The Joyful Heart | Page 3

time accomplish as in what has actually just started
into life under your pencil or clayey thumb, your bow or brush. For
what you are about to receive, the Lord, as a rule, makes you duly
thankful. But with the thankfulness is always mingled the shadowy
apprehension that your powers may fail you when next you wish to use
them. Thus the joy of anticipatory creation is akin to pain. It holds no
such pure bliss as actual creation. When you are in full swing, what you
have just finished (unless you are exhausted) seems to you nearly
always the best piece of work that you have ever done. For your critical,
inhibitory apparatus is temporarily paralyzed by the intoxication of the
moment. What makes so many artists fail at these times to enjoy a
maximum of pleasure and a minimum of its opposite, is that they do
not train their bodies "like a strong man to run a race," and make and
keep them aboundingly vital. The actual toil takes so much of their
meager vitality that they have too little left with which to enjoy the
resulting achievement. If they become ever so slightly intoxicated over
the work, they have a dreadful morning after, whose pain they read
back into the joy preceding. And then they groan out that all is vanity,
and slander joy by calling it a pottle of hay.
It takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement is
something finished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished in art, for
instance, without re-creating it for yourself. But, though re-creation
demands almost as much vital overplus as creation, the layman should

realize that he has, as a rule, far more of this overplus than the pallid,
nervous sort of artist. And he should accordingly discount the other's
lamentations over the vanity of human achievement.
The reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure in writing, and in having
written, his delicious essays is that he did not know how to take proper
care of his body. To be extremely antithetical, I, on the other hand, take
so much pleasure in writing and in having written these essays of mine
(which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise, or brilliant as
Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery, discouragement, and
disillusionment which accompany and follow almost every one of them,
and the need of Spartan training for their sake, hardly displace a drop
from the bucket of joy that the work brings. Training has meant so
much vital overplus to me that I long ago spurted and caught up with
my pottle of joy. And, finding that it made a cud of unimagined flavor
and durability, I substituted for the pottle a placard to this effect:
REMEMBER THE RACE!
This placard, hung always before me, 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 Life. Such a
regimen pays thousands of per cent. in yearly dividends. It allows one
to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather like that which
the sprinter enjoys when, after months of flawless preparation, he hurls
himself through space like some winged creature too much in love with
the earth to leave it; while every drop of his tingling blood makes him
conscious of endless reserves of vitality.
Tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things into
joy--even sorrow itself. 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 living."
The physical variety of exuberance, once won, makes easy the winning
of the mental variety. This, when it is almost isolated from the other
kinds, is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world of

abstract thought, or drink delight of battle with your intellectual peers,
or follow with full understanding the phonographic version of some
mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this means work. But if your body is
shouting for joy over the mere act of living, mental calisthenics no
longer appear so impossibly irksome. And anyway, the discipline of
your physical training has induced your will to put up with a good deal
of irksomeness. This is partly because its eye is fixed on something
beyond the far-off, divine event of achieving concentration on one
subject for five minutes without allowing the mind to wander from it
more than twenty-five times. That something is a keenness of
perception which makes any given fragment of nature or human nature
or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace, endlessly alive
with possibilities of joyful