The Joyful Heart

xhaustive study of his office force and their every action. After considering the tabulated results he arose, smashed all but one of the many office mirrors, boug

itecture, and painting. But beyond the card catalogue and the filing cabinet the artists find that this new gospel has little to offer them. Their sympathies go out, instead, to a different kind of efficiency.

planning, eugenics, housing reform, the child-welfare and country-life movements, the cult of exercise and sport-these all are helping to lower the death-rate and enrich the life

r, while the cheap little boys and girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four or five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is, like Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It is dawning upon him that one chief reason why the old Greeks scaled Parnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, and kept, t

use the artist broke training when Greece declined, and has never

al 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 th

d 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

own book, offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of the first essentials of genius; and shows how triumphant a pa

ir 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 t

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

criminately, 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 quantity. "If that powerful corrosive, alcohol, only makes us do a little fir

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

lants 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

at Englishman I cannot forbear givi

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 th

ly 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 a

anite 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 substituted for perspiration

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 gra

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

the sacrifice is by no means as heroic as it appears; and that, once it is accomplished, the odds are that

ttle 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 cr

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 su

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 decima

at 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 harassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the true poet. The circumstance that this belief runs

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 hat

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 outr

eistes Flügeln

cher Flügel s

kind of birthrights they bartered away for a mess of pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased to write poetry

at does me gr

looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along with lack-luster eyes, or eyes bright with the luster of fever. And the people whom they serve are not entirely free from blame. They have neglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks, or put shirts 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 J

lly 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 trainin

hat we may liv

s 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 agains

exercise. It is fairly good for the artist to perform solemn antics in a gymnasium class, to gesture impassionedly 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

tistic 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, an?mic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at sight by th

intense

l-eyed y

uper?sthetical, Out-

ke 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 a

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 e

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 go

gain, to team-play, or communal gain. Together they imply a feeling for true democracy. To be converted to the religion of sportsmanship 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 w

his 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 o

ss of the players so to train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect condition; and

re 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

s little to teach the successful artist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency-in sho

baffled to fight be

-Saxon gameness of Johnny

Fight on, my

hurt, but I

down for to

ise and fight w

ties? I believe that a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship, acting upon a newly developed body, will presently brin

ortsmanship. For this spirit was unknown to the ancient world. Until yesterday art and sportsmanship never met. But now that they are mating I am confident that there will come of this

rators, singers,

justify me and an

ve, athletic, continental,

you must j