The Joyful Heart Part 5

Now, as the physiological psychologists a.s.sure us, the artist needs a generous overplus of physical vitality. The art-impulse is a br.i.m.m.i.n.g-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance. And the best way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain the physical. The artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full as possible. He will soon find that he is greater than he knows. He will discover that he has, until then, been walking the earth more than half a corpse. 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 bedroom.

"All through the life of a feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's grave-stones which mark the spots where n.o.ble enterprises perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds." Thus wrote the educator, Horace Mann. And his words apply with special force to the worker in the arts. One should bear in mind that the latter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve-racking, confining, exhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But the claims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spare intensity. Unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doing nothing at all. And to do his utmost he must keep his body in that supremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending to destroy. 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 minimum, and to train "without haste, without rest."

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

Is the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessary to the artist? Then let him read biography and note the paralyzing effect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and three quarter wellness. He will see that, as a rule, the masters have done their most telling and lasting work with the tides of physical vim at flood. For the genius is no Joshua. He cannot make the sun of the mind and the moon of the spirit stand still while the tides of health are ebbing seaward. Indeed biography should not be necessary to convince the fair-minded reader. Autobiography should answer. 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 health.

There is, of course, the vexed question of the sickly genius. My personal belief is firm that, as a rule, he has won his triumphs _despite_ bad health, and not--as some like to imagine--because of bad health. To this rule there are a few often cited exceptions. Now, no one can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer in the works of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. The white plague is a powerful mental stimulant. It is a double-distilled extract of baseless optimism. But this optimism, like that resulting from other stimulants, is dearly bought. Its shrift is too short. And let n.o.body 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 liver, heart, stomach, brain, skin, and so on without end.

The thing for artists to do is to find out what physical conditions make for the best art in the long run, and then secure these conditions in as short a run as possible. If tuberculosis makes for it, then by all means let those of us who are sincerely devoted to art be inoculated without delay. If the family doctor refuses to oblige, all we have to do is to avoid fresh air, kiss indiscriminately, practice a systematic neglect of colds, and frequent the subway during rush hours. If alcohol makes for the best art, let us forthwith be admitted to the bar--the stern judgment bar where each solitary drinker is arraigned. For it is universally admitted that in art, quality is more important than quant.i.ty. "If that powerful corrosive, alcohol, only makes us do a little first-cla.s.s work, what matter if it corrode us to death immediately afterwards? We shall have had our day." Thus many a gallant soul argues. But is there not another ideal which is as far above mere quality as quality is above mere quant.i.ty?

I think there is. It is quant.i.ty of quality. And quant.i.ty of quality is exactly the thing that cannot brook the corrosiveness of powerful stimulants.

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

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

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

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

In other words, the artist should keep himself in a condition so fit as to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance. But this should always flow as freely as beer at a college reunion. And there should always be plenty in reserve. It were well to consider whether there is not some connection between decadent art and decadent bodies. 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 room.

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 thereto; and exercise has not seemed to them sufficiently dignified. We are indebted to the dark ages for this dull superst.i.tion. It was then that the monasteries built gloomy granite greenhouses for the flower of the world's intellect, that it might deteriorate in the darkness and perish without reproducing its kind.

The monastic system held the body a vile thing, and believed that to develop and train it was beneath the dignity of the spiritually elect.

So flagellation was subst.i.tuted for perspiration, much as, in the Orient, scent is subst.i.tuted for soap--and with no more satisfactory result. This false notion of dignity has since then, by keeping men out of flannels, gymnasium suits, running-tights, and overalls, performed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mind and stunting the fruit trees of the spirit.

To-day, however, we are escaping from the old superst.i.tion. We begin to see that there is no complete dignity for man without a dignified physique; and that there is no physical dignity to compare with that of the hard-trained athlete. True, he who trains can hardly keep up the old-time pose of the grand old man or the grand young man. He must perforce be more human and natural. But this sort of grandeur is now going out of fas.h.i.+on. And its absence must show to advantage in his work.

As a rule the true artist is a most devoted and self-sacrificing person. 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 health. Wife, children, friends, credit--all may go by the board. But his poor health he addresses with solemn, scriptural loyalty: "Whither thou goest I will go: and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried." Not that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor health.

But he most thoroughly enjoys a number of its causes. Sitting up too late at night is what he enjoys; smoking too much, drinking too much, yielding to the exhausting sway of the divine efflatus for longer hours at a time than he has any business to, bolting unbalanced meals, and so on.

But the artist is finding out that poor health is the very first enjoyment which he ought to sacrifice; that the sacrifice is by no means as heroic as it appears; and that, once it is accomplished, the odds are that all the other things he thought he must offer up may be added unto him through his own increased efficiency.

No doubt, all this business of regimen, of constant alertness and petty self-sacrifice, is bound to grow irksome before it settles down in life and becomes habitual. But what does a little irksomeness count--or even a great deal of irksomeness--as against the long, 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 over?

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

If only the physical conscientiousness of the Greeks had never been allowed to die out, the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer, fairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, we shall never be able to reckon up our losses in genius: in Shakespeares whose births were frustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possible parents; in Schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causes before they had delivered a note of their message; in Giorgiones whom a suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have their work cheapened and curtailed. 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 health! 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-fighter.

To-day there is still a vast amount of superst.i.tion arrayed against the truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the mother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only the stepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves that sickness and morbidity are good for the arts, just as they delightedly embrace the conviction, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life of hara.s.sing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the true poet. The circ.u.mstance that this belief runs clean counter to the showing of history does not embarra.s.s them. Convinced against their will, most people are of the same opinion still. And they enthusiastically a.s.sault and batter any one who points out the truth, as I shall endeavor to do in chapter eight.

Even if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as little as a century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If Richard Wagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching cold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary places to overlook in "The Ring," and would, instead, have three or four more immortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to write. 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 bucket.

Tuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said so before the death of Keats!...

It makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in a stuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how the sole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game of _l'hombre_ with the philosopher Sch.e.l.ling. And then he wondered why he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever catching cold (_einen starken Schnupfen_); and why his head was so thick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. 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 humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdraw their health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it would have been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made them health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourish inspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case their published works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of their _Sammtliche Werke_ than they do. And the second part of "Faust"

would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom having wings to match those of the spirit.

"Ach! zu des Geistes Flugeln wird so leicht Kein korperlicher Flugel sich gesellen."

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 pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased to write poetry after thirty because, by dissipating his overplus of life, he had too grievously wronged what he described as

"This body that does me grievous wrong."

After all, there are comparatively few masters, since the glory that was Greece, who have not half buried their talents in the earthy darkness of mediocre health. When we survey the army of modern genius, how little of the sustained ring and resilience and triumphant immortal youth of real exuberance do we find there! Instead of a band of sound, alert, well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit, behold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along with lack-l.u.s.ter eyes, or eyes bright with the l.u.s.ter of fever. And the people whom they serve are not entirely free from blame. They have neglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks, or put s.h.i.+rts on their backs. As for footgear, it is the usual campaign army shoe, made of blotting paper--the shoe that left red marks behind it at Valley Forge and Gettysburg and San Juan Hill. I believe that a better time is coming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn.

For we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if the artist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able to run--not alone with patience, but also with the brilliance born of abounding vitality--the race that is set before him. This dawning belief is the greatest hope of modern art.

It does one good to see how artists, here, there, and everywhere, are beginning to grow enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodily efficiency, and physically to "revive the just designs of Greece." The encouraging thing is that the true artist who once finds what an impulse is given his work by rigorous training, is never content to slump back to his former vegetative, death-in-life existence. His daily prayer has been said in a single line by a recent American poet:

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

In every way the artist finds himself the gainer by cutting down his hours of work to the point where he never loses his reserve of energy.

He now is beginning to take absolute--not merely relative--vacations, and more of them. For he remembers that no man's work--not even Rembrandt's or Beethoven's or Shakespeare's--is ever _too_ good; and that every hour of needed rest or recreation makes the ensuing work better. 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 craft. Insight into the physiological basis of his life-work can save the artist, it seems, from those periods of black despair which he once used to employ in running his head against a concrete wall, and raging impotently because he could not b.u.t.t through. Now, instead of laying his futility to a mysteriously malignant fate, or to the persecution of secret enemies, he is likely to throw over stimulants and late hours and take to the open road, the closed squash-court, and the sleeping-porch. And presently armies cannot withhold him from joyful, triumphant labor.

The artist is finding that exuberance, this Open Sesame to the things that count, may not be won without the friendly collaboration of the pores; and that two birds of paradise may be killed with one stone (which is precious above rubies) by giving the mind fun while one gives the pores occupation. Sport is this precious stone. There is, of course, something to be said for sportless exercise. It is fairly good for the artist to perform solemn antics in a gymnasium cla.s.s, to gesture impa.s.sionedly with dumb-bells, and tread the mill of the circular running-track. But it is far better for him to go in with equal energy for exercise which, while developing the body, re-creates the mind and spirit. That kind of exercise is best, in my opinion, which offers plenty of variety and humor and the excitement of compet.i.tion. I mean games like tennis, baseball, handball, golf, lacrosse, and polo, and sports like swift-water canoeing and fly-fis.h.i.+ng, boxing, and fencing. These take the mind of the artist quite away from its preoccupations and then restore it to them, unless he has taken too much of a good thing, with a fresh viewpoint and a zest for work.

Sport is one of the chief makers of exuberance because of its purging, exhilarating, and constructive effects on body, mind, and spirit. So many contemporary artists are being converted to sport that the artistic type seems to be changing under our eyes. It was only yesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, or music was a sickly, morbid, anaemic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at sight by the average man, and a s.h.i.+ning mark for all the cast-off wit of the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in "Patience." He was a "foot-in-the-grave young man," or a "_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young man." He was

"A most intense young man, A soulful-eyed young man.

An ultra-poetical, superaesthetical, Out-of-the-way young man."

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

Faint though distinct, one begins to hear the new note of exuberance spreading through the arts. On canvas it registers the fact that the painters are migrating in hordes to live most of the year in the open country. It vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musical performer like Willeke, the 'cellist. Like a starter's pistol it sounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like John Masefield and Alfred Noyes. 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 exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a state somewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity. And I believe that as yet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physical renaissance. Wait until this new religion of exuberance is a few generations older and eugenics has said her say!

Curiously enough, 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-fas.h.i.+oned, invertebrate type of physique.

The rest are in a fair way to undergo such a change as came to Queed, the sedentary hero of Mr. Harrison's novel, when he took up boxing. As sport and the artists come closer together, they should have a good effect on one another. The artists will doubtless make sport more formful, rhythmical, and beautiful. Sport, on the other hand, ought before long to influence the arts by making sportsmen of the artists.

Now good sportsmans.h.i.+p is composed of fairness, team-work, the grace of a good loser, the grace of a good winner, modesty, and gameness.

The first two of these amount to an equitable pa.s.sion for a fair field and no favor, and a willingness to subordinate star-play, or personal gain, to team-play, or communal gain. Together they imply a feeling for true democracy. To be converted to the religion of sportsmans.h.i.+p means to become more socially minded. I think it is more than a coincidence that at the moment when the artists are turning to sport, their work is taking on the brotherly tone of democracy. The call of brotherhood is to-day one of the chief preoccupations of poetry, the drama, ideal sculpture, and mural decoration. For this rapid change I should not wonder if the democracy of sportsmans.h.i.+p were in part responsible.

The third element of sportsmans.h.i.+p is the grace of a good loser.

Artists to-day are better losers than were the "foot-in-the-grave young men." Among them one now finds less and less childish petulance, outspoken jealousy of others' success, and apology for their own failure. Some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering that the good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat. And they are importing these manly tactics into the game of art. It has not taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who hides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They are impressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading the less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair as chess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recent chess match between Lasker and Capablanca:

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

The fourth factor of sportsmans.h.i.+p is the grace of a good winner. It would seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep from gloating over his vanquished rival, but also to be generous and minimize his own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did all the apologizing. To-day less apologizing is done by the failure and more by the success. The master in art is learning modesty, and from whom but the master in sport? 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 men." Sport has made them more normal spiritually, while making them more normal physically. It has kept them younger. Old age has been attacked and driven back all along the line. One reason why we no longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitch.e.l.l, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion,"

writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up with itself and becoming contemporaneous."

Gameness is the final factor of good sportsmans.h.i.+p. In the matter of gameness, I grant that sport has little to teach the successful artist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency--in short, the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts. It takes the Browning spirit of those who

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

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

"Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all.

I am a little hurt, but I am not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed a while, And then I'll rise and fight with you again.'"

Yes, but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have not yet succeeded--perhaps for want of these very qualities? I believe that a newly developed spirit of sportsmans.h.i.+p, acting upon a newly developed body, will presently bring to many a disheartened struggler just that increment of resilient gameness which will mean success instead of failure.