The Joyful Heart | Page 7

sorrow mark the diminution, the joy of living
and the upspringing of happiness signify the increase of energy.... By
using special instruments, such as the plethysmograph of Hallion, the
pneumograph of Marey, the sphygmometer of Cheron, and so many
others which have come in fashion during these latter years, we have
succeeded in proving experimentally that joy, sadness, and pain depend
upon our energy." To keep exuberant one must possess more than just
enough vitality to fill the cup of the present. There must be enough to
make it brim over. Real exuberance, however, is not the extravagant,
jarring sort of thing that some thoughtless persons suppose it to be. The
word is not accented on the first syllable. Indeed, it might just as well
be "inuberance." It does not long to make an impression or, in vulgar
phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends to be self-contained. It is not
boisterousness. It is generous and infectious, while boisterousness is
inclined to be selfish and repellent. Most of us would rather spend a
week among a crowd of mummies than in a gang of boisterous young
blades. For boisterousness is only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and

on the rampage. The royal old musician and poet was not filled with
this, but with the real thing, when he sang:
"He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul ... My cup
runneth over."
The merely boisterous man, on the other hand, is a fatuous spendthrift
of his fortune. He reminds us how close we are of kin to the frolicsome
chimpanzee. His attitude was expressed on election night by a young
man of Manhattan who shouted hoarsely to his fellow:
"On with the dance; let joy be unrefined!"
Neither should mere vivacity be mistaken for exuberance. It is no more
surely indicative of the latter than is the laugh of a parrot. 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 vivacity, while the less demonstrative Teuton
more easily stores his up for use where it will count. This gives him an
advantage in such pursuits as athletics and empire-building.
The more exuberance of all varieties one has stored up in body and
mind and spirit, 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 existence. A little of this precious
commodity, more or less, is what often makes the difference between
the ordinary and the supreme achievement. It is the liquid explosive
that shatters the final, and most stubborn, barrier between man and the
Infinite. It is what Walt Whitman called "that last spark, that sharp flash
of power, that something or other more which gives life to all great
literature."
The happy man is the one who possesses these three kinds of overplus,
and whose will is powerful enough to keep them all healthy and to keep
him from indulging in their delights intemperately.
It is a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many do, that such fullness of
life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back door when

middle age knocks at the front. 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 principal.
To ascribe it to youth as an exclusive attribute is as fatuous as it would
be to ascribe a respectable income only to the recent investor.
A red-letter day it will be for us when we realize that exuberance
represents for every one the income from his fund of vitality; that when
one's exuberance is all gone, his income is temporarily exhausted; and
that he cannot go on living at the same rate without touching the
principal. The hard-headed, harder-worked American business man is
admittedly clever and prudent about money matters. But when he
comes to deal with immensely more important matters such as life,
health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. He has not yet grasped the
obvious truth that a man's fund of vitality ought to be administered
upon at least as sound a business basis as his fund of dollars. The
principal should not be broken into for living expenses during a term of
at least ninety-nine years. (Metchnikoff says that this term is one
hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of the Bulgarian bacillus.)
And one should not be content with anything short of a substantial rate
of interest.
In one respect this life-business is a simpler thing to manage than