Read Ebook: The Joyful Heart by Schauffler Robert Haven

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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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

In looking back over my own life, a series of enthusiasms would appear to stand out as a sort of spinal system, about which are grouped as tributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence. Or, rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, sparkling stream which carries along and solves and neutralizes, if not sweetens, in its impetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds, such as school, the Puritan Sabbath, boot and hair-brushing, polite and unpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and shorter catechists--and so on all the way down between the shores of age to the higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whose word is not as good as his bond.

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

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

The collecting mania appeared some time before tennis. I first collected ferns under a crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon gave way to discrimination, which led to picking out a favorite fern. This was chosen, I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feeling. I called it "The Alligator" from its fancied resemblance to my brother's alligator-skin traveling-bag. But admiration of this fern brought a dawning consciousness that certain natural objects were preferable to others. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collecting impressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance of nature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolic thing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or best-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also in each department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorial incense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among shores, those of Capri and Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one called Isis as seen at dawn from the depths of the Grand Ca?on.

Next, I collected postage-stamps. I know that it is customary to-day for writers to sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have forgotten its variety and subtlety; its demand on the imagination; how it makes history and geography live, and initiates one painlessly into the mysteries of the currency of all nations. Then what a tonic it is for the memory! Only think of the implications of the annual price-catalogue! Soon after the issue of this work, every collector worthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind the current market values of thousands of stamps. And he can tell you offhand, not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceled condition, but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled, unperforated, embossed, rouletted, surcharged with all manner of initials, printed by mistake with the king standing on his head, or water-marked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine of Egypt. This feat of memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, for the enthusiasm of the normal stamp-collector is so potent that its proprietor has only to stand by and let it do all the work.

Even old circulars issued by dealers, now long gone to stampless climes, have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. I prefer those of foreign dealers because their English has the quaint, other-world atmosphere of what they dealt in. The other day I found in an old scrapbook a circular from Vienna, which annihilated a score of years 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 nouveaut?s of Central America.

Before continuing this persuasive flow, the dealer inserts a number of testimonials 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 seized with longing to turn myself into a society of collectors and to implore the altruistic dealer "kindly please" to send me, at a prodigious "abatement," "stamps and whole things against four weeks calculation."

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

When stamps had passed their zenith I was filled with a lust for slaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I sat watching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of the muddy and torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hoping against hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and dive beneath the surface of things, into touch with the great living realities. And when the cork finally marked a historic epoch by vanishing, and a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was pulled in hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest old and strong as the race.

But presently I myself was drawn, like the cork, beneath the superficial surface of the angler's art. For in the public library I chanced on a shelf of books, that told about fishing of a nobler, jollier, more seductive sort. At once I was consumed with a passion for five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal leaders, double-tapered casting-lines of braided silk, and artificial flies more fair than birds of paradise. Armed in spirit, with all these, I waded the streams of England with kindly old Isaak Walton, and ranged the Restigouche with the predecessors of Henry van Dyke. These dreams brought with them a certain amount of satisfaction--about as much satisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party, each equipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite. The visions were pleasant, of course, but they cried out, and made me cry out, for action. There were no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, and there was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight. But I did what I could to be prepared for the blessed hour when we should meet. I secured five new subscriptions or so to "The Boys' Chronicle" , and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it would have resolved itself into its elements at sight of a half-pound trout. It was destined, though, never to meet with this embarrassment.

My casting-line bore a family resemblance to grocery string. My leader was a piece of gut from my brother's 'cello; my flybook, an old wallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond my means; and it was perplexing to know what to do, until I found a book which said that it was better by far to tie your own flies. With joyful relief I acted on this counsel. Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White Millers with shoe-thread upon cod-hooks. One of these I stained and streaked with my heart's blood into the semblance of a Parmacheene Belle. The canary furnished materials for a Yellow May; a dooryard English sparrow, for a Brown Hackle. My masterpiece, the beautiful, parti-colored fly known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my sister's Easter bonnet.

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

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

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