Some Enthusiasms I Have Known

I

ENTHUSIASM is the thing that makes the world go round. The old Greeks who gave it a name knew that it was the god-energy in the human machine. Without its driving power nothing worth doing has ever been done. It is man’s dearest possession. Love, friendship, religion, altruism, devotion to career or hobby, — all these, and most of the other good things in life, are forms of enthusiasm. A medicine for the most diverse ills, it alleviates both the pains of poverty and the boredom of riches. Apart from it joy cannot live. Therefore it should be husbanded with zeal and spent with wisdom.

To waste it is folly; to misuse it, disaster. For it is safe to utilize this godenergy only in its own proper sphere. Enthusiasm moves the human vessel. To let it move the rudder too, is criminal negligence. The great composer 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 instead they let it work them up into an absolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of the goose-quill looks to them like part of a swan-song.

Love is blind, they say. This is an exaggeration. But it is based on the fact that enthusiasm, whether it appears as love, or in any other form, always has trouble with its eyes. In its own place it is incomparably efficient; only keep it away from the pilot-house!

Since this god-energy is the most precious and important thing we have, why should our word for its possessor have sunk almost to the level of a contemptuous epithet? Nine times in ten we apply it to the man who allows his enthusiasm to steer his vessel. It would be quite as logical to employ the word ‘writer’ for one who misuses his literary gift in writing dishonest advertisements. When we speak of an ‘enthusiast’ to-day, we usually mean a person who has all the ill-judging impulsiveness of a child without its compensating charm, and is therefore not to be taken seriously. This was the attitude of Commodore Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central Railroad, when George Westinghouse sent him a proposal to substitute airfor hand-brakes. ‘He’s only an enthusiast,’ remarked the Commodore, and returned the inventor’s letter politely indorsed: ‘I have no time to waste on fools.’ It might do all such superficial scoffers good if they were answered as the Commodore was answered. Some time after, when the air-brake had been put into brilliant operation on the more progressive Pennsylvania Railroad, the president of the New York Central wrote the inventor a benignant letter, appointing an interview. His reply was a single sentence: ‘I have no time to waste on fools. — GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE.’

But besides its poor sense of direction, men have another complaint against enthusiasm. They think it insincere on account of its capacity for frequent and violent fluctuation in temperature. In his Creative Evolution, Bergson shows how ‘our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one so easily takes the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt our own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we did not know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living.’ The philosopher then goes on to show how, when we fall into this confusion, we are unjust to enthusiasm, which is the materialization of the invisible breath of life itself. It is ‘the spirit.’ The action it induces is ‘the letter.’ These give rise to two different and often antagonistic movements. The letter kills the spirit. But when this occurs we are apt to mistake the slayer for the slain and impute to the ardent spirit all the cold vices of its murderer. Hence, the taint of insincerity that seems to hang about enthusiasm is, after all, nothing but illusion. To be just, we should discount this illusion in advance as the wise man discounts discouragement. And the word for the man whose lungs are large with the breath of life should cease to be a term of reproach.

Enthusiasm is the prevailing characteristic of the child and of the man who does memorable things. The two are near akin and bear a family resemblance. Youth trails clouds of glory. The eternal man is usually the eternal boy. And it frequently follows that 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 on a branch, or, in his fat forties, playing at frogcatching like a five-year-old.

The American celebrity is no less youthful. Not long ago one of our good gray men of letters was among his children, awaiting dinner and his wife. Her footstep sounded on the stairs. ‘Quick, children!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here’s mother. Let’s hide under the table, and when she comes in we’ll rush out on all-fours and pretend we’re bears.’ The manœuvre was executed with spirit. At the agreed signal out they all waddled and galumphed with horrid grunts, only to find something unfamiliar about mother’s skirt, and, glancing up, to discover that it hung upon a strange and terrified guest.

The biographers have paid too little attention to the god-energy of their heroes. I think that it should be one of the crowning achievements of biography to communicate to the reader certain actual vibrations of the enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philosopher for truth; the patriot for his country; the artist for beauty and self-expression; the altruist for humanity; the discoverer for knowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred soul; the prophet, martyr, or saint for his god.

Every lover, according to Emerson, is a poet. Not only is this true, but every one of us, when in the sway of any enthusiasm, has in him something creative. Therefore a record of the most ordinary person’s enthusiasms should prove as well worth reading as the ordinary record of the extraordinary person’s life if written with the usual neglect of this important subject.

II

Now I should like to try the experiment of sketching in outline a new kind of biography. It would consist entirely of the record of an ordinary person’s enthusiasms. But, as I know no other life-story so well as my own, perhaps the reader will pardon me for abiding in the first person singular. He may the more readily pardon me if he realizes the universality of this offense among writers. For it is a fact that almost all novels, stories, poems, and essays are nothing but more or less cleverly disguised autobiography.

In looking back over my life, a series of enthusiasms would appear to stand out as a sort of spinal system, about which are grouped as tributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence. 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, bootand hair-brushing, polite and unpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants and shorter catechists — and so on, all the way down the shores of age, to the higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whose word is not as good as his bond.

My first enthusiasm was for good things to eat. It was stimulated by that priceless asset, a virginal palate. But here at once the medium of expression fails. For what may words presume to do with the flavor of that first dish of oatmeal; with the first pear, grape, watermelon; with the Bohemian roll called Hooska, besprinkled with poppy and mandragora, or the wondrous dishes which our Viennese cook called Aepfelstrudel and Scheiterhaufen? The best way for me to express my reaction to each of these delicacies would be to play it on the ’cello. The next best would be to say that they tasted somewhat better than Eve thought the apple was going to taste. But how absurdly inadequate this sounds! I suppose the truth is that such enthusiasms have become too utterly congealed in our blasé minds when at last these minds have grown mature enough to grasp the principles of penmanship. So that whatever has been recorded about the sensations of extreme youth is probably all false. Why, even

‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy,’

as Wordsworth revealed in his ode on Immortality. And though Tennyson pointed out that we try to revenge ourselves by lying about heaven in our maturity, this does not serve to correct a single one of crabbed age’s misapprehensions about youth.

Games next caught my fancy. From the first I seemed to prefer those demanding dexterity and quickness of eye. More than dominoes or halma, lead soldiers appealed to me, and tops, marbles, and battledore-and-shuttlecock. Perhaps I should not have cared so much for the last-named if I had foreseen myself participating in this sport for some years in grim earnest, I, the literary beginner, being the shuttlecock, and receiving many a shrewd rap as I was bandied from one editorial battledore to another.

Through tag, fire-engine, hide-andseek, pom-pom-pull-away, and baseball, I came to boxing. Until then I had been much bullied by the older boys of the neighborhood. This was only natural, for my physical make-up was an irresistible invitation to the bully. Its chief item was a huge, bulbous head, under the weight of which a wraith of a body and penholder-like legs seemed to buckle. But my reach was long, my eye fair. After a few scientific hints from a brother, I took to the manly art so naturally as to win both the reluctant respect of my contemporaries, and admission to the cherished society of my elders. With delight I found that I could stand up to the latter on apparently equal terms. But now, looking back, I am almost sure that after having broken my nose, the big fellows must have treated me as indulgently as the Saint Bernard treats the snarling spaniel. However that may be, boxing gave me a first taste of the joys of physical competence.

But when, after a few years, I found tennis, I knew instinctively that here was to be my athletic grand passion. Perhaps I was first attracted by the game’s constant humor, which was forever making the ball imitate or caricature humanity, or beguiling the players to act like solemn automata. I came to like the game’s variety, its tense excitement, its beauty of posture and curve. From an early date I have been a fascinated student of humanity. And about this time I must have vaguely felt what I later learned consciously: that tennis is a sure revealer of character. Three sets with a man suffice to give one a working knowledge of his moral equipment; six, of his chief mental traits; and a dozen, of that most important and usually veiled part of him, his subconscious personality. Young people of opposite sexes are sometimes counseled to take a long railway journey together before deciding on a matrimonial merger. But I would advise them to play ‘singles’ with each other before venturing upon a continuous game of ‘doubles.’

The collecting mania appeared some time before tennis. I first collected ferns under a crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon gave way to discrimination, which led to choosing a favorite fern. This was chosen, I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feeling. I called it the Alligator from its fancied resemblance to my brother’s alligatorskin traveling bag. But admiration of this fern brought a dawning consciousness that certain natural objects were vastly preferable to others. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collecting impressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance of nature. The Alligator Fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolic thing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or best-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also in each department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorial incense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among shores, those of Capri and Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one called Isis as seen at dawn from the depths of the Grand Canyon; among friendly brooks, a stream that chuckles and foams and swirls seaward under Massachusetts oaks and beeches and past the log cabin where I sit writing these words.

III

Next, I collected postage-stamps. I know that it is customary for writers to-day to sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have forgotten its variety and subtlety; its demand on the imagination; how it makes history and geography live, and initiates one painlessly into the mysteries of the currency of all nations. And what a tonic it is for the memory! Only think of the implications of the annual price-catalogue! Soon after the issue of this work, every collector worthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind the current market values of thousands of stamps. And he can tell you offhand, not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceled condition, but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled, embossed, rouletted, unperforated, surcharged with all manner of initials, printed by mistake with the king standing on his head, or watermarked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine of Egypt. This feat of memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, for the enthusiasm of the normal stamp-collector is so potent that its proprietor has only to stand by and let it do all the work.

We often hear that the wealthy do not enjoy their possessions. This depends entirely upon the wealthy. That some of them enjoy their treasures giddily, madly, my own experience proves. For, as youthful stamp-collectors went in those days, I was a philatelic magnate. By inheritance, by the ceaseless and passionate trading of duplicates, by rummaging in every available attic, by correspondence with a wide circle of foreign missionaries, and by delivering up my whole allowance to the dealers, I had amassed a collection of several thousand varieties. These included such gems as all of the triangular Cape of Good Hopes, almost all of the early Persians, and our own spectacular issue of 1869 unused, including the one on which the silk-stockinged Fathers are signing the Declaration of Independence. Such possessions as these I well-nigh worshiped.

Even to-day, after having collected no stamps for a generation, the chance sight of an ‘approval sheet’, with its paper-hinged reminders of every land of the nineteenth century, gives me a curious sensation. There visit my spine echoes of the thrills that used to course it on similar occasions in boyhood. Those were the days when my stamps had formed for me mental pictures, more or less accurate, of every country from Angola to Western Australia, its history, climate, scenery, inhabitants, rulers. To possess its rarest stamp was mysteriously connected in my mind with being given the freedom of the land itself, and introduced with warm recommendations to its genius loci.

Even old circulars issued by dealers now long gone to stampless climes, have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. I prefer those of foreign dealers because their English has the quaint, other-world atmosphere of what they dealt in. How otherworld this English was I did not perhaps stop to appreciate in the rush of youth. The other day I found in an old scrap-book a circular from Vienna, which annihilated a score of years with its very first words: —

CLEARING

OF A LARGE PART OF MY RETAIL DEPOSITORY Being lately so much engaged into my wholesale business ... I have made up my mind to sell out a large post of my retail-stamps at underprices. They are rests of larger collections containing for the most, only older marks and not thrash possibly put together purposedly as they used to be composed by the other dealers and containing therefore mostly but worthless and useless nouveautés of Central America.

Before continuing this persuasive flow, the dealer inserts a number of testimonials like the following. He calls them: —

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sent package having surpassed my expertations I beg to remit by to days post-office-ordres Mk. 100. Kindly please send me by return of post offered album wanted for retail sale.

G. BHANNOVER.

He now comes to his peroration: —

I beg to call the kind of attention of every buyer to the fact of my selling all these packages and albums with my own loss merely for clearings sake of my retail business and in order to get rid of them as much and as soon as possible. With 25-60% abatement I give stamps and whole things to societies against four weeks calculation.

All collectors are bound to oblige themselves by writing contemporaneously with sending in the depository amount to make calculation within a week as latest term.

It is enough! As I read, the old magic enfolds me, and I am seized with longing to turn myself into a society of collectors, and to implore the altruistic dealer ‘kindly please’ to send me, at a prodigious ‘abatement,’ ‘stamps and whole things against four weeks calculation.’

IV

The youngest children of large families are apt to be lonely folk, somewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I was such a child, blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and rather inclined to sedentary joys. Even when I reached the barbaric stage of evolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits of his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy these in the more sophisticated forms natural to a lonely young city-dweller.

When stamps had passed their zenith I was filled with a lust for slaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I sat watching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of the muddy and sluggish Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hoping against hope to see his child outlive the flippant period and dive below the surface of things, into touch with the great living realities. And when the cork finally marked a historic period by vanishing, and a small, inert and intensely bored sucker was pulled in hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest old and strong as the race.

But presently I myself was drawn, like the cork, beneath the superficial surface of the angler’s art. For in the public library I chanced on a shelf of books that told about fishing of a nobler, jollier, more seductive sort. At once I was consumed with a passion for five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal leaders, double-tapered casting lines of braided silk, and artificial flies more fair than birds of Paradise. Armed in spirit with all these, I waded the streams of England with kindly old Isaak Walton, and ranged the Restigouche with the predecessors of Henry Van Dyke.

These dreams brought with them a certain amount of satisfaction — about as much satisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party, each equipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite. The visions were pleasant, of course, but they cried out, and made me cry out, for action. There were no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, and there was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight. But I did what I could to be prepared for the blessed day when we should meet. I secured five new subscriptions or so to The Boys’ Chronicle (let us call it) and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it would have resolved itself into its elements at sight of a half-pound trout. It was destined, though, never to meet with this embarrassment.

My casting line bore a family resemblance to grocery string. My leader was a piece of gut from my brother’s ’cello; my fly-book, an old wallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond my means; and it was perplexing to know what to do, until I found a book that said it was best to tie your own flies. With joyful relief I acted on this counsel, and no one can say that I did not throw myself into the project. Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White Millers with shoe-thread upon cod hooks. One of these I stained and streaked with my heart ’s blood into the semblance of a Parmacheenee Belle. The canary furnished materials for a Yellow May; a door-yard English sparrow for a Brown Hackle. My masterpiece, the beautiful, particolored fly known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my sister’s Easter bonnet.

I covered the points of the hooks with pieces of cork, and fished on the front lawn from morning to night, leaning with difficulty against the thrust of an imaginary torrent. And I never ceased striving to make the three flies straighten out properly as the books directed, and fall like thistledown on the strategic spot where the empty tomato can was anchored, and then jiggle appctizingly down over the four-pounder, where he sulked in the deep hole just beyond the hydrant.

The hunting fever was wakened by the need for the Brown Hackle already mentioned. But as the choice of weapons and of victims culminated in the air-gun and the sparrow, respectively, my earliest hunting was confined even more closely than my fishing to the library and the wild and teeming forests and fields of the imagination. But while somewhat handicapped here by the scarcity of ferocious game, I was more fortunate in another enthusiasm which attacked me almost at the same time. For however unpropitious the hunting is on any given part of the earth’s surface, there is everywhere and always an abundance of good hidden-treasure-seeking to be had. The garden, the attic, the tennis lawn, all suffered. And my enterprise was stimulated by the discovery of an incomparable book, all about a dead man’s chest, and not only digging for gold in a secret island, but finding it too, by jingo! and fighting off the mutineers.

These aspirations led naturally to games of Pirate, or Outlaw, which were handicapped, however, by the scarcity of playmates and their curious hesitation to serve as victims. As pirates and outlaws are well known to be the most superstitious of creatures, inclining to the primitive in their religious views, we were naturally led into a sort of dread enthusiasm for — or enthusiastic dread of — the whole pantheon of spooks, sprites, and bugaboos to which savages and children, great and small, bow the knee.

But perhaps it might be more possible to convey the quality of these interlaced enthusiasms by turning aside for a moment from the cooler ways of prose. I suppose that a metrical statement of the ideals of this period might be called

PARADISE REVISED

The enthusiasms of this barbaric period never died. They grew up, instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now the highlights of vacation time. The crude call of the inexplicable and the weird has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten psychic continents which we western peoples have only just discovered and begun to explore. As for the buried-treasure craze — why, my beloved life-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden gold in the attics and cellars, the chimney-pieces and desert islands of the mind, and the secret coining of it into currency.

And so I might go on to tell of my enthusiasms for no end of other things like modeling, reading, philology, cathedrals, writing, pictures, folk-lore, and the theatre. Then, there is the long story of that enthusiasm called Love, of Friendship its twin, and their elder brother, Religion, and their younger sister, Altruism. And travel and adventure and so on. But no! It is, I believe, a misdemeanor to obtain attention under false pretenses. If I have caught the reader’s eye by promising to sketch him the merest outline of a new method of writing autobiography, I must not abuse his confidence by putting that method into practice. So, with a regret almost equal to that of Lewis Carroll’s famous Bellman, ‘ I skip twenty years,’ and close with my latest enthusiasm.

v

Confirmed wanderers that we were, my wife and I had rented a house for the winter in a Massachusetts coast village and had fallen somewhat under the spell of the place. Nevertheless we had decided to move on soon, to try, in fact, another trip through Italy. Our friendly neighbors urged us to buy land up the ’back lane’ instead, and build and settle down. But we knew nothing of this thoroughfare, and scarcely heard them.

They were so insistent, however, that one day we ventured up the back lane at dusk and began to explore the woods. It grew dark and we thought of turning back. Then it began to grow light again. A full moon was climbing up through the maples, inviting further explorations. We pushed on in the undergrowth, and presently were in a grove of great white pines. There was a faint sound of running water, and suddenly we came upon an astonishing brook, wide, swift, and musical. We had not suspected the existence of such a brook within a dozen leagues. It was overarched by great oaks and elms, beeches, tupelos, and maples. The moonbeams were dancing in the ripples and on the floating castles of foam.

‘What a place for a study!’ ‘Yes, a log cabin with a big stone fire-place.'

The remarks came idly, but our eyes met and held. Moved by one impulse we turned our backs upon the stream and remarked what bosh people will sometimes talk, and discussed the coming Italian trip as we moved cautiously among the briars. But when we came once more to the veteran pines they seemed more glamorous than ever in the moonlight, especially one that stood near a tall holly, apart from the rest, — a lyre-shaped, musical fellow,

— and his opposite, a burly, thickset archer, bending his long-bow into a most exquisite curve. The fragrant pine-needles whispered. The brook lent its faint music.

‘Quick! We had better get away!’

A forgotten lumber road led us safe from briars up a hill. Out of a dense oak grove we emerged upon its more open crest. Our feet sank deep in moss.

‘Look,’ I said.

Over the heads of the high forest trees below, shimmered a mile of moonlit marshes, and beyond them a gleam

— perhaps from some vessel far at sea, perhaps even from a Provincetown lighthouse.

‘Yes; but look!’

At a touch I turned and beheld, crowning the hill, a stately band of red cedars, lithe and comely, dense and mysterious as the cypresses of Tivoli, and gloriously drenched in moonlight.

‘But what a place for a house!’

‘Let’s give up Italy,’ was the answer, ‘ and make this wood our home.'

By instinct and training we were two inveterate wanderers. Never had we possessed so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth. But the nest-building enthusiasm had us at last. Our hands met in compact. And a ten o’clock dinner was eaten to the tune of deeds in fee simple, pneumatic water-systems, and landscape architecture.