethe once observed, "people are so used to regarding poetic talentas a free gift of the gods that they think the poet should be asfree-handed with the public as the gods have been with him. "

The poet is tired. Great art, however, is not the product ofexhaustion, but of exuberance. It will have none of the skimmed milkof mere existence. Nothing less than the thick, pure cream ofabounding vitality will do. The exhausted artist has but threecourses open to him: either to stimulate himself into a counterfeit, and suicidally brief, exuberance; or to relapse into mediocrity; or togain a healthy fullness of life. 

In the previous chapter it was shown why poetry demands moreimperatively than any other art, that the appreciator shall bring toit a margin of vitality. For a like reason poetry makes this sameinordinate demand upon its maker. It insists that he shall keephimself even more keenly alive than the maker of music or sculpture, painting or architecture. This is the reason why, in the present eraof overstrain, the poet's art has been so swift to succumb and so slowto recuperate. 

The poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able toreadjust his body to the pace of modern urban life, so that he maylive among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations andstill keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into hispoems. Under these new and strenuous conditions, very little realpoetry has been written in our cities. American poets, despite theirgenuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amidits turmoil, have almost invariably done the best of their actuallycreative work during the random moments that could be snatched in woodand meadow, by weedy marsh or rocky headland. To his friends it wastouching to see with what wistfulness Richard Watson Gilder used toseek his farm at Tyringham for a day or two of poetry after afortnight of furious office life. Even Walt Whitman--poet of citiesthat he was--had to retire "precipitate" from his beloved Manahatta inorder fitly to celebrate her perfections. In fact, Stedman was perhapsthe only one of our more important singers at the close of the centurywho could do his best work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to thepoet: "Thou shalt lie close hid with Nature, and canst not be affordedto the Capitol or the Exchange. " But it is pleasant to recall howeven that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in thepeace of the country. 

One reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women--andespecially of unmarried women--among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command themeans of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as anantecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost Englishwriters live far from the town. Most of the more promising Americanpoets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to dowith the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of thetwentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of theirpotential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite ontheir own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in thelarge cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harnessinto which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced. Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading forpublishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to itthat the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of abull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of adray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to makeup in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city doesnot consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with hisprobably inadequate physique, chafes against the hack-work and yieldsto the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him. Then, after yielding, he chafes again, and more bitterly, at hisfaint, imperfect expression of these dreams, recognizing in despairthat he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuouslife about him. So he burns the torch of life at both ends, and thesuperhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle. Then suddenly the light fails altogether. 

Those poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to doeven a small amount of steady, fine-grained work in the city. The restare as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarredfrom learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil. Inher autobiography Miss Jane Addams speaks some luminous words aboutthe state of society which forces finely organized artistic talentinto the wearing struggle for mere existence. She refers to it as "oneof the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of thismost precious human faculty, this consummate possession of allcivilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may betreasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost. "

I wonder if we have ever stopped to ask ourselves why so many of ourmore recent poets have died young. Was it the hand of God, or theeffort to do the work of two in a hostile environment, that struckdown before their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, Edward RowlandSill, Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, WilliamVaughn Moody, and the like? These were poets whom we bound to thestrenuous city, or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much oftheir vitality. An old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius"will out. " This is true, but only in a sadder sense than the stupidlyproverbial one. As a matter of fact, the light of genius is all tooeasily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we ofAmerica are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius asan unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardyplant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us haveyet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of anindestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usuallydemands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a reallyexcellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive andproduce the finest possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormoussolicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with thattrouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to hisbest work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realizethat the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, ineven the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as thesparks to fly upward. " They see that fortune has slain its hundreds ofgeniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that theirown real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have too littleadversity to contend with, but lest he have too much. 

We have heard not a little about the conservation of land, ore, wood, and water. The poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort ofconservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college. I mean the conservation of energy. Our poetry will never emerge fromthe dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage toovertake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it--oruntil we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable partof every year to the country--the place where the poet belongs. 

It is true that the masters of the other arts have not fared any toowell at our hands; but they do not need help as badly by far as thepoets need it. What with commissions and sales, scholarships, fellowships, and substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors andarchitects and even the musicians have, broadly speaking, been able tolearn and practise their art in that peace and security which iswell-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productivemastery. They have usually been able to spend more of the year in thecountry than the poet. And even when bound as fast as he to the city, they have not been forced to choose between burning the candle atboth ends or abandoning their art. 

But for some recondite reason--perhaps because this art cannot betaught at all--it has always been an accepted American conviction thatpoetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issueby highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength andfaculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand boutwith the wolf on the threshold--a most practical, philistine wolf, moreover, which never heard of rhyme or rhythm, and whose wholeacquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiaritywith frayed masculine and feminine endings. 

As a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariablybeen obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazardaffair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to goout and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leavelittle Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister oncrusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much ofour verse "jest growed, " like Topsy. And the resulting state of thingshas but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poetsspend their days in correcting encyclopædia proof, or clerking, orrunning, notebook in hand, to fires--inheres in the eternal fitness ofthings. 

Bergson says in "Creative Evolution, " that "an intelligence whichreflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, overand above practically useful efforts. " Does it not follow that when wemake the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort ofrunning to fires, we prevent him from enjoying the very advantagewhich made man a reflective being, to say nothing of a poet?

Perhaps we have never yet realized that this attitude of ours wouldturn poetic success into a question of the survival of that paradox, the commercially shrewd poet, or of the poet who by some happyaccident of birth or marriage has been given an income, or of thatprodigy of versatility who, in our present stage of civilization, besides being mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's calling, isalso physically fit to bear the strain of doing two men's work; or, perhaps we had better say, three men's--for simply being a good poetis about as nerve-consuming an occupation as any two ordinary mencould support in common--and the third would have to run to fires forthe first two. 

It is natural to the character of the American business man to declarethat the professional poet has no reason for existence _qua_ poetunless he can make his art support him. But let the business man bearin mind that if he had the power to enforce such a condition, he wouldbe practically annihilating the art. For it is literally true that, ifplays were excluded, it would take not even a five-foot shelf tocontain all the first-rate poetry which was ever written by poets in astate of poetic self-support. "Could a man live by it, " the author of"The Deserted Village" once wrote to Henry Goldsmith, "it were notunpleasant employment to be a poet. " Alas, the fatal condition! Forthe art itself has almost never fed and clothed its devotee--at leastuntil his best creative days are done and he has become a "grand oldman. " More often the poet has attained not even this reward. Wordsworth's lines on Chatterton have a wider application:

 "What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow-- Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find Whose footsteps mark the music of mankind! 'T was his to lend a life: 't was Man's to borrow: 'T was his to make, but not to share, the morrow. "

Those who insist upon judging the art of poetry on the hard American"cash basis" ought to be prepared, for the sake of consistency, toapply the same criterion as well to colleges, public schools, symphonyorchestras, institutions for scientific research, missions, settlements, libraries, and all other unlucrative educationalenterprises. With inexorable logic they should be prepared to insistthat people really do not desire or need knowledge or any sort ofuplift because they are not prepared to pay its full cost. It isprecisely this sort of logic which would treat the Son of Man if Heshould appear among us, to a bench in Bryant Park, and a place in thebread-line, and send the mounted police to ride down his socialisticmeetings in Union Square. No! poetry and most other forms of highereducation have always had to be subsidized--and probably always will. When wisely subsidized, however, this art is very likely to repay itssupport in princely fashion. In fact, I know of no other investmentto-day that would bid fair to bring us in so many thousand per cent. Of return as a small fresh-air fund for poets. 

We Americans are rather apt to complain of the comparatively poor, unoriginal showing which our poets have as yet made among those ofother civilized nations. We are quietly disgusted that only two ofall our bards have ever made their work forcibly felt in Europe; andthat neither Poe nor Whitman has ever profoundly influenced the greatmasses of his own people. 

Despite our splendid inheritance, our richly mingled blood, ourincomparably stimulating New World atmosphere, why has our poetry madesuch a meager showing among the nations? The chief reason is obvious. _We have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were workingfor us. _ True, we have the reputation of being an open-handed, even anextravagantly generous folk. But thriftiness in small things oftengoes with an extravagant disposition, much as manifestations of pietyoften accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placedoutside the edifice. We have spent millions on bronze and marblebook-palaces which shall house the works of the poets. We have spentmore millions on universities which shall teach these works. But asfor making it possible for our few real poets to produce works, andcompletely fulfill their priceless functions, we have always satisfiedourselves by decreeing: "Let there be a sound cash basis. "

So it came to pass that when the first exuberant, pioneerenergy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormaltype of city life, it became no longer possible for the poets to putas much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines, after they hadtoilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders. For often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneervitality. And how did we treat them from the first? In the old days weset Longfellow and Lowell at one of the most exhausting ofprofessions--teaching. We made Emerson do one-night lecture-stands allwinter long in the West--sometimes for five dollars a lecture and feedfor his horse. We made Bryant ruin a gift as elemental asWordsworth's, in journalism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours ofthe day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices and drink. We madeWhitman drive nails, set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau inWashington, from which he was dismissed for writing the most originaland the most poetic of American books. Later he was rescued from wantonly by the humiliation of a public European subscription. Lanier weallowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill himself sofast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing theflute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing"Sunrise" until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips. Andthis was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry ofreproach:

 "Why can we poets dream us beauty, so, But cannot dream us bread?"

With Lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-upprocess began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland Sill we did awaywith in his early prime through journalism and teaching. We curbedand pinched and stunted the promising art of Richard Watson Gilder bypiling upon him several men's editorial work. We created a poeticresemblance between Arthur Upson and the hero of "The Divine Fire" byemploying him in a bookstore. We made William Vaughn Moody teach in acity environment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later set the handthat gave us "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" to the building of popularmelodrama. These are only a tithe of the things that we have done tothe hardiest of those benefactors of ours:

 "The poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight. "

It is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those less sturdy ones whohave remained mute, inglorious Miltons for lack of a little practicalappreciation and a small part of a small fresh-air fund. 

So far as I know, Thomas Bailey Aldrich is the only prominent figureamong the poets of our elder generations who was given the means ofdevoting himself entirely to his art. And even _his_ fortune was notleft to him by his practical, poetry-loving friend until so late inthe day that his creative powers had already begun to decline throughage and over-much magazine editing. 

More than almost any other civilized nation we have earned AllenUpward's reproach in "The New Word":

 There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, in his march upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main body. Humanity condemns equally those who are too good for it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve side by side.... Literature is the chief ornament of humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead, and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel.... England will always have fifteen thousand a year for some respectable clergyman; she will never have it for Shelley. 

Yes, but how incomparably better England has treated her poets thanAmerica has treated hers! What convenient little plums, as De Quinceysomewhat wistfully remarked, were always being found for Wordsworthjust at the psychological moment; and they were not withheld, moreover, until he was full of years and honors. Indeed, we owe thispoet to the poet-by-proxy of whom Wordsworth wrote, in "The Prelude":

 "He deemed that my pursuits and labours, lay Apart from all that leads to wealth, or even A necessary maintenance insures Without some hazard to the finer sense. "

How tenderly the frail bodies of Coleridge and of Francis Thompsonwere cared for by their appreciators. How potently the Civil List andthe laureateship have helped a long, if most uneven, line of England'ssingers. Over against our solitary ageing Aldrich, how many greatEnglish poets like Byron, Keats, the Brownings, Tennyson, andSwinburne have found themselves with small but independent incomes, free to give their whole unembarrassed souls and all that in them wasto their art. And all this since the close of the age of patronage!

Why have we never had a Wordsworth, or a Browning? For one thing, because this nation of philanthropists has been too thoughtless tofound the small fellowship in creative poetry which might have freed aWordsworth of ours from communion with a cash-book to wander chantinghis new-born lines among the dreamy Adirondack lakes or the frowningSierras; or that might have sought out our Browning in his grocerystore and built him a modest retreat among the Thousand Islands. Ifnot too thoughtless to act thus, we have been too timid. We have beentoo much afraid of encouraging weaklings by mistake. We have been, infact, more afraid of encouraging a single mediocre poet than ofneglecting a score of Shelleys. But we should remember that even ifthe weak are encouraged with the strong, no harm is done. 

It can not be too strongly insisted upon that the poor and mediocreverse which has always been produced by every age is practicallyinnocuous. It hurts only the publishers who are constantly beingimportuned to print the stuff, and the distinguished men and women whoare burdened with presentation copies or requests for criticism. Theseunfortunates all happen to be capable of emitting loud andauthoritative cries of distress about the menace of bad poets. But weshould discount these cries one hundred per cent. For nobody else ishurt by the bad poets, because nobody else pays the slightestattention to them. Time and their own "inherent perishableness" soonremove all traces of the poetasters. It were better to help hundredsof them than to risk the loss of one new Shelley. And do we realizehow many Shelleys we may actually have lost already? I think itpossible that we may have had more than one such potential singer towhom we never allowed any leisure or sympathy or margin of vitality toturn into poetry. Perhaps there is more grim truth than humor in MarkTwain's vision of heaven where Captain Stormfield saw a poet as greatas Shakespeare who hailed, I think, from Tennessee. The reason why theworld had never heard of him was that his neighbors in Tennessee hadregarded him as eccentric and had ridden him out of town on a rail andassisted his departure to a more congenial clime above. 

We complain that we have had no poet to rank with England's greatest. I fear that it would have been useless for us to have had such aperson. We probably would not have known what to do with him. 

I realize that mine is not the popular side of this question and thatan occasional poet with an income may be found who will even argueagainst giving incomes to other poets. Mr. Aldrich, for instance, wrote, after coming into his inheritance:

 "A man should live in a garret aloof, And have few friends, and go poorly clad, With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof, To keep the goddess constant and glad. "

But a friend of Mr. Aldrich's, one of his poetic peers, has assured methat it was not the poet's freedom from financial cares at all, butpremature age, instead, that made his goddess of poesy fickle afterthe advent of the pitifully belated fortune. Mr. Stedman spoke a fartruer word on this subject. "Poets, " he said, "in spite of theproverb, sing best when fed by wage or inheritance. " "'Tis theconvinced belief of mankind, " wrote Francis Thompson with a sardonicsmile, "that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if theAlmighty had constructed him like certain rudimentarily vocal dolls. ""No artist, " declares Arnold Bennett, "was ever assisted in his careerby the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by economicinferiority. " And Bliss Carman speaks out loud and bold: "The bestpoets who have come to maturity have always had some means oflivelihood at their command. The idea that any sort of artist orworkman is all the better for being doomed to a life of penuriousworry, is such a silly old fallacy, one wonders it could havepersisted so long. " The wolf may be splendid at suckling journalismand various other less inspired sorts of writing, but she is aferocious old stepmother to poetry. 

There are some who snatch eagerly at any argument in support of theexisting order, and who triumphantly point out the number of goodpoems that have been written under "seemingly" adverse conditions. Butthey do not stop to consider how much better these poems might havebeen made under "seemingly" favorable conditions. Percy Mackaye isright in declaring that the few singers left to English poetry afterour "wholesale driving-out and killing-out of poets ... Are of twosorts: those with incomes and those without. Among the former arefound most of the excellent names in English poetry, a fact which ishardly a compliment to our civilization. "

Would that one of those excellent philanthropists who has grown soaccustomed to giving a million to libraries and universities that theact has become slightly mechanical--might realize that he has, withall his generosity, made no provision as yet for helping one of themost indispensable of all educational institutions--the poet. Wouldthat he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derivefrom the universities--places whose conservative formalism is evendangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along withall the other students and pour him into their one mold. It isdistressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luringthem on with the glitter of cash prizes. One shudders to think of allthe fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctantyoung dry-as-dusts while they are preparing to pack still tighter thealready overcrowded ranks of "professors of English literature"--whoseprofession, as Gerald Stanley Lee justly remarks, is founded on thestriking principle that a very great book can be taught by a verylittle man. This is a department of human effort which, as now usuallyconducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry. Why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of theclass of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should wethink of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to bepenniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested, instead, in a few more professors of Victorian literature?

Why should not a few thousands out of the millions we spend oneducation be used to found fellowships of creative poetry? These wouldnot be given at first to those who wish to learn to write poetry; forthe first thousands would be far too precious for use in any suchwild-cat speculations. They would be devoted, rather, to poets ofproved quality, who have already, somehow, learned their art, and whoask no more wondrous boon from life than fresh air and time to regainand keep that necessary margin of vitality which must go to the makingof genuine poetry. 

I would not have the incumbent of such a fellowship, however, deprivedsuddenly of all outer incentives for effort. The abrupt transitionfrom constant worry and war among his members to an absolutelyunclouded life of pure vocation-following might be almost too violenta shock, and unsettle him and injure his productivity for a time. 

The award of such a fellowship must not, of course, involve the leasthint of charity or coercion. It should be offered and accepted as anhonor, not as a donation. The yearly income should, in my opinion, besmall. It should be such a sum as would almost, but not quite, supportthe incumbent very simply in the country, and still allow for booksand an occasional trip to town. In some cases an income of a thousanddollars, supplemented by the little that poetry earns and possibly bya random article or story in the magazines, would enable a poet tolead a life of the largest effectiveness. 

It is my belief that almost any genuine poet who is now kept in thewhirl by economic reasons and thus debarred from the free practice ofhis calling would gladly relinquish even a large salary and reduce hislife to simple terms to gain the inestimable privilege of devotinghimself wholly to his art before the golden bowl is broken. Many ofthose who are in intimate touch with the poets of America to-day couldshow any philanthropist how to do his land and the world more actual, visible, immediate good by devoting a thousand dollars to poetry, thanby allowing an hundred times that sum to slip into the ordinarywell-worn grooves of philanthropy. 

Some years ago a _questionnaire_ was submitted to various literary menby a poetry-lover who hoped to induce a wealthy friend to subsidizepoets of promise in case these literary leaders approved the plan. While the younger writers warmly favored the idea, a few of the olderones discouraged it. These were, in all cases, men who had made afinancial success in more lucrative branches of literature thanpoetry; and it was natural for the veterans, who had brawnilystruggled through the burden and heat of the day, to look with theunsympathetic eye of the sturdy upon those frailer ones of the risinggeneration who perhaps might, without assistance, be eliminated in therough-and-tumble of the literary market-place. Of course it was buthuman for the veterans to insist that any real genius among theiryouthful competitors "would out, " and that any assistance would butmake life too soft for the youngsters, and go to swell the growing"menace" of bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors of naturalselection. No doubt the generation of writers older than Wordsworthquite innocently uttered these very same sentiments in voices of deepauthority when it was proposed to offer this young person a chance tocompose in peace. No. One fears that the attitude of these veteranswas not wholly judicial. But then, why should any haphazard group ofcreative artists be expected to be judicial, anyway? One might asreasonably go to the Louvre for classes in conic sections, or to theGarden of the Gods for instruction in Rabbinical theology. 

Few supporters of the general plan, on the other hand, were wholly infavor of all the measures proposed for carrying it out. Some of themost telling criticisms went to show that while poets of undoubtedability ought to be helped, the method of their selection offers agrave difficulty. H. G. Wells, who heartily approved the main idea, brought out the fact that it would never do to leave the choice to ajury, as no jury would ever have voted for half of the great poets whohave perished miserably. Juries are much too conventionally minded. For they are public functionaries; or, if not that, at least they feelself-consciously as if they were going to be held publiclyresponsible, and are apt to bring extremely conventional, and perhapspriggish, standards to bear upon their choice. "They invariably becometimid and narrow, " wrote Mr. Wells, "and seek refuge in practical, academic, and moral tests that invariably exclude the real men ofgenius. "

Prizes and competitions were considered equally ill-advised methods ofselection. It is significant that these methods are now being rapidlydropped in the fields of sculpture and architecture. For the merethought of a competition is a thing essentially antagonistic to thecreative impulse; and talent is likely to acquit itself better thangenius in such a struggle. The idea of a poetic competition is a relicof a pioneer mode of thought. Mr. Wells concluded that the decisionshould be made by the individual. But I cannot agree with him thatthat same individual should be the donor of the fellowship. It seemsto me that this would-be savior of our American poetry should selectthe best judge of poets and poetry that he can discover and be guidedby his advice. 

On general principles, there are several things that this judge should_not_ be. He should not be a professor of English, because of theprofessor's usual bias toward the academic. Besides, these fellowshipsought not in any way to be associated with institutions oflearning--places which are apt to fetter poets and surround them withan atmosphere hostile to the creative impulse. Neither should thismomentous decision be left to editors or publishers, because they areusually suffering from literary indigestion caused by skimming toomany manuscripts too fast, and because, at any rate, they ordinarilypay little attention to poetry and hold it commercially "in one granddespise. " Nor should the normal type of poet be chosen as judge todecide this question. For the poet is apt to have a narrow, one-sidedview of the field. He has probably developed his own distinctive styleand personality at the expense of artistic catholicity and kindlybreadth of critical judgment. The creative and the critical facultiesare usually as distinct and as mutually exclusive spheres as that ofthe impassioned, partisan lawyer and the cool, impartial judge. 

To whom, then, should the decision be left? It should, in my opinion, be left to a real _judge_--to some broad, keen critic of poetry with aclear, unbiased contemporary view of the whole domain of the art. Itmatters not whether he is professional or amateur, so he is untouchedby academicism and has not done so much reading or writing as toimpair his mental digestion and his clarity of vision. Care, ofcourse, would have to be used in safeguarding the critic-judge againstundue pressure in favor of this candidate or that; and in safeguardingthe incumbent of the fellowship from yet more insidious influences. For the apparently liberated poet would merely have exchanged prisonsif he learned that the founder of the fellowship wished to dictatewhat sort of poetry he should write. 

The idea of poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps maysound. It is no mere empirical theory. Americans ought to be proud toknow that, in a modest way, it has recently been tried here, and isproving a success. I am told that already two masters of poetry havebeen presented to us as free workers in their art by two Bostonphilanthropists, and have been enabled to accomplish some of theirbest work through such fellowships as are here advocated. This factshould put cities like New York, Pittsburg, and Chicago on theirmettle. For they must realize that Boston, with her quiet, slow-moving, Old-World pace, has not done to poetry a tithe of theharm that her more energetic neighbors have, and should therefore notbe suffered to bear the entire brunt of the expiation. 

Men say that money cannot buy a joyful heart. But next to writing agreat poem, I can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than to knowthat a thousand of my dollars had enabled an imprisoned genius toshake from his shoes the dust of a city office and go for a year to"God's outdoors, " there to free his system of some of the beauty thathad chokingly accumulated there until it had grown an almostintolerable pain. What joy to know that my fellowship had given menthe modern New World "Hyperion, " or "Prelude, " or "Ring and the Book"!And even if that whole year resulted in nothing more than a "Skylark, "or a "Rabbi Ben Ezra, " or a "Crossing the Bar"--could one possiblyconsider such a result in the same thought-wave with dollars andcents?

But this thousand dollars might do something even better than helpproduce counterparts of famous poems created in other times and lands. It might actually secure the inestimable boon of a year's leisure, aprocession of peaceful vistas, and a brimming cup for one of that "newbrood" of "poets to come" which Walt Whitman so confidently countedupon to 'justify him and answer what he was for. ' This handful of goldmight make it possible for one of these new poets to come into hisown, and ours, at once, and in his own person accomplish that fusion, so devoutly to be wished, of those diverse factors of the greatestpoetry which have existed among us thus far only in awfulisolation--the possession of this one and that of our chief singers. 

How fervently we poetry-lovers wish that one of the captains ofindustry would feel impelled to put his hand into his pocket--if onlyinto his watch-pocket--or adorn his last testament with a modestcodicil! It would be such poetic justice if one of those who haveprospered through the very speeding-up process which has so seriouslycrippled our poetry, should devote to its service a small tithe ofwhat he has won from poetry's loss--and thus hasten our renaissance ofsingers, and bring a new dawn, 'brighter than before known, ' out ofthe dusk of the poets. 

IX

THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC

I wonder if any other invention has ever, in such a brief time, madeso many joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical music. It hasbrought light, peace, gladness, and the gift of self-expression toevery third or fourth flat, villa, and lonely farmhouse in the land. Its voice has literally gone out through all the earth, and with aswiftness more like that of light than of sound. 

Only yesterday we were marveling at the discovery of the largermagazine audience. Until then we had never dreamed of addressingmillions of fellow creatures at one time, as the popular magazine nowdoes. Imagine the astonished delight of Plato or Cervantes, Poe orDickens, if they had been given in one week an audience equivalent innumber to five thousand readers a year for ten centuries! Dickenswould have called it, I think, "immortality-while-you-wait. " Yet thissort of immortality was recently placed at the immediate disposal ofthe ordinary writer. 

The miracle was unique in history. But it did not long remain so. Notcontent with raining this wonder upon us, history at once poured downa greater. One morning we awoke to find a new and still vaster mediumof expression, a medium whose globe-girdling voice was to that of thefive-million reader magazine as the roar of Niagara to the roar of aPhiladelphia trolley-car. To-day, from wherever civilized man hasobtained even a temporary foothold, there arise without ceasing theaccents of mechanical music, which talk persuasively to all in alanguage so universal that even the beasts understand it and cockapplauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while themagazine writers now address the million, the composers and singersand players make their bows to the billion. 

Their omnipresence is astonishing. They are the last to bid youfarewell when you leave civilization. They are the first to greet youon your return. When I canoed across the wild Allagash country, I wassped from Moosehead Lake by Caruso, received with open arms at thehalfway house by the great-hearted Plancon, and welcomed to Fort Kentby Sousa and his merry men. With Schumann-Heinck, Melba, andTetrazzini I once camped in the heart of the Sierras. When I persistedto the uttermost secret corner of the Dolomites, I found myselfanticipated by Kreisler and his fiddle. They tell me that the portlyVictor Herbert has even penetrated with his daring orchestra throughdarkest Africa and gone on to arrange a special benefit, in his hometown, for the dalai-lama of Tibet. 

One of the most promising things about mechanical music is this: Nomatter what kind of music or quality of performance it offers you, you presently long for something a little better--unless yourdevelopment has been arrested. It makes small difference in thisrespect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happento own. It may be the phonograph. It may be the kind of automaticpiano which accurately reproduces the performances of the masterpianists. It may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies youwith technic ready-made, and allows you to throw your own soul intothe music, whether you have ever taken lessons or not. Or it may be acombination of the last two. The influence of these machines isprogressive. It stands for evolution rather than for devolution orrevolution. 

Often, however, the evolution seems to progress by sheer accident. This is the way the accident is likely to happen. Jones is buyingrecords for the family phonograph. One may judge of his particularstage of musical evolution by his purchases, which are: "Meet me inSt. Louis, Louis, " "Dance of the Honey Bells, " "Hello Central, Give meHeaven, " "Fashion Plate March, " and "I Know that I'll be Happy when IDie. " He also notices in the catalogue a piece called "TannhäuserMarch, " and, after some hesitation, buys this as well, because thename sounds so much like his favorite brand of beer that he suspectsit to be music of a convivial nature--a medley of drinking-songs, perhaps. 

But that evening in the parlor it does not seem much like beer. Whenthe Mephisto Military Band strikes it up--far from seeming in theleast alcoholic, it exhilarates nobody. So Jones inters it in thedarkest corner of the music-cabinet. And the family devote themselvesto the cake-walks and comic medleys, the fandangoes and tangos, thexylophone solos, the shakedowns and break-downs and the rags andtatters of their collection until they have thoroughly exhausted thedelights thereof. Then, having had time to forget somewhat theflatness of "Tannhäuser, " and for want of anything better to do, theytake out the despised record, dust it, and insert it into the machine. But this time, curiously enough, the thing does not sound quite soflat. After repeated playings, it even begins to rival the "FashionPlate March" in its appeal. And it keeps on growing in grace untilwithin a year the "Fashion Plate March" is as obsolete as fashionplates have a habit of growing within a year, while "Tannhäuser" haswon the distinction of being the best-wearing record in the cabinet. 

Then it begins to occur to the Jones family that there must be twokinds of musical food: candy and staples. Candy, like the "FashionPlate March, " tastes wonderfully sweet to the unsophisticated palateas it goes down; but it is easy to take too much. And the cheaper thecandy, the swifter the consequent revulsion of feeling. As for thestaples, there is nothing very piquant about their flavor; but if theyare of first quality, and if one keeps his appetite healthy, oneseems to enjoy them more and more and to thrive on them three times aday. 

Accordingly, Jones is commissioned, when next he visits themusic-store, to get a few more records like "Tannhäuser. " On thisoccasion, he may even be rash enough to experiment with a Schubertmarch, or a Weber overture, or one of the more popular movements of aBeethoven sonata. And so the train of evolution will rush onward, bearing the Joneses with it until fashion-plate marches are things ofthe misty, backward horizon, and the family has, by little and little, come to know and love the whole blessed field of classical music. Andthey have found that the word "classical" is not a synonym fordry-rot, but that it simply means the music that wears best. 

However the glorious mistake may occur, it is being made by someoneevery hour. By such hooks and crooks as these, good music is findingits way into more and more homes. Although its true "classical"nature is detected at the first trial, it is not thrown away, becauseit cost good money. It is put away and bides its time; and some daythe surprising fact that it has wearing qualities is bound to bediscovered. To those who believe in the law of musical evolution, andwho realize that mechanical music has reached the wide world, and iseven beginning to penetrate into the public library, the possibilityof these happy accidents means a sure and swift general development inthe appreciation of the best music. 

Those who know that man's musical taste tends to grow better and notworse, know also that _any_ music is better than no music. Amechanical instrument which goes is better than a new concert grandpiano that remains shut. 

"Canned music may not be the highest form of art, " the enthusiast willsay with a needless air of half apology, half defiance, "but I enjoyit no end. " And then he will go on to tell how the parlor melodeonhad gathered dust for years until it was given in part exchange for apiano-player. And now the thing is the joy of the family, and the homeis filled with color and effervescence, and every one's head is filledwith at least a rudiment of living, growing musical culture. 

The fact is, the piano-player is turning thousands of supposedlyhumdrum, prosaic people into musical enthusiasts, to their own immensesurprise. Many of these people are actually taking lessons in thesubtle art of manipulating the machine. They are spending more moneythan they can afford on vast collections of rolls. They are going moreand more to every important concert for hints on interpretation. Better still, the most musical among them are being piqued, by thecombined merits and defects of the machine, into learning to play an_un_mechanical instrument for the joy of feeling less mechanisminterposed between themselves and "the real thing. "

Machinery has already done as much for the true spirit of music as the"safe and sane" movement has done for the true spirit of the Fourth ofJuly. Both have shifted the emphasis from brute noise and fireworks tomore spiritual considerations. The piano-player has done a great dealto cheapen the glamour of mere technical display on the part of thevirtuosi and to redeem us from the thralldom of the school of Liszt. Our admiration for musical gymnastics and tight-rope balancing is nowleaking away so fast through the perforations of the paper rolls thatthe kind of display-piece known as the concerto is going out offashion. The only sort of concerto destined to keep our favor is, Iimagine, that of the Schumann or Brahms type, which depends for itseffect not at all on display, but on sound musicianship alone. Thevirtuoso is destined soon to leave the circus business and bid a longfarewell to his late colleagues, the sword-swallower, the trapezeartist, the strong man, the fat lady, the contortionist, and thegentleman who conducts the shell-and-pea game. For presently the onlything that will be able to entice people to concerts will be the soulof music. Its body will be a perfectly commonplace affair. 

Many a good musician fears, I know, that machine-made music will notstop with annihilating vulgar display, but will do to death allprofessional music as well. This fear is groundless. Mechanicalinstruments will no more drive the good pianist or violinist or'cellist out of his profession than the public library, as many oncefeared, will drive the bookseller out of business. For the library, after persuading people to read, has taught them how much pleasure maybe had from owning a book, with the privilege of marking it andscribbling one's own ideas on the margins, and not having to rush itback to headquarters at inopportune moments and pay to a stern youngwoman a fine of eight cents. Likewise people are eventually led torealize that the joy of passively absorbing the product of phonographor electric piano contrasts with the higher joy of listeningcreatively to music which the hearer helps to make, in the same waythat borrowing a book of Browning contrasts with owning a book ofBrowning. I believe that, just as the libraries are yearly educatinghosts of book-buyers, so mechanical music is coöperating withevolution to swell the noble army of those who support concerts andgive private musicales. 

Of course there is no denying that the existence of music-makingmachinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talentedfollowers of the muse of strumming, scraping, screeching, andblatting. This is because the soul of music is not in them. And instriving to reproduce its body, they perceive how hopeless it is tocompete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product. Inlike manner, the invention of canned meats doubtless discouraged manyminor cooks from further struggles with their craft. But theselosses, I, for one, cannot bring myself to mourn. 

What seems a sounder complaint is that the phonograph, because itreproduces with equal readiness music and the spoken word, may becomean effective instrument of satire in the hands of the cleverphilistine. Let me illustrate. To the Jones collection of records, shortly after "Tannhäuser" began to win its way, there was added areactionary "comic" record entitled "Maggie Clancy's New Piano. " Inthe record Maggie begins playing "Tannhäuser" very creditably on hernew instrument. Presently the voice of old Clancy is heard fromanother room calling, "Maggie!" The music goes on. There is a_crescendo_ series of calls. The piano stops. 

"Yes, Father?"

"Maggie, is the new pianny broke?"

"No, Father; I was merely playing Wagner. "

Old Clancy meditates a moment; then, with a gentleness of touch thatmight turn a New York music critic green with envy, he replies: "Oh, I thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the parlor stove. "

Records like these have power to retard and roughen the otherwisesmooth course of a family's musical evolution; but they are usuallyunable to arrest it. In general I think that such satires may fortifythe elder generation in its conservative mistrust of classical music. But if they are only heard often enough by the young, I believe thatthe sympathies of the latter will end in chiming with the taste of theenlightened Maggie rather than with that of her father. 

Until recently a graver charge against the phonograph has been that itwas so much better adapted for reproducing song than pure instrumentalmusic that it was tending to identify the art of music in the minds ofmost men with song alone. This tendency was dangerous. For song is notall of music, nor even its most important part. The voice is naturallymore limited in range, technic, and variety of color than manyanother instrument. And it is artificially handicapped by the ratherabsurd custom which forces the singer to drag in poetry (much to thelatter's disadvantage), and therewith distract his own attention andthat of his audience from the music. 

The fact remains that one art at a time is none too easy for even themost perfect medium of expression to cope with. To make a somewhatless than perfect instrument like the human voice, cope always withtwo simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music hasnot yet emerged from its teens. This is one reason why most song is asyet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach is, as a rule, forced toexceed its grasp. Also the accident of having a fine voice usuallydetermines a singer's career, though a perfect vocal organ does notnecessarily imply a musical nature. The best voices, in fact, oftenbelong, by some contrariety of fate, to the worst musicians. For theseand other reasons, there is less of the true spirit of music to beheard from vocal cords than from the cords and reeds and brazen tubesof piano, organ, string quartet, and orchestra. Thus, when thephonograph threatened to identify song with music in general, itthreatened to give the art a setback and make the singer thearch-enemy of the wider musical culture. Fortunately the phonographnow gives promise of averting this peril by bringing up itsreproduction of absolute music near to its vocal standard. 

Another charge against most machine-made music is its unhumanaccuracy. The phonograph companies seldom give out a record which isnot practically perfect in technic and intonation. As for themechanical piano, there is no escape from the certainty of just whatnotes are coming next--that is, if little Johnnie has not been editingthe paper record with his father's leather-punch. Therefore one growsafter a while to long for a few of those deviations from mathematicalprecision which imply human frailty and lovableness. One reason whythe future is veiled from us is that it is so painful to be certainthat one's every prediction is coming true. 

A worse trouble with the phonograph is that it seems to leave out ofaccount that essential part of every true musical performance, thecreative listener. A great many phonograph records sound as though therecorder had been performing to an audience no more spirituallyresonant than the four walls of a factory. I think that the makers ofanother kind of mechanical instrument must have realized thisoversight on the part of the phonograph manufacturer. I mean the sortof electric piano which faithfully reproduces every _nuance_ of themaster pianists. Many of the records of this marvelous instrumentsound as though the recording-room of the factory had been "papered"with creative listeners who coöperated mightily with the master on thestage. Would that the phonographers might take the hint!

But no matter how effectively the creative listener originallycoöperates with the maker of this kind of record, the electric pianodoes not appeal as strongly to the creative listener in his home asdoes the less perfect but more impressionable piano-player, whichresponds like a cycle to pedal and brake. For the records of thephonograph and of the electric piano, once they are made, are made. Thereafter they are as insensible to influence as the laws of theMedes and Persians. They do not admit the audience to an active, influential part in the performance. But such a part in theperformance is exactly what the true listener demands as hisdemocratic right. And rather than be balked of it, he turns to theless sophisticated mechanism of the piano-player. This, at least, responds to his control. 

Undeniably, though, even the warmest enthusiasts for the piano-playercome in time to realize that their machine has distinct limitations;that it is better suited to certain pieces than to others. They findthat music may be performed on it with the more triumphant successthe less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of anarabesque. The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops or switchinglevers, cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life. The disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands tobe filled with soul, the thinner and more ghost-like it comes forth. The less intimately human the music, the more satisfactorily itemerges. For example, the performer is stirred by the "TannhäuserMarch, " as rendered by himself, with its flourish of trumpets and itsgeneral hurrah-boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the"Evening Star" from the same opera. For this, in passing through thepiano-player, is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis. Thesinger is no longer Scotti or Bispham, but Herschel or Laplace. Theoperator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart--but if he hasany real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lackin this sort of music. So for the present, while confidently awaitingthe invention of an improved piano-player, which shall give equallyfree expression to every mood and tense of the human spirit--theoperator learns to avoid the very soulful things as much as ispracticable. 

At this stage of his development he usually begins to crave thatsupreme kind of music which demands a perfect balance of theintellectual, the sensuous, and the emotional. So he goes more oftento concerts where such music is given. Saturated with it, he returnsto his piano-player and plays the concert all over again. And hisimagination is now so full of the emotional side of what he has justheard and is re-hearing, that he easily discounts the obviousshortcomings of the mechanical instrument. This is an excellent way ofgetting the most from music. One should not, as many do, take it fromthe piano-player before the concert and then go with its somewhatstereotyped accents so fixed in the mind as to obscure the heart ofthe performance. Rather, in preparation, let the score be silentlyglanced through. Leave wide the doors of the soul for the preciousspiritual part of the music to enter in and take possession. Afterthis happens, use mechanical music to renew your memories of theconcert, just as you would use a catalogue illustrated with etchingsin black and white, to renew your memory of an exhibition ofpaintings. 

 * * * * *

The supreme mission of mechanical music is its direct educationalmission. By this I mean something more than its educational mission tothe many thousands of grown men and women whose latent interest inmusic it is suddenly awakening. I have in mind the girls and boys ofthe rising generation. If people can only hear enough good music whenthey are young, without having it forcibly fed to them, they arealmost sure to care for it when they come to years of discretion. Thereason why America is not more musical is that we men and women ofto-day did not yesterday, as children, hear enough good music. Ourparents probably could not afford it. It was then a luxury, implyingexpensive concert tickets or an elaborate musical training for someonein the family. 

The invention of mechanical instruments ended this state of affairsforever by suddenly making the best music as inexpensive as the worst. There exists no longer any financial reason why most children shouldnot grow up in an atmosphere of the best music. And I believe that sosoon as parents learn how to educate their children through thephonograph or the mechanical piano, the world will realize with astart that the invention of these things is doing more for musicalculture than the invention of printing did for literary culture. 

We must bear in mind, however, that the invention of mechanicalinstruments has come far earlier in the history of music than theinvention of printing came in the history of literature. Music is theyoungest of the fine arts. It is in somewhat the same stage ofdevelopment to-day that literature was in the time of Homer. It is inthe age of oral--and aural--tradition. Most people still take in musicthrough their ears alone. For all that the invention of note-printingmeans to them as enjoyers of music, they might almost as well beliving æons before Gutenberg. Musically speaking, they belong to theHomeric age. 

Now the entrance of mechanical music upon the scene is making mendepend on their ears more than ever. It is intensifying and speedingup this age of oral tradition. But in so doing, I believe that it isbound to shorten this age also, on the principle that the faster yougo the sooner you arrive. Thus, machinery is hastening us toward thetime when the person of ordinary culture will no more depend on hisears alone for the enjoyment of music than he now depends on his earsalone for the enjoyment of Shakespeare. 

Thanks to machine-made music, the day is coming the sooner when weshall behold, as neighbors in the ordinary bookcase, such pairs ofcounterparts as Milton and Bach, Beethoven and Shakespeare, Loefflerand Maeterlinck, Byron and Tschaikowsky, Mendelssohn and Longfellow, Nietzsche and Richard Strauss. Browning will stand up cheek by jowlwith his one true affinity, Brahms. And the owner will sit by thequiet hearth reading to himself with equal fluency and joy fromSchubert and Keats. 

X

MASTERS BY PROXY

 _It is only in a surrounding of personalities that personalities can as such make themselves seen and heard. _

HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN. 

Between many of my readers and the joyful heart there seems to standbut a single obstacle--their lack of creativeness. They feel that theycould live and die happy if only they might become responsible for thecreation of something which would remain to bless mankind after theyare gone. But as it is, how can they have the joyful heart when theyare continually being tortured by regret because God did not makemasters of them?

One is sad because he is not a master of poetry. He never sees A, hisgolden-tongued friend, without a pang very like the envy of achildless man for a happy father. But he has no suspicion that he ispartly responsible for A's poetic excellence. Another thinks her lifea mistake because the Master of all good workmen did not make her asculptor. Yet all the while she is lavishing unawares upon her brotheror son or husband the very stuff that art is made of. Others areinconsolable because no fairy wand at their birth destined them formen of original action, for discoverers in science, pianists, statesmen, or actors; for painters, philosophers, inventors, orarchitects of temples or of religions. 

Now my task in this last chapter is a more delightful one than if Iwere the usual solicitor of fiction, come to inform thepoor-but-honest newsboy that he is a royal duke. It is my privilege tocomfort many of the comfortless by revealing to them how and why theyare--or may be--masters of an art as indispensable as the arts whichthey now regard so wistfully. I mean the art of master-making--the artof being a master by proxy. 

To be specific, let us single out one of the arts and see what itmeans to master it by proxy. Suppose we consider the simple case ofexecutive music. In a book called "The Musical Amateur" I have triedto prove (more fully than is here possible) that the reproduction ofmusic is a social act. It needs two: one to perform, one toappreciate. Both are almost equally essential to a good performance. The man who appreciates a musical phrase unconsciously imitates itwith almost imperceptible contractions of throat or lips. Thesecontractions represent an incipient singing or whistling. Motionssimilar to these, and probably more fully developed, are made at thesame time by his mind and his spirit. The whole man actually feels hisway, physically and psychically, into the heart of the music. He isturned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contributionof emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy tothe performer. When a violinist and a listener of the right sort meetfor musical purposes, this is what happens. The violinist happens tobe in the mood for playing. This means that he has feelings whichdemand expression. These his bow releases. The music strikes thelistener, sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board, androuses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist. Enriched bythis new contribution, the emotional complex resounds back to theviolinist, intensifying his original "feeling-state. " In itsheightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator, "and so on, back and forth, growing in stimulating power at each recoil. The wholeprocess is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis, with the opponentsclosing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net fasterwith every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure. 'Social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing. " This, briefly told, is what passes between the player of music and hiscreative listener. 

In application this principle does not by any means stop withperforming or composing music or with the fine arts. It goes on toembrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in thefiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not toomuch to say that no great passion or action has ever had itselfadequately expressed without the coöperation of this social resonance, without the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognizedpartners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy. 

Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few whounderstand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize yourown thankworthiness. Our children shall rise up and call you blessed. For in your quiet way, you have helped to create the world'screators--the preachers, prophets, captains, artists, discoverers, andseers of the ages. To these, you, unrecognized and unawares, have beenproviding the very sinews of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality, and insight. 

What made the game of art so brilliant in the age of Pericles? It wasnot star playing by individuals. It was steady, consistent team-workby the many. Almost every one of the Athenians who were not masterswere masters by proxy. In "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"Chamberlain holds that Greek culture derived its incomparable charmfrom "a peculiar harmony of greatness"; and that "if our poets are notin every respect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, that is notthe fault of their talent, but of those who surround them. " Onlyimagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean atmosphere!It must have been as exhilarating as coasting down into the YosemiteValley with John Muir on an avalanche of snow. 

But even in that enlightened age the master received all the creditfor every achievement, and his creative appreciator none at all. Andso it has been ever since that particular amoeba which was destinedfor manhood had a purse made up for him and was helped upon the trainof evolution by his less fortunate and more self-effacing friends whowere destined to remain amoebæ; because the master by proxy is sucha retiring, unspectacular sort of person that he has never caught thepopular imagination or found any one to sing his praises. But if heshould ever resent this neglect and go on strike, we should realizethat without him progress is impossible. For the real lords ofcreation are not always the apparent lords. We should bear in mindthat the most important part of many a throne is not the red velvetseat, the back of cloth of gold, or the onyx arms that so sumptuouslyaccommodate the awe and majesty of acknowledged kings. Neither is itthe seed-pearl canopy that intercepts a too searching light frommajesty's complexion. It is a certain little filigreed hole in thethrone-back which falls conveniently close to the sovereign's ear whenhe leans back between the periods of the wise, beauteous, andthrilling address to his subjects. 

For doubled up in a dark, close box behind the chair of state is ahumble, drab individual who, from time to time, applies his mouth tothe wrong side of the filigreed hole and whispers things. If he werevisible at all, he would look like the absurd prompter under the hoodat the opera. He is not a famous person. Most people are so ignorantof his very existence that he might be pardoned for being an agnosticabout it himself. The few others know little and care less. Only twoor three of the royal family are aware of his name and real function. They refer to him as M. Power-Behind-the-Throne, Master-by-Proxy ofState. 

There is one sign by which masters by proxy may be detected wherevermet. They are people whose presence is instantly invigorating. Beforeyou can make out the color of their eyes you begin to feel that youare greater than you know. It is as if they wore diffused about themauras so extensive and powerful that entering these auras wasequivalent to giving your soul electric massage. You do not have totouch the hem of their garments nor even see them. The auras penetratea brick wall as a razor penetrates Swiss cheese. And if you arefortunate enough to be on the other side of the partition, you becomeaware with a thrill that "virtue, " in the beautiful, Biblical sense ofthe word, has gone out of somebody and into you. 

If ever I return to live in a city apartment (which may the godsforfend!) I shall this time select the apartment with almost solereference to what comes through the walls. I shall enter one of thosetypical New York piles which O. Henry described as "paved with Parianmarble in the entrance-hall, and cobblestones above the first floor, "and my inquiry will be focused on things far other than Parian marbleand cobblestones. I shall walk about the rooms and up and down thebowling-alleys of halls trying to make myself as sensitive toimpressions as are the arms of the divining-rod man during his solemnparade with the wand of witch-hazel. And when I feel "virtue" from thenext apartment streaming through the partition, there will I instantlygive battle to the agent and take up my abode. And this though it beup six flights of cobblestones, without elevator, without closet-room, with a paranoiac for janitor, and radiators whose musical performanceall the day long would make a Cleveland boiler factory pale with envy. For none of these things would begin to offset the privilege of livingbeside a red-letter wall whose influence should be as benignlyconstructive as Richard Washburn Child's "Blue Wall" was malignlydestructive. 

To-day I should undoubtedly be much more of a person if I had once hadthe pleasure of living a wall away from Richard Watson Gilder. He wasa true master by proxy. For he was a vastly more creative person thanhis published writings will ever accredit him with being. Not onlywith his pen, but also with his whole self he went about doing good. "Virtue" fairly streamed from him all the time. Those bowed shouldersand deep-set, kindly eyes would emerge from the inner sanctum of the"Century" office. In three short sentences he would reject the storywhich had cost you two years of labor and travail. But all the timethe fatal words were getting themselves uttered, so much "virtue" waspassing from him into you that you would turn from his presenceexhilarated, uplifted, and while treading higher levels for the nextweek, would produce a check-bearing tale. The check, however, wouldnot bring you a tithe of the "virtue" that the great editor's personalrebuff had brought. 

But more than to any editor, writers look to their readers forsupport, especially to their unknown correspondents--postal andpsychic. Leonard Merrick has so finely expressed the attitude of manywriters that I cannot forbear giving his words to his "public":

 I have thought of you so often and wanted to win a smile from you; you don't realize how I have longed to meet you--to listen to you, to have you lift the veil that hides your mind from me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I caught a glimpse of you; I can't explain--the poise of the head, a look in the eyes, there was something that hinted it was You. And in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed that you would recognize me; but you said no word--you passed, a secret from me still. To yourself where you are sitting you are just a charming woman with "a local habitation and a name"; but to me you are not Miss or Madam, not M. Or N. --you are a Power, and I have sought you by a name you have not heard--you are my Public. And O my Lady, I am speaking to you! I feel your presence in my senses, though you are far away and I can't hear your answer.... It is as if I had touched your hand across the page. 

There are probably more masters by proxy to be found among the world'smothers than in any other class. The profession of motherhood is sucha creative one, and demands so constant an outgo of unselfishsympathy, that a mother's technic as silent partner is usually kept ina highly efficient state. And occasionally a mother of a geniusdeserves as much credit for him spiritually as physically. Think ofFrau Goethe, for example. 

Many a genius attains a commanding position largely through the happychance of meeting many powerful masters by proxy and through his happyfacility for taking and using whatever creativeness these have tooffer. Genius has been short-sightedly defined as "an infinitecapacity for taking pains. " Galton more truthfully holds that thetriune factors of genius are industry, enthusiasm, and ability. Now ifwe were to insist, as so many do, on making a definition out of asingle one of these factors to the neglect of the others, we shouldcome perhaps nearer the mark by saying that genius is an infinitecapacity for taking others' pains. But all such definings are absurd. For the genius absorbs and alchemizes not only the industry of hissilent partners, but also their ability and enthusiasm. Theirenthusiasm is fortunately contained in a receptacle as generous asPhilemon's famous pitcher. And the harder the genius tries to pour itempty, the more the sparkling liquid bubbles up inside. Thetransaction is like "the quality of mercy"--

 "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. "

The ability to receive as well as give this sort of help varies widelywith the individual. Some geniuses of large psychic power are ableinstantly to seize out of any crowd whatever creativeness there is init. These persons are spiritual giants. Their strength is as thestrength of ten because their grasp is sure. They are such stuff asShakespeares are made of. 

Others are not psychically gifted. They can absorb creativeness onlyfrom their nearest and dearest, in the most favoring environment, andonly after the current has been seriously depleted by wastage intransmission. But these are the two extremes. They are as rare asextremes usually are. 

In general I believe that genius, though normally capable of drawingcreativeness from a number of different sources, has as a ruledepended largely on the collaboration of one chief master by proxy. This idea gazes wide-eyed down a fascinating vista of speculation. Who, for instance, was Lincoln's silent partner? the power behind thethrone of Charlemagne? Buddha's better self? Who were the secretcommanders of Grant, Wellington, and Cæsar? Who was Molière's hiddenprompter? the conductor of the orchestra called Beethoven? the psychiccomrade of Columbus?

I do not know. For history has never commemorated, as such, themasters by proxy with honor due, or indeed with any honor orremembrance at all. It will take centuries to explore the past withthe sympathetic eye and the understanding heart in order to discoverwhat great tombs we have most flagrantly neglected. 

Already we can single out a few of them. The time is coming whenmusic-lovers will never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place ofWagner without making another to the grave of Mathilde Wesendonk, whose "virtue" breathed into "Tristan and Isolde" the breath of life. We shall not much longer neglect the tomb of Charles Darwin's father, who, by making the evolutionist financially independent, gave hisservices to the world. Nor shall we disregard the memory of that otherCharles-Darwin-by-proxy--his wife. For her tireless comradeship anddevotion and freely lavished vitality were an indispensable reservoirof strength to the great invalid. Without it the world would neverhave had the "Origin of Species" or the "Descent of Man. "

Other instances throng to mind. I have small doubt that Charles EliotNorton was the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell; Ste. Clare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim and Billroth of Brahms, andDorothy Wordsworth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, I had nosooner noted down the last of these names than I came upon thissentence in Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: "How much that we callWordsworth himself was Dorothy to begin with. " And soon after, I foundthese words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim with the score ofhis second "Serenade": "Care for the piece a little, dear friend; itis very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, thatmusic sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or twopeople whom one loves as I love you?" The impressionable Charles Lambmust have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlittwrote: "He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me yourcompany, and I'll tell you your manners. ' He is the creature ofsympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain ofhim. "

Perhaps the most creative master by proxy I have ever known was thewife of one of our ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experiencethe elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses ofchampagne, with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. Ishould not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due asmuch to her creativeness as to his own. 

It sometimes happens that the most potent masters in their own rightare also the most potent masters by proxy. They grind out more powerthan they can consume in their own particular mill-of-the-gods. I aminclined to think that Sir Humphry Davy was one of these. He was thediscoverer of chlorine and laughing-gas, and the inventor of theminer's safety lamp. He was also the _deus ex machina_ who rescuedFaraday from the bookbinder's bench, made him the companion of histravels, and incidentally poured out the overplus of his own creativeenergy upon the youth who has recently been called "perhaps the mostremarkable discoverer of the nineteenth century. " Schiller was anotherof these. "In more senses than one your sympathy is fruitful, " wroteGoethe to him during the composition of "Faust. "

Indeed, the greatest Master known to history was first and foremost amaster by proxy. It was He who declared that we all are "members oneof another. " Writing nothing Himself, He inspired others to writethousands of immortal books. He was unskilled as painter, or sculptor, or architect; yet the greatest canvases, marbles, and cathedrals sinceHe trod the earth have sprung directly from his influence. He was nomusician. 

 "His song was only living aloud. "

But that silent song was the direct inspiration of much of thesublimest music of the centuries to come. And so we might go on and onabout this Master of all vicarious masters. 

Yet it is a strange and touching thing to note that even his exuberantcreativeness sometimes needed the refreshment of silent partners. WhenHe was at last to perform a great action in his own right He lookedabout for support and found a master by proxy in Mary, the sister ofthe practical Martha. But when He turned for help in uttermost needto his best-beloved disciples He found them only negative, destructiveinfluences. This accounts for the anguish of his reproach: "Could yenot watch with me one hour?"

Having never been properly recognized as such, the world's masters byproxy have never yet been suitably rewarded. Now the world isconvinced that its acknowledged masters deserve more of a feast atlife's surprise party than they can bring along for themselves intheir own baskets. So the world bows them to the places of honor atthe banquet board. True, the invitation sometimes comes so late thatthe master has long since devoured everything in his basket and isdead of starvation. But that makes not the slightest difference tohumanity, which will take no refusal, and props the cynically amusedskeleton up at the board next the toastmaster. My point is, however, that humanity is often forehanded enough with its invitations to givethe masters a charming time of it before they, too, into the dustdescend, _sans_ wine, _sans_ song, etc. But I do not know that it hasever yet consciously bidden a master by proxy--as such--to the feast. And I contend that if a man's deserts are to be measured at all by hiscreativeness, then the great masters by proxy deserve seats well upabove the salt. 

For is it any less praiseworthy to make a master than to make amasterpiece? I grant that the masterpiece is the more sudden anddramatic in appearing and can be made immediate use of, whereas themaster is slowly formed, and even then turns out unsatisfactory inmany ways. He is apt to be that well-known and inconvenient sort ofperson who, when he comes in out of the rain to dress for his wedding, abstractedly prepares to retire instead, and then, still moreabstractedly, puts his umbrella to bed and stands himself in thecorner. All the same, it is no less divine to create a master by slow, laborious methods than to snatch a masterpiece apparently out ofnothing-at-all. In the eye of the evolutionist, man is not of any theless value because he was made by painful degrees instead of havingbeen produced, a perfect gentleman, out of the void somewhat as themagician brings forth from the empty saucepan an omelette, containinga live pigeon with the loaned wedding-ring in its beak. 

The master-makers have long been expending their share of the power. It is high time they were enjoying their share of the glory. What anunconscionable leveling up and down there will presently be when itdawns upon humanity what a large though inglorious share it has beenhaving in the spiritually creative work of the world! In that day theseats of the mighty individualists of science, industry, politics, anddiscovery; of religion and its ancient foe ecclesiasticism; ofeconomy, the arts and philosophy, will all be taken down a peg by thesame knowledge that shall exalt "them of low degree. "

I can imagine how angrily ruffled the sallow shade of ArthurSchopenhauer will become at the dawn of this spiritual Commune. Whenthe first full notes of the soul's "Marseillaise" burst upon hisirritable eardrums, I can hear above them his savage snarl. I can seehis malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearnedincrement of fame with some of those _Mitmenschen_ whom he, like a badSamaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil ofvitriol and the sour wine of sadness. And how like red-raggedturkey-cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napoleon will puff out whenrequired to stand and deliver some of their precious credit!

There will be compensations, though, to the genius who, safely dead, feels himself suddenly despoiled of a fullness of fame which he hadcounted on enjoying in _sæcula sæculorum_. When he comes to balancethings up, perhaps he will not, after all, find the net loss soserious. Though he lose some credit for his successes, he will alsolose some discredit for his failures. Humanity will recognize thatwhile the good angels of genius are the masters by proxy, the badangels of genius exert an influence as negative and destructive as theinfluence of the others is positive and constructive. 

How jolly it will be, for all but the bad angels, when we can assignto them such failures as Browning's "The Inn Album"; Davy's contentionthat iodine was not an element, and Luther's savage hounding of thenobles upon the wretched peasants who had risen in revolt under hisown inspiration. But enough of the bad angels! Let us inter them withthis epitaph: "They did their worst; devils could do no more. "

Turn we to the bright side of the situation. How delighted Keats willbe when at last the world develops a little sense of proportion, andafter first neglecting and then over-praising him, finally proposes togive poor old Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine Sir WilliamHerschel's pleasure when his beloved sister Caroline begins toreceive her full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough his morbidnessand improvise a Slavic Hallelujah Chorus when his unseen patronesscomes into her own. It is true that the world has already given hermemory two fingers and a perfunctory "thank ye. " This was for puttingher purse at Tschaikowsky's disposal, thus making it possible for himto write a few immortal compositions instead of teaching mortals thepiano in a maddening conservatory. But now, glory! hallelujah! theworld is soon going to render her honor long overdue for the spiritualsupport which so ably reinforced the financial. 

And Sir Thomas More, that early socialist--imagine his elation! For hewill regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the manin the pre-Elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadilyapproaching the golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir Thomas knowsthat our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too littledemocratic. We have been over-inclined, with the aristocraticCarlyle, to see all history as a procession of a few transcendentmasters surrounded, preceded, and followed by enormous herds of abjectand quite insignificant slaves. Between these slaves and the masters, there is, in the old view, about as much similarity as exists in thechild's imagination between the overwhelming dose of castor oil andthe single pluperfect chocolate drop whereby the dose is supposed tobe made endurable. Already the idea is beginning to glimmer thatheroic stuff is far more evenly distributed throughout the throng thanwe had supposed. 

It is, of course, very meet and very right and our bounden duty toadmire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong torevere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no lessessential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at thehorse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus theiradmiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot thevery existence of its patient and unself-conscious propeller. 

It is especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of themaster by proxy just now, when the movement for the socialization ofthe world, after so many ineffectual centuries, is beginning to engagethe serious attention of mankind. Thus far, one of the chiefreactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men areso shockingly unequal. And the reactionaries have called us to witnessthe gulf that yawns, for example, between the god-like individualist, Ysaye, and the worm-like little factory girl down there in theaudience balanced on the edge of the seat and listening to theviolin--her rapt soul sitting in her eyes. Now, however, we know that, but for the wireless tribute of creativeness that flashes up to themonarch of tone from that "rapt soul" and others as humble and asrapt--the king of fiddlers would then and there be obliged to lay downhis horsehair scepter and abdicate. 

We have reached a stage of social evolution where it is high time thatone foolish old fallacy should share the fate of the now partiallydiscredited belief that "genius will out" in spite of man or devil. This fallacy is the supposition that man's creativeness is to bemeasured solely by its visible, audible, or tangible results. Browning's old Rabbi made a shrewd commentary on this question when hedeclared:

 "Not on the vulgar mass Called 'work, ' must sentence pass, Things done that took the eye and had the price.... But all the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb.... Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped: All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. "

Yes, we are being slowly socialized, even to our way of regardinggenius; and this has been until now the last unchallenged strongholdof individualism. We perceive that even there individualism must nolonger be allowed to have it all its own way. After a century we arebeginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially mindedEnglish poet when he sang:

 "Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle. "

To-day we have in library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangiblerecords of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think weare to possess--thanks to Edison and the cinematographers--intangiblerecords--or at least suggestions--of the modest creativeness of ourmasters by proxy. Some day every son with this inspiring sort ofmother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords, of perpetuating her voice, her changing look, her walk, her tendersmile. Thus he may keep at least a gleam of her essential creativenessalways at hand for help in the hour of need. 

I would give almost anything if I could have in a storage batterybeside me now some of the electric current that was forever flowingout of my own mother, or out of Richard Watson Gilder, or out of HaydSampson, a glorious old "inglorious Milton" of a master by proxy whomI once found toiling in a small livery-stable in Minnesota. My faithis firm that some such miracle will one day be performed. And in ourirreverent, Yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of themaster by proxy--"canned virtue. " In that event the twenty-firstcenturion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or fora God-forsaken environment without a supply of "canned virtue" than ofstarting for one of the poles equipped with only a pocketful ofpemmican. 

There is a grievous amount of latent master-making talent spoilingto-day for want of development. Many an one feels creative energycrying aloud within himself for vicarious spiritual expression. Hewould be a master by proxy, yet is at a loss how to learn. Him Iwould recommend to try learning the easiest form of the art. Let himresolve to become a creative listener to music. Once he is able toinfluence reproducers of art like pianists and singers, he can thenbegin groping by analogy toward the more difficult art of influencingdirectly the world's creators. But even if he finds himself quitelacking in creativeness, he can still be a silent partner of genius ifhe will relax purse-strings, or cause them to be relaxed, for thefounding of creative fellowships. 

I do not know if ever yet in the history of the planet the mightyforce which resides in the masters by proxy has been systematicallyused. I am sure it has never been systematically conserved, and thatit is one of the least understood and least developed of earth'snatural resources. One of our next long steps forward should be alongthis line of the conservation of "virtue. " The last physical frontierhas practically been passed. Now let us turn to the undiscoveredcontinents of soul which have so long been awaiting their Columbusesand Daniel Boones, their country-life commissions and conferences ofgovernors. 

When the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall growaware of your possibilities, and take your light from under thebushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at yourelbow, or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumblinggenius, or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master--ourcivilization will take a mighty step towards God. 

Try it, my masters!

THE END

 * * * * *

By Robert Haven Schauffler

THE JOYFUL HEART. SCUM O' THE EARTH AND OTHER POEMS. THE MUSICAL AMATEUR. 

 * * * * *

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

 * * * * *