The Joyful Heart | Page 5

to take many a third-class carriage full of witty peasants, and stop at many an "unpretending" inn "Of the White Hind," with bowered rose-garden and bowling-green running down to the trout-filled river, and mine ample hostess herself to make and bring you the dish for which she is famous over half the countryside. Thus you will increase by at least one Baedekerian star-power the luster of the next Grand Hotel Royal de l'Univers which may receive you. And be sure to alternate pedestrianism with motoring, and the "peanut" gallery with the stage-box. Omit not to punctuate with stag vacations long periods of domestic felicity. When Solomon declared that all was vanity and vexation of spirit I suspect that he had been more than unusually intemperate in frequenting the hymeneal altar.
Why is it that the young painters, musicians, and playwrights who win fame and fortune as heroes in the novels of Mr. E. F. Benson enjoy achievement so hugely? Simply because they are exuberant in mind, body, and spirit, and, if not averse to brandy and soda, are in other ways, at least, paragons of moderation. And yet, in his "Book of Months," Mr. Benson requests God to help those who have attained!
With this fourfold equipment of the three exuberances and moderation, I defy Solomon himself in all his glory not to enjoy the situation immensely and settle down in high good humor and content with the paltry few scores of wives already achieved. I defy him not to enjoy even his fame.
We have heard much from the gloomily illustrious about the fraudulent promise of fame. At a distance, they admit, it seems like a banquet board spread with a most toothsome feast. But step up to the table. All you find there is dust and ashes, vanity and vexation of spirit and a desiccated joint that defies the stoutest carver. If a man holds this view, however, you may be rather sure that he belongs to the bourgeois great. For it is just as bourgeois to win fame and then not know what on earth to do with it, as it is to win fortune and then not know what on earth to do with it. The more cultivated a famous man is, the more he must enjoy the situation; for along with his dry scrag of fame, the more he must have of the sauce which alone makes it palatable. The recipe for this sauce runs as follows: to one amphoraful best physical exuberance add spice of keen perception, cream of imagination, and fruits of the spirit. Serve with grain of salt.
That famous person is sauceless who can, without a tingle of joy, overhear the couple in the next steamer-chairs mentioning his name casually to each other as an accepted and honored household word. He has no sauce for his scrag if he, unmoved, can see the face of some beautiful child in the holiday crowd suddenly illuminated by the pleasure of recognizing him, from his pictures, as the author of her favorite story. He is bourgeois if it gives him no joy when the weight of his name swings the beam toward the good cause; or when the mail brings luminous gratitude and comprehension from the perfect stranger in Topeka or Tokyo. No; fame to the truly cultivated should be fully as enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward fame.
In certain other cases, indeed, attainment is even more delicious than the hope thereof. Think of the long, cool drink at the New Mexican pueblo after a day in the incandescent desert, with your tongue gradually enlarging itself from thirst. How is it with you, O golfer, when, even up at the eighteenth, you top into the hazard, make a desperate demonstration with the niblick, and wipe the sand out of your eyes barely in time to see your ball creep across the distant green and drop into the hole? Has not the new president's aged father a slightly better time at the inauguration of his dear boy than he had at any time during the fifty years of hoping for and predicting that consummation? Does not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly the certainty of having made the world a better place to live in, than he had enjoyed the hope of achieving that desirable end? Can there be any comparison between the joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring, now hopefully, now despairingly, to port, and the joys of the same soul which has at last found a perfect haven in the heart of God?
And still the writers go on talking of joy as if it were a pottle of hay--a flimsy fraud--and of the satisfaction of attainment as if it were unattainable. Why do they not realize, at least, that their every thrill of response to a beautiful melody,