Robert Haven Schauffler

“ The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. The attainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a complete panorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover by re-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther and loftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attacking the week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him his mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, the achiever, if his joy-digesting apparatus be working properly, rejoices with exceeding great joy in past, present, and future alike. ”

“ The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries 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 the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.
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In other words, the artist should keep himself in a condition so fit as to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance. ”

“ One morning we awoke to find a new and still vaster medium of expression, a medium whose globe-girdling voice was to that of the five-million reader magazine as the roar of Niagara to the roar of a Philadelphia trolley-car. To-day, from wherever civilized man has obtained even a temporary foothold, there arise without ceasing the accents of mechanical music, which talk persuasively to all in a language so universal that even the beasts understand it and cock applauding ears at the sound of the master voice. ”

“ No doubt, all this business of regimen, of constant alertness and petty self-sacrifice, is bound to grow irksome before it settles down in life and becomes habitual. But what does a little 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 creating that which will elevate and delight mankind long after the pangs of installing regimen are forgotten and you have once and for all broken training and laid you down to sleep over? ”

“ Humanity condemns equally those who are too good for it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve side by side.... Literature is the chief ornament of humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead, and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel.... England will always have fifteen thousand a year for some respectable clergyman ”

“ Never again has the American poet felt the abounding energy with which he began. And never has he overtaken the leaders.
The reason why the poet is tired is that he lives in the over-paced city. The reason why he lives in the city is that he is chained to it by the nature of his hack-work. And the reason for the hack-work is that the poet is the only one of all the artists whose art almost never offers him a living. He alone is forced to earn in other ways the luxury of performing his appointed task in the world. ”

“ The kind that bids fair to shatter their old lives to bits and re-mold them nearer to the heart's desire is not industrial but human. For inspiration it goes back of the age of Brandeis to the age of Pericles.
The enthusiasm for human efficiency is beginning to rival that for industrial efficiency. Preventive medicine, public playgrounds, the new health education, school hygiene, city 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-rate the world over. ”

“ I shall not here go into the myriad details of just how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is no dearth of wise books and physicians and "Masters of the Inn," competent to mark out sound business programs of work, exercise, recreation, and regimen for body, mind, and spirit; while all that you must contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension, time, money, and will-power. You see, I am not a professor of vital commerce and investment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to induce the voters to elect a sound business administration. ”

“ I believe that a better time is coming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn. For we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if the artist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able to run—not alone with patience, but also with the brilliance born of abounding vitality—the race that is set before him. ”

“ For there is no more treacherous guide than the consummate artist on the wrong track.
Those who decry the joy of achievement are like tyros at skating who venture alone upon thin ice, fall down, fall in, and insist on the way home that winter sports have been grossly overestimated. This outcry about men being unable to enjoy what they have attained is a half-truth which cannot skate two consecutive strokes in the right direction without the support of its better half. And its better half is the fact that one may enjoy achievement hugely, provided only he will get himself into proper condition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed against the truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the mother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only the stepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves that 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Enthusiasm moves [44] the human vessel. To let it move the rudder, too, is criminal negligence. Brahms once made a remark somewhat to this effect: The reason why there is so much bad music in the world is that composers are in too much of a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, what do they do? Instead of taking it out for a long, cool walk, they sit down at once to work it up, but let it work them up instead into an absolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of the goose-quill looks to them like part of a swan-song. ”

“ Is the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessary to the artist? Then let him read biography and note the paralyzing effect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and three quarter wellness. He will see that, as a rule, the masters have done their 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 the fair-minded reader. ”

“ 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 exuberance and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a state somewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity. And I believe that as yet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physical renaissance. Wait until this new religion of exuberance is a few generations older and eugenics has said her say! ”

“ It goes on to embrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the fiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not too much to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself adequately expressed without the coöperation of this social resonance, without the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognized partners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy.
Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few who understand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your own thankworthiness. ”

“ We perceive that even there individualism must no longer be allowed to have it all its own way. After a century we are beginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially minded English poet when he sang:
"Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle."
To-day we have in library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible records of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we are to possess—thanks to Edison and the cinematographers—intangible records—or at least suggestions—of the modest creativeness of our masters by proxy. ”

“ When the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall grow aware of your possibilities, and take your light from under the bushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at your elbow, or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumbling genius, or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master—our civilization will take a mighty step towards God. ”

“ Or, rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, sparkling stream which carries along and solves and neutralizes, if not sweetens, in its impetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds, such as school, the Puritan Sabbath, boot and hair-brushing, polite and unpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and shorter catechists—and so on all the way down between the shores of age to the higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whose word is not as good as his bond. ”

“ Thanks to machine-made music, the day is coming the sooner when we shall behold, as neighbors in the ordinary bookcase, such pairs of counterparts as Milton and Bach, Beethoven and Shakespeare, Loeffler and Maeterlinck, Byron and Tschaikowsky, Mendelssohn and Longfellow, Nietzsche and Richard Strauss. Browning will stand up cheek by jowl with his one true affinity, Brahms. And the owner will sit by the quiet hearth reading to himself with equal fluency and joy from Schubert and Keats. ”

“ Youth trails clouds of glory. Glory often trails clouds of youth. Usually the eternal man is the eternal boy; and the more of a boy he is, the more of a man. The most conventional-seeming great men possess as a rule a secret vein of eternal-boyishness. Our idea of Brahms, for example, is of a person hopelessly mature and respectable. But we open Kalbeck's new biography and discover him climbing a tree to conduct his chorus while swaying upon a branch; or, in his fat forties, playing at frog-catching like a five-year-old.
The prominent American is no less youthful. ”

“ 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 [15] 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. ”

“ Of course there is no denying that the existence of music-making machinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talented followers of the muse of strumming, scraping, screeching, and blatting. This is because the soul of music is not in them. And in striving to reproduce its body, they perceive how hopeless it is to compete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product. ”

“ But auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by the mediæval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintage of the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption. Consecutive thought, though it is one of man's greatest pleasures, is at the same time perhaps the most arduous labor that he can perform. And after a long period of it, both the Auto-Comrade and his companion become exhausted and, perforce, less comradely. ”