,,the ,,joyful ,,heart ,,by ,,robert ,,haven ,,schauffler ,,author ,,of ,,the ,,musical ,,amateur1 ,,scum ,o' ,,the ,,earth ,,and ,,other ,,poems1 ,,romantic ,,america1 ,,etc4 ,people who are nobly happy constitute the power1 the beauty and the foundation of the state4 ,,jean ,,finot3 ,the ,science of ,happiness4 ,,boston ,,and ,,new ,,york ,,houghton ,,mifflin ,,company ,the ,riverside ,press ,cambridge #aiad ,,copyright1 #aiad ,,by ,,robert ,,haven ,,schauffler 99 99 99 99 99 ,,to ,,my ,,wife 99 99 99 99 99 ,,foreword ,this is a guide-book to joy4 ,it is for the use of the sad1 the bored1 the tired1 anxious1 disheartened and disappointed4 ,it is for the use of all those whose cup of vitality is not brimming over4 ,the world has not yet seen enough of joy4 ,it bears the reputation of an elusive sprite with finger always at lip bidding farewell4 ,in certain dark periods1 especially in times of international warfare1 it threatens to vanish altogether from the earth4 ,it is then the first duty of all peaceful folk to find and hold fast to joy1 keeping it in trust for their embattled brothers4 ,even if this were not their duty as citizens of the world1 it would be their duty as patriots4 ,for ,jean ,finot is right in declaring that people who are nobly happy constitute the power1 the beauty and the foundation of the state4 ,this book is a manual of enthusiasm--the power which drives the world--and of those kinds of exuberance 7physical1 mental and spiritual7 which can make every moment of every life worth living4 ,it aims to show how to get the most joy not only from traveling hopefully toward one's goal1 but also from the goal itself on arrival there4 ,it urges sound business methods in conducting that supreme business1 the investment of one's vitality4 ,it would show how one may find happiness all alone with his better self1 his ',auto-,comrade'--an accomplishment well-nigh lost in this crowded age4 ,it would show how the gospel of exuberance1 by offering the joys of hitherto unsuspected power to the artist and his audience1 bids fair to lift the arts again to the lofty level of the ,periclean age4 ,it would show the so-called common man or woman how to develop that creative sympathy which may make him a 'master by proxy1' and thus let him know the conscious happiness of playing an essential part in the creation of works of genius4 ,in short1 the book tries to show how the cup of joy may not only be kept full for one's personal use1 but may also be made hospitably to brim over for others4 ,to the ,atlantic ,monthly thanks are due for permission to reprint chapters ,i1 ,,iii and ,,iv2 to the ,north ,american ,review1 for chapter ,,viii2 and to the ,century1 for chapters ,v1 ,,vi1 ,,ix and ,x4 ,r4 ,h4 ,s4 ,,geeenbush1 ,,mass4 ,august1 #aiad4 99 99 99 99 99 ,,contents ,i4 ,a ,,defense ,,of ,,joy ,,ii4 ,,the ,,brimming ,,cup ,,iii4 ,,enthusiasm ,,iv4 ,a ,,chapter ,,of ,,enthusiasms ,v4 ,,the ,,auto-,,comrade ,,vi4 ,,vim ,,and ,,vision ,,vii4 ,,printed ,,joy ,,viii4 ,,the ,,joyful ,,heart ,,for ,,poets ,,ix4 ,,the ,,joyous ,,mission ,,of ,,mechanical ,,music ,x4 ,,masters ,,by ,,proxy 99 99 99 99 99 ,,the ,,joyful ,,heart ,i ,a ,,defense ,,of ,,joy ,joy is such stuff as the hinges of ,heaven's doors are made of4 ,so our fathers believed4 ,so we supposed in childhood4 ,since then it has become the literary fashion to oppose this idea4 ,the writers would have us think of joy not as a supernal hinge1 but as a pottle of hay1 hung by a crafty creator before humanity's asinine nose4 ,the donkey is thus constantly incited to unrewarded efforts4 ,and when he arrives at the journey's end he is either defrauded of the hay outright1 or he dislikes it1 or it disagrees with him4 ,robert ,louis ,stevenson warns us that to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive1 beautifully portraying the emptiness and illusory character of achievement4 ,and1 of those who have attained1 ,mr4 ,e4 ,f4 ,benson exclaims1 ,god help them6 ,these sayings are typical of a widespread literary fashion4 ,now to slander ,mistress ,joy to-day is a serious matter4 ,for we are coming to realize that she is a far more important person than we had supposed2 that she is1 in fact1 one of the chief managers of life4 ,instead of doing a modest little business in an obscure suburb1 she has offices that embrace the whole first floor of humanity's city hall4 ,of course ,i do not doubt that our writer-friends note down the truth as they see it4 ,but they see it imperfectly4 ,they merely have a corner of one eye on a corner of the truth4 ,therefore they tell untruths that are the falser for being so charmingly and neatly expressed4 ,what they say about joy being the bribe that achievement offers us to get itself realized may be true in a sense4 ,but they are wrong in speaking of the bribe as if it were an apple rotten at the core1 or a bag of counterfeit coin1 or a wisp of artificial hay4 ,it is none of these things4 ,it is sweet and genuine and well worth the necessary effort1 once we are in a position to appreciate it at anything like its true worth4 ,we must learn not to trust the beautiful writers too implicitly4 ,for there is no more treacherous guide than the consummate artist on the wrong track4 ,those who decry the joy of achievement are like tyros at skating who venture alone upon thin ice1 fall down1 fall in1 and insist on the way home that winter sports have been grossly overestimated4 ,this outcry about men being unable to enjoy what they have attained is a half-truth which cannot skate two consecutive strokes in the right direction without the support of its better half4 ,and its better half is the fact that one may enjoy achievement hugely1 provided only he will get himself into proper condition4 ,of course ,i am not for one moment denying that achievement is harder to enjoy than the hope of achievement4 ,undoubtedly the former lacks the glamour of the indistinct1 that sweet bloom of all that is far away4 ,but our celebrated writer-friends overlook the fact that glamour and sweet bloom are so much pepsin to help weak stomachs digest strong joy4 ,if you would have the best possible time of it in the world1 develop your joy-digesting apparatus to the point where it can1 without a qualm1 dispose of that tough morsel1 the present1 obvious and attained4 ,there will always be enough of the unachieved at table to furnish balanced rations4 ,god help the attainers6--forsooth6 ,why1 the ideas which ,i have quoted1 if they were carried to logical lengths1 would make heaven a farcical kill-joy1 a weary1 stale1 flat1 unprofitable morgue of disappointed hopes1 with ,ennui for janitor4 ,i admit that the old heaven of the ,semitic poets was constructed somewhat along these lines4 ,but that was no real heaven4 ,the real heaven is a quiet1 harpless1 beautiful place where every one is a heaven-born creator and is engaged--not caring in the least for food or sleep--in turning out1 one after another1 the greatest of masterpieces1 and enjoying them to the quick1 both while they are being done and when they are quite achieved4 ,i would not1 however1 fall into the opposite error and disparage the joy of traveling hopefully4 ,it is doubtless easy to amuse one's self in a wayside air-castle of an hundred suites1 equipped with self-starting servants1 a ,congressional ,library1 a ,national ,gallery of pictures1 a ,vatican-ful of sculpture1 with ,hoppe for billiard-marker1 ,paderewski to keep things going in the music-room1 ,wright as grand hereditary master of the hangar1 and ,miss ,annette ,kellerman in charge of the swimming-pool4 ,i am not denying that such a castle is easier to enjoy before the air has been squeezed out of it by the horny clutch of reality1 which moves it to the journey's end and sets it down with a jar in its fifty-foot lot1 complete with seven rooms and bath1 and only half an hour from the depot4 ,but this is not for one moment admitting the contention of the lords of literature that the air-castle has a monopoly of joy1 while the seven rooms and bath have a monopoly of disillusionized boredom and anguish of mind4 ,if your before-mentioned apparatus is only in working order1 you can have no end of joy out of the cottage4 ,and any morning before breakfast you can build another1 and vastly superior1 air-castle on the vacant land behind the woodshed4 ,what is all this1 ,i heard the reader ask1 about a joy-digesting apparatus8 ,it consists of four parts4 ,physical exuberance is the first4 ,to a considerable extent joy depends on an overplus of health4 ,the joy of artistic creation1 for instance1 lies not so intensely and intoxicatingly in what you may some time accomplish as in what has actually just started into life under your pencil or clayey thumb1 your bow or brush4 ,for what you are about to receive1 the ,lord1 as a rule1 makes you duly thankful4 ,but with the thankfulness is always mingled the shadowy apprehension that your powers may fail you when next you wish to use them4 ,thus the joy of anticipatory creation is akin to pain4 ,it holds no such pure bliss as actual creation4 ,when you are in full swing1 what you have just finished 7unless you are exhausted7 seems to you nearly always the best piece of work that you have ever done4 ,for your critical1 inhibitory apparatus is temporarily paralyzed by the intoxication of the moment4 ,what makes so many artists fail at these times to enjoy a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of its opposite1 is that they do not train their bodies like a strong man to run a race1 and make and keep them aboundingly vital4 ,the actual toil takes so much of their meager vitality that they have too little left with which to enjoy the resulting achievement4 ,if they become ever so slightly intoxicated over the work1 they have a dreadful morning after1 whose pain they read back into the joy preceding4 ,and then they groan out that all is vanity1 and slander joy by calling it a pottle of hay4 ,it takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement is something finished4 ,and you cannot enjoy what is finished in art1 for instance1 without re-creating it for yourself4 ,but1 though re-creation demands almost as much vital overplus as creation1 the layman should realize that he has1 as a rule1 far more of this overplus than the pallid1 nervous sort of artist4 ,and he should accordingly discount the other's lamentations over the vanity of human achievement4 ,the reason why ,hazlitt took no pleasure in writing1 and in having written1 his delicious essays is that he did not know how to take proper care of his body4 ,to be extremely antithetical1 ,i1 on the other hand1 take so much pleasure in writing and in having written these essays of mine 7which are no hundredth part as beautiful1 witty1 wise1 or brilliant as ,hazlitt's71 that the leaden showers of drudgery1 discouragement1 and disillusionment which accompany and follow almost every one of them1 and the need of ,spartan training for their sake1 hardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings4 ,training has meant so much vital overplus to me that ,i long ago spurted and caught up with my pottle of joy4 ,and1 finding that it made a cud of unimagined flavor and durability1 ,i substituted for the pottle a placard to this effect3 ,,remember ,,the ,,race6 ,this placard1 hung always before me1 is a reminder that a decent respect for the laws of good sportsmanship requires one to keep in as hard condition as possible for the hundred-yard dash called ,life4 ,such a regimen pays thousands of per cent4 in yearly dividends4 ,it allows one to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather like that which the sprinter enjoys when1 after months of flawless preparation1 he hurls himself through space like some winged creature too much in love with the earth to leave it2 while every drop of his tingling blood makes him conscious of endless reserves of vitality4 ,tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things into joy--even sorrow itself4 ,i wonder if any one seriously doubts that it was just this which was giving ,browning's young ,david such a glorious time of it when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop about our manhood's prime vigor and the wild joys of living4 ,the physical variety of exuberance1 once won1 makes easy the winning of the mental variety4 ,this1 when it is almost isolated from the other kinds1 is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world of abstract thought1 or drink delight of battle with your intellectual peers1 or follow with full understanding the phonographic version of some mighty1 four-part fugue4 ,to attain this means work4 ,but if your body is shouting for joy over the mere act of living1 mental calisthenics no longer appear so impossibly irksome4 ,and anyway1 the discipline of your physical training has induced your will to put up with a good deal of irksomeness4 ,this is partly because its eye is fixed on something beyond the far-off1 divine event of achieving concentration on one subject for five minutes without allowing the mind to wander from it more than twenty-five times4 ,that something is a keenness of perception which makes any given fragment of nature or human nature or art1 however seemingly barren and commonplace1 endlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery--with possibilities1 even1 of a developing imagination4 ,for the ,auto-,comrade1 your better self1 is a magician4 ,he can get something out of nothing4 ,at this stage of your development you will probably discover in yourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enable you to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind4 ,as you wander through your mental pleasure-grounds1 whenever you come upon an ugly intruder of a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as fear1 envy1 hate1 remorse1 anger1 and the like1 there is only one right way to treat it4 ,pull it up like a weed2 drop it on the rubbish heap as if it were a stinging nettle2 and let some harmonious thought grow in its place4 ,there is no more reckless consumer of all kinds of exuberance than the discordant thought1 and weeding it out saves such an amazing quantity of eau de vie wherewith to water the garden of joy1 that every man may thus be his own ,burbank and accomplish marvels of mental horticulture4 ,when you have won physical and mental exuberance1 you will have pleased your ,auto-,comrade to such an extent that he will most likely startle and delight you with a birthday present as the reward of virtue4 ,some fine morning you will climb out of the right side of your bed and come whistling down to breakfast and find by your plate a neat packet of spiritual exuberance with his best wishes4 ,such a gift is what the true artist enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and full for a dozen pens or brushes to record4 ,jeanne d',arc knew it when the mysterious voices spoke to her2 and ,st4 ,john on ,patmos2 and every true lover at certain moments2 and each one of us who has ever flung wide the gates of prayer and felt the infinite come flooding in as the clean vigor of the tide swirls up through a sour1 stagnant marsh2 or who at some supreme instant has felt enfolding him1 like the everlasting arms1 a sure conviction of immortality4 ,now for purposes of convenience we may speak of these three kinds of exuberance as we would speak of different individuals4 ,but in reality they hardly ever exist alone4 ,the physical variety is almost sure to induce the mental and spiritual varieties and to project itself into them4 ,the mental kind looks before and after and warms body and soul with its radiant smile4 ,and even when we are in the throes of a purely spiritual love or religious ecstasy1 we have a feeling--though perhaps it is illusory--that the flesh and the intellect are more potent than we knew4 ,these1 then1 constitute the first three parts of the joy-digesting apparatus4 ,i think there is no need of dwelling on their efficacy in helping one to enjoy achievement4 ,let us pass1 therefore1 to the fourth and last part1 which is self-restraint4 ,perhaps the worst charge usually made against achievement is its sameness1 its dry monotony4 ,on the way to it 7the writers say7 you are constantly falling in with something new4 ,but1 once there1 you must abandon the variegated delights of yesterday and settle down1 to-day and forever1 to the same old thing4 ,in this connection ,i recall an epigram of ,professor ,woodrow ,wilson's4 ,he was lecturing to us young ,princetonians about ,gladstone's ability to make any subject of absorbing interest1 even a four hours' speech on the budget4 ,young gentlemen1 cried the professor1 it is not the subject that is dry4 ,it is you that are dry6 ,similarly1 it is not achievement that is dry2 it is the achievers1 who fondly suppose that now1 having achieved1 they have no further use for the exuberance of body1 mind1 and spirit1 or the self-restraint which helped them toward their goal4 ,particularly the self-restraint4 ,one chief reason why the thing attained palls so often and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy it immoderately4 ,why1 if ,ponce de ,leon had found the fountain of youth and drunk of it as bibulously as we are apt to guzzle the cup of achievement1 he would not only have arrested the forward march of time1 but would have over-reached himself and slipped backward through the years of his age to become a chronic infant in arms4 ,even traveling hopefully would pall if one kept at it twenty-four hours a day4 ,just feast on the rich food of ,beethoven's ,fifth ,symphony morning1 noon1 and night for a few months1 and see how you feel4 ,there is no other way4 ,achievement must be moderately indulged in1 not made the pretext for a debauch4 ,if one has achieved a new cottage1 for example1 let him take numerous week-end vacations from it4 ,and let not an author sit down and read through his own book the moment it comes from the binder4 ,a few more months will suffice to blur the memory of those irrevocable1 nauseating foundry proofs4 ,if he forbears--instead of being sickened by the stuff1 no gentle reader1 ,i venture to predict1 will be more keenly and delicately intrigued by the volume's vigors and subtleties4 ,if you have recently made a fortune1 be sure1 in the course of your ,continental wanderings1 to take many a third-class carriage full of witty peasants1 and stop at many an unpretending inn ,of the ,white ,hind1 with bowered rose-garden and bowling-green running down to the trout-filled river1 and mine ample hostess herself to make and bring you the dish for which she is famous over half the countryside4 ,thus you will increase by at least one ,baedekerian star-power the luster of the next ,grand ,hotel ,royal de l',univers which may receive you4 ,and be sure to alternate pedestrianism with motoring1 and the peanut gallery with the stage-box4 ,omit not to punctuate with stag vacations long periods of domestic felicity4 ,when ,solomon declared that all was vanity and vexation of spirit ,i suspect that he had been more than unusually intemperate in frequenting the hymeneal altar4 ,why is it that the young painters1 musicians1 and playwrights who win fame and fortune as heroes in the novels of ,mr4 ,e4 ,f4 ,benson enjoy achievement so hugely8 ,simply because they are exuberant in mind1 body1 and spirit1 and1 if not averse to brandy and soda1 are in other ways1 at least1 paragons of moderation4 ,and yet1 in his ,book of ,months1 ,mr4 ,benson requests ,god to help those who have attained6 ,with this fourfold equipment of the three exuberances and moderation1 ,i defy ,solomon himself in all his glory not to enjoy the situation immensely and settle down in high good humor and content with the paltry few scores of wives already achieved4 ,i defy him not to enjoy even his fame4 ,we have heard much from the gloomily illustrious about the fraudulent promise of fame4 ,at a distance1 they admit1 it seems like a banquet board spread with a most toothsome feast4 ,but step up to the table4 ,all you find there is dust and ashes1 vanity and vexation of spirit and a desiccated joint that defies the stoutest carver4 ,if a man holds this view1 however1 you may be rather sure that he belongs to the bourgeois great4 ,for it is just as bourgeois to win fame and then not know what on earth to do with it1 as it is to win fortune and then not know what on earth to do with it4 ,the more cultivated a famous man is1 the more he must enjoy the situation2 for along with his dry scrag of fame1 the more he must have of the sauce which alone makes it palatable4 ,the recipe for this sauce runs as follows3 to one amphoraful best physical exuberance add spice of keen perception1 cream of imagination1 and fruits of the spirit4 ,serve with grain of salt4 ,that famous person is sauceless who can1 without a tingle of joy1 overhear the couple in the next steamer-chairs mentioning his name casually to each other as an accepted and honored household word4 ,he has no sauce for his scrag if he1 unmoved1 can see the face of some beautiful child in the holiday crowd suddenly illuminated by the pleasure of recognizing him1 from his pictures1 as the author of her favorite story4 ,he is bourgeois if it gives him no joy when the weight of his name swings the beam toward the good cause2 or when the mail brings luminous gratitude and comprehension from the perfect stranger in ,topeka or ,tokyo4 ,no2 fame to the truly cultivated should be fully as enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward fame4 ,in certain other cases1 indeed1 attainment is even more delicious than the hope thereof4 ,think of the long1 cool drink at the ,new ,mexican pueblo after a day in the incandescent desert1 with your tongue gradually enlarging itself from thirst4 ,how is it with you1 ,o golfer1 when1 even up at the eighteenth1 you top into the hazard1 make a desperate demonstration with the niblick1 and wipe the sand out of your eyes barely in time to see your ball creep across the distant green and drop into the hole8 ,has not the new president's aged father a slightly better time at the inauguration of his dear boy than he had at any time during the fifty years of hoping for and predicting that consummation8 ,does not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly the certainty of having made the world a better place to live in1 than he had enjoyed the hope of achieving that desirable end8 ,can there be any comparison between the joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring1 now hopefully1 now despairingly1 to port1 and the joys of the same soul which has at last found a perfect haven in the heart of ,god8 ,and still the writers go on talking of joy as if it were a pottle of hay--a flimsy fraud--and of the satisfaction of attainment as if it were unattainable4 ,why do they not realize1 at least1 that their every thrill of response to a beautiful melody1 their every laugh of delighted comprehension of ,hazlitt or ,crothers1 is in itself attainment8 ,the creative appreciator of art is always at his goal4 ,and the much-maligned present is the only time at our disposal in which to enjoy the much-advertised future4 ,too bad that our literary friends should have gone to extremes on this point6 ,if ,robert ,louis ,stevenson had noted that to travel hopefully is an easier thing than to arrive1 he would undoubtedly have hit the truth4 ,if ,mr4 ,benson had said1 ,if you attain1 ,god help you bountifully to exuberance1 etc41 that would have been unexceptionable4 ,it would even have been a more useful--though slightly supererogatory--service1 to point out for the million-and-first time that achievement is not all that it seems to be from a considerable distance4 ,in other words1 that the laws of perspective will not budge4 ,these writers would thus quite sufficiently have played dentist to ,disappointment and extracted his venomous fangs for us in advance4 ,what the gentlemen really should have done was to perform the dentistry first1 reminding us once again that a part of attainment is illusory and consists of such stuff as dreams--good and bad--are made of4 ,then1 on the other hand1 they should have demonstrated attainment's good points1 finally leading up to its supreme advantage4 ,this advantage is--its strategic position4 ,arriving beats hoping to arrive1 in this3 that while the hoper is so keenly hopeful that he has little attention to spare for anything besides the future1 the arriver may take a broader1 more leisurely survey of things4 ,the hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak4 ,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 retrospect4 ,he has also yonder farther and loftier peak in his eye1 which he may now look forward to attacking the week after next2 for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him his mountain legs4 ,hence1 while the hoper enjoys only the future1 the achiever1 if his joy-digesting apparatus be working properly1 rejoices with exceeding great joy in past1 present1 and future alike4 ,he has an advantage of three to one over the merely hopeful traveler4 ,and when they meet this is the song he sings3-- ,mistress ,joy is at your side ,waiting to become a bride4 ,soft6 ,restrain your jubilation4 ,that ripe mouth may not be kissed ,ere you stand examination4 ,mistress ,joy's a eugenist4 ,is your crony ,moderation8 ,do your senses say you sooth8 ,are your veins the kind that tingle8 ,is your soul awake in truth8 ,if these traits in you commingle ,joy no more shall leave you single4 ,,ii ,,the ,,brimming ,,cup ,exuberance is the income yielded by a wise investment of one's vitality4 ,on this income1 so long as it flows in regularly1 the moderate man may live in the ,land of the ,joyful ,heart1 incased in triple steel against any arrows of outrageous fortune that happen to stray in across the frontier4 ,immigrants to this land who have no such income are denied admission4 ,they may steam into the country's principal port1 past the great statue of the goddess ,joy who holds aloft a brimming cup in the act of pledging the world4 ,but they are put ashore upon a small island for inspection4 ,and so soon as the inferior character of their investments becomes known1 or their recklessness in eating into their principal1 they are deported4 ,the contrast between those within the well-guarded gates and those without is an affecting one4 ,the latter often squander vast fortunes in futile attempts to gain a foothold in the country4 ,and they have a miserable time of it4 ,many of the natives1 on the other hand1 are so poor that they have constantly to fight down the temptation to touch their principal4 ,but every time they resist1 the old miracle happens for them once more3 the sheer act of living turns out to be paradise enow4 ,now no mere fullness of life will qualify a man for admission to the ,land of the ,joyful ,heart4 ,one must have overflowingness of life4 ,in his book ,the ,science of ,happiness ,jean ,finot declares1 that the disenchantment and the sadness which degenerate into a sort of pessimistic melancholy are frequently due to the diminution of the vital energy4 ,and as pain and sorrow mark the diminution1 the joy of living and the upspringing of happiness signify the increase of energy4444 ,by using special instruments1 such as the plethysmograph of ,hallion1 the pneumograph of ,marey1 the sphygmometer of ,cheron1 and so many others which have come in fashion during these latter years1 we have succeeded in proving experimentally that joy1 sadness1 and pain depend upon our energy4 ,to keep exuberant one must possess more than just enough vitality to fill the cup of the present4 ,there must be enough to make it brim over4 ,real exuberance1 however1 is not the extravagant1 jarring sort of thing that some thoughtless persons suppose it to be4 ,the word is not accented on the first syllable4 ,indeed1 it might just as well be inuberance4 ,it does not long to make an impression or1 in vulgar phrase1 to get a rise2 but tends to be self-contained4 ,it is not boisterousness4 ,it is generous and infectious1 while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish and repellent4 ,most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd of mummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades4 ,for boisterousness is only a degenerate exuberance1 drunk and on the rampage4 ,the royal old musician and poet was not filled with this1 but with the real thing1 when he sang3 ,he leadeth me beside the still waters4 ,he restoreth my soul 444 ,my cup runneth over4 ,the merely boisterous man1 on the other hand1 is a fatuous spendthrift of his fortune4 ,he reminds us how close we are of kin to the frolicsome chimpanzee4 ,his attitude was expressed on election night by a young man of ,manhattan who shouted hoarsely to his fellow3 ,on with the dance2 let joy be unrefined6 ,neither should mere vivacity be mistaken for exuberance4 ,it is no more surely indicative of the latter than is the laugh of a parrot4 ,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 vivacity1 while the less demonstrative ,teuton more easily stores his up for use where it will count4 ,this gives him an advantage in such pursuits as athletics and empire-building4 ,the more exuberance of all varieties one has stored up in body and mind and spirit1 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 existence4 ,a little of this precious commodity1 more or less1 is what often makes the difference between the ordinary and the supreme achievement4 ,it is the liquid explosive that shatters the final1 and most stubborn1 barrier between man and the ,infinite4 ,it is what ,walt ,whitman called that last spark1 that sharp flash of power1 that something or other more which gives life to all great literature4 ,the happy man is the one who possesses these three kinds of overplus1 and whose will is powerful enough to keep them all healthy and to keep him from indulging in their delights intemperately4 ,it is a ridiculous fallacy to assume1 as many do1 that such fullness of life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back door when middle age knocks at the front4 ,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 principal4 ,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 investor4 ,a red-letter day it will be for us when we realize that exuberance represents for every one the income from his fund of vitality2 that when one's exuberance is all gone1 his income is temporarily exhausted2 and that he cannot go on living at the same rate without touching the principal4 ,the hard-headed1 harder-worked ,american business man is admittedly clever and prudent about money matters4 ,but when he comes to deal with immensely more important matters such as life1 health1 and joy1 he often needs a guardian4 ,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 dollars4 ,the principal should not be broken into for living expenses during a term of at least ninety-nine years4 7,metchnikoff says that this term is one hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of the ,bulgarian bacillus47 ,and one should not be content with anything short of a substantial rate of interest4 ,in one respect this life-business is a simpler thing to manage than the dollar-business4 ,for1 in the former1 if the interest comes in regularly and unimpaired1 you may know that the principal is safe1 while in the dollar-business they may be paying your interest out of your principal1 and you none the wiser until the crash4 ,but here the difference ceases4 ,for if little or no vital interest comes in1 your generous scale of living is pinched4 ,you may defer the catastrophe a little by borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate from usurious stimulants1 giving many pounds of flesh as security4 ,but soon ,shylock forecloses and you are forced to move with your sufferings to the slums and ten-cent lodging-houses of ,life4 ,moreover1 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 stands1 the ,arch ,fear in a visible form there to pay slack life's arrears of pain1 darkness1 and cold4 ,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 living1 or to overdraw his account in the ,bank of ,heaven on ,earth4 ,every one of his days is a joy--that is1 except in so far as his elders have impressed their tired standards of behavior too masterfully upon him4 ,happy as a child--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary4 ,in order to remain as happy as this for a century or so1 all that a child has to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles1 and never overdraw or borrow4 ,i shall not here go into the myriad details of just how to invest and administer one's vitality4 ,for there is no dearth of wise books and physicians and ,masters of the ,inn1 competent to mark out sound business programs of work1 exercise1 recreation1 and regimen for body1 mind1 and spirit2 while all that you must contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension1 time1 money1 and will-power4 ,you see1 ,i am not a professor of vital commerce and investment2 ,i am a stump-speaker1 trying to induce the voters to elect a sound business administration4 ,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 office4 ,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 nation4 ,if it only were6 ,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 ,europe4 ,this is probably due to the exhilarating climate which makes ,america--physically1 at least1 though not yet economically and socially--the promised land4 ,of course ,i realize the absurdity of urging the great majority of human beings to keep within their vital incomes4 ,to ask the overworked1 under-fed1 under-rested1 under-played1 shoddily dressed1 overcrowded masses of humanity why they are not exuberant1 is to ask again1 with ,marie ,antoinette1 why the people who are starving for bread do not eat cake4 ,the fact is that to keep within one's income to-day1 either financially or vitally1 is an aristocratic luxury that is absolutely denied to the many4 ,most men--the rich as well as the poor--stumble through life three parts dead4 ,the ruling class1 if it had the will and the skill1 might awaken itself to fullness of life4 ,but only a comparatively few of the others could1 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 bank4 ,i think that this state of things is very different from the one which the fathers contemplated in founding our nation4 ,when they undertook to secure for us all life1 liberty1 and the pursuit of happiness1 they did not mean a bare clinging to existence1 liberty to starve1 and the pursuit of a nimble happiness by the lame1 the halt1 and the blind4 ,they meant fullness of life1 liberty in the broadest sense1 both outer and inner1 and that almost certain success in the attainment of happiness which these two guarantee a man4 ,in a word1 the fathers meant to offer us all a good long draft of the brimming cup with the full sum of benefits implied by that privilege4 ,for the vitalized man possesses real life and liberty1 and finds happiness usually at his disposal without putting himself to the trouble of pursuit4 ,i can imagine the good fathers' chagrin if they are aware to-day of how things have gone on in their republic4 ,perhaps they realize that the possibility of exuberance has now become a special privilege4 ,and if they are still as wise as they once were1 they will be doubly exasperated by this state of affairs because they will see that it is needless4 ,it has been proved over and over again that modern machinery has removed all real necessity for poverty and overwork4 ,there is enough to go 'round4 ,under a more democratic system we might have enough of the necessities and reasonable comforts of life to supply each of the hundred million ,americans1 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 living4 ,on the same terms there is likewise enough exuberance to go 'round4 ,the only obstacle to placing it within the reach of all exists in men's minds4 ,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 few1 but for the use of the many4 ,until that day comes1 the possibility of exuberance will remain a special privilege4 ,in the mean while it is too bad that the favored classes do not make more use of this privilege4 ,it is absurd that such large numbers of them are still as far from exuberance as the unprivileged4 ,they keep reducing their overplus of vitality to an under-minus of it by too much work and too foolish play1 by plain thinking and high living and the dissipation of maintaining a pace too swift for their as yet unadjusted organisms4 ,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 rooms4 ,if we would bring joy to the masses why not first vitalize the classes8 ,if the latter can be led to develop a fondness for that brimming cup which is theirs for the asking1 a long step will be taken toward the possibility of overflowing life for all4 ,the classes will come to realize that1 even from a selfish point of view1 democracy is desirable2 that because man is a social animal1 the best-being of the one is inseparable from the best-being of the many2 that no one can be perfectly exuberant until all are exuberant4 ,jean ,finot is right3 ,true happiness is so much the greater and deeper in the proportion that it embraces and unites in a fraternal chain more men1 more countries1 more worlds4 ,but the classes may also be moved by instincts less selfish4 ,for the brimming cup has this at least in common with the cup that inebriates3 its possessor is usually filled with a generous--if sometimes maudlin--anxiety to have others enjoy his own form of beverage4 ,the present writer is a case in point4 ,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 cup4 ,before getting hold of this cup1 the writer would have looked with an indifferent and perhaps hostile eye upon the proposition to make such a blessing generally available4 ,but now he cannot for the life of him see how any one whose body1 mind1 and spirit are alive and reasonably healthy can help wishing the same jolly good fortune for all mankind4 ,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 particular3 ,there's too much old folk here for me6 ,for me1 too1 cried the poet with one of his hearty laughs4 ,we are all of us a good deal older than we need to be1 than we think we are4 ,let's all get young again4 ,even so6 ,here's to eternal youth for every one4 ,and here's to the hour when we may catch the eye of humanity and pledge all brother men in the brimming cup4 ,,iii ,,enthusiasm ,enthusiasm is exuberance-with-a-motive4 ,it is the power that makes the world go 'round4 ,the old ,greeks who christened it knew that it was the god-energy in the human machine4 ,without its driving force nothing worth doing has ever been done4 ,it is man's dearest possession4 ,love1 friendship1 religion1 altruism1 devotion to hobby or career--all these1 and most of the other good things in life1 are forms of enthusiasm4 ,a medicine for the most diverse ills1 it alleviates both the pains of poverty and the boredom of riches4 ,apart from it man's heart is seldom joyful4 ,therefore it should be husbanded with zeal and spent with wisdom4 ,to waste it is folly2 to misuse it1 disaster4 ,for it is safe to utilize this god-energy only in its own proper sphere4 ,enthusiasm moves the human vessel4 ,to let it move the rudder1 too1 is criminal negligence4 ,brahms once made a remark somewhat to this effect3 ,the reason why there is so much bad music in the world is that composers are in too much of a hurry4 ,when an inspiration comes to them1 what do they do8 ,instead of taking it out for a long1 cool walk1 they sit down at once to work it up1 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-song4 ,love is blind1 they say4 ,this is an exaggeration4 ,but it is based on the fact that enthusiasm1 whether it appears as love1 or in any other form1 always has trouble with its eyes4 ,in its own place it is incomparably efficient2 only keep it away from the pilot-house6 ,since this god-energy is the most precious and important thing that we have1 why should our word for its possessor have sunk almost to the level of a contemptuous epithet8 ,nine times in ten we apply it to the man who allows his enthusiasm to steer his vessel4 ,it would be full as logical to employ the word writer for one who misuses his literary gift in writing dishonest advertisements4 ,when we speak of an enthusiast to-day1 we usually mean a person who has all the ill-judging impulsiveness of a child without its compensating charm1 and is therefore not to be taken seriously4 ,he's only an enthusiast6 ,this has been said about ,columbus and ,christ and every other great man who ever lived4 ,but besides its poor sense of distance and direction1 men have another complaint against enthusiasm4 ,they think it insincere on account of its capacity for frequent and violent fluctuation in temperature4 ,in his ,creative ,evolution1 ,bergson shows how our most ardent enthusiasm1 as soon as it is externalized into action1 is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity1 the one so easily takes the shape of the other1 that we might confuse them together1 doubt our own sincerity1 deny goodness and love1 if we did not know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living4 ,the philosopher then goes on to show how1 when we fall into this confusion1 we are unjust to enthusiasm1 which is the materialization of the invisible breath of life itself4 ,it is the spirit4 ,the action it induces is the letter4 ,these constitute two different and often antagonistic movements4 ,the letter kills the spirit4 ,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 murderer4 ,hence1 the taint of insincerity that seems to hang about enthusiasm is1 after all1 nothing but illusion4 ,to be just we should discount this illusion in advance as the wise man discounts discouragement4 ,and the epithet for the man whose lungs are large with the breath of life should cease to be a term of reproach4 ,enthusiasm is the prevailing characteristic of the child and of the adult who does memorable things4 ,the two are near of kin and bear a family resemblance4 ,youth trails clouds of glory4 ,glory often trails clouds of youth4 ,usually the eternal man is the eternal boy2 and the more of a boy he is1 the more of a man4 ,the most conventional-seeming great men possess as a rule a secret vein of eternal-boyishness4 ,our idea of ,brahms1 for example1 is of a person hopelessly mature and respectable4 ,but we open ,kalbeck's new biography and discover him climbing a tree to conduct his chorus while swaying upon a branch2 or1 in his fat forties1 playing at frog-catching like a five-year-old4 ,the prominent ,american is no less youthful4 ,not long ago one of our good gray men of letters was among his children1 awaiting dinner and his wife4 ,her footsteps sounded on the stairs4 ,quick1 children6 he exclaimed4 ,here's mother4 ,let's hide under the table and when she comes in we'll rush out on all-fours and pretend we're bears4 ,the maneuver was executed with spirit4 ,at the preconcerted signal1 out they all waddled and galumphed with horrid grunts--only to find something unfamiliar about mother's skirt1 and1 glancing up1 to discover that it hung upon a strange and terrified guest4 ,the biographers have paid too little attention to the god-energy of their heroes4 ,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 truth2 the patriot for his country2 the artist for beauty and self-expression2 the altruist for humanity2 the discoverer for knowledge2 the lover or friend for a kindred soul2 the prophet1 martyr1 or saint for his god4 ,every lover1 according to ,emerson1 is a poet4 ,not only is this true1 but every one of us1 when in the sway of any enthusiasm1 has in him something creative4 ,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 subject4 ,now ,i should like to try the experiment of sketching in outline a new kind of biography4 ,it would consist entirely of the record of an ordinary person's enthusiasms4 ,but1 as ,i know no other life-story so well as my own1 perhaps the reader will pardon me for abiding in the first person singular4 ,he may grant pardon the more readily if he realizes the universality of this offense among writers4 ,for it is a fact that almost all novels1 stories1 poems1 and essays are only more or less cleverly disguised autobiography4 ,so here follow some of my enthusiasms in a new chapter4 ,,iv ,a ,,chapter ,,of ,,enthusiasms ,i ,in looking back over my own life1 a series of enthusiasms would appear to stand out as a sort of spinal system1 about which are grouped as tributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence4 ,or1 rather1 enthusiasm is the deep1 clear1 sparkling stream which carries along and solves and neutralizes1 if not sweetens1 in its impetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds1 such as school1 the ,puritan ,sabbath1 boot and hair-brushing1 polite and unpolemic converse with bores1 prigs1 pedants1 and shorter catechists--and so on all the way down between the shores of age to the higher mathematics1 bank failures1 and the occasional editor whose word is not as good as his bond4 ,my first enthusiasm was for good things to eat4 ,it was stimulated by that priceless asset1 a virginal palate4 ,but here at once the medium of expression fails4 ,for what may words presume to do with the flavor of that first dish of oatmeal2 with the first pear1 grape1 watermelon2 with the ,bohemian roll called ,hooska1 besprinkled with poppy and mandragora2 or the wondrous dishes which our ,viennese cook called ,aepfelstrudel and ,scheiterhaufen8 ,the best way for me to express my reaction to each of these delicacies would be to play it on the 'cello4 ,the next best would be to declare that they tasted somewhat better than ,eve thought the apple was going to taste4 ,but how absurdly inadequate this sounds6 ,i suppose the truth is that such enthusiasms have become too utterly congealed in our blas minds when at last these minds have grown mature enough to grasp the principles of penmanship4 ,so that whatever has been recorded about the sensations of extreme youth is probably all false4 ,why1 even ,heaven lies about us in our infancy1-- as ,wordsworth revealed in his ,ode on ,immortality4 ,and though ,tennyson pointed out that we try to revenge ourselves by lying about heaven in our maturity1 this does not serve to correct a single one of crabbed age's misapprehensions about youth4 ,games next inflamed my fancy4 ,more than dominoes or ,halma1 lead soldiers appealed to me1 and tops1 marbles1 and battledore and shuttlecock4 ,through tag1 fire-engine1 pom-pom-pull-away1 hide-and-seek1 baseball1 and boxing1 ,i came to tennis1 which ,i knew instinctively was to be my athletic grand passion4 ,perhaps ,i was first attracted by the game's constant humor which was forever making the ball imitate or caricature humanity1 or beguiling the players to act like solemn automata4 ,for children are usually quicker than grown-ups to see these droll resemblances4 ,i came by degrees to like the game's variety1 its tense excitement1 its beauty of posture and curve4 ,and before long ,i vaguely felt what ,i later learned consciously3 that tennis is a sure revealer of character4 ,three sets with a man suffice to give one a working knowledge of his moral equipment2 six1 of his chief mental traits2 and a dozen1 of that most important1 and usually veiled part of him1 his subconscious personality4 ,young people of opposite sexes are sometimes counseled to take a long railway journey together before deciding on a matrimonial merger4 ,but ,i would respectfully advise them rather to play singles with each other before venturing upon a continuous game of doubles4 ,the collecting mania appeared some time before tennis4 ,i first collected ferns under a crag in a deep glen4 ,mere amassing soon gave way to discrimination1 which led to picking out a favorite fern4 ,this was chosen1 ,i now realize1 with a woeful lack of fine feeling4 ,i called it ,the ,alligator from its fancied resemblance to my brother's alligator-skin traveling-bag4 ,but admiration of this fern brought a dawning consciousness that certain natural objects were preferable to others4 ,this led1 in years1 to an enthusiasm for collecting impressions of the beauty1 strength1 sympathy1 and significance of nature4 ,the ,alligator fern1 as ,i still call it1 has become a symbolic thing to me2 and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or best-loved impression1 not alone in the world of ferns1 but also in each department of nature4 ,among forests it symbolizes the immemorial incense cedars and redwoods of the ,yosemite2 among shores1 those of ,capri and ,monterey2 among mountains1 the glowing one called ,isis as seen at dawn from the depths of the ,grand ,caon4 ,,ii ,next1 ,i collected postage-stamps4 ,i know that it is customary to-day for writers to sneer at this pursuit4 ,but surely they have forgotten its variety and subtlety2 its demand on the imagination2 how it makes history and geography live1 and initiates one painlessly into the mysteries of the currency of all nations4 ,then what a tonic it is for the memory6 ,only think of the implications of the annual price-catalogue6 ,soon after the issue of this work1 every collector worthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind the current market values of thousands of stamps4 ,and he can tell you offhand1 not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceled condition1 but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled1 unperforated1 embossed1 rouletted1 surcharged with all manner of initials1 printed by mistake with the king standing on his head1 or water-marked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine of ,egypt4 ,this feat of memory is1 moreover1 no hardship at all1 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 work4 ,we often hear that the wealthy do not enjoy their possessions4 ,this depends entirely upon the wealthy4 ,that some of them enjoy their treasures giddily1 madly1 my own experience proves4 ,for1 as youthful stamp-collectors went in those days1 ,i was a philatelic magnate4 ,by inheritance1 by the ceaseless and passionate trading of duplicates1 by rummaging in every available attic1 by correspondence with a wide circle of foreign missionaries1 and by delivering up my whole allowance1 to the dealers1 ,i had amassed a collection of several thousand varieties4 ,among these were such gems as all of the triangular ,cape of ,good ,hopes1 almost all of the early ,persians1 and our own spectacular issue of #ahfi unused1 including the one on which the silk-stockinged fathers are signing the ,declaration of ,independence4 ,such possessions as these ,i well-nigh worshiped4 ,even to-day1 after having collected no stamps for a generation1 the chance sight of an approval sheet1 with its paper-hinged reminders of every land1 gives me a curious sensation4 ,there visit my spine echoes of the thrills that used to course it on similar occasions in boyhood4 ,these were the days when my stamps had formed for me mental pictures--more or less accurate--of each country from ,angola to ,zululand1 its history1 climate1 scenery1 inhabitants1 and rulers4 ,to possess its rarest stamp was mysteriously connected in my mind with being given the freedom of the land itself1 and introduced with warm recommendations to its genius loci4 ,even old circulars issued by dealers1 now long gone to stampless climes1 have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour4 ,i prefer those of foreign dealers because their ,english has the quaint1 other-world atmosphere of what they dealt in4 ,the other day ,i found in an old scrapbook a circular from ,vienna1 which annihilated a score of years with its very first words3 ,,clearing ,,of ,a ,,large ,,part ,,of ,,my ,,retail ,,depository ,being lately so much engaged into my wholesale business 444 ,i have made up my mind to sell out a large post of my retail-stamps at under-prices4 ,they are rests of larger collections containing for the most1 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 nouveauts of ,central ,america4 ,before continuing this persuasive flow1 the dealer inserts a number of testimonials like the following4 ,he calls them3 ,,acknowledgments ,sent package having surpassed my expectations ,i beg to remit by to-days post-office-ordres ,mk4 #ajj4 ,kindly please send me by return of post offered album wanted for retail sale4 ,g4 ,b4--,,hannover4 ,the dealer now comes to his peroration3 ,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 possible4 ,with #be-fj abatement ,i give stamps and whole things to societies against four weeks calculation4 ,all collectors are bound to oblige themselves by writing contemporaneously with sending in the depository amount to make calculation within a week as latest term4 ,it is enough6 ,as ,i read1 the old magic enfolds me1 and ,i am seized with longing to turn myself into a society of collectors and to implore the altruistic dealer kindly please to send me1 at a prodigious abatement1 stamps and whole things against four weeks calculation4 ,,iii ,the youngest children of large families are apt to be lonely folk1 somewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms4 ,i was such a child1 blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and rather inclined to sedentary joys4 ,even when ,i reached the barbaric stage of evolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits of his primitive ancestors1 ,i was fain to enjoy these in the more sophisticated forms natural to a lonely young city-dweller4 ,when stamps had passed their zenith ,i was filled with a lust for slaughter4 ,fish were at first the desired victims4 ,day after day ,i sat watching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of the muddy and torpid ,cuyahoga4 ,i was like some fond parent1 hoping against hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and dive beneath the surface of things1 into touch with the great living realities4 ,and when the cork finally marked a historic epoch by vanishing1 and a small1 inert1 and intensely bored sucker was pulled in hand over hand1 ,i felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest old and strong as the race4 ,but presently ,i myself was drawn1 like the cork1 beneath the superficial surface of the angler's art4 ,for in the public library ,i chanced on a shelf of books1 that told about fishing of a nobler1 jollier1 more seductive sort4 ,at once ,i was consumed with a passion for five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods1 ethereal leaders1 double-tapered casting-lines of braided silk1 and artificial flies more fair than birds of paradise4 ,armed in spirit1 with all these1 ,i waded the streams of ,england with kindly old ,isaak ,walton1 and ranged the ,restigouche with the predecessors of ,henry van ,dyke4 ,these dreams brought with them a certain amount of satisfaction--about as much satisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party1 each equipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite4 ,the visions were pleasant1 of course1 but they cried out1 and made me cry out1 for action4 ,there were no trout1 to be sure1 within a hundred miles1 and there was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight4 ,but ,i did what ,i could to be prepared for the blessed hour when we should meet4 ,i secured five new subscriptions or so to ,the ,boys' ,chronicle 7let us call it71 and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it would have resolved itself into its elements at sight of a half-pound trout4 ,it was destined1 though1 never to meet with this embarrassment4 ,my casting-line bore a family resemblance to grocery string4 ,my leader was a piece of gut from my brother's 'cello2 my flybook1 an old wallet4 ,as for flies1 they seemed beyond my means2 and it was perplexing to know what to do1 until ,i found a book which said that it was better by far to tie your own flies4 ,with joyful relief ,i acted on this counsel4 ,plucking the feather-duster1 ,i tied two ,white ,millers with shoe-thread upon cod-hooks4 ,one of these ,i stained and streaked with my heart's blood into the semblance of a ,parmacheene ,belle4 ,the canary furnished materials for a ,yellow ,may2 a dooryard ,english sparrow1 for a ,brown ,hackle4 ,my masterpiece1 the beautiful1 parti-colored fly known as ,jock ,scott1 owed its being to my sister's ,easter bonnet4 ,i covered the points of the hooks with pieces of cork1 and fished on the front lawn from morning to night1 leaning with difficulty against the thrust of an imaginary torrent4 ,and ,i never ceased striving to make the three flies straighten out properly as the books directed1 and fall like thistledown upon the strategic spot where the empty tomato can was anchored1 and then jiggle appetizingly down over the four-pounder1 where he sulked in the deep hole just beyond the hydrant4 ,the hunting fever was wakened by the need for the ,brown ,hackle already mentioned4 ,but as the choice of weapons and of victims culminated in the air-gun and the sparrow1 respectively1 my earliest hunting was confined even more closely than my fishing to the library and the dense and teeming forests of the imagination4 ,but while somewhat handicapped here by the scarcity of ferocious game1 ,i was more fortunate in another enthusiasm which attacked me at almost the same time4 ,for however unpropitious the hunting is on any given part of the earth's surface1 there is everywhere and always an abundance of good hidden-treasure-seeking to be had4 ,the garden1 the attic1 the tennis lawn all suffered4 ,and my initiative was strengthened by the discovery of an incomparable book all about a dead man's chest1 and not only digging for gold in a secret island1 but finding it1 too1 by jingo6 and fighting off the mutineers4 ,these aspirations naturally led to games of ,pirate1 or ,outlaw1 which were handicapped1 however1 by the scarcity of playmates1 and their curious hesitation to serve as victims4 ,as pirates and outlaws are well known to be the most superstitious of creatures1 inclining to the primitive in their religious views1 we were naturally led into a sort of dread enthusiasm for--or enthusiastic dread of--the whole pantheon of spooks1 sprites1 and bugaboos to which savages and children1 great and small1 bow the knee4 ,my dreams at that time ran something like this3 ,,paradise ,,revised ,playing hymn-tunes day and night ,on a harp may be all right ,for the grown-ups2 but for me1 ,i do wish that heaven could be ,sort o' like a circus1 run ,so a kid could have some fun6 ,there ,i'd not play harps1 but horns ,when ,i chased the unicorns-- ,magic tubes with pistons greasy1 ,slides that pushed and pulled out easy1 ,cylinders of snaky brass ,where the fingers like to fuss1 ,polished like a looking-glass1 ,ending in a blunderbuss4 ,i would ride a horse of steel ,wound up with a ratchet-wheel4 ,every beast ,i'd put to rout ,like the man ,i read about4 ,i would singe the leopard's hair1 ,stalk the vampire and the adder1 ,drive the werewolf from his lair1 ,make the mad gorilla madder4 ,needle-guns my work should do4 ,but1 if beasts got closer to1 ,i would pierce them to the marrow ,with a barbed and poisoned arrow1 ,or ,i'd whack 'em on the skull ,till my scimiter was dull4 ,if these weapons didn't work1 ,with a kris or bowie-knife1 ,poniard1 assegai1 or dirk1 ,i would make them beg for life2-- ,spare them1 though1 if they'd be good ,and guard me from what haunts the wood-- ,from those creepy1 shuddery sights ,that come round a fellow nights-- ,imps that squeak and trolls that prowl1 ,ghouls1 the slimy devil-fowl1 ,headless goblins with lassoes1 ,scarlet witches worse than those1 ,flying dragon-fish that bellow ,so as most to scare a fellow4444 ,there1 as nearly as ,i could1 ,i would live like ,robin ,hood1 ,taking down the mean and haughty1 ,getting plunder from the naughty ,to reward all honest men ,who should seek my outlaw's den4 ,when ,i'd wearied of these pleasures ,i'd go hunt for hidden treasures-- ,in no ordinary way1 ,pirates' luggers ,i'd waylay2 ,board them from my sinking dory1 ,wade through decks of gore and glory1 ,drive the fiends1 with blazing matchlock1 ,down below1 and snap the hatch-lock4 ,next1 ,i'd scud beneath the sky-land1 ,sight the hills of ,treasure ,island1 ,prowl and peer and prod and prise1 ,till there burst upon my eyes ,just the proper pirate's freight3 ,gold doubloons and pieces of eight6 ,then--the very best of all-- ,suddenly a stranger tall ,would appear1 and ,i'd forget ,that we hadn't ever met4 ,and with cap upthrown ,i'd greet him 7,turning from the plunder1 yellow7 ,and ,i'd hurry fast to meet him1 ,for he'd be the very fellow ,who1 ,i think1 invented fun-- ,robert ,louis ,stevenson4 ,the enthusiasms of this barbaric period never died4 ,they grew up1 instead1 and proved serviceable friends4 ,fishing and hunting are now the high-lights of vacation time4 ,the crude call of the weird and the inexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten psychic continents which we ,western peoples have only just discovered and begun to explore4 ,as for the buried treasure craze--why1 my life-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden valuables in the cellars and attics1 the chimney-pieces and desert islands of the mind1 and secret attempts to coin them into currency4 ,and so ,i might go on to tell of my enthusiasms for no end of other things like reading1 modeling1 folk-lore1 cathedrals1 writing1 pictures1 and the theater4 ,then there is the long story of that enthusiasm called ,love1 of ,friendship its twin1 and their elder brother1 ,religion1 and their younger sister1 ,altruism4 ,and travel and adventure and so on4 ,but no6 ,it is1 ,i believe1 a misdemeanor to obtain attention under false pretenses4 ,if ,i have caught the reader's eye by promising to illustrate in outline a new method of writing autobiography1 ,i must not abuse his confidence by putting that method into practice4 ,so1 with a regret almost equal to that of ,lewis ,carroll's famous ,bellman-- ,i skip twenty years-- and close with my latest enthusiasm4 ,,iv ,confirmed wanderers that we were1 my wife and ,i had rented a house for the winter in a ,massachusetts coast village and had fallen somewhat under the spell of the place4 ,nevertheless1 we had decided to move on soon--to try1 in fact1 another trip through ,italy4 ,our friendly neighbors urged us to buy land up the back lane instead1 and build and settle down4 ,we knew nothing of this region1 however1 and scarcely heard them4 ,but they were so insistent that one day we ventured up the back lane at dusk and began to explore the woods4 ,it grew dark and we thought of turning back4 ,then it began to grow light again4 ,a full moon was climbing up through the maples1 inviting further explorations4 ,we pushed through a dense undergrowth and presently were in a grove of great white pines4 ,there was a faint sound of running water1 and suddenly we came upon an astonishing brook--wide1 swift1 and musical4 ,we had not suspected the existence of such a brook within a dozen leagues4 ,it was over-arched by tall oaks and elms1 beeches1 tupelos1 and maples4 ,the moonbeams were dancing in the ripples and on the floating castles of foam4 ,what a place for a study6 ,yes2 a log cabin with a big stone fireplace4 ,the remarks came idly1 but our eyes met and held4 ,moved by one impulse we turned from the stream and remarked what bosh people will sometimes talk1 and discussed the coming ,italian trip as we moved cautiously among the briers4 ,but when we came once more to the veteran pines1 they seemed more glamorous than ever in the moonlight1 especially one that stood near a large holly1 apart from the rest--a three-prong lyrical fellow--and his opposite1 a burly1 thickset archer1 bending his long-bow into a most exquisite curve4 ,the fragrant pine needles whispered4 ,the brook lent its faint music4 ,quick6 ,we had better get away6 ,a forgotten lumber road led us safe from briers up a hill4 ,out of a dense oak grove we suddenly emerged upon the more open crest4 ,our feet sank deep in moss4 ,look1 ,i said4 ,over the heads of the high forest trees below shimmered a mile of moonlit marshes1 and beyond them a gleam--perhaps from some vessel far at sea1 perhaps even from a ,provincetown lighthouse4 ,yes1 but look6 ,at a touch ,i faced around and beheld1 crowning the hill1 a stately company of red cedars1 comely and dense and mysterious as the cypresses of ,tivoli1 and gloriously drenched in moonlight4 ,but what a place for a house6 ,let's give up ,italy1 was the answer1 and make this wood our home4 ,by instinct and training we were two inveterate wanderers4 ,never had we possessed so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth4 ,but the nest-building enthusiasm had us at last4 ,our hands met in compact4 ,as we strolled reluctantly homeward to a ten-o'clock dinner we talked of road-making1 swamps1 pneumatic water-systems1 the nimbleness of dollars1 and mountains of other difficulties4 ,and we agreed that the only kind of faith which can easily remove mountains is the faith of the enthusiast4 ,v ,,the ,,auto-,,comrade ,human nature abhors a vacuum1 especially a vacuum inside itself4 ,offer the ordinary man a week's vacation all alone1 and he will look as though you were offering him a cell in ,sing ,sing4 ,there are1 as ,ruth ,cameron truly observes1 a great many people to whom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hours with only their own selves for company4 ,to escape that terrible catastrophe1 they will make friends with the most fearful bore or read the most stupid story4444 ,if such people are marooned a few hours1 not only without human companionship1 but even without a book or magazine with which to screen their own stupidity from themselves1 they are fairly frantic4 ,if any one hates to be alone with himself1 the chances are that he has not much of any self to be alone with4 ,he is in as desolate a condition as a certain ,mr4 ,pease of ,oberlin1 who1 having lost his wife and children1 set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this epitaph3 ,here lies the pod4 ,the ,pease are shelled and gone to ,god4 ,now1 pod-like people such as he are always solitary wherever other people are not2 and there is1 of course1 nothing much more distressing than solitariness4 ,these people1 however1 fall through sheer ignorance into a confusion of thought4 ,they suppose that solitude and solitariness are the same thing4 ,to the artist in life--to the wise keeper of the joyful heart--there is just one difference between these two3 it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes4 ,for1 to the artist in life1 solitude is solitariness plus the ,auto-,comrade4 ,as it is the ,auto-,comrade who makes all the difference1 ,i shall try to describe his appearance4 ,his eyes are the most arresting part of him4 ,they never peer stupidly through great1 thick spectacles of others' making4 ,they are scarcely ever closed in sleep1 and sometimes make their happiest discoveries during the small hours4 ,these hours are truly small because the ,auto-,comrade often turns his eyes into the lenses of a moving-picture machine--such an entertaining one that it compresses the hours to seconds4 ,it is through constant1 alert use that his eyes have become sharp4 ,they can pierce through the rinds of the toughest personalities1 and even penetrate on occasion into the future4 ,they can also take in whole panoramas of the past in one sweeping look4 ,for they are of that inner variety through which ,wordsworth1 winter after winter1 used to survey his daffodil-fields4 ,the bliss of solitude1 he called them4 ,the ,auto-,comrade has an adjustable brow4 ,it can be raised high enough to hold and reverberate and add rich overtones to1 the grandest chords of thought ever struck by a ,plato1 a ,buddha1 or a ,kant4 ,the next instant it may easily be lowered to the point where the ordinary cartoon of commerce or the tiny cachinnation of a machine-made ,chesterton paradox will not ring entirely hollow4 ,as for his voice1 it can at times be more musical than ,melba's or ,caruso's4 ,without being raised above a whisper1 it can girdle the globe4 ,it can barely breathe some delicious new melody2 yet the thing will float forth not only undiminished1 but gathering beauty1 significance1 and incisiveness in every land it passes through4 ,the ,auto-,comrade is an erect1 wiry young figure of an athlete4 ,as he trades at the ,seven-,league ,boot and ,shoe ,concern1 it never bothers him to accompany you on the longest tramps4 ,his feet simply cannot be tired out4 ,as for his hands1 they are always alert to give you a lift up the rough places on the mountain-side4 ,he has remarkable presence of body4 ,in any emergency he is usually the best man on the spot4 ,he is at once seer1 creator1 accomplisher1 and present help in time of trouble4 ,but his everyday occupation is that of entertainer4 ,he is the joy-bringer--the ,prometheus of pleasure4 ,in his vicinity there is no such thing as ennui or lonesomeness4 ,emerson wrote3 ,when ,i would spend a lonely day ,sun and moon are in my way4 ,but for pals of the ,auto-,comrade1 not only sun1 moon1 etc41 are in the way1 but all of his own unlimited resources4 ,for every time and season he has a fittingly varied repertory of entertainment4 ,now and again he startles you by the legerdemain feat of snatching brand-new ideas out of the blue1 like rabbits out of a hat4 ,while you stand at the port-hole of your cabin and watch the rollers rushing back to the beloved home-land you are quitting1 he marshals your friends and acquaintances into a long line for a word of greeting or a rapid-fire chat1 just as though you were some idol of the people1 and were steaming in past the ,statue of ,liberty on your way home from lionizing and being lionized abroad1 and the ,auto-,comrade were the factotum at your elbow who asks1 ,what name1 please8 ,after the friends and acquaintances1 he even brings up your btes noires and dearest enemies for inspection and comment4 ,strangely enough1 viewed in this way1 these persons no longer seem so contemptible or pernicious or devilish as they once did4 ,at this point your factotum rubs your eye-glasses bright with the handkerchief he always carries about for slate-cleaning purposes1 and lo6 you even begin to discover good points about the chaps1 hitherto unsuspected4 ,then there are always your million-and-one favorite melodies which nobody but that all-around musical amateur1 the ,auto-,comrade1 can so exquisitely whistle1 hum1 strum1 fiddle1 blat1 or roar4 ,there is also a universe full of new ones for him to improvise4 ,and he is the jolliest sort of fellow musician1 because1 when you play or sing a duet with him1 you can combine with the exciting give-and-take and reciprocal stimulation of the duet1 the god-like autocracy of the solo1 its opportunity for wide1 uninterrupted1 uncoerced self-expression4 ,sometimes1 however1 in the first flush of escape with him to the wilds1 you are fain to clap your hand over his mouth in order the better to taste the essentially folk-less savor of solitude4 ,for music is a curiously social art1 and ,browning was more than half right when he said1 ,who hears music1 feels his solitude peopled at once4 ,perhaps you can find your entertainer a small lump of clay or modeling-wax to thumb into bad caricatures of those you love and good ones of those you hate1 until increasing facility impels him to try and model not a ,tanagra figurine1 for that would be unlike his original fancy1 but a ,hoboken figurine1 say1 or a sketch for some ,elgin 7,illinois7 marbles4 ,if you care anything for poetry and can find him a stub of pencil and an unoccupied cuff1 he will be most completely in his element2 for if there is any one occupation more closely identified with him than another1 it is that of poet4 ,and though all ,auto-,comrades are not poets1 all poets are ,auto-,comrades4 ,every poem which has ever thrilled this world or another has been written by the ,auto-,comrade of some so-called poet4 ,this is one reason why the so-called poets think so much of their great companions4 ,allons6 after the great companions6 cried old ,walt to his fellow poets4 ,if he had not overtaken1 and held fast to1 his1 we should never have heard the ,leaves of ,grass whispering one or two indicative words for the future4 ,the bards have always obeyed this call4 ,and they have known how to value their ,auto-,comrades1 too4 ,see1 for example1 what ,keats thought of his3 ,though the most beautiful ,creature were waiting for me at the end of a ,journey or a ,walk2 though the ,carpet were of ,silk1 the ,curtains of the morning ,clouds2 the chairs and ,sofa stuffed with ,cygnet's down2 the food ,manna1 the ,wine beyond ,claret1 the ,window opening on ,winander mere1 ,i should not feel--or rather my ,happiness would not be so fine1 as my ,solitude is sublime4 ,then instead of what ,i have described1 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 ,children4444 ,i feel more and more every day1 as my imagination strengthens1 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 me1 and serve my ,spirit the office which is equivalent to a ,king's body-guard4444 ,i live more out of ,england than in it4 ,the ,mountains of ,tartary are a favorite lounge1 if ,i happen to miss the ,alleghany ridge1 or have no whim for ,savoy4 ,this last sentence not only reveals the fact that the ,auto-,comrade1 equipped as he is with a wishing-mat1 is the very best cicerone in the world1 but also that he is the ideal tramping companion4 ,suppose you are mountain-climbing4 ,as you start up into nature's observatory1 he kneels in the dust and fastens wings upon your feet4 ,he conveniently adjusts a microscope to your hat-brim1 and hangs about your neck an excellent telescope4 ,he has enough sense1 too1 to keep his mouth closed4 ,for1 like ,hazlitt1 he can see no wit in walking and talking4 ,the joy of existence1 you find1 rarely tastes more cool and sweet and sparkling than when you and your ,auto-,comrade make a picnic thus1 swinging in a basket between you a real1 live thought for lunch4 ,on such a day you come to believe that ,keats1 on another occasion1 must have had his own ,auto-,comrade in mind when he remarked to his friend ,solitude that 444 it sure must be ,almost the highest bliss of human-kind1 ,when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee4 ,the ,auto-,comrade can sit down with you in thick weather on a barren lighthouse rock and give you a breathless day by hanging upon the walls of fog the mellow screeds of old philosophies1 and causing to march and countermarch over against them the scarlet and purple pageants of history4 ,hour by hour1 too1 he will linger with you in the metropolis1 that breeder of the densest solitudes--in market or terminal1 subway1 court-room1 library1 or lobby--and hour by hour unlock you those chained books of the soul to which the human countenance offers the master key4 ,something of a sportsman1 too1 is the ,auto-,comrade4 ,he it is who makes the fabulously low score at golf--the kind of score1 by the way1 that is almost invariably born to blush unseen4 ,and he will uncomplainingly1 even zestfully1 fish from dawn to dusk in a solitude so complete that there is not even a fin to break it4 ,but if there are fish1 he finds them4 ,he knows how to make the flies float indefinitely forward through yonder narrow opening1 and drop1 as light as thistledown1 in the center of the temptingly inaccessible pool4 ,he knows without looking1 exactly how thick and how prehensile are the bushes and branches that lie in wait for the back cast1 and he can calculate to a grain how much urging the reactionary three-pounder and the blest tie that binds him to the four-ounce rod will stand4 ,he is one of the handiest possible persons to have along in the woods4 ,when you take him on a canoe trip with others1 and the party comes to white water1 he turns out to be a dead shot at rapid-shooting4 ,he is sure to know what to do at the supreme moment when you jam your setting-pole immutably between two rocks and1 with the alternative of taking a bath1 are forced to let go and grab your paddle2 and are then hung up on a slightly submerged rock at the head of the chief rapid just in time to see the rest of the party disappear majestically around the lower bend4 ,at such a time1 simply look to the ,auto-,comrade4 ,he will carry you through4 ,also there is no one like him at the moment when1 having felled your moose1 leaned your rifle against a tree1 and bent down the better to examine him1 the creature suddenly comes to life4 ,in tennis1 when you wake up to find that your racket has just smashed a lob on the bounce from near the back-net1 scoring a clean ace between your paralyzed opponents1 you ought to know that the racket was guided by that superior sportsman2 and if you are truly modest1 you will admit that your miraculous stop wherewith the team whisked the baseball championship out of the fire in the fourteenth inning was due to his unaided efforts4 ,there are other games about which he is not so keen3 solitaire1 for instance4 ,for solitaire is a social game that soon loses its zest if there be not some devoted friend or relative sitting by and simulating that pleasureable absorption in the performance which you yourself only wish that you could feel4 ,this great companion can keep you from being lonely even in a crowd4 ,but there is a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide4 ,beware how you try to keep him in a crowd of unadulterated human porcupines6 ,you know how the philosopher ,schopenhauer once likened average humanity to a herd of porcupines on a cold day1 who crowd stupidly together for warmth1 prick one another with their quills1 are mutually repelled1 forget the incident1 grow cold again1 and repeat the whole thing ad infinitum4 ,in other words1 the human porcupine is the person considered at the beginning of this one-sided discussion who1 to escape the terrible catastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum1 will make friends with the most hideous bore4 ,this creature1 however1 is much more rare than the misanthropic ,schopenhauer imagined4 ,it takes a long time to find one among such folk as lumbermen1 gypsies1 shirt-waist operatives1 fishermen1 masons1 trappers1 sailors1 tramps1 and teamsters4 ,if the sour philosopher had only had the pleasure of knowing those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage by cracking their whips in the alley1 ,i am sure that he would never have spoken as harshly of their minds as he did4 ,the fact is that porcupines are not extremely common among the very common people4 ,it may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the upper classes1 the best people1 breathe and put on1 but the social climber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he scales the heights4 ,this curious fact would seem incidentally to show that our misanthropic philosopher must have moved exclusively in the best circles4 ,now1 if there is one thing above all others that the ,auto-,comrade cannot away with1 it is the flaccid1 indolent1 stodgy brain of the porcupine4 ,if people have let their minds slump down into porcupinishness1 or have never taken the trouble to rescue them from that ignominious condition--well1 the ,auto-,comrade is no snob2 when all's said1 he is a rather democratic sort of chap4 ,but he has to draw the line somewhere1 you know1 and he really must beg to be excused from rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble1 for instance1 as blocks upper ,fifth ,avenue on ,sunday noons4 ,he prefers instead the rabble which1 on all other noons of the week1 blocks the lower end of that variegated thoroughfare4 ,such exclusiveness lays the ,auto-,comrade open1 of course1 to the charge of inhospitality4 ,but is not he hospitable1 asks ,thoreau1 who entertains good thoughts8 ,personally1 ,i think he is4 ,and ,i believe that this sort of hospitality does more to make the world worth living in than much conventional hugging to your bosom of porcupines whose language you do not speak1 yet with whom it is embarrassing to keep silence4 ,if the ,auto-,comrade mislikes the porcupine1 however1 the feeling is returned with exorbitant interest4 ,the alleged failings of auto-comradeship have always drawn grins1 jokes1 fleers1 and nudges1 from the auto-comradeless4 ,it is time the latter should know that the joke is really on him2 for he is the most forlorn of mankind4 ,the other is never at a loss4 ,he is invulnerable1 being one whom destiny may not surprise nor death dismay4 ,but the porcupine is liable at any moment to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp1 hollow quills4 ,he finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees that the hermit shall find his crowds in solitude and never be alone2 but that the flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness1 where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth4 ,the laugh is on the porcupine2 but the laugh turns almost into a tear when one stops to realize the nature of his plight4 ,why1 the poor wretch is actually obliged to be near someone else in order to enjoy a sense of vitality6 ,in other words1 he needs somebody else to do his living for him4 ,he is a vicarious citizen of the world1 holding his franchise only by courtesy of ,tom1 ,dick1 and ,harry4 ,all the same1 it is rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he continues to feel quite as contemptuously superior as he usually does4 ,for1 the contempt of the average porcupine for pals of the ,auto-,comrade is akin to the contempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those paltry beings who were called clerks because they possessed the queer1 unfashionable accomplishment of being able to read and write4 ,i remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-day orator at college came when he related how the literary guy and the tennis-player were walking one day in the woods1 and the literary guy suddenly exclaimed3 ,ah1 leave me1 ,louis6 ,i would be alone4 ,even apart from the stilted language in which the orator clothed the thought of the literary guy1 there is1 to the porcupine1 something irresistibly comic in such a situation4 ,it is to him as though the literary guy had stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged for the room at ,sing ,sing already referred to4 ,indeed1 the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of the ,auto-,comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and witches--folk1 by the way1 who probably consorted with spirits no more malign than ,auto-,comrades4 ,what1 asked the porcupines of one another1 can they be doing1 all alone there in those solitary huts8 ,what honest man would live like that8 ,ah1 they must be up to no good4 ,they must be hand in glove with the ,evil ,one4 ,well1 then1 away with them to the stake and the river6 ,as a matter of fact1 it probably was not the ,evil ,one that these poor folk were consorting with1 but the ,good ,one4 ,for what is a man's ,auto-,comrade1 anyway1 but his own soul1 or the same thing by what other name soever he likes to call it1 with which he divides the practical1 conscious part of his brain1 turn and turn about1 share and share alike8 ,and what is a man's own soul but a small stream of the infinite1 eternal water of life8 ,and what is heaven but a vast harbor where myriad streams of soul flow down1 returning at last to their ,source in the bliss of perfect reunion8 ,i believe that many a ,salem witch was dragged to her death from sanctuary2 for church is not exclusively connected with stained glass and collection-baskets4 ,church is also wherever you and your ,auto-,comrade can elude the starched throng and fall together1 if only for a moment1 on your knees4 ,the ,auto-,comrade has much to gain by contrast with one's flesh-and-blood associates1 especially if this contrast is suddenly brought home to one after a too long separation from him4 ,i shall never forget the thrill that was mine early one morning after two months of close1 uninterrupted communion with one of my best and dearest friends4 ,at the very instant when the turn of the road cut off that friend's departing hand-wave1 ,i was aware of a welcoming1 almost boisterous shout from the hills of dream1 and turning quickly1 beheld my long-lost ,auto-,comrade rushing eagerly down the slopes toward me4 ,few joys may compare with the joy of such a sudden unexpected reunion4 ,it is like the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land4 ,no1 this simile is too disloyal to my friend4 ,well1 then1 it is like a beaker full of the warm ,south when you are leaving a good beer country and are trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next few weeks4 ,at any rate1 similes or not1 there were we two together again at last4 ,what a week of weeks we spent1 pacing back and forth on the veranda of our log cabin1 where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities of the ,sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly birch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the ,aroostook6 ,and how we did take stock of the immediate past1 chuckling to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as ,i had stupidly supposed4 ,what gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into the glamorous land of to-morrow6 ,and every other moment these recreative labors would be interrupted while ,i pressed between the pages of a notebook some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruply fortunate clover which my ,auto-,comrade found and turned over to me4 7,between two of those pages1 by the way1 ,i afterwards found the argument of this chapter47 ,then1 when the effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of its first1 fine1 carbonated sting1 what ,elysian hours we did spend over the correspondence of those other two friends1 ,goethe and ,schiller6 ,passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over4 ,these we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic insistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash of mental steel on mental steel from a different mill4 ,and without making any one else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuse us passionately of reading ahead1 we would1 on the slightest provocation1 out-,fletcher ,fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy4 ,and we would underline and bracket and side-line and overline the ragged little paper volume1 and scribble up and down its margins1 and dream over its footnotes1 to our hearts' content4 ,such experiences1 though1 are all too rare with me4 ,why8 ,because my ,auto-,comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate with me unless ,i toe his mark4 ,come1 ,i propose to him1 let us go a journey4 ,hold hard1 says he1 and looks me over appraisingly4 ,you know the rule of the ,auto-,comrades' ,union4 ,we are supposed to associate with none but fairly able persons4 ,are you a fairly able person8 ,if it turns out that ,i am not1 he goes on a rampage1 and begins to talk like an athletic trainer4 ,the first thing he demands is that his would-be associate shall keep on hand a jolly good store of surplus vitality4 ,you are expected to supply exuberance to him somewhat as you supply gasolene to your motor4 ,now1 of course1 there are in the world not a few invalids and other persons of low physical vitality whose ,auto-,comrades happen to have sufficient gasolene to keep them both running1 if only on short rations4 ,most of these cases1 however1 are pathological4 ,they have hot-boxes at both ends of the machine1 and their progress is destined all too soon to cease and determine disastrously4 ,the rest of these cases are the rare exceptions which prove the rule4 ,for unexuberant yet unpathological pals of the ,auto-,comrade are as rare as harmonious households in which the efforts of a devoted and blissful wife support an able-bodied husband4 ,the rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two4 ,learn to eat balanced rations right1 thunders the ,auto-,comrade1 laying down the law2 exercise1 perspire1 breathe1 bathe1 sleep out of doors1 and sleep enough2 rule your liver with a rod of iron1 don't take drugs or nervines1 cure sickness beforehand1 keep love in your heart1 do an adult's work in the world1 have at least as much fun as you ought to have4 ,that1 he goes on1 is the way to develop enough physical overplus so that you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction to mob-intoxication4 ,and1 provided your mind is not in as bad condition as your body1 this physical overplus will transmute some of itself into mental exuberance4 ,this will enable you to have more fun with your mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail4 ,it will enable you to look before and after1 and purr over what is1 as well as to discern1 with pleasurable longing1 what is not1 and set forth confidently to capture it4 ,but if1 by any chance1 you have allowed your mind to get into the sort of condition which the old-fashioned ,german scholar used to allow his body to get into1 it develops that the ,auto-,comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body4 ,he soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying4 ,also1 he demands of his companion the knack of calm1 consecutive thought4 ,this is one reason why so many more ,auto-,comrades are to be found in crow's-nests1 gypsy-vans1 and shirt-waist factories than on upper ,fifth ,avenue4 ,for1 watching the stars and the sea from a swaying masthead1 taking light-heartedly to the open road1 or even operating a rather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence1 is better for consecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices1 clubs1 committees1 servants1 dinners1 teas1 and receptions1 to each of which one is a little late4 ,in diffusing knowledge of1 and enthusiasm for1 this knack of concentration1 ,arnold ,bennett's little books on mental efficiency have done wonders for the art of auto-comradeship4 ,their popular persuasiveness has coaxed thousands on thousands of us to go in for a few minutes' worth of mental calisthenics every day4 ,they have actually cajoled us into the painful feat of glancing over a page of a book and then putting it down and trying to retrace the argument in memory4 ,or they have coaxed us to fix on some subject--any subject--for reflection1 and then scourge our straying minds back to it at every few steps of the walk to the morning train4 ,and we have found that the mental muscles have responded at once to this treatment4 ,they have hardened under the exercise until being left alone has begun to change from confinement in the same cell with that worst of enemies who has the right to forge one's own name--into a joyful pleasure jaunt with a totally different person who1 if not one's best friend1 is at least to be counted on as a trusty1 entertaining1 resourceful1 unselfish associate--at times1 perhaps1 a little exacting--yet certainly a far more brilliant and generally satisfactory person than his companion4 ,no matter what the ignorant or the envious may say1 there is nothing really unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of auto-comradeship4 ,a few weeks of it bring you back with a fresher1 keener appreciation of your other friends and of humanity in general than you had before setting forth4 ,in the continuous performance of the psalm of life such contrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal advantage4 ,but auto-comradeship must not be overdone1 as it was overdone by the medival monks4 ,its delights are too delicious1 its particular vintage of the wine of experience too rich1 for long-continued consumption4 ,consecutive thought1 though it is one of man's greatest pleasures1 is at the same time perhaps the most arduous labor that he can perform4 ,and after a long period of it1 both the ,auto-,comrade and his companion become exhausted and1 perforce1 less comradely4 ,besides the incidental exhaustion1 there is another reason why this beatific association must have its time-limit2 for1 unfortunately1 one's ,auto-,comrade is always of the same sex as one's self1 and in youth1 at least1 if the presence of the complementary part of creation is long denied1 there comes a time when this denial surges higher and higher in subconsciousness1 then breaks into consciousness1 and keeps on surging until it deluges all the tranquillities1 zests1 surprises1 and excitements of auto-comradeship1 and makes them of no effect4 ,this is1 probably1 a wise provision for the salvation of the human digestion4 ,for otherwise1 many a man1 having tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship1 might thereupon be tempted to retire to his hermit's den hard by and endeavor to sustain himself for life on this food alone4 ,most of us1 however1 long before such extremes have been reached1 are sure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we are enjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want someone else to enjoy it with4 ,,vi ,,vim ,,and ,,vision ,efficiency is to-day the ,hallelujah ,chorus of industry4 ,i know a manufacturer who recently read a book on business management4 ,stop-watch in hand he then made an exhaustive study of his office force and their every action4 ,after considering the tabulated results he arose1 smashed all but one of the many office mirrors1 bought modern typewriters1 and otherwise eliminated works of supererogation4 ,the sequel is that a dozen stenographers to-day perform the work of the former thirty-two4 ,this sort of thing is spreading through the business world and beyond it in every direction4 ,even the artists are studying the bearing of industrial efficiency on the arts of sculpture1 music1 literature1 architecture1 and painting4 ,but beyond the card catalogue and the filing cabinet the artists find that this new gospel has little to offer them4 ,their sympathies go out1 instead1 to a different kind of efficiency4 ,the kind that bids fair to shatter their old lives to bits and re-mold them nearer to the heart's desire is not industrial but human4 ,for inspiration it goes back of the age of ,brandeis to the age of ,pericles4 ,the enthusiasm for human efficiency is beginning to rival that for industrial efficiency4 ,preventive medicine1 public playgrounds1 the new health education1 school hygiene1 city planning1 eugenics1 housing reform1 the child-welfare and country-life movements1 the cult of exercise and sport--these all are helping to lower the death-rate and enrich the life-rate the world over4 ,health has fought with smoke and germs and is now in the air4 ,it would be strange if the receptive nature of the artist should escape the benignant infection4 ,there is an excellent reason why human efficiency should appeal less to the industrial than to the artistic worlds4 ,industry has a new supply of human machines always available4 ,their initial cost is nothing4 ,so it pays to overwork them1 scrap them promptly1 and install fresh ones4 ,thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in the ,southern mills are exquisitely cared for1 while the cheap little boys and girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four or five years4 ,in art it is different4 ,the artist knows that he is1 like ,swinburne's ,hertha1 at once the machine and the machinist4 ,it is dawning upon him that one chief reason why the old ,greeks scaled ,parnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got1 and kept1 their human machines in good order for the climb4 ,they trained for the event as an ,olympic athlete trains to-day for the ,marathon4 ,one other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancient ,greece is that the non-artists trained also1 and thus1 through their heightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers1 became masters by proxy4 ,but that is another chapter4 ,why has art never again reached the ,periclean plane8 ,chiefly because the artist broke training when ,greece declined1 and has never since then brought his body up to the former level of efficiency4 ,now1 as the physiological psychologists assure us1 the artist needs a generous overplus of physical vitality4 ,the art-impulse is a brimming-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance4 ,and the best way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain the physical4 ,the artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full as possible4 ,he will soon find that he is greater than he knows4 ,he will discover that he has1 until then1 been walking the earth more than half a corpse4 ,with joy he will come to see that living in a glow of health bears the same relation to merely not being sick that a plunge in the cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag in a hall bedroom4 ,all through the life of a feeble-bodied man1 his path is lined with memory's grave-stones which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds4 ,thus wrote the educator1 ,horace ,mann4 ,and his words apply with special force to the worker in the arts4 ,one should bear in mind that the latter is in a peculiar dilemma4 ,his nerve-racking1 confining1 exhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body4 ,but the claims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spare intensity4 ,unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doing nothing at all4 ,and to do his utmost he must keep his body in that supremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending to destroy4 ,the one lasting solution is for him to reduce his working time to a safe maximum and increase his recreation and sleeping-time to a safe minimum1 and to train without haste1 without rest4 ,the first requisite to great intellectuality in a man is to be a good animal1 says ,maxim the inventor4 ,hamerton1 in his best-known book1 offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of the first essentials of genius2 and shows how triumphant a part it played in the careers of such mighty men of intellectual valor as ,leonardo da ,vinci1 ,kant1 ,wordsworth1 and ,sir ,walter ,scott4 ,is the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessary to the artist8 ,then let him read biography and note the paralyzing effect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and three quarter wellness4 ,he will see that1 as a rule1 the masters have done their most telling and lasting work with the tides of physical vim at flood4 ,for the genius is no ,joshua4 ,he cannot make the sun of the mind and the moon of the spirit stand still while the tides of health are ebbing seaward4 ,indeed biography should not be necessary to convince the fair-minded reader4 ,autobiography should answer4 ,just let him glance back over his own experience and say whether he has not thought his deepest thoughts and performed his most brilliant deeds under the intoxication of a stimulant no less heady than that of exuberant health4 ,there is1 of course1 the vexed question of the sickly genius4 ,my personal belief is firm that1 as a rule1 he has won his triumphs despite bad health1 and not--as some like to imagine--because of bad health4 ,to this rule there are a few often cited exceptions4 ,now1 no one can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer in the works of ,stevenson and other tubercular artists4 ,the white plague is a powerful mental stimulant4 ,it is a double-distilled extract of baseless optimism4 ,but this optimism1 like that resulting from other stimulants1 is dearly bought4 ,its shrift is too short4 ,and let nobody forget that for each variety of pathological optimism and brilliance and beauty there are ninety and nine corresponding sorts of pathological pessimism and dullness and ugliness induced by disorders of the liver1 heart1 stomach1 brain1 skin1 and so on without end4 ,the thing for artists to do is to find out what physical conditions make for the best art in the long run1 and then secure these conditions in as short a run as possible4 ,if tuberculosis makes for it1 then by all means let those of us who are sincerely devoted to art be inoculated without delay4 ,if the family doctor refuses to oblige1 all we have to do is to avoid fresh air1 kiss indiscriminately1 practice a systematic neglect of colds1 and frequent the subway during rush hours4 ,if alcohol makes for the best art1 let us forthwith be admitted to the bar--the stern judgment bar where each solitary drinker is arraigned4 ,for it is universally admitted that in art1 quality is more important than quantity4 ,if that powerful corrosive1 alcohol1 only makes us do a little first-class work1 what matter if it corrode us to death immediately afterwards8 ,we shall have had our day4 ,thus many a gallant soul argues4 ,but is there not another ideal which is as far above mere quality as quality is above mere quantity8 ,i think there is4 ,it is quantity of quality4 ,and quantity of quality is exactly the thing that cannot brook the corrosiveness of powerful stimulants4 ,i am not satisfied1 however1 that stimulants make entirely for the fine quality of even the short shrift4 ,to my ear1 tubercular optimism1 when thumped on the chest1 sounds a bit hollow4 ,it does not ring quite as true as healthy optimism because one feels in the long run its automatic1 pathological character4 ,thus tubercular1 alcoholized1 and drugged art may often be recognized by its somewhat artificial1 unhuman1 abnormal quality4 ,i believe that if the geniuses who have done their work under the influence of these stimulants had1 instead1 trained sound bodies as for an ,olympic victory1 the arts would to-day be the richer in quantity of quality4 ,on this point ,george ,meredith wrote a trenchant word in a letter to ,w4 ,g4 ,collins3 ,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 latter4 ,stimulants may refresh1 and may even temporarily comfort1 the body after labor of brain2 they do not help it--not even in the lighter kinds of labor4 ,they unseat the judgment1 pervert vision4 ,productions1 cast off by the aid of the use of them1 are but flashy1 trashy stuff--or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit1 of the kind which ,hoffman's tales give1 for example2 he was one of the few at all eminent1 who wrote after drinking4 ,to reinforce the opinion of the great ,englishman ,i cannot forbear giving that of an equally great ,american3 ,never wrote ,emerson can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick4 ,the spirit of the world1 the great calm presence of the ,creator1 comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine4 ,the sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body4444 ,the poet's habit of living should be set on so low a key that the common influences should delight him4 ,his cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight2 the air should suffice for his inspiration1 and he should be tipsy with water4 ,in other words1 the artist should keep himself in a condition so fit as to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance4 ,but this should always flow as freely as beer at a college reunion4 ,and there should always be plenty in reserve4 ,it were well to consider whether there is not some connection between decadent art and decadent bodies4 ,a friend of mine recently attended a meeting of decadent painters and reported that he could not find a chin or a forehead in the room4 ,one reason why so many of the world's great since ,greece have neglected to store up an overplus of vitality is that exercise is well-nigh indispensable thereto2 and exercise has not seemed to them sufficiently dignified4 ,we are indebted to the dark ages for this dull superstition4 ,it was then that the monasteries built gloomy granite greenhouses for the flower of the world's intellect1 that it might deteriorate in the darkness and perish without reproducing its kind4 ,the monastic system held the body a vile thing1 and believed that to develop and train it was beneath the dignity of the spiritually elect4 ,so flagellation was substituted for perspiration1 much as1 in the ,orient1 scent is substituted for soap--and with no more satisfactory result4 ,this false notion of dignity has since then1 by keeping men out of flannels1 gymnasium suits1 running-tights1 and overalls1 performed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mind and stunting the fruit trees of the spirit4 ,to-day1 however1 we are escaping from the old superstition4 ,we begin to see that there is no complete dignity for man without a dignified physique2 and that there is no physical dignity to compare with that of the hard-trained athlete4 ,true1 he who trains can hardly keep up the old-time pose of the grand old man or the grand young man4 ,he must perforce be more human and natural4 ,but this sort of grandeur is now going out of fashion4 ,and its absence must show to advantage in his work4 ,as a rule the true artist is a most devoted and self-sacrificing person4 ,ever since the piping times of ,pericles he has usually been willing to sacrifice to the demands of his art most of the things he enjoys excepting poor health4 ,wife1 children1 friends1 credit--all may go by the board4 ,but his poor health he addresses with solemn1 scriptural loyalty3 ,whither thou goest ,i will go3 and where thou lodgest ,i will lodge4 ,where thou diest1 will ,i die1 and there will ,i be buried4 ,not that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor health4 ,but he most thoroughly enjoys a number of its causes4 ,sitting up too late at night is what he enjoys2 smoking too much1 drinking too much1 yielding to the exhausting sway of the divine efflatus for longer hours at a time than he has any business to1 bolting unbalanced meals1 and so on4 ,but the artist is finding out that poor health is the very first enjoyment which he ought to sacrifice2 that the sacrifice is by no means as heroic as it appears2 and that1 once it is accomplished1 the odds are that all the other things he thought he must offer up may be added unto him through his own increased efficiency4 ,no doubt1 all this business of regimen1 of constant alertness and petty self-sacrifice1 is bound to grow irksome before it settles down in life and becomes habitual4 ,but what does a little irksomeness count--or even a great deal of irksomeness--as against the long1 deep thrill of doing better than you thought you ever knew how--of going from strength to strength and creating that which will elevate and delight mankind long after the pangs of installing regimen are forgotten and you have once and for all broken training and laid you down to sleep over8 ,the reason why great men and women are so often cynical about their own success is this3 they have been so immoderate in their enjoyment of poor health that when the hour of victory comes1 they lack the exuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring of achievement or of any other pleasure4 ,i believe that the successful invalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthy failure about his failure4 ,the latter is usually an optimist4 ,but this is a hard belief to substantiate4 ,for the perfectly healthy failure does not grow on every bush4 ,if only the physical conscientiousness of the ,greeks had never been allowed to die out1 the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer1 fairer1 and more inspiring place4 ,as it is1 we shall never be able to reckon up our losses in genius3 in ,shakespeares whose births were frustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possible parents2 in ,schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causes before they had delivered a note of their message2 in ,giorgiones whom a suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have their work cheapened and curtailed4 ,what overwhelming losses has art not sustained by having the ranks of its artists and their most creative audiences decimated by the dullness of mediocre health6 ,it is hard to endure the thought of what the geniuses of the modern world might have been able to accomplish if only they had lived and trained like athletes and been treated with a small part of the practical consideration and live sympathy which humanity bestows on a favorite ball-player or prize-fighter4 ,to-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed against the truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the mother of artistic invention4 ,necessity is1 of course1 only the stepmother of invention4 ,but men like to convince themselves that sickness and morbidity are good for the arts1 just as they delightedly embrace the conviction1 and hold it with a death-grip1 that a life of harassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the true poet4 ,the circumstance that this belief runs clean counter to the showing of history does not embarrass them4 ,convinced against their will1 most people are of the same opinion still4 ,and they enthusiastically assault and batter any one who points out the truth1 as ,i shall endeavor to do in chapter eight4 ,even if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as little as a century ago1 how much our world would be the gainer6 ,if ,richard ,wagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching cold every other month1 we would not have so many dull1 dreary places to overlook in ,the ,ring1 and would1 instead1 have three or four more immortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to write4 ,one hates to think what ,poe might have done in literature if he had taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket4 ,tuberculosis1 they now say1 is preventable4 ,if only they had said so before the death of ,keats6444 ,it makes one lose patience to think how ,schiller shut himself up in a stuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work2 and how the sole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game of l'hombre with the philosopher ,schelling4 ,and then he wondered why he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever catching cold 7einen starken ,schnupfen72 and why his head was so thick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it4 ,in his correspondence with ,goethe it is exasperating to observe that these great poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight change of temperature or humidity1 or even a dark day1 was enough to overdraw their health account and bankrupt their work4 ,how glorious it would have been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made them health magnates1 impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous ,february1 and able to snap their fingers and flourish inspired quills in the face of a vile ,march6 ,in that case their published works might not1 perhaps1 have gained much in bulk1 but the masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of their ,smmtliche ,werke than they do4 ,and the second part of ,faust would not1 ,i think1 contain that lament about the flesh so seldom having wings to match those of the spirit4 ,ach6 zu des ,geistes ,flgeln wird so leicht ,kein korperlicher ,flgel sich gesellen4 ,some of the most opulent and powerful spirits ever seen on earth have scarcely done more than indicate what kind of birthrights they bartered away for a mess of pottage4 ,coleridge1 for example1 ceased to write poetry after thirty because1 by dissipating his overplus of life1 he had too grievously wronged what he described as ,this body that does me grievous wrong4 ,after all1 there are comparatively few masters1 since the glory that was ,greece1 who have not half buried their talents in the earthy darkness of mediocre health4 ,when we survey the army of modern genius1 how little of the sustained ring and resilience and triumphant immortal youth of real exuberance do we find there6 ,instead of a band of sound1 alert1 well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit1 behold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along with lack-luster eyes1 or eyes bright with the luster of fever4 ,and the people whom they serve are not entirely free from blame4 ,they have neglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks1 or put shirts on their backs4 ,as for footgear1 it is the usual campaign army shoe1 made of blotting paper--the shoe that left red marks behind it at ,valley ,forge and ,gettysburg and ,san ,juan ,hill4 ,i believe that a better time is coming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn4 ,for we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if the artist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able to run--not alone with patience1 but also with the brilliance born of abounding vitality--the race that is set before him4 ,this dawning belief is the greatest hope of modern art4 ,it does one good to see how artists1 here1 there1 and everywhere1 are beginning to grow enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodily efficiency1 and physically to revive the just designs of ,greece4 ,the encouraging thing is that the true artist who once finds what an impulse is given his work by rigorous training1 is never content to slump back to his former vegetative1 death-in-life existence4 ,his daily prayer has been said in a single line by a recent ,american poet3 ,life1 grant that we may live until we die4 ,in every way the artist finds himself the gainer by cutting down his hours of work to the point where he never loses his reserve of energy4 ,he now is beginning to take absolute--not merely relative--vacations1 and more of them4 ,for he remembers that no man's work--not even ,rembrandt's or ,beethoven's or ,shakespeare's--is ever too good2 and that every hour of needed rest or recreation makes the ensuing work better4 ,it is being borne in on the artist that a health-book like ,fisher's ,making ,life ,worth ,while is of as much professional value to him as many a treatise on the practice of his craft4 ,insight into the physiological basis of his life-work can save the artist1 it seems1 from those periods of black despair which he once used to employ in running his head against a concrete wall1 and raging impotently because he could not butt through4 ,now1 instead of laying his futility to a mysteriously malignant fate1 or to the persecution of secret enemies1 he is likely to throw over stimulants and late hours and take to the open road1 the closed squash-court1 and the sleeping-porch4 ,and presently armies cannot withhold him from joyful1 triumphant labor4 ,the artist is finding that exuberance1 this ,open ,sesame to the things that count1 may not be won without the friendly collaboration of the pores2 and that two birds of paradise may be killed with one stone 7which is precious above rubies7 by giving the mind fun while one gives the pores occupation4 ,sport is this precious stone4 ,there is1 of course1 something to be said for sportless exercise4 ,it is fairly good for the artist to perform solemn antics in a gymnasium class1 to gesture impassionedly with dumb-bells1 and tread the mill of the circular running-track4 ,but it is far better for him to go in with equal energy for exercise which1 while developing the body1 re-creates the mind and spirit4 ,that kind of exercise is best1 in my opinion1 which offers plenty of variety and humor and the excitement of competition4 ,i mean games like tennis1 baseball1 handball1 golf1 lacrosse1 and polo1 and sports like swift-water canoeing and fly-fishing1 boxing1 and fencing4 ,these take the mind of the artist quite away from its preoccupations and then restore it to them1 unless he has taken too much of a good thing1 with a fresh viewpoint and a zest for work4 ,sport is one of the chief makers of exuberance because of its purging1 exhilarating1 and constructive effects on body1 mind1 and spirit4 ,so many contemporary artists are being converted to sport that the artistic type seems to be changing under our eyes4 ,it was only yesterday that the worker in literature1 sculpture1 painting1 or music was a sickly1 morbid1 anmic1 peculiar specimen1 distrusted at sight by the average man1 and a shining mark for all the cast-off wit of the world4 ,gilbert never tired of describing him in ,patience4 ,he was a foot-in-the-grave young man1 or a ,je-ne-sais-quoi young man4 ,he was ,a most intense young man1 ,a soulful-eyed young man4 ,an ultra-poetical1 supersthetical1 ,out-of-the-way young man4 ,to-day1 what a change6 ,where is this young man8 ,most of his ilk have accompanied the snows of yester-year4 ,and a goodly proportion of those who make merry in their room are sure-eyed1 well set-up1 ruddy1 muscular chaps1 about whom the average man may jeer and quote slanderous doggerel only at his peril4 ,but somehow or other the average man likes this new type better and does not want to jeer at him1 but goes and buys his work instead4 ,faint though distinct1 one begins to hear the new note of exuberance spreading through the arts4 ,on canvas it registers the fact that the painters are migrating in hordes to live most of the year in the open country4 ,it vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musical performer like ,willeke1 the 'cellist4 ,like a starter's pistol it sounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like ,john ,masefield and ,alfred ,noyes4 ,one has only to compare the overflowing life and sanity of workers like these with the condition of the ordinary ,out-of-the-way young man to see what a gulf yawns between exuberance and exhaustion1 between absolute sanity and a state somewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity4 ,and ,i believe that as yet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physical renaissance4 ,wait until this new religion of exuberance is a few generations older and eugenics has said her say6 ,curiously enough1 the decadent artists who pride themselves on their extreme modernity are the ones who now seem to cling with the most reactionary grip to the old-fashioned1 invertebrate type of physique4 ,the rest are in a fair way to undergo such a change as came to ,queed1 the sedentary hero of ,mr4 ,harrison's novel1 when he took up boxing4 ,as sport and the artists come closer together1 they should have a good effect on one another4 ,the artists will doubtless make sport more formful1 rhythmical1 and beautiful4 ,sport1 on the other hand1 ought before long to influence the arts by making sportsmen of the artists4 ,now good sportsmanship is composed of fairness1 team-work1 the grace of a good loser1 the grace of a good winner1 modesty1 and gameness4 ,the first two of these amount to an equitable passion for a fair field and no favor1 and a willingness to subordinate star-play1 or personal gain1 to team-play1 or communal gain4 ,together they imply a feeling for true democracy4 ,to be converted to the religion of sportsmanship means to become more socially minded4 ,i think it is more than a coincidence that at the moment when the artists are turning to sport1 their work is taking on the brotherly tone of democracy4 ,the call of brotherhood is to-day one of the chief preoccupations of poetry1 the drama1 ideal sculpture1 and mural decoration4 ,for this rapid change ,i should not wonder if the democracy of sportsmanship were in part responsible4 ,the third element of sportsmanship is the grace of a good loser4 ,artists to-day are better losers than were the foot-in-the-grave young men4 ,among them one now finds less and less childish petulance1 outspoken jealousy of others' success1 and apology for their own failure4 ,some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering that the good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat4 ,and they are importing these manly tactics into the game of art4 ,it has not taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who hides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training4 ,they are impressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading the less athletic games1 even down to such a sedentary affair as chess4 ,this remarkable rule1 for example1 was proposed in the recent chess match between ,lasker and ,capablanca3 ,illness shall not interfere with the playing of any game1 on the ground that it is the business of the players so to train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect condition2 and it is their duty1 which by this rule is enforced1 to study their health and live accordingly4 ,the fourth factor of sportsmanship is the grace of a good winner4 ,it would seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep from gloating over his vanquished rival1 but also to be generous and minimize his own victory4 ,in ,gilbert's day the failure did all the apologizing4 ,to-day less apologizing is done by the failure and more by the success4 ,the master in art is learning modesty1 and from whom but the master in sport8 ,there are in the arts to-day fewer megalomaniacs and persons afflicted with delusions of grandeur than there were among the ,je-ne-sais-quoi young men4 ,sport has made them more normal spiritually1 while making them more normal physically4 ,it has kept them younger4 ,old age has been attacked and driven back all along the line4 ,one reason why we no longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men4 ,instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late ,dr4 ,s4 ,weir ,mitchell1 who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector1 ,senility4 ,this is a fair omen for the future of progress4 ,if only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion1 writes ,bourne in ,youth1 can1 by caring for the physical basis1 keep themselves young1 why1 the world will go far to catching up with itself and becoming contemporaneous4 ,gameness is the final factor of good sportsmanship4 ,in the matter of gameness1 ,i grant that sport has little to teach the successful artist4 ,for it takes courage1 dogged persistence1 resiliency--in short1 the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts4 ,it takes the ,browning spirit of those who fall to rise1 are baffled to fight better1 sleep to wake4 ,it takes the typical ,anglo-,saxon gameness of ,johnny ,armstrong of the old ballad3 ,said ,john1 ',fight on1 my merry men all4 ,i am a little hurt1 but ,i am not slain2 ,i will lay me down for to bleed a while1 ,and then ,i'll rise and fight with you again4' ,yes1 but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have not yet succeeded--perhaps for want of these very qualities8 ,i believe that a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship1 acting upon a newly developed body1 will presently bring to many a disheartened struggler just that increment of resilient gameness which will mean success instead of failure4 ,thus1 while our artists show a tendency to hark back to the ,greek physical ideal1 they are not harking backward but forward when they yield to the mental and spiritual influences of sportsmanship4 ,for this spirit was unknown to the ancient world4 ,until yesterday art and sportsmanship never met4 ,but now that they are mating ,i am confident that there will come of this union sons and daughters who shall joyfully obey the summons that is still ringing down to us over the heads of the anmic contemporaries of the exuberant old sportsman1 ,walt ,whitman3 ,poets to come6 orators1 singers1 musicians to come6 ,not to-day is to justify me and answer what ,i am for1 ,but you1 a new brood1 native1 athletic1 continental1 greater than before known1 ,arouse6 for you must justify me4 ,,vii ,,printed ,,joy ,the old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than anything else in life4 ,,ralph ,,waldo ,,emerson4 ,america is trying to emerge from the awkward age4 ,its body is full-grown4 ,its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity4 ,what does this spirit need8 ,next to contact with true religion1 it most needs contact with true poetry4 ,it needs to absorb the grace1 the wisdom1 the idealistic beauty of the art1 and thrill in rhyme with poetry's profound1 spiritual insights4 ,the promising thing is that ,america is beginning to do exactly this to-day4 ,the entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed up in that curious symbol which appears over the letter n in the word caon4 ,a rise1 a fall1 a rise4 ,here is the whole story of the ,american poetry-lover4 ,his enthusiasm first reached a high point about the middle of the nineteenth century4 ,a generation later it fell into a swift decline4 ,but three or four years ago it began to revive so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality4 ,this renaissance has not yet been explained1 although the majority of readers and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined4 ,let us glance at a few of the more popular explanations4 ,many say that poetry declined in ,america because we turned ourselves into a nation of entirely prosaic materialists4 ,but if this is true1 how do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds and waterfalls1 for groves of ancient trees1 national parks1 and city-planning8 ,how do they explain the fact that our annual expenditure on the art of music is six times that of ,germany1 the ,fatherland of ,tone8 ,and how do they account for the flourishing condition of some of our other arts8 ,if we are hopelessly materialistic1 why should ,american painters and sculptors have such a high world-standing8 ,and why should their strongest1 most original1 most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic1 suggestive landscape1 and ideal sculpture8 ,the answer is self-evident4 ,it is no utterly prosaic age1 and people that founded our superb orchestras1 that produced and supported ,winslow ,homer1 ,tryon1 and ,woodbury1 ,french1 ,barnard1 and ,saint ,gaudens4 ,a more poetic hand than ,wall ,street's built ,st4 ,thomas's and the cathedral1 terminals and towers of ,new ,york1 ,trinity ,church in ,boston1 the ,minnesota ,state ,capitol1 ,bar ,harbor's ,building of ,arts1 ,west ,point1 and ,princeton ,university4 ,it is plain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism4 ,other philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetry was the fault of the poets themselves4 ,popular interest slackened1 they say1 because the art first degenerated4 ,now an obvious answer to this is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become1 men may always turn1 if they will1 to those dead poets of old who live forever on their shelves4 ,but let us grant for the sake of argument that any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect poetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way4 ,and let us recall the situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic appreciation first set in4 ,at that time ,whittier1 ,holmes1 ,emerson1 and ,whitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment1 and the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was the rare genius of the young ,lanier4 ,longfellow1 who remains even to-day the most popular of our poets1 was still in full swing4 ,lowell was in his prime4 ,thus it appears that public appreciation1 and not creative power1 was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of the ,parnassian hill4 ,not until then did the poet come tumbling after4 ,moreover1 in the light of modern sthetic psychology1 this seems the more natural order of events4 ,it takes two to make a work of art3 one to produce1 one to appreciate4 ,the creative appreciator is a correlative of all artistic expression4 ,it is almost impossible for the artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphere exhaled by the ignorant1 the stupid1 the indifferent1 the callous1 or the actively hostile4 ,it follows that the demand for poetry is created no more by the supply than the supply is created by the demand4 ,thus the general indifference to this one department of ,american art was not primarily caused by the degenerating supply4 ,the decline and fall of our poetic empire have yet other ,gibbons who say that our civilization suddenly changed from the country to the urban type1 and that our love of poetry began to disappear simultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and the mushroom growth of the large cities4 ,so far ,i agree2 but not with their reason4 ,for they say that poetry declined because cities are such dreadfully unpoetic things2 because they have become synonymous only with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the ,germans call the heaven-scratcher1 with elevated railways1 sand hogs1 whirring factories1 and alleys reeking with the so-called dregs of ,europe4 ,they claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar creed of the modern city is epitomized by such things as a certain signboard in ,new ,york1 which offers a typically neo-urban solution of the old problem1 ,what is art8 --------------- ,,paragon ,,pants ,,are ,,art --------------- the board declares4 ,and this1 they say1 is about as poetic as a large city ever becomes4 ,now let us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of ,mr4 ,james ,oppenheim1 a young man for whom a metropolis is almost completely epitomized by the riveting-machine1 the sweat-shop1 and the slum4 ,there we discover that this poet's vision has pierced straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty shimmering beneath4 ,in his eyes the sinewy1 heroic forms of the builders1 clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly hurling red-hot rivets through space1 are so many young gods at play with elemental forces4 ,the sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and glorious a battlefield as any ,tours or ,gettysburg of them all4 ,and the dingy1 battered old ,l train1 as it clatters through the ,east ,side early on morose1 gray ,monday morning1 becomes a divine chariot winging through ,deeps of the ,lord with its eighty ,earth-anchored ,souls4 ,oh1 yes2 there is ,god's plenty of poetry in these sights and sounds1 if only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness4 ,but there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawn from the city by him who1 instead of thus straitly confining his gaze to any one aspect of urban life1 is able to see it steadily and see it whole1 with its subtle nuances and its over-powering dramatic contrasts--as a twentieth-century ,walt ,whitman1 for example1 might see it if he had a dash of ,tennyson's technical equipment1 of ,arnold's sculpturesque polish and restraint1 of ,lanier's instinct for sensuous beauty4 ,what songs greater than before known might such a poet not sing as he wandered close to precious records of the ,anglo-,saxon culture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of ,st4 ,mark's church-yard1 with the vividly colored life of all southeastern ,europe surging about that slender iron fence--children of the blood of ,chopin and ,tschaikowsky2 of ,gutenberg1 ,kossuth1 and ,napoleon2 of ,isaiah and ,plato1 ,leonardo and ,dante--with the wild strains of the gypsy orchestra floating across ,second ,avenue1 and to the southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer1 purer air of builders clambering on the cupola of a neighboring ,giotto's tower built of steel8 ,who dares say that the city is unpoetic8 ,it is one of the most poetic places on earth4 ,these1 then1 are the chief explanations which have been offered us to-day of the historic decline of the ,american poetry-lover4 ,we weigh them1 and find them wanting4 ,why8 ,because they have sought1 like radiographers1 far beneath the surface2 whereas the real trouble has been only skin deep4 ,i shall try to show the nature of this trouble2 and how1 by beginning to cure it1 we have already brought on a poetic renaissance4 ,most of us who care for poetry frequently have one experience in common4 ,during our summer vacations in the country we suddenly re-discover the well-thumbed ,golden ,treasury of ,palgrave1 and the ,oxford ,book of ,verse which have been so unaccountably neglected during the city winter4 ,we wander farther into the poetic fields and revel in ,keats and ,shakespeare4 ,we may even attempt once more to get beyond the first book of the ,farie ,queene1 or fumble again at the combination lock which seems to guard the meaning of the second part of ,faust4 ,and we find these occupations so invigorating and joyful that we model and cast an iron resolution to the effect that this winter1 whatever betide1 we will read a little poetry every day1 or every week1 as the case may be4 ,on that we plunge back into the beautiful1 poetic1 inspiring city1 and adhere to our poetry-reading program--for exactly a fortnight4 ,then1 unaccountably1 our resolve begins to slacken4 ,we cannot seem to settle our minds to ordered rhythms where more is meant than meets the ear4 ,our resolve collapses4 ,once again ,palgrave is covered with dust4 ,but vacation time returns4 ,after a few days in green pastures and beside still waters the soul suddenly turns like a homing-pigeon to poetry4 ,and the old1 perplexing cycle begins anew4 ,a popular magazine once sent a certain young writer and ardent amateur of poetry on a long journey through the ,middle ,west4 ,he took but one book in his bag4 ,it was by ,whitman 7the poet of cities1 mark74 ,and he determined to read it every evening in his bedroom after the toils of the day4 ,the first part of the trip ran in the country4 ,afoot and light-hearted he took to the open road every morning1 and reveled every evening in such things as ,manahatta1 ,the ,song of ,joys1 and ,crossing ,brooklyn ,ferry4 ,then he carried his poet of cities to a city4 ,but the two would have nothing to do with one another4 ,and to the traveler's perplexity1 a place no larger than ,columbus1 ,ohio1 put a violent end to poetry on that trip4 ,in our day most poetry-lovers have had such experiences4 ,these have been hard to explain1 however1 only because their cause has been probed for too profoundly4 ,the chief cause of the decline of poetry was not spiritual but physical4 ,cities are not unpoetic in spirit4 ,it is only in the physical sense that ,emerson's warning is true3 ,if thou fill thy brain with ,boston and ,new ,york 444 thou shalt find no radiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods4 ,the trouble was this3 that the modern type of city1 when it started into being1 back in the seventies1 began to take from men1 and to use up1 that margin of nervous energy1 that exuberant overplus of vitality of which so much has already been said in this book1 and which is always needed for the true appreciation of poetry4 ,grant ,allen has shown that man1 when he is conscious of a superfluity of sheer physical strength1 gives himself to play2 and in like manner1 when he is conscious of a superfluity of receptive power1 which has a physical basis1 he gives himself to art4 ,now1 though all of the arts demand of their appreciators this overplus of nervous energy 7and ,heaven knows perfectly well how inadequate a supply is offered up to music and the arts of design671 yet the appreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands this bloom on the cheek of existence4 ,for poetry1 with quite as much of emotional demand as the others1 combines a considerably greater and more persistent intellectual demand1 involving an unusual amount of physical wear and tear4 ,hence1 in an era of overstrain1 poetry is the first of the arts to suffer4 ,most lovers of poetry must realize1 when they come to consider it1 that their pleasure in verse rises and falls1 like the column of mercury in a barometer1 with the varying levels of their physical overplus4 ,physical overplus1 however1 is the thing which life in a modern city is best calculated to keep down4 ,surely it was no mere coincidence that1 back there in the seventies1 just at the edge of the poetic decline1 city life began to grow so immoderately in volume and to be speeded up and noised up so abruptly that it took our bodies by surprise4 ,this process has kept on so furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able to catch up4 ,no large number have yet succeeded in readjusting themselves completely to the new pace of the city4 ,and this continues to exact from most of us more nervous energy than any life may1 which would keep us at our best4 ,hence1 until we have succeeded either in accomplishing the readjustment1 or in spending more time in the country1 the appreciation of poetry has continued to suffer4 ,even in the country1 it is1 of course1 perfectly true that life spins faster now than it used to--what with telephones and inter-urban trolleys1 the motor1 and the ,r4,f4,d4 ,but this rural progress has arrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powers of readjustment4 ,when we go from city to country we recede to a rate of living with which our nervous systems can comfortably fall in1 and still control for the use of the mind and spirit a margin of that delicious vital bloom which resembles the ring of the overtones in some beautiful voice4 ,but how is it practicable to keep this margin in the city1 when the roar of noisy traffic over noisy pavements1 the shrieks of newsboy and peddler1 the all-pervading chronic excitement1 the universal obligation to step lively1 even at a funeral1 are every instant laying waste our conscious or unconscious powers8 ,how are we to give the life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin is forever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due to lack of sleep1 unhygienic surroundings1 constant interruption 7or the expectation thereof71 and the impossibility of relaxation owing to the never-ending excitement and interest and sexual stimulus of the great human pageant--its beauty and suggestiveness8 ,apart from the general destruction of the margin of energy1 one special thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry is to keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of the importance of the present moment4 ,we might call this sense the journalistic spirit of the city4 ,how many typical metropolitans one knows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whatever is just happening1 like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire1 or a neursthete--if one may coin a word--who perceives a spider on her collarette4 ,this habit of mind soon grows stereotyped1 and is1 of course1 immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our innumerable newspapers4 ,the city gets one to living so intensely in the present minute1 and often in the very most sensational second of that minute1 that one grows impatient of the olds1 and comes to regard a constantly renewed and increased dose of news as the only present help in a chronic time of trouble4 ,this is a kind of mental drug-habit4 ,and its origin is physical4 ,it is a morbid condition induced by the over-paced life of cities4 ,long before the rise of the modern city--indeed1 more than a century ago--,goethe1 who was considerably more than a century ahead of his age1 wrote to ,schiller from ,frankfort of the journalistic spirit of cities and its relation to poetry3 ,it seems to me very remarkable how things stand with the people of a large city4 ,they live in a constant delirium of getting and consuming1 and the thing we call atmosphere can neither be brought to their attention nor communicated to them4 ,all recreations1 even the theater1 must be mere distractions2 and the great weakness of the reading public for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that the former always1 and the latter generally1 brings distraction into the distraction4 ,indeed1 ,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 causes4 ,poetry requires1 yes1 it absolutely commands1 concentration4 ,it isolates man against his own will4 ,it forces itself upon him again and again2 and is as uncomfortable a possession as a too constant mistress4 ,if this reporter's attitude of mind was so rampant in cultivated urban ,germany a century ago as to induce a sort of dislike of poetic productions1 what sort of dislike of them must it not be inducing to-day8 ,for the appreciation of poetry cannot live under the same roof with the journalistic spirit4 ,the art needs long1 quiet vistas backward and forward1 such as are to be had daily on one of those lone heaths where ,hazlitt used to love to stalk ideas1 but such as are not to be met with in ,times ,square or the ,subway4 ,the joyful side of the situation is that this need is being met4 ,a few years ago the city dwellers of ,america began to return to nature4 ,the movement spread until every one who could afford it1 habitually fled from the city for as long a summer outing as possible4 ,more and more people learned the delightful sport of turning an abandoned farm into a year-round country estate4 ,the man who was tied to a city office formed the commuting habit1 thus keeping his wife and children permanently away from the wear and tear of town4 ,the suburban area was immensely increased by the rapid spread of motoring4 ,thus1 it was recently made possible for hundreds of thousands of ,americans to live1 at least a considerable part of the year1 where they could hoard up an overplus of vitality4 ,the result was that these well-vitalized persons1 whenever they returned to the city1 were better able to stand--and adjust themselves to--the severe urban pace1 than were the fagged city people4 ,it was largely by the impact of this new vitality that the city was roused to the importance of physical efficiency1 so that it went in for parks1 gymnasia1 baths1 health and welfare campaigns1 athletic fields1 playgrounds1 ,boy ,scouts1 ,campfire ,girls1 and the like4 ,there are signs everywhere that we ,americans have1 by wise living1 begun to win back the exuberance which we lost at the rise of the modern city4 ,one of the surest indications of this is the fact that the nation has suddenly begun to read poetry again1 very much as the exhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns again to his ,palgrave during the third week of vacation4 ,in returning to neglected nature we are returning to the most neglected of the arts4 ,the renaissance of poetry is here4 ,and men like ,masefield1 ,noyes1 and ,tagore begin to vie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists4 ,moreover this is only the beginning4 ,aviation has come and is reminding us of the ancient prophecy of ,h4 ,g4 ,wells that the suburbs of a city like ,new ,york will now soon extend from ,washington to ,albany4 ,urban centers are being diffused fast2 but social-mindedness is being diffused faster4 ,men are wishing more and more to share with each brother man the brimming cup of life4 ,aircraft and true democracy are on the way to bear all to the land of perpetual exuberance4 ,and on their wings the poet will again mount to that height of authority and esteem from which1 in the healthful1 athletic days of old1 ,homer and ,sophocles dominated the minds and spirits of their fellow-men4 ,that is to say--he will mount if we let him4 ,in the following chapter ,i shall endeavor to show why the ,american poet has as yet scarcely begun to share in the poetry-renaissance4 ,,viii ,,the ,,joyful ,,heart ,,for ,,poets ,nothing probably is more dangerous for the human race than science without poetry1 civilization without culture4 ,,houston ,,stewart ,,chamberlain4 ,a poet in history is divine1 but a poet in the next room is a joke4 ,,max ,,eastman4 ,in the last two chapters we have seen the contemporary master of various arts1 and the reader of poetry1 engaged in cultivating the joyful heart4 ,but there is one artist who has not yet been permitted to join in this agreeable pastime4 ,he is the ,american poet4 ,and as his inclusion would be an even more joyful thing for his land than for himself1 this book may not ignore him4 ,the ,american poet has not yet begun to keep pace with the poetry-lovers' renaissance4 ,he is no very arresting figure2 and therefore you1 reader1 are already considering a skip to chapter nine4 ,well1 if you are no more interested in him or his possibilities than is the average ,american consumer of ,british poetry--,i counsel you by all means to skip in peace4 ,but if you are one of the few who discern the promise of a vast power latent in the ,american poet1 and would gladly help in releasing this power for the good of the race1 ,i can show you what is the matter with him and what to do about it4 ,why has the present renaissance of the poetry-lover not brought with it a renaissance of the ,american poet8 ,almost every reason but the true one has been given4 ,the true reason is that our poets are tired4 ,they became exhausted a couple of generations ago2 and we have kept them in this condition ever since4 ,in the previous chapter we saw how city life began abruptly to be speeded up in the seventies4 ,at that time the poet--like almost every one else in the city--was unable to readjust his body at once to the new pace4 ,he was like a six-day bicycle racer who should be lapped in a sudden and continued sprint4 ,that sprint is still going on4 ,never again has the ,american poet felt the abounding energy with which he began4 ,and never has he overtaken the leaders4 ,the reason why the poet is tired is that he lives in the over-paced city4 ,the reason why he lives in the city is that he is chained to it by the nature of his hack-work4 ,and the reason for the hack-work is that the poet is the only one of all the artists whose art almost never offers him a living4 ,he alone is forced to earn in other ways the luxury of performing his appointed task in the world4 ,for1 as ,goethe once observed1 people are so used to regarding poetic talent as a free gift of the gods that they think the poet should be as free-handed with the public as the gods have been with him4 ,the poet is tired4 ,great art1 however1 is not the product of exhaustion1 but of exuberance4 ,it will have none of the skimmed milk of mere existence4 ,nothing less than the thick1 pure cream of abounding vitality will do4 ,the exhausted artist has but three courses open to him3 either to stimulate himself into a counterfeit1 and suicidally brief1 exuberance2 or to relapse into mediocrity2 or to gain a healthy fullness of life4 ,in the previous chapter it was shown why poetry demands more imperatively than any other art1 that the appreciator shall bring to it a margin of vitality4 ,for a like reason poetry makes this same inordinate demand upon its maker4 ,it insists that he shall keep himself even more keenly alive than the maker of music or sculpture1 painting or architecture4 ,this is the reason why1 in the present era of overstrain1 the poet's art has been so swift to succumb and so slow to recuperate4 ,the poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able to readjust his body to the pace of modern urban life1 so that he may live among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations and still keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into his poems4 ,under these new and strenuous conditions1 very little real poetry has been written in our cities4 ,american poets1 despite their genuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amid its turmoil1 have almost invariably done the best of their actually creative work during the random moments that could be snatched in wood and meadow1 by weedy marsh or rocky headland4 ,to his friends it was touching to see with what wistfulness ,richard ,watson ,gilder used to seek his farm at ,tyringham for a day or two of poetry after a fortnight of furious office life4 ,even ,walt ,whitman--poet of cities that he was--had to retire precipitate from his beloved ,manahatta in order fitly to celebrate her perfections4 ,in fact1 ,stedman was perhaps the only one of our more important singers at the close of the century who could do his best work in defiance of ,emerson's injunction to the poet3 ,thou shalt lie close hid with ,nature1 and canst not be afforded to the ,capitol or the ,exchange4 ,but it is pleasant to recall how even that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in the peace of the country4 ,one reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women--and especially of unmarried women--among our poetic leaders is1 ,i think1 to be found in the fact that women1 more often than men1 command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital1 unstrenuous1 contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation4 ,it is a significant fact that1 according to ,arnold ,bennett1 nearly all of the foremost ,english writers live far from the town4 ,most of the more promising ,american poets of both sexes1 however1 have of late had little enough to do with the country4 ,and the result is that the supreme songs of the twentieth century have remained unsung1 to eat out the hearts of their potential singers4 ,for fate has thrown most of our poets quite on their own resources1 so that they have been obliged to live in the large cities1 supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness into which the uncommercially shaped withers of ,pegasus can be forced4 ,such harness1 ,i mean1 as journalism1 editing1 compiling1 reading for publishers1 hack-article writing1 and so on4 ,fate has also seen to it that the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a bull-neck1 pugilistic limbs1 and the nervous equipoise of a dray-horse4 ,what he may lack in strength1 however1 he is apt to make up in hectic ambition4 ,thus it often happens that when the city does not consume quite all of his available energy1 the poet1 with his probably inadequate physique1 chafes against the hack-work and yields to the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him4 ,then1 after yielding1 he chafes again1 and more bitterly1 at his faint1 imperfect expression of these dreams1 recognizing in despair that he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuous life about him4 ,so he burns the torch of life at both ends1 and the superhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle4 ,then suddenly the light fails altogether4 ,those poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to do even a small amount of steady1 fine-grained work in the city4 ,the rest are as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarred from learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil4 ,in her autobiography ,miss ,jane ,addams speaks some luminous words about the state of society which forces finely organized artistic talent into the wearing struggle for mere existence4 ,she refers to it as one of the haunting problems of life2 why do we permit the waste of this most precious human faculty1 this consummate possession of all civilization8 ,when we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be treasured1 it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost4 ,i wonder if we have ever stopped to ask ourselves why so many of our more recent poets have died young4 ,was it the hand of ,god1 or the effort to do the work of two in a hostile environment1 that struck down before their prime such spirits as ,sidney ,lanier1 ,edward ,rowland ,sill1 ,frederic ,lawrence ,knowles1 ,arthur ,upson1 ,richard ,hovey1 ,william ,vaughn ,moody1 and the like8 ,these were poets whom we bound to the strenuous city1 or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much of their vitality4 ,an old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius will out4 ,this is true1 but only in a sadder sense than the stupidly proverbial one4 ,as a matter of fact1 the light of genius is all too easily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world4 ,but we of ,america are loath to admit this4 ,and if we do not think of genius as an unquenchable flame1 we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy plant1 more tough than horse-brier or cactus4 ,only a few of us have yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an indestructible weed1 but of a fastidious exotic1 which usually demands good conditions for bare existence1 and needs a really excellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and produce the finest possible blooms4 ,mankind has usually shown enormous solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his best work4 ,but here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize that the irritable1 impulsive1 impractical nature of the genius1 in even the most favorable environment1 is formed for trouble as the sparks to fly upward4 ,they see that fortune has slain its hundreds of geniuses1 but trouble its ten thousands4 ,and they conclude that their own real solicitude should be1 not lest the genius have too little adversity to contend with1 but lest he have too much4 ,we have heard not a little about the conservation of land1 ore1 wood1 and water4 ,the poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort of conservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college4 ,i mean the conservation of energy4 ,our poetry will never emerge from the dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to overtake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it--or until we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable part of every year to the country--the place where the poet belongs4 ,it is true that the masters of the other arts have not fared any too well at our hands2 but they do not need help as badly by far as the poets need it4 ,what with commissions and sales1 scholarships1 fellowships1 and substantial prizes1 the painters and sculptors and architects and even the musicians have1 broadly speaking1 been able to learn and practise their art in that peace and security which is well-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productive mastery4 ,they have usually been able to spend more of the year in the country than the poet4 ,and even when bound as fast as he to the city1 they have not been forced to choose between burning the candle at both ends or abandoning their art4 ,but for some recondite reason--perhaps because this art cannot be taught at all--it has always been an accepted ,american conviction that poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue by highly organized persons1 most of whose time and strength and faculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout with the wolf on the threshold--a most practical1 philistine wolf1 moreover1 which never heard of rhyme or rhythm1 and whose whole acquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiarity with frayed masculine and feminine endings4 ,as a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard affair1 like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little ,johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee4 ,no wonder that so much of our verse jest growed1 like ,topsy4 ,and the resulting state of things has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets spend their days in correcting encyclopdia proof1 or clerking1 or running1 notebook in hand1 to fires--inheres in the eternal fitness of things4 ,bergson says in ,creative ,evolution1 that an intelligence which reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend1 over and above practically useful efforts4 ,does it not follow that when we make the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort of running to fires1 we prevent him from enjoying the very advantage which made man a reflective being1 to say nothing of a poet8 ,perhaps we have never yet realized that this attitude of ours would turn poetic success into a question of the survival of that paradox1 the commercially shrewd poet1 or of the poet who by some happy accident of birth or marriage has been given an income1 or of that prodigy of versatility who1 in our present stage of civilization1 besides being mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's calling1 is also physically fit to bear the strain of doing two men's work2 or1 perhaps we had better say1 three men's--for simply being a good poet is about as nerve-consuming an occupation as any two ordinary men could support in common--and the third would have to run to fires for the first two4 ,it is natural to the character of the ,american business man to declare that the professional poet has no reason for existence qua poet unless he can make his art support him4 ,but let the business man bear in mind that if he had the power to enforce such a condition1 he would be practically annihilating the art4 ,for it is literally true that1 if plays were excluded1 it would take not even a five-foot shelf to contain all the first-rate poetry which was ever written by poets in a state of poetic self-support4 ,could a man live by it1 the author of ,the ,deserted ,village once wrote to ,henry ,goldsmith1 it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet4 ,alas1 the fatal condition6 ,for the art itself has almost never fed and clothed its devotee--at least until his best creative days are done and he has become a grand old man4 ,more often the poet has attained not even this reward4 ,wordsworth's lines on ,chatterton have a wider application3 ,what treasure found he8 ,chains and pains and sorrow-- ,yea1 all the wealth those noble seekers find ,whose footsteps mark the music of mankind6 ',t was his to lend a life3 't was ,man's to borrow3 ',t was his to make1 but not to share1 the morrow4 ,those who insist upon judging the art of poetry on the hard ,american cash basis ought to be prepared1 for the sake of consistency1 to apply the same criterion as well to colleges1 public schools1 symphony orchestras1 institutions for scientific research1 missions1 settlements1 libraries1 and all other unlucrative educational enterprises4 ,with inexorable logic they should be prepared to insist that people really do not desire or need knowledge or any sort of uplift because they are not prepared to pay its full cost4 ,it is precisely this sort of logic which would treat the ,son of ,man if ,he should appear among us1 to a bench in ,bryant ,park1 and a place in the bread-line1 and send the mounted police to ride down his socialistic meetings in ,union ,square4 ,no6 poetry and most other forms of higher education have always had to be subsidized--and probably always will4 ,when wisely subsidized1 however1 this art is very likely to repay its support in princely fashion4 ,in fact1 ,i know of no other investment to-day that would bid fair to bring us in so many thousand per cent4 of return as a small fresh-air fund for poets4 ,we ,americans are rather apt to complain of the comparatively poor1 unoriginal showing which our poets have as yet made among those of other civilized nations4 ,we are quietly disgusted that only two of all our bards have ever made their work forcibly felt in ,europe2 and that neither ,poe nor ,whitman has ever profoundly influenced the great masses of his own people4 ,despite our splendid inheritance1 our richly mingled blood1 our incomparably stimulating ,new ,world atmosphere1 why has our poetry made such a meager showing among the nations8 ,the chief reason is obvious4 ,we have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were working for us4 ,true1 we have the reputation of being an open-handed1 even an extravagantly generous folk4 ,but thriftiness in small things often goes with an extravagant disposition1 much as manifestations of piety often accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placed outside the edifice4 ,we have spent millions on bronze and marble book-palaces which shall house the works of the poets4 ,we have spent more millions on universities which shall teach these works4 ,but as for making it possible for our few real poets to produce works1 and completely fulfill their priceless functions1 we have always satisfied ourselves by decreeing3 ,let there be a sound cash basis4 ,so it came to pass that when the first exuberant1 pioneer energy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormal type of city life1 it became no longer possible for the poets to put as much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines1 after they had toilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders4 ,for often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer vitality4 ,and how did we treat them from the first8 ,in the old days we set ,longfellow and ,lowell at one of the most exhausting of professions--teaching4 ,we made ,emerson do one-night lecture-stands all winter long in the ,west--sometimes for five dollars a lecture and feed for his horse4 ,we made ,bryant ruin a gift as elemental as ,wordsworth's1 in journalism2 ,holmes1 visit patients at all hours of the day and night2 ,poe1 take to newspaper offices and drink4 ,we made ,whitman drive nails1 set type and drudge in the ,indian ,bureau in ,washington1 from which he was dismissed for writing the most original and the most poetic of ,american books4 ,later he was rescued from want only by the humiliation of a public ,european subscription4 ,lanier we allowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office1 then kill himself so fast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing the flute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing ,sunrise until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips4 ,and this was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry of reproach3 ,why can we poets dream us beauty1 so1 ,but cannot dream us bread8 ,with ,lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-up process began to be more apparent4 ,edward ,rowland ,sill we did away with in his early prime through journalism and teaching4 ,we curbed and pinched and stunted the promising art of ,richard ,watson ,gilder by piling upon him several men's editorial work4 ,we created a poetic resemblance between ,arthur ,upson and the hero of ,the ,divine ,fire by employing him in a bookstore4 ,we made ,william ,vaughn ,moody teach in a city environment utterly hostile to his poetry1 and later set the hand that gave us ,an ,ode in ,time of ,hesitation to the building of popular melodrama4 ,these are only a tithe of the things that we have done to the hardiest of those benefactors of ours3 ,the poets1 who on earth have made us heirs ,of truth and pure delight4 ,it is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those less sturdy ones who have remained mute1 inglorious ,miltons for lack of a little practical appreciation and a small part of a small fresh-air fund4 ,so far as ,i know1 ,thomas ,bailey ,aldrich is the only prominent figure among the poets of our elder generations who was given the means of devoting himself entirely to his art4 ,and even his fortune was not left to him by his practical1 poetry-loving friend until so late in the day that his creative powers had already begun to decline through age and over-much magazine editing4 ,more than almost any other civilized nation we have earned ,allen ,upward's reproach in ,the ,new ,word3 ,there are two kinds of human outcasts4 ,man1 in his march upward out of the deep into the light1 throws out a vanguard and a rearguard1 and both are out of step with the main body4 ,humanity condemns equally those who are too good for it1 and those who are too bad4 ,on its ,procrustean bed the stunted members of the race are racked2 the giants are cut down4 ,it puts to death with the same ruthless equality the prophet and the atavist4 ,the poet and the drunkard starve side by side4444 ,literature is the chief ornament of humanity2 and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead1 and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel4444 ,england will always have fifteen thousand a year for some respectable clergyman2 she will never have it for ,shelley4 ,yes1 but how incomparably better ,england has treated her poets than ,america has treated hers6 ,what convenient little plums1 as ,de ,quincey somewhat wistfully remarked1 were always being found for ,wordsworth just at the psychological moment2 and they were not withheld1 moreover1 until he was full of years and honors4 ,indeed1 we owe this poet to the poet-by-proxy of whom ,wordsworth wrote1 in ,the ,prelude3 ,he deemed that my pursuits and labours1 lay ,apart from all that leads to wealth1 or even ,a necessary maintenance insures ,without some hazard to the finer sense4 ,how tenderly the frail bodies of ,coleridge and of ,francis ,thompson were cared for by their appreciators4 ,how potently the ,civil ,list and the laureateship have helped a long1 if most uneven1 line of ,england's singers4 ,over against our solitary ageing ,aldrich1 how many great ,english poets like ,byron1 ,keats1 the ,brownings1 ,tennyson1 and ,swinburne have found themselves with small but independent incomes1 free to give their whole unembarrassed souls and all that in them was to their art4 ,and all this since the close of the age of patronage6 ,why have we never had a ,wordsworth1 or a ,browning8 ,for one thing1 because this nation of philanthropists has been too thoughtless to found the small fellowship in creative poetry which might have freed a ,wordsworth of ours from communion with a cash-book to wander chanting his new-born lines among the dreamy ,adirondack lakes or the frowning ,sierras2 or that might have sought out our ,browning in his grocery store and built him a modest retreat among the ,thousand ,islands4 ,if not too thoughtless to act thus1 we have been too timid4 ,we have been too much afraid of encouraging weaklings by mistake4 ,we have been1 in fact1 more afraid of encouraging a single mediocre poet than of neglecting a score of ,shelleys4 ,but we should remember that even if the weak are encouraged with the strong1 no harm is done4 ,it can not be too strongly insisted upon that the poor and mediocre verse which has always been produced by every age is practically innocuous4 ,it hurts only the publishers who are constantly being importuned to print the stuff1 and the distinguished men and women who are burdened with presentation copies or requests for criticism4 ,these unfortunates all happen to be capable of emitting loud and authoritative cries of distress about the menace of bad poets4 ,but we should discount these cries one hundred per cent4 ,for nobody else is hurt by the bad poets1 because nobody else pays the slightest attention to them4 ,time and their own inherent perishableness soon remove all traces of the poetasters4 ,it were better to help hundreds of them than to risk the loss of one new ,shelley4 ,and do we realize how many ,shelleys we may actually have lost already8 ,i think it possible that we may have had more than one such potential singer to whom we never allowed any leisure or sympathy or margin of vitality to turn into poetry4 ,perhaps there is more grim truth than humor in ,mark ,twain's vision of heaven where ,captain ,stormfield saw a poet as great as ,shakespeare who hailed1 ,i think1 from ,tennessee4 ,the reason why the world had never heard of him was that his neighbors in ,tennessee had regarded him as eccentric and had ridden him out of town on a rail and assisted his departure to a more congenial clime above4 ,we complain that we have had no poet to rank with ,england's greatest4 ,i fear that it would have been useless for us to have had such a person4 ,we probably would not have known what to do with him4 ,i realize that mine is not the popular side of this question and that an occasional poet with an income may be found who will even argue against giving incomes to other poets4 ,mr4 ,aldrich1 for instance1 wrote1 after coming into his inheritance3 ,a man should live in a garret aloof1 ,and have few friends1 and go poorly clad1 ,with an old hat stopping the chink in the roof1 ,to keep the goddess constant and glad4 ,but a friend of ,mr4 ,aldrich's1 one of his poetic peers1 has assured me that it was not the poet's freedom from financial cares at all1 but premature age1 instead1 that made his goddess of poesy fickle after the advent of the pitifully belated fortune4 ,mr4 ,stedman spoke a far truer word on this subject4 ,poets1 he said1 in spite of the proverb1 sing best when fed by wage or inheritance4 ',tis the convinced belief of mankind1 wrote ,francis ,thompson with a sardonic smile1 that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly1 as if the ,almighty had constructed him like certain rudimentarily vocal dolls4 ,no artist1 declares ,arnold ,bennett1 was ever assisted in his career by the yoke1 by servitude1 by enforced monotony1 by economic inferiority4 ,and ,bliss ,carman speaks out loud and bold3 ,the best poets who have come to maturity have always had some means of livelihood at their command4 ,the idea that any sort of artist or workman is all the better for being doomed to a life of penurious worry1 is such a silly old fallacy1 one wonders it could have persisted so long4 ,the wolf may be splendid at suckling journalism and various other less inspired sorts of writing1 but she is a ferocious old stepmother to poetry4 ,there are some who snatch eagerly at any argument in support of the existing order1 and who triumphantly point out the number of good poems that have been written under seemingly adverse conditions4 ,but they do not stop to consider how much better these poems might have been made under seemingly favorable conditions4 ,percy ,mackaye is right in declaring that the few singers left to ,english poetry after our wholesale driving-out and killing-out of poets 444 are of two sorts3 those with incomes and those without4 ,among the former are found most of the excellent names in ,english poetry1 a fact which is hardly a compliment to our civilization4 ,would that one of those excellent philanthropists who has grown so accustomed to giving a million to libraries and universities that the act has become slightly mechanical--might realize that he has1 with all his generosity1 made no provision as yet for helping one of the most indispensable of all educational institutions--the poet4 ,would that he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive from the universities--places whose conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality1 because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold4 ,it is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow1 overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel1 by luring them on with the glitter of cash prizes4 ,one shudders to think of all the fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctant young dry-as-dusts while they are preparing to pack still tighter the already overcrowded ranks of professors of ,english literature--whose profession1 as ,gerald ,stanley ,lee justly remarks1 is founded on the striking principle that a very great book can be taught by a very little man4 ,this is a department of human effort which1 as now usually conducted1 succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry4 ,why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry1 to the neglect of the class of artists whose work they profess to interpret8 ,what should we think of ,england if her ,victorian poets had all happened to be penniless1 and she had packed them off to ,grub ,street and invested1 instead1 in a few more professors of ,victorian literature8 ,why should not a few thousands out of the millions we spend on education be used to found fellowships of creative poetry8 ,these would not be given at first to those who wish to learn to write poetry2 for the first thousands would be far too precious for use in any such wild-cat speculations4 ,they would be devoted1 rather1 to poets of proved quality1 who have already1 somehow1 learned their art1 and who ask no more wondrous boon from life than fresh air and time to regain and keep that necessary margin of vitality which must go to the making of genuine poetry4 ,i would not have the incumbent of such a fellowship1 however1 deprived suddenly of all outer incentives for effort4 ,the abrupt transition from constant worry and war among his members to an absolutely unclouded life of pure vocation-following might be almost too violent a shock1 and unsettle him and injure his productivity for a time4 ,the award of such a fellowship must not1 of course1 involve the least hint of charity or coercion4 ,it should be offered and accepted as an honor1 not as a donation4 ,the yearly income should1 in my opinion1 be small4 ,it should be such a sum as would almost1 but not quite1 support the incumbent very simply in the country1 and still allow for books and an occasional trip to town4 ,in some cases an income of a thousand dollars1 supplemented by the little that poetry earns and possibly by a random article or story in the magazines1 would enable a poet to lead a life of the largest effectiveness4 ,it is my belief that almost any genuine poet who is now kept in the whirl by economic reasons and thus debarred from the free practice of his calling would gladly relinquish even a large salary and reduce his life to simple terms to gain the inestimable privilege of devoting himself wholly to his art before the golden bowl is broken4 ,many of those who are in intimate touch with the poets of ,america to-day could show any philanthropist how to do his land and the world more actual1 visible1 immediate good by devoting a thousand dollars to poetry1 than by allowing an hundred times that sum to slip into the ordinary well-worn grooves of philanthropy4 ,some years ago a questionnaire was submitted to various literary men by a poetry-lover who hoped to induce a wealthy friend to subsidize poets of promise in case these literary leaders approved the plan4 ,while the younger writers warmly favored the idea1 a few of the older ones discouraged it4 ,these were1 in all cases1 men who had made a financial success in more lucrative branches of literature than poetry2 and it was natural for the veterans1 who had brawnily struggled through the burden and heat of the day1 to look with the unsympathetic eye of the sturdy upon those frailer ones of the rising generation who perhaps might1 without assistance1 be eliminated in the rough-and-tumble of the literary market-place4 ,of course it was but human for the veterans to insist that any real genius among their youthful competitors would out1 and that any assistance would but make life too soft for the youngsters1 and go to swell the growing menace of bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors of natural selection4 ,no doubt the generation of writers older than ,wordsworth quite innocently uttered these very same sentiments in voices of deep authority when it was proposed to offer this young person a chance to compose in peace4 ,no4 ,one fears that the attitude of these veterans was not wholly judicial4 ,but then1 why should any haphazard group of creative artists be expected to be judicial1 anyway8 ,one might as reasonably go to the ,louvre for classes in conic sections1 or to the ,garden of the ,gods for instruction in ,rabbinical theology4 ,few supporters of the general plan1 on the other hand1 were wholly in favor of all the measures proposed for carrying it out4 ,some of the most telling criticisms went to show that while poets of undoubted ability ought to be helped1 the method of their selection offers a grave difficulty4 ,h4 ,g4 ,wells1 who heartily approved the main idea1 brought out the fact that it would never do to leave the choice to a jury1 as no jury would ever have voted for half of the great poets who have perished miserably4 ,juries are much too conventionally minded4 ,for they are public functionaries2 or1 if not that1 at least they feel self-consciously as if they were going to be held publicly responsible1 and are apt to bring extremely conventional1 and perhaps priggish1 standards to bear upon their choice4 ,they invariably become timid and narrow1 wrote ,mr4 ,wells1 and seek refuge in practical1 academic1 and moral tests that invariably exclude the real men of genius4 ,prizes and competitions were considered equally ill-advised methods of selection4 ,it is significant that these methods are now being rapidly dropped in the fields of sculpture and architecture4 ,for the mere thought of a competition is a thing essentially antagonistic to the creative impulse2 and talent is likely to acquit itself better than genius in such a struggle4 ,the idea of a poetic competition is a relic of a pioneer mode of thought4 ,mr4 ,wells concluded that the decision should be made by the individual4 ,but ,i cannot agree with him that that same individual should be the donor of the fellowship4 ,it seems to me that this would-be savior of our ,american poetry should select the best judge of poets and poetry that he can discover and be guided by his advice4 ,on general principles1 there are several things that this judge should not be4 ,he should not be a professor of ,english1 because of the professor's usual bias toward the academic4 ,besides1 these fellowships ought not in any way to be associated with institutions of learning--places which are apt to fetter poets and surround them with an atmosphere hostile to the creative impulse4 ,neither should this momentous decision be left to editors or publishers1 because they are usually suffering from literary indigestion caused by skimming too many manuscripts too fast1 and because1 at any rate1 they ordinarily pay little attention to poetry and hold it commercially in one grand despise4 ,nor should the normal type of poet be chosen as judge to decide this question4 ,for the poet is apt to have a narrow1 one-sided view of the field4 ,he has probably developed his own distinctive style and personality at the expense of artistic catholicity and kindly breadth of critical judgment4 ,the creative and the critical faculties are usually as distinct and as mutually exclusive spheres as that of the impassioned1 partisan lawyer and the cool1 impartial judge4 ,to whom1 then1 should the decision be left8 ,it should1 in my opinion1 be left to a real judge--to some broad1 keen critic of poetry with a clear1 unbiased contemporary view of the whole domain of the art4 ,it matters not whether he is professional or amateur1 so he is untouched by academicism and has not done so much reading or writing as to impair his mental digestion and his clarity of vision4 ,care1 of course1 would have to be used in safeguarding the critic-judge against undue pressure in favor of this candidate or that2 and in safeguarding the incumbent of the fellowship from yet more insidious influences4 ,for the apparently liberated poet would merely have exchanged prisons if he learned that the founder of the fellowship wished to dictate what sort of poetry he should write4 ,the idea of poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps may sound4 ,it is no mere empirical theory4 ,americans ought to be proud to know that1 in a modest way1 it has recently been tried here1 and is proving a success4 ,i am told that already two masters of poetry have been presented to us as free workers in their art by two ,boston philanthropists1 and have been enabled to accomplish some of their best work through such fellowships as are here advocated4 ,this fact should put cities like ,new ,york1 ,pittsburg1 and ,chicago on their mettle4 ,for they must realize that ,boston1 with her quiet1 slow-moving1 ,old-,world pace1 has not done to poetry a tithe of the harm that her more energetic neighbors have1 and should therefore not be suffered to bear the entire brunt of the expiation4 ,men say that money cannot buy a joyful heart4 ,but next to writing a great poem1 ,i can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than to know that a thousand of my dollars had enabled an imprisoned genius to shake from his shoes the dust of a city office and go for a year to ,god's outdoors1 there to free his system of some of the beauty that had chokingly accumulated there until it had grown an almost intolerable pain4 ,what joy to know that my fellowship had given men the modern ,new ,world ,hyperion1 or ,prelude1 or ,ring and the ,book6 ,and even if that whole year resulted in nothing more than a ,skylark1 or a ,rabbi ,ben ,ezra1 or a ,crossing the ,bar--could one possibly consider such a result in the same thought-wave with dollars and cents8 ,but this thousand dollars might do something even better than help produce counterparts of famous poems created in other times and lands4 ,it might actually secure the inestimable boon of a year's leisure1 a procession of peaceful vistas1 and a brimming cup for one of that new brood of poets to come which ,walt ,whitman so confidently counted upon to 'justify him and answer what he was for4' ,this handful of gold might make it possible for one of these new poets to come into his own1 and ours1 at once1 and in his own person accomplish that fusion1 so devoutly to be wished1 of those diverse factors of the greatest poetry which have existed among us thus far only in awful isolation--the possession of this one and that of our chief singers4 ,how fervently we poetry-lovers wish that one of the captains of industry would feel impelled to put his hand into his pocket--if only into his watch-pocket--or adorn his last testament with a modest codicil6 ,it would be such poetic justice if one of those who have prospered through the very speeding-up process which has so seriously crippled our poetry1 should devote to its service a small tithe of what he has won from poetry's loss--and thus hasten our renaissance of singers1 and bring a new dawn1 'brighter than before known1' out of the dusk of the poets4 ,,ix ,,the ,,joyous ,,mission ,,of ,,mechanical ,,music ,i wonder if any other invention has ever1 in such a brief time1 made so many joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical music4 ,it has brought light1 peace1 gladness1 and the gift of self-expression to every third or fourth flat1 villa1 and lonely farmhouse in the land4 ,its voice has literally gone out through all the earth1 and with a swiftness more like that of light than of sound4 ,only yesterday we were marveling at the discovery of the larger magazine audience4 ,until then we had never dreamed of addressing millions of fellow creatures at one time1 as the popular magazine now does4 ,imagine the astonished delight of ,plato or ,cervantes1 ,poe or ,dickens1 if they had been given in one week an audience equivalent in number to five thousand readers a year for ten centuries6 ,dickens would have called it1 ,i think1 immortality-while-you-wait4 ,yet this sort of immortality was recently placed at the immediate disposal of the ordinary writer4 ,the miracle was unique in history4 ,but it did not long remain so4 ,not content with raining this wonder upon us1 history at once poured down a greater4 ,one morning we awoke to find a new and still vaster medium of expression1 a medium whose globe-girdling voice was to that of the five-million reader magazine as the roar of ,niagara to the roar of a ,philadelphia trolley-car4 ,to-day1 from wherever civilized man has obtained even a temporary foothold1 there arise without ceasing the accents of mechanical music1 which talk persuasively to all in a language so universal that even the beasts understand it and cock applauding ears at the sound of the master voice4 ,so that1 while the magazine writers now address the million1 the composers and singers and players make their bows to the billion4 ,their omnipresence is astonishing4 ,they are the last to bid you farewell when you leave civilization4 ,they are the first to greet you on your return4 ,when ,i canoed across the wild ,allagash country1 ,i was sped from ,moosehead ,lake by ,caruso1 received with open arms at the halfway house by the great-hearted ,plancon1 and welcomed to ,fort ,kent by ,sousa and his merry men4 ,with ,schumann-,heinck1 ,melba1 and ,tetrazzini ,i once camped in the heart of the ,sierras4 ,when ,i persisted to the uttermost secret corner of the ,dolomites1 ,i found myself anticipated by ,kreisler and his fiddle4 ,they tell me that the portly ,victor ,herbert has even penetrated with his daring orchestra through darkest ,africa and gone on to arrange a special benefit1 in his home town1 for the dalai-lama of ,tibet4 ,one of the most promising things about mechanical music is this3 ,no matter what kind of music or quality of performance it offers you1 you presently long for something a little better--unless your development has been arrested4 ,it makes small difference in this respect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happen to own4 ,it may be the phonograph4 ,it may be the kind of automatic piano which accurately reproduces the performances of the master pianists4 ,it may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies you with technic ready-made1 and allows you to throw your own soul into the music1 whether you have ever taken lessons or not4 ,or it may be a combination of the last two4 ,the influence of these machines is progressive4 ,it stands for evolution rather than for devolution or revolution4 ,often1 however1 the evolution seems to progress by sheer accident4 ,this is the way the accident is likely to happen4 ,jones is buying records for the family phonograph4 ,one may judge of his particular stage of musical evolution by his purchases1 which are3 ,meet me in ,st4 ,louis1 ,louis1 ,dance of the ,honey ,bells1 ,hello ,central1 ,give me ,heaven1 ,fashion ,plate ,march1 and ,i ,know that ,i'll be ,happy when ,i ,die4 ,he also notices in the catalogue a piece called ,tannhuser ,march1 and1 after some hesitation1 buys this as well1 because the name sounds so much like his favorite brand of beer that he suspects it to be music of a convivial nature--a medley of drinking-songs1 perhaps4 ,but that evening in the parlor it does not seem much like beer4 ,when the ,mephisto ,military ,band strikes it up--far from seeming in the least alcoholic1 it exhilarates nobody4 ,so ,jones inters it in the darkest corner of the music-cabinet4 ,and the family devote themselves to the cake-walks and comic medleys1 the fandangoes and tangos1 the xylophone solos1 the shakedowns and break-downs and the rags and tatters of their collection until they have thoroughly exhausted the delights thereof4 ,then1 having had time to forget somewhat the flatness of ,tannhuser1 and for want of anything better to do1 they take out the despised record1 dust it1 and insert it into the machine4 ,but this time1 curiously enough1 the thing does not sound quite so flat4 ,after repeated playings1 it even begins to rival the ,fashion ,plate ,march in its appeal4 ,and it keeps on growing in grace until within a year the ,fashion ,plate ,march is as obsolete as fashion plates have a habit of growing within a year1 while ,tannhuser has won the distinction of being the best-wearing record in the cabinet4 ,then it begins to occur to the ,jones family that there must be two kinds of musical food3 candy and staples4 ,candy1 like the ,fashion ,plate ,march1 tastes wonderfully sweet to the unsophisticated palate as it goes down2 but it is easy to take too much4 ,and the cheaper the candy1 the swifter the consequent revulsion of feeling4 ,as for the staples1 there is nothing very piquant about their flavor2 but if they are of first quality1 and if one keeps his appetite healthy1 one seems to enjoy them more and more and to thrive on them three times a day4 ,accordingly1 ,jones is commissioned1 when next he visits the music-store1 to get a few more records like ,tannhuser4 ,on this occasion1 he may even be rash enough to experiment with a ,schubert march1 or a ,weber overture1 or one of the more popular movements of a ,beethoven sonata4 ,and so the train of evolution will rush onward1 bearing the ,joneses with it until fashion-plate marches are things of the misty1 backward horizon1 and the family has1 by little and little1 come to know and love the whole blessed field of classical music4 ,and they have found that the word classical is not a synonym for dry-rot1 but that it simply means the music that wears best4 ,however the glorious mistake may occur1 it is being made by someone every hour4 ,by such hooks and crooks as these1 good music is finding its way into more and more homes4 ,although its true classical nature is detected at the first trial1 it is not thrown away1 because it cost good money4 ,it is put away and bides its time2 and some day the surprising fact that it has wearing qualities is bound to be discovered4 ,to those who believe in the law of musical evolution1 and who realize that mechanical music has reached the wide world1 and is even beginning to penetrate into the public library1 the possibility of these happy accidents means a sure and swift general development in the appreciation of the best music4 ,those who know that man's musical taste tends to grow better and not worse1 know also that any music is better than no music4 ,a mechanical instrument which goes is better than a new concert grand piano that remains shut4 ,canned music may not be the highest form of art1 the enthusiast will say with a needless air of half apology1 half defiance1 but ,i enjoy it no end4 ,and then he will go on to tell how the parlor melodeon had gathered dust for years until it was given in part exchange for a piano-player4 ,and now the thing is the joy of the family1 and the home is filled with color and effervescence1 and every one's head is filled with at least a rudiment of living1 growing musical culture4 ,the fact is1 the piano-player is turning thousands of supposedly humdrum1 prosaic people into musical enthusiasts1 to their own immense surprise4 ,many of these people are actually taking lessons in the subtle art of manipulating the machine4 ,they are spending more money than they can afford on vast collections of rolls4 ,they are going more and more to every important concert for hints on interpretation4 ,better still1 the most musical among them are being piqued1 by the combined merits and defects of the machine1 into learning to play an unmechanical instrument for the joy of feeling less mechanism interposed between themselves and the real thing4 ,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 of ,july4 ,both have shifted the emphasis from brute noise and fireworks to more spiritual considerations4 ,the piano-player has done a great deal to cheapen the glamour of mere technical display on the part of the virtuosi and to redeem us from the thralldom of the school of ,liszt4 ,our admiration for musical gymnastics and tight-rope balancing is now leaking away so fast through the perforations of the paper rolls that the kind of display-piece known as the concerto is going out of fashion4 ,the only sort of concerto destined to keep our favor is1 ,i imagine1 that of the ,schumann or ,brahms type1 which depends for its effect not at all on display1 but on sound musicianship alone4 ,the virtuoso is destined soon to leave the circus business and bid a long farewell to his late colleagues1 the sword-swallower1 the trapeze artist1 the strong man1 the fat lady1 the contortionist1 and the gentleman who conducts the shell-and-pea game4 ,for presently the only thing that will be able to entice people to concerts will be the soul of music4 ,its body will be a perfectly commonplace affair4 ,many a good musician fears1 ,i know1 that machine-made music will not stop with annihilating vulgar display1 but will do to death all professional music as well4 ,this fear is groundless4 ,mechanical instruments will no more drive the good pianist or violinist or 'cellist out of his profession than the public library1 as many once feared1 will drive the bookseller out of business4 ,for the library1 after persuading people to read1 has taught them how much pleasure may be had from owning a book1 with the privilege of marking it and scribbling one's own ideas on the margins1 and not having to rush it back to headquarters at inopportune moments and pay to a stern young woman a fine of eight cents4 ,likewise people are eventually led to realize that the joy of passively absorbing the product of phonograph or electric piano contrasts with the higher joy of listening creatively to music which the hearer helps to make1 in the same way that borrowing a book of ,browning contrasts with owning a book of ,browning4 ,i believe that1 just as the libraries are yearly educating hosts of book-buyers1 so mechanical music is coperating with evolution to swell the noble army of those who support concerts and give private musicales4 ,of course there is no denying that the existence of music-making machinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talented followers of the muse of strumming1 scraping1 screeching1 and blatting4 ,this is because the soul of music is not in them4 ,and in striving to reproduce its body1 they perceive how hopeless it is to compete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product4 ,in like manner1 the invention of canned meats doubtless discouraged many minor cooks from further struggles with their craft4 ,but these losses1 ,i1 for one1 cannot bring myself to mourn4 ,what seems a sounder complaint is that the phonograph1 because it reproduces with equal readiness music and the spoken word1 may become an effective instrument of satire in the hands of the clever philistine4 ,let me illustrate4 ,to the ,jones collection of records1 shortly after ,tannhuser began to win its way1 there was added a reactionary comic record entitled ,maggie ,clancy's ,new ,piano4 ,in the record ,maggie begins playing ,tannhuser very creditably on her new instrument4 ,presently the voice of old ,clancy is heard from another room calling1 ,maggie6 ,the music goes on4 ,there is a crescendo series of calls4 ,the piano stops4 ,yes1 ,father8 ,maggie1 is the new pianny broke8 ,no1 ,father2 ,i was merely playing ,wagner4 ,old ,clancy meditates a moment2 then1 with a gentleness of touch that might turn a ,new ,york music critic green with envy1 he replies3 ,oh1 ,i thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the parlor stove4 ,records like these have power to retard and roughen the otherwise smooth course of a family's musical evolution2 but they are usually unable to arrest it4 ,in general ,i think that such satires may fortify the elder generation in its conservative mistrust of classical music4 ,but if they are only heard often enough by the young1 ,i believe that the sympathies of the latter will end in chiming with the taste of the enlightened ,maggie rather than with that of her father4 ,until recently a graver charge against the phonograph has been that it was so much better adapted for reproducing song than pure instrumental music that it was tending to identify the art of music in the minds of most men with song alone4 ,this tendency was dangerous4 ,for song is not all of music1 nor even its most important part4 ,the voice is naturally more limited in range1 technic1 and variety of color than many another instrument4 ,and it is artificially handicapped by the rather absurd custom which forces the singer to drag in poetry 7much to the latter's disadvantage71 and therewith distract his own attention and that of his audience from the music4 ,the fact remains that one art at a time is none too easy for even the most perfect medium of expression to cope with4 ,to make a somewhat less than perfect instrument like the human voice1 cope always with two simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music has not yet emerged from its teens4 ,this is one reason why most song is as yet so intrinsically unmusical4 ,its reach is1 as a rule1 forced to exceed its grasp4 ,also the accident of having a fine voice usually determines a singer's career1 though a perfect vocal organ does not necessarily imply a musical nature4 ,the best voices1 in fact1 often belong1 by some contrariety of fate1 to the worst musicians4 ,for these and other reasons1 there is less of the true spirit of music to be heard from vocal cords than from the cords and reeds and brazen tubes of piano1 organ1 string quartet1 and orchestra4 ,thus1 when the phonograph threatened to identify song with music in general1 it threatened to give the art a setback and make the singer the arch-enemy of the wider musical culture4 ,fortunately the phonograph now gives promise of averting this peril by bringing up its reproduction of absolute music near to its vocal standard4 ,another charge against most machine-made music is its unhuman accuracy4 ,the phonograph companies seldom give out a record which is not practically perfect in technic and intonation4 ,as for the mechanical piano1 there is no escape from the certainty of just what notes are coming next--that is1 if little ,johnnie has not been editing the paper record with his father's leather-punch4 ,therefore one grows after a while to long for a few of those deviations from mathematical precision which imply human frailty and lovableness4 ,one reason why the future is veiled from us is that it is so painful to be certain that one's every prediction is coming true4 ,a worse trouble with the phonograph is that it seems to leave out of account that essential part of every true musical performance1 the creative listener4 ,a great many phonograph records sound as though the recorder had been performing to an audience no more spiritually resonant than the four walls of a factory4 ,i think that the makers of another kind of mechanical instrument must have realized this oversight on the part of the phonograph manufacturer4 ,i mean the sort of electric piano which faithfully reproduces every nuance of the master pianists4 ,many of the records of this marvelous instrument sound as though the recording-room of the factory had been papered with creative listeners who coperated mightily with the master on the stage4 ,would that the phonographers might take the hint6 ,but no matter how effectively the creative listener originally coperates with the maker of this kind of record1 the electric piano does not appeal as strongly to the creative listener in his home as does the less perfect but more impressionable piano-player1 which responds like a cycle to pedal and brake4 ,for the records of the phonograph and of the electric piano1 once they are made1 are made4 ,thereafter they are as insensible to influence as the laws of the ,medes and ,persians4 ,they do not admit the audience to an active1 influential part in the performance4 ,but such a part in the performance is exactly what the true listener demands as his democratic right4 ,and rather than be balked of it1 he turns to the less sophisticated mechanism of the piano-player4 ,this1 at least1 responds to his control4 ,undeniably1 though1 even the warmest enthusiasts for the piano-player come in time to realize that their machine has distinct limitations2 that it is better suited to certain pieces than to others4 ,they find that music may be performed on it with the more triumphant success the less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of an arabesque4 ,the best operator1 by pumping or pulling stops or switching levers1 cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life4 ,the disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands to be filled with soul1 the thinner and more ghost-like it comes forth4 ,the less intimately human the music1 the more satisfactorily it emerges4 ,for example1 the performer is stirred by the ,tannhuser ,march1 as rendered by himself1 with its flourish of trumpets and its general hurrah-boys4 ,but he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the ,evening ,star from the same opera4 ,for this1 in passing through the piano-player1 is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis4 ,the singer is no longer ,scotti or ,bispham1 but ,herschel or ,laplace4 ,the operator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart--but if he has any real musical instinct1 he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack in this sort of music4 ,so for the present1 while confidently awaiting the invention of an improved piano-player1 which shall give equally free expression to every mood and tense of the human spirit--the operator learns to avoid the very soulful things as much as is practicable4 ,at this stage of his development he usually begins to crave that supreme kind of music which demands a perfect balance of the intellectual1 the sensuous1 and the emotional4 ,so he goes more often to concerts where such music is given4 ,saturated with it1 he returns to his piano-player and plays the concert all over again4 ,and his imagination is now so full of the emotional side of what he has just heard and is re-hearing1 that he easily discounts the obvious shortcomings of the mechanical instrument4 ,this is an excellent way of getting the most from music4 ,one should not1 as many do1 take it from the piano-player before the concert and then go with its somewhat stereotyped accents so fixed in the mind as to obscure the heart of the performance4 ,rather1 in preparation1 let the score be silently glanced through4 ,leave wide the doors of the soul for the precious spiritual part of the music to enter in and take possession4 ,after this happens1 use mechanical music to renew your memories of the concert1 just as you would use a catalogue illustrated with etchings in black and white1 to renew your memory of an exhibition of paintings4 99 99 99 99 99 ,the supreme mission of mechanical music is its direct educational mission4 ,by this ,i mean something more than its educational mission to the many thousands of grown men and women whose latent interest in music it is suddenly awakening4 ,i have in mind the girls and boys of the rising generation4 ,if people can only hear enough good music when they are young1 without having it forcibly fed to them1 they are almost sure to care for it when they come to years of discretion4 ,the reason why ,america is not more musical is that we men and women of to-day did not yesterday1 as children1 hear enough good music4 ,our parents probably could not afford it4 ,it was then a luxury1 implying expensive concert tickets or an elaborate musical training for someone in the family4 ,the invention of mechanical instruments ended this state of affairs forever by suddenly making the best music as inexpensive as the worst4 ,there exists no longer any financial reason why most children should not grow up in an atmosphere of the best music4 ,and ,i believe that so soon as parents learn how to educate their children through the phonograph or the mechanical piano1 the world will realize with a start that the invention of these things is doing more for musical culture than the invention of printing did for literary culture4 ,we must bear in mind1 however1 that the invention of mechanical instruments has come far earlier in the history of music than the invention of printing came in the history of literature4 ,music is the youngest of the fine arts4 ,it is in somewhat the same stage of development to-day that literature was in the time of ,homer4 ,it is in the age of oral--and aural--tradition4 ,most people still take in music through their ears alone4 ,for all that the invention of note-printing means to them as enjoyers of music1 they might almost as well be living ons before ,gutenberg4 ,musically speaking1 they belong to the ,homeric age4 ,now the entrance of mechanical music upon the scene is making men depend on their ears more than ever4 ,it is intensifying and speeding up this age of oral tradition4 ,but in so doing1 ,i believe that it is bound to shorten this age also1 on the principle that the faster you go the sooner you arrive4 ,thus1 machinery is hastening us toward the time when the person of ordinary culture will no more depend on his ears alone for the enjoyment of music than he now depends on his ears alone for the enjoyment of ,shakespeare4 ,thanks to machine-made music1 the day is coming the sooner when we shall behold1 as neighbors in the ordinary bookcase1 such pairs of counterparts as ,milton and ,bach1 ,beethoven and ,shakespeare1 ,loeffler and ,maeterlinck1 ,byron and ,tschaikowsky1 ,mendelssohn and ,longfellow1 ,nietzsche and ,richard ,strauss4 ,browning will stand up cheek by jowl with his one true affinity1 ,brahms4 ,and the owner will sit by the quiet hearth reading to himself with equal fluency and joy from ,schubert and ,keats4 ,x ,,masters ,,by ,,proxy ,it is only in a surrounding of personalities that personalities can as such make themselves seen and heard4 ,,houston ,,stewart ,,chamberlain4 ,between many of my readers and the joyful heart there seems to stand but a single obstacle--their lack of creativeness4 ,they feel that they could live and die happy if only they might become responsible for the creation of something which would remain to bless mankind after they are gone4 ,but as it is1 how can they have the joyful heart when they are continually being tortured by regret because ,god did not make masters of them8 ,one is sad because he is not a master of poetry4 ,he never sees ,a1 his golden-tongued friend1 without a pang very like the envy of a childless man for a happy father4 ,but he has no suspicion that he is partly responsible for ,a's poetic excellence4 ,another thinks her life a mistake because the ,master of all good workmen did not make her a sculptor4 ,yet all the while she is lavishing unawares upon her brother or son or husband the very stuff that art is made of4 ,others are inconsolable because no fairy wand at their birth destined them for men of original action1 for discoverers in science1 pianists1 statesmen1 or actors2 for painters1 philosophers1 inventors1 or architects of temples or of religions4 ,now my task in this last chapter is a more delightful one than if ,i were the usual solicitor of fiction1 come to inform the poor-but-honest newsboy that he is a royal duke4 ,it is my privilege to comfort many of the comfortless by revealing to them how and why they are--or may be--masters of an art as indispensable as the arts which they now regard so wistfully4 ,i mean the art of master-making--the art of being a master by proxy4 ,to be specific1 let us single out one of the arts and see what it means to master it by proxy4 ,suppose we consider the simple case of executive music4 ,in a book called ,the ,musical ,amateur ,i have tried to prove 7more fully than is here possible7 that the reproduction of music is a social act4 ,it needs two3 one to perform1 one to appreciate4 ,both are almost equally essential to a good performance4 ,the man who appreciates a musical phrase unconsciously imitates it with almost imperceptible contractions of throat or lips4 ,these contractions represent an incipient singing or whistling4 ,motions similar to these1 and probably more fully developed1 are made at the same time by his mind and his spirit4 ,the whole man actually feels his way1 physically and psychically1 into the heart of the music4 ,he is turned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contribution of emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy to the performer4 ,when a violinist and a listener of the right sort meet for musical purposes1 this is what happens4 ,the violinist happens to be in the mood for playing4 ,this means that he has feelings which demand expression4 ,these his bow releases4 ,the music strikes the listener1 sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board1 and rouses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist4 ,enriched by this new contribution1 the emotional complex resounds back to the violinist1 intensifying his original feeling-state4 ,in its heightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator1 and so on1 back and forth1 growing in stimulating power at each recoil4 ,the whole process is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis1 with the opponents closing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster with every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure4 ',social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing4 ,this1 briefly told1 is what passes between the player of music and his creative listener4 ,in application this principle does not by any means stop with performing or composing music or with the fine arts4 ,it goes on to embrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the fiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy4 ,perhaps it is not too much to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself adequately expressed without the coperation of this social resonance1 without the help of at least one of those modest1 unrecognized partners of genius1 the social resonators1 the masters by proxy4 ,thanks1 dear master-makers unawares6 ,the gratitude of the few who understand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your own thankworthiness4 ,our children shall rise up and call you blessed4 ,for in your quiet way1 you have helped to create the world's creators--the preachers1 prophets1 captains1 artists1 discoverers1 and seers of the ages4 ,to these1 you1 unrecognized and unawares1 have been providing the very sinews of peace1 vision1 war1 beauty1 originality1 and insight4 ,what made the game of art so brilliant in the age of ,pericles8 ,it was not star playing by individuals4 ,it was steady1 consistent team-work by the many4 ,almost every one of the ,athenians who were not masters were masters by proxy4 ,in ,the ,foundations of the ,nineteenth ,century ,chamberlain holds that ,greek culture derived its incomparable charm from a peculiar harmony of greatness2 and that if our poets are not in every respect equal to the greatest poets of ,athens1 that is not the fault of their talent1 but of those who surround them4 ,only imagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the ,periclean atmosphere6 ,it must have been as exhilarating as coasting down into the ,yosemite ,valley with ,john ,muir on an avalanche of snow4 ,but even in that enlightened age the master received all the credit for every achievement1 and his creative appreciator none at all4 ,and so it has been ever since that particular amoeba which was destined for manhood had a purse made up for him and was helped upon the train of evolution by his less fortunate and more self-effacing friends who were destined to remain amoeb2 because the master by proxy is such a retiring1 unspectacular sort of person that he has never caught the popular imagination or found any one to sing his praises4 ,but if he should ever resent this neglect and go on strike1 we should realize that without him progress is impossible4 ,for the real lords of creation are not always the apparent lords4 ,we should bear in mind that the most important part of many a throne is not the red velvet seat1 the back of cloth of gold1 or the onyx arms that so sumptuously accommodate the awe and majesty of acknowledged kings4 ,neither is it the seed-pearl canopy that intercepts a too searching light from majesty's complexion4 ,it is a certain little filigreed hole in the throne-back which falls conveniently close to the sovereign's ear when he leans back between the periods of the wise1 beauteous1 and thrilling address to his subjects4 ,for doubled up in a dark1 close box behind the chair of state is a humble1 drab individual who1 from time to time1 applies his mouth to the wrong side of the filigreed hole and whispers things4 ,if he were visible at all1 he would look like the absurd prompter under the hood at the opera4 ,he is not a famous person4 ,most people are so ignorant of his very existence that he might be pardoned for being an agnostic about it himself4 ,the few others know little and care less4 ,only two or three of the royal family are aware of his name and real function4 ,they refer to him as ,m4 ,power-,behind-the-,throne1 ,master-by-,proxy of ,state4 ,there is one sign by which masters by proxy may be detected wherever met4 ,they are people whose presence is instantly invigorating4 ,before you can make out the color of their eyes you begin to feel that you are greater than you know4 ,it is as if they wore diffused about them auras so extensive and powerful that entering these auras was equivalent to giving your soul electric massage4 ,you do not have to touch the hem of their garments nor even see them4 ,the auras penetrate a brick wall as a razor penetrates ,swiss cheese4 ,and if you are fortunate enough to be on the other side of the partition1 you become aware with a thrill that virtue1 in the beautiful1 ,biblical sense of the word1 has gone out of somebody and into you4 ,if ever ,i return to live in a city apartment 7which may the gods forfend67 ,i shall this time select the apartment with almost sole reference to what comes through the walls4 ,i shall enter one of those typical ,new ,york piles which ,o4 ,henry described as paved with ,parian marble in the entrance-hall1 and cobblestones above the first floor1 and my inquiry will be focused on things far other than ,parian marble and cobblestones4 ,i shall walk about the rooms and up and down the bowling-alleys of halls trying to make myself as sensitive to impressions as are the arms of the divining-rod man during his solemn parade with the wand of witch-hazel4 ,and when ,i feel virtue from the next apartment streaming through the partition1 there will ,i instantly give battle to the agent and take up my abode4 ,and this though it be up six flights of cobblestones1 without elevator1 without closet-room1 with a paranoiac for janitor1 and radiators whose musical performance all the day long would make a ,cleveland boiler factory pale with envy4 ,for none of these things would begin to offset the privilege of living beside a red-letter wall whose influence should be as benignly constructive as ,richard ,washburn ,child's ,blue ,wall was malignly destructive4 ,to-day ,i should undoubtedly be much more of a person if ,i had once had the pleasure of living a wall away from ,richard ,watson ,gilder4 ,he was a true master by proxy4 ,for he was a vastly more creative person than his published writings will ever accredit him with being4 ,not only with his pen1 but also with his whole self he went about doing good4 ,virtue fairly streamed from him all the time4 ,those bowed shoulders and deep-set1 kindly eyes would emerge from the inner sanctum of the ,century office4 ,in three short sentences he would reject the story which had cost you two years of labor and travail4 ,but all the time the fatal words were getting themselves uttered1 so much virtue was passing from him into you that you would turn from his presence exhilarated1 uplifted1 and while treading higher levels for the next week1 would produce a check-bearing tale4 ,the check1 however1 would not bring you a tithe of the virtue that the great editor's personal rebuff had brought4 ,but more than to any editor1 writers look to their readers for support1 especially to their unknown correspondents--postal and psychic4 ,leonard ,merrick has so finely expressed the attitude of many writers that ,i cannot forbear giving his words to his public3 ,i have thought of you so often and wanted to win a smile from you2 you don't realize how ,i have longed to meet you--to listen to you1 to have you lift the veil that hides your mind from me4 ,sometimes in a crowd ,i have fancied ,i caught a glimpse of you2 ,i can't explain--the poise of the head1 a look in the eyes1 there was something that hinted it was ,you4 ,and in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed that you would recognize me2 but you said no word--you passed1 a secret from me still4 ,to yourself where you are sitting you are just a charming woman with a local habitation and a name2 but to me you are not ,miss or ,madam1 not ,m4 or ,n4--you are a ,power1 and ,i have sought you by a name you have not heard--you are my ,public4 ,and ,o my ,lady1 ,i am speaking to you6 ,i feel your presence in my senses1 though you are far away and ,i can't hear your answer4444 ,it is as if ,i had touched your hand across the page4 ,there are probably more masters by proxy to be found among the world's mothers than in any other class4 ,the profession of motherhood is such a creative one1 and demands so constant an outgo of unselfish sympathy1 that a mother's technic as silent partner is usually kept in a highly efficient state4 ,and occasionally a mother of a genius deserves as much credit for him spiritually as physically4 ,think of ,frau ,goethe1 for example4 ,many a genius attains a commanding position largely through the happy chance of meeting many powerful masters by proxy and through his happy facility for taking and using whatever creativeness these have to offer4 ,genius has been short-sightedly defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains4 ,galton more truthfully holds that the triune factors of genius are industry1 enthusiasm1 and ability4 ,now if we were to insist1 as so many do1 on making a definition out of a single one of these factors to the neglect of the others1 we should come perhaps nearer the mark by saying that genius is an infinite capacity for taking others' pains4 ,but all such definings are absurd4 ,for the genius absorbs and alchemizes not only the industry of his silent partners1 but also their ability and enthusiasm4 ,their enthusiasm is fortunately contained in a receptacle as generous as ,philemon's famous pitcher4 ,and the harder the genius tries to pour it empty1 the more the sparkling liquid bubbles up inside4 ,the transaction is like the quality of mercy-- ,it blesseth him that gives and him that takes4 ,the ability to receive as well as give this sort of help varies widely with the individual4 ,some geniuses of large psychic power are able instantly to seize out of any crowd whatever creativeness there is in it4 ,these persons are spiritual giants4 ,their strength is as the strength of ten because their grasp is sure4 ,they are such stuff as ,shakespeares are made of4 ,others are not psychically gifted4 ,they can absorb creativeness only from their nearest and dearest1 in the most favoring environment1 and only after the current has been seriously depleted by wastage in transmission4 ,but these are the two extremes4 ,they are as rare as extremes usually are4 ,in general ,i believe that genius1 though normally capable of drawing creativeness from a number of different sources1 has as a rule depended largely on the collaboration of one chief master by proxy4 ,this idea gazes wide-eyed down a fascinating vista of speculation4 ,who1 for instance1 was ,lincoln's silent partner8 the power behind the throne of ,charlemagne8 ,buddha's better self8 ,who were the secret commanders of ,grant1 ,wellington1 and ,csar8 ,who was ,molire's hidden prompter8 the conductor of the orchestra called ,beethoven8 the psychic comrade of ,columbus8 ,i do not know4 ,for history has never commemorated1 as such1 the masters by proxy with honor due1 or indeed with any honor or remembrance at all4 ,it will take centuries to explore the past with the sympathetic eye and the understanding heart in order to discover what great tombs we have most flagrantly neglected4 ,already we can single out a few of them4 ,the time is coming when music-lovers will never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place of ,wagner without making another to the grave of ,mathilde ,wesendonk1 whose virtue breathed into ,tristan and ,isolde the breath of life4 ,we shall not much longer neglect the tomb of ,charles ,darwin's father1 who1 by making the evolutionist financially independent1 gave his services to the world4 ,nor shall we disregard the memory of that other ,charles-,darwin-by-proxy--his wife4 ,for her tireless comradeship and devotion and freely lavished vitality were an indispensable reservoir of strength to the great invalid4 ,without it the world would never have had the ,origin of ,species or the ,descent of ,man4 ,other instances throng to mind4 ,i have small doubt that ,charles ,eliot ,norton was the silent partner of ,carlyle1 ,ruskin1 and ,lowell2 ,ste4 ,clare of ,francis of ,assisi2 ,joachim and ,billroth of ,brahms1 and ,dorothy ,wordsworth of ,william4 ,by a pleasant coincidence1 ,i had no sooner noted down the last of these names than ,i came upon this sentence in ,sarah ,orne ,jewett's ,letters3 ,how much that we call ,wordsworth himself was ,dorothy to begin with4 ,and soon after1 ,i found these words in a letter which ,brahms sent ,joachim with the score of his second ,serenade3 ,care for the piece a little1 dear friend2 it is very much yours and sounds of you4 ,whence comes it1 anyway1 that music sounds so friendly1 if it is not the doing of the one or two people whom one loves as ,i love you8 ,the impressionable ,charles ,lamb must have had many such partners besides his sister ,mary4 ,hazlitt wrote3 ,he is one of those of whom it may be said1 ',tell me your company1 and ,i'll tell you your manners4' ,he is the creature of sympathy1 and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of him4 ,perhaps the most creative master by proxy ,i have ever known was the wife of one of our ex-,presidents4 ,to call upon her was to experience the elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses of champagne1 with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects4 ,i should not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due as much to her creativeness as to his own4 ,it sometimes happens that the most potent masters in their own right are also the most potent masters by proxy4 ,they grind out more power than they can consume in their own particular mill-of-the-gods4 ,i am inclined to think that ,sir ,humphry ,davy was one of these4 ,he was the discoverer of chlorine and laughing-gas1 and the inventor of the miner's safety lamp4 ,he was also the deus ex machina who rescued ,faraday from the bookbinder's bench1 made him the companion of his travels1 and incidentally poured out the overplus of his own creative energy upon the youth who has recently been called perhaps the most remarkable discoverer of the nineteenth century4 ,schiller was another of these4 ,in more senses than one your sympathy is fruitful1 wrote ,goethe to him during the composition of ,faust4 ,indeed1 the greatest ,master known to history was first and foremost a master by proxy4 ,it was ,he who declared that we all are members one of another4 ,writing nothing ,himself1 ,he inspired others to write thousands of immortal books4 ,he was unskilled as painter1 or sculptor1 or architect2 yet the greatest canvases1 marbles1 and cathedrals since ,he trod the earth have sprung directly from his influence4 ,he was no musician4 ,his song was only living aloud4 ,but that silent song was the direct inspiration of much of the sublimest music of the centuries to come4 ,and so we might go on and on about this ,master of all vicarious masters4 ,yet it is a strange and touching thing to note that even his exuberant creativeness sometimes needed the refreshment of silent partners4 ,when ,he was at last to perform a great action in his own right ,he looked about for support and found a master by proxy in ,mary1 the sister of the practical ,martha4 ,but when ,he turned for help in uttermost need to his best-beloved disciples ,he found them only negative1 destructive influences4 ,this accounts for the anguish of his reproach3 ,could ye not watch with me one hour8 ,having never been properly recognized as such1 the world's masters by proxy have never yet been suitably rewarded4 ,now the world is convinced that its acknowledged masters deserve more of a feast at life's surprise party than they can bring along for themselves in their own baskets4 ,so the world bows them to the places of honor at the banquet board4 ,true1 the invitation sometimes comes so late that the master has long since devoured everything in his basket and is dead of starvation4 ,but that makes not the slightest difference to humanity1 which will take no refusal1 and props the cynically amused skeleton up at the board next the toastmaster4 ,my point is1 however1 that humanity is often forehanded enough with its invitations to give the masters a charming time of it before they1 too1 into the dust descend1 sans wine1 sans song1 etc4 ,but ,i do not know that it has ever yet consciously bidden a master by proxy--as such--to the feast4 ,and ,i contend that if a man's deserts are to be measured at all by his creativeness1 then the great masters by proxy deserve seats well up above the salt4 ,for is it any less praiseworthy to make a master than to make a masterpiece8 ,i grant that the masterpiece is the more sudden and dramatic in appearing and can be made immediate use of1 whereas the master is slowly formed1 and even then turns out unsatisfactory in many ways4 ,he is apt to be that well-known and inconvenient sort of person who1 when he comes in out of the rain to dress for his wedding1 abstractedly prepares to retire instead1 and then1 still more abstractedly1 puts his umbrella to bed and stands himself in the corner4 ,all the same1 it is no less divine to create a master by slow1 laborious methods than to snatch a masterpiece apparently out of nothing-at-all4 ,in the eye of the evolutionist1 man is not of any the less value because he was made by painful degrees instead of having been produced1 a perfect gentleman1 out of the void somewhat as the magician brings forth from the empty saucepan an omelette1 containing a live pigeon with the loaned wedding-ring in its beak4 ,the master-makers have long been expending their share of the power4 ,it is high time they were enjoying their share of the glory4 ,what an unconscionable leveling up and down there will presently be when it dawns upon humanity what a large though inglorious share it has been having in the spiritually creative work of the world6 ,in that day the seats of the mighty individualists of science1 industry1 politics1 and discovery2 of religion and its ancient foe ecclesiasticism2 of economy1 the arts and philosophy1 will all be taken down a peg by the same knowledge that shall exalt them of low degree4 ,i can imagine how angrily ruffled the sallow shade of ,arthur ,schopenhauer will become at the dawn of this spiritual ,commune4 ,when the first full notes of the soul's ,marseillaise burst upon his irritable eardrums1 ,i can hear above them his savage snarl4 ,i can see his malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearned increment of fame with some of those ,mitmenschen whom he1 like a bad ,samaritan1 loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil of vitriol and the sour wine of sadness4 ,and how like red-ragged turkey-cocks ,lord ,byron and ,nietzsche and ,napoleon will puff out when required to stand and deliver some of their precious credit6 ,there will be compensations1 though1 to the genius who1 safely dead1 feels himself suddenly despoiled of a fullness of fame which he had counted on enjoying in scula sculorum4 ,when he comes to balance things up1 perhaps he will not1 after all1 find the net loss so serious4 ,though he lose some credit for his successes1 he will also lose some discredit for his failures4 ,humanity will recognize that while the good angels of genius are the masters by proxy1 the bad angels of genius exert an influence as negative and destructive as the influence of the others is positive and constructive4 ,how jolly it will be1 for all but the bad angels1 when we can assign to them such failures as ,browning's ,the ,inn ,album2 ,davy's contention that iodine was not an element1 and ,luther's savage hounding of the nobles upon the wretched peasants who had risen in revolt under his own inspiration4 ,but enough of the bad angels6 ,let us inter them with this epitaph3 ,they did their worst2 devils could do no more4 ,turn we to the bright side of the situation4 ,how delighted ,keats will be when at last the world develops a little sense of proportion1 and after first neglecting and then over-praising him1 finally proposes to give poor old ,severn his due as a master by proxy4 ,imagine ,sir ,william ,herschel's pleasure when his beloved sister ,caroline begins to receive her full deserts4 ,and ,tschaikowsky will slough his morbidness and improvise a ,slavic ,hallelujah ,chorus when his unseen patroness comes into her own4 ,it is true that the world has already given her memory two fingers and a perfunctory thank ye4 ,this was for putting her purse at ,tschaikowsky's disposal1 thus making it possible for him to write a few immortal compositions instead of teaching mortals the piano in a maddening conservatory4 ,but now1 glory6 hallelujah6 the world is soon going to render her honor long overdue for the spiritual support which so ably reinforced the financial4 ,and ,sir ,thomas ,more1 that early socialist--imagine his elation6 ,for he will regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the man in the pre-,elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadily approaching the golden gates of his ,utopia4 ,for good ,sir ,thomas knows that our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too little democratic4 ,we have been over-inclined1 with the aristocratic ,carlyle1 to see all history as a procession of a few transcendent masters surrounded1 preceded1 and followed by enormous herds of abject and quite insignificant slaves4 ,between these slaves and the masters1 there is1 in the old view1 about as much similarity as exists in the child's imagination between the overwhelming dose of castor oil and the single pluperfect chocolate drop whereby the dose is supposed to be made endurable4 ,already the idea is beginning to glimmer that heroic stuff is far more evenly distributed throughout the throng than we had supposed4 ,it is1 of course1 very meet and very right and our bounden duty to admire the world's standard1 official heroes4 ,but it is wrong to revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less essential4 ,it is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the very existence of its patient and unself-conscious propeller4 ,it is especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of the master by proxy just now1 when the movement for the socialization of the world1 after so many ineffectual centuries1 is beginning to engage the serious attention of mankind4 ,thus far1 one of the chief reactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men are so shockingly unequal4 ,and the reactionaries have called us to witness the gulf that yawns1 for example1 between the god-like individualist1 ,ysaye1 and the worm-like little factory girl down there in the audience balanced on the edge of the seat and listening to the violin--her rapt soul sitting in her eyes4 ,now1 however1 we know that1 but for the wireless tribute of creativeness that flashes up to the monarch of tone from that rapt soul and others as humble and as rapt--the king of fiddlers would then and there be obliged to lay down his horsehair scepter and abdicate4 ,we have reached a stage of social evolution where it is high time that one foolish old fallacy should share the fate of the now partially discredited belief that genius will out in spite of man or devil4 ,this fallacy is the supposition that man's creativeness is to be measured solely by its visible1 audible1 or tangible results4 ,browning's old ,rabbi made a shrewd commentary on this question when he declared3 ,not on the vulgar mass ,called 'work1' must sentence pass1 ,things done that took the eye and had the price4444 ,but all the world's coarse thumb ,and finger failed to plumb4444 ,thoughts hardly to be packed ,into a narrow act1 ,fancies that broke through language and escaped3 ,all ,i could never be1 ,all men ignored in me1 ,this1 ,i was worth to ,god1 whose wheel the pitcher shaped4 ,yes1 we are being slowly socialized1 even to our way of regarding genius2 and this has been until now the last unchallenged stronghold of individualism4 ,we perceive that even there individualism must no longer be allowed to have it all its own way4 ,after a century we are beginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially minded ,english poet when he sang3 ,nothing in the world is single1 ,all things by a law divine ,in one another's being mingle4 ,to-day we have in library1 museum1 gallery1 and cathedral tangible records of the creativeness of the world's masters4 ,soon ,i think we are to possess--thanks to ,edison and the cinematographers--intangible records--or at least suggestions--of the modest creativeness of our masters by proxy4 ,some day every son with this inspiring sort of mother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords1 of perpetuating her voice1 her changing look1 her walk1 her tender smile4 ,thus he may keep at least a gleam of her essential creativeness always at hand for help in the hour of need4 ,i would give almost anything if ,i could have in a storage battery beside me now some of the electric current that was forever flowing out of my own mother1 or out of ,richard ,watson ,gilder1 or out of ,hayd ,sampson1 a glorious old inglorious ,milton of a master by proxy whom ,i once found toiling in a small livery-stable in ,minnesota4 ,my faith is firm that some such miracle will one day be performed4 ,and in our irreverent1 ,yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of the master by proxy--canned virtue4 ,in that event the twenty-first centurion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or for a ,god-forsaken environment without a supply of canned virtue than of starting for one of the poles equipped with only a pocketful of pemmican4 ,there is a grievous amount of latent master-making talent spoiling to-day for want of development4 ,many an one feels creative energy crying aloud within himself for vicarious spiritual expression4 ,he would be a master by proxy1 yet is at a loss how to learn4 ,him ,i would recommend to try learning the easiest form of the art4 ,let him resolve to become a creative listener to music4 ,once he is able to influence reproducers of art like pianists and singers1 he can then begin groping by analogy toward the more difficult art of influencing directly the world's creators4 ,but even if he finds himself quite lacking in creativeness1 he can still be a silent partner of genius if he will relax purse-strings1 or cause them to be relaxed1 for the founding of creative fellowships4 ,i do not know if ever yet in the history of the planet the mighty force which resides in the masters by proxy has been systematically used4 ,i am sure it has never been systematically conserved1 and that it is one of the least understood and least developed of earth's natural resources4 ,one of our next long steps forward should be along this line of the conservation of virtue4 ,the last physical frontier has practically been passed4 ,now let us turn to the undiscovered continents of soul which have so long been awaiting their ,columbuses and ,daniel ,boones1 their country-life commissions and conferences of governors4 ,when the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall grow aware of your possibilities1 and take your light from under the bushel1 and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at your elbow1 or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumbling genius1 or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master--our civilization will take a mighty step towards ,god4 ,try it1 my masters6 ,,the ,,end 99 99 99 99 99 ,by ,robert ,haven ,schauffler ,,the ,,joyful ,,heart4 ,,scum ,o' ,,the ,,earth ,,and ,,other ,,poems4 ,,the ,,musical ,,amateur4 99 99 99 99 99 ,,houghton ,,mifflin ,,company ,,boston ,,and ,,new ,,york 99 99 99 99 99