The Joyful Heart | Page 4

an ugly intruder of a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as fear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like, there is only one right way to treat it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on the rubbish heap as if it were a stinging nettle; and let some harmonious thought grow in its place. There is no more reckless consumer of all kinds of exuberance than the discordant thought, and weeding it out saves such an amazing quantity of eau de vie wherewith to water the garden of joy, that every man may thus be his own Burbank and accomplish marvels of mental horticulture.
When you have won physical and mental exuberance, 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 virtue. 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 wishes. Such a gift is what the true artist enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and full for a dozen pens or brushes to record. Jeanne d'Arc knew it when the mysterious voices spoke to her; and St. John on Patmos; and every true lover at certain moments; 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 sour, stagnant marsh; or who at some supreme instant has felt enfolding him, like the everlasting arms, a sure conviction of immortality.
Now for purposes of convenience we may speak of these three kinds of exuberance as we would speak of different individuals. But in reality they hardly ever exist alone. The physical variety is almost sure to induce the mental and spiritual varieties and to project itself into them. The mental kind looks before and after and warms body and soul with its radiant smile. And even when we are in the throes of a purely spiritual love or religious ecstasy, we have a feeling--though perhaps it is illusory--that the flesh and the intellect are more potent than we knew.
These, then, constitute the first three parts of the joy-digesting apparatus. I think there is no need of dwelling on their efficacy in helping one to enjoy achievement. Let us pass, therefore, to the fourth and last part, which is self-restraint.
Perhaps the worst charge usually made against achievement is its sameness, its dry monotony. On the way to it (the writers say) you are constantly falling in with something new. But, once there, you must abandon the variegated delights of yesterday and settle down, to-day and forever, to the same old thing. In this connection I recall an epigram of Professor Woodrow Wilson's. He was lecturing to us young Princetonians about Gladstone's ability to make any subject of absorbing interest, even a four hours' speech on the budget. "Young gentlemen," cried the professor, "it is not the subject that is dry. It is you that are dry!" Similarly, it is not achievement that is dry; it is the achievers, who fondly suppose that now, having achieved, they have no further use for the exuberance of body, mind, and spirit, or the self-restraint which helped them toward their goal.
Particularly the self-restraint. One chief reason why the thing attained palls so often and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy it immoderately. Why, 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 achievement, he would not only have arrested the forward march of time, but would have over-reached himself and slipped backward through the years of his age to become a chronic infant in arms. Even traveling hopefully would pall if one kept at it twenty-four hours a day. Just feast on the rich food of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony morning, noon, and night for a few months, and see how you feel. There is no other way. Achievement must be moderately indulged in, not made the pretext for a debauch. If one has achieved a new cottage, for example, let him take numerous week-end vacations from it. And let not an author sit down and read through his own book the moment it comes from the binder. A few more months will suffice to blur the memory of those irrevocable, nauseating foundry proofs. If he forbears--instead of being sickened by the stuff, no gentle reader, I venture to predict, will be more keenly and delicately intrigued by the volume's vigors and subtleties.
If you have recently made a fortune, be sure, in the course of your Continental wanderings,