Chapter 2

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

Arriving beats hoping to arrive, in this: that while the hoper is so keenly hopeful that he has little attention to spare for anything besides the future, the arriver may take a broader, more leisurely survey of things. The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. The attainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a complete panorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover by re-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther and loftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attacking the week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him his mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, the achiever, if his joy-digesting apparatus be working properly, rejoices with exceeding great joy in past, present, and future alike. He has an advantage of three to one over the merely hopeful traveler. And when they meet this is the song he sings:--

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

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

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

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

II

THE BRIMMING CUP

Exuberance is the income yielded by a wise investment of one's vitality. On this income, so long as it flows in regularly, the moderate man may live in the Land of the Joyful Heart, incased in triple steel against any arrows of outrageous fortune that happen to stray in across the frontier. Immigrants to this land who have no such income are denied admission. They may steam into the country's principal port, past the great statue of the goddess Joy who holds aloft a brimming cup in the act of pledging the world. But they are put ashore upon a small island for inspection. And so soon as the inferior character of their investments becomes known, or their recklessness in eating into their principal, they are deported.

The contrast between those within the well-guarded gates and those without is an affecting one. The latter often squander vast fortunes in futile attempts to gain a foothold in the country. And they have a miserable time of it. Many of the natives, on the other hand, are so poor that they have constantly to fight down the temptation to touch their principal. But every time they resist, the old miracle happens for them once more: the sheer act of living turns out to be "paradise enow."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many do, that such fullness of life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back door when middle age knocks at the front. It is no more bound to go as the wrinkles and gray hairs arrive than your income is bound to take wings two or three score years after the original investment of the principal. To ascribe it to youth as an exclusive attribute is as fatuous as it would be to ascribe a respectable income only to the recent investor.

A red-letter day it will be for us when we realize that exuberance represents for every one the income from his fund of vitality; that when one's exuberance is all gone, his income is temporarily exhausted; and that he cannot go on living at the same rate without touching the principal. The hard-headed, harder-worked American business man is admittedly clever and prudent about money matters. But when he comes to deal with immensely more important matters such as life, health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. He has not yet grasped the obvious truth that a man's fund of vitality ought to be administered upon at least as sound a business basis as his fund of dollars. The principal should not be broken into for living expenses during a term of at least ninety-nine years. (Metchnikoff says that this term is one hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of the Bulgarian bacillus.) And one should not be content with anything short of a substantial rate of interest.

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

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

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

The reason why every day is a joy to the normal child is that he fell heir at birth to a fortune of vitality and has not yet had time to squander all his substance in riotous or thoughtless living, or to overdraw his account in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one of his days is a joy--that is, except in so far as his elders have impressed their tired standards of behavior too masterfully upon him. "Happy as a child"--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary. In order to remain as happy as this for a century or so, all that a child has to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles, and never overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into the myriad details of just how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is no dearth of wise books and physicians and "Masters of the Inn," competent to mark out sound business programs of work, exercise, recreation, and regimen for body, mind, and spirit; while all that you must contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension, time, money, and will-power. You see, I am not a professor of vital commerce and investment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to induce the voters to elect a sound business administration.

I believe that the blessings of climate give us of North America less excuse than most other people for failing to put such an administration into office. It is noteworthy that many of the Europeans who have recently written their impressions of the United States imagine that Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of vitality is shared by nearly the whole nation. If it only were! But the fact that these observers think so would seem to confirm our belief that our own cup brims over more plentifully than that of Europe. This is probably due to the exhilarating climate which makes America--physically, at least, though not yet economically and socially--the promised land.

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

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

I can imagine the good fathers' chagrin if they are aware to-day of how things have gone on in their republic. Perhaps they realize that the possibility of exuberance has now become a special privilege. And if they are still as wise as they once were, they will be doubly exasperated by this state of affairs because they will see that it is needless. It has been proved over and over again that modern machinery has removed all real necessity for poverty and overwork. There is enough to go 'round. Under a more democratic system we might have enough of the necessities and reasonable comforts of life to supply each of the hundred million Americans, if every man did no more than a wholesome amount of productive labor in a day and had the rest of his time for constructive leisure and real living.

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

In the mean while it is too bad that the favored classes do not make more use of this privilege. It is absurd that such large numbers of them are still as far from exuberance as the unprivileged. They keep reducing their overplus of vitality to an _under-minus_ of it by too much work and too foolish play, by plain thinking and high living and the dissipation of maintaining a pace too swift for their as yet unadjusted organisms. They keep their house of life always a little chilly by opening the windows before the furnace has had a chance to take the chill out of the rooms.

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

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

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

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

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

III

ENTHUSIASM

Enthusiasm is exuberance-with-a-motive. It is the power that makes the world go 'round. The old Greeks who christened it knew that it was the god-energy in the human machine. Without its driving force nothing worth doing has ever been done. It is man's dearest possession. Love, friendship, religion, altruism, devotion to hobby or career--all these, and most of the other good things in life, are forms of enthusiasm. A medicine for the most diverse ills, it alleviates both the pains of poverty and the boredom of riches. Apart from it man's heart is seldom joyful. Therefore it should be husbanded with zeal and spent with wisdom.

To waste it is folly; to misuse it, disaster. For it is safe to utilize this god-energy only in its own proper sphere. Enthusiasm moves the human vessel. To let it move the rudder, too, is criminal negligence. Brahms once made a remark somewhat to this effect: The reason why there is so much bad music in the world is that composers are in too much of a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, what do they do? Instead of taking it out for a long, cool walk, they sit down at once to work it up, but let it work _them_ up instead into an absolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of the goose-quill looks to them like part of a swan-song.

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

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

But besides its poor sense of distance and direction, men have another complaint against enthusiasm. They think it insincere on account of its capacity for frequent and violent fluctuation in temperature. In his "Creative Evolution," Bergson shows how "our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one so easily takes the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt our own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we did not know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living."

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

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

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

The biographers have paid too little attention to the god-energy of their heroes. I think that it should be one of the crowning achievements of biography to communicate to the reader certain actual vibrations of the enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philosopher for truth; the patriot for his country; the artist for beauty and self-expression; the altruist for humanity; the discoverer for knowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred soul; the prophet, martyr, or saint for his god.

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

IV

A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS

I