| THERE
is some inherent reason for the rightness of joy in
art. It holds its place there by at title even more
inalienable than its title to a place in actual life.
There is reason, too, for a belief in joy as the core
and essence of good art, as the one ingredient most
needful. For joy is, as it were, the last grain to turn
the balance; it makes all the difference between success
and failure, between life and death. Joy, mere gladness
in living, is the tiny increment which keeps life dominant
and sane. When that is taken from us, we are left to
slow or swift disintegration, disaster, dejection, and
death.
Of all the good gifts which
ever came out of the wallet of the Fairy Godmother,
the gift of natural gladness is the greatest and best.
It is to the soul what health is to the [Page
122] body, what sanity is to the mind, —
the test of normality. The most fortunate of mortals
are those whom Nature has endowed with a wholesome power
of assimilating life, just as she endows her field-bred
children with a good digestion. A quick and ready appetite
for life, a capacity for smiling contentment, and a
glad willingness, are the great things, — these
and courage. For after all life needs courage, long-enduring,
stubborn, unflinching courage. The bare problem of life
is so difficult, the fine art of living so well-nigh
impossible, that surely no man yet can ever have looked
at it with realization without a sudden terror at heart.
Yet there is laid upon us all the prime duty of joy,
the obligation to be glad, the necessity for happiness.
In
spite of pain and failure and weariness and exhaustion,
happiness is still our business, the one thing to be
attained and maintained at all risks and costs. It is
not cheap, cannot be bought in the open market, is not
to be confused with the pleasure of the moment, [Page
123] which is often only distraction. Sometimes
the Great Vender says to us: “Would you buy happiness?
Very sorry, sirs, but happiness is particularly scarce
to-day. The crop is not overplenty this season. Here
is some pleasure, however, much cheaper and almost as
good. We sell a great deal of it. Many of our customers
prefer it to the genuine article. May I put you up a
sample?
Now,
woe be to you, beauteous mortal, if you listen to that
strain. Against that fallacious but alluring speech
you are to set your face for ever like a rock. Have
happiness or nothing. How are you to know the false
from the true, do you ask? Well, we are provided with
an instinct in that direction, and you will find it
not easy to deceive yourself for long with any specious
counterfeit of joy. True happiness differs from pleasure
in being more thorough, complete, and indubitable. We
are so constituted for it, so dependent on it, and so
immemorially nourished by it, that the substitution
is palpable at once. Happiness [Page 124] is
really a complete poise of being, and comes upon us
only when we have secured a measure of health, a measure
of certitude of mind, and a measure of rectitude of
conduct. So small a thing can overturn it! A little
overtaxing of the physical powers, a little misuse of
any faculty, a little deflection from the ways of kindliness,
sincerity, frankness, and all our balance and self-poise
may be undone, all our modest store of happiness scattered
to the air.
Now,
whatever the strange element of sadness or evil may
be in the great universe, it seems that all men and
women may be divided into two great classes, —
the majority, which is always for progress and assurance
and glad certainty about life, and the minority, which
is full of trepidation and fear and gloomy foreboding.
We each of us belong to one party or the other, the
successful or the unsuccessful, the brave or the timid,
the happy or the sad. It is an innate difference, a
prenatal endowment, possibly; as if from the first we
had been destined for the one faction [Page
125] of humanity or the other, — the
great majority or the great minority, the joyous or
the sorry-hearted. Yet much may be achieved by culture,
and we must never capitulate to the odious doctrine
of original depravity.
There
are in art also, which is no more than an image and
reflection of life, two main trends, — the greater
trend toward gladness and faith and strength, and the
lesser trend toward sorrow and doubt and decay. To the
one belongs the masters, to the other the minor craftsmen.
A minor poet or a minor painter, as it seems to me,
is not essentially minor because of the slightness of
his gift, but because of its timorous and uncertain
quality. And the big men are big because they have the
gift of gladness. Or is that they are glad and well
assured because they are big? Sure it is, in any case,
that the two phenomena appear together.
And
that, too, is natural, for on the principle that to
him that hath shall be given, the strong acquire strength,
the glad acquire new [Page 126] gladness,
taking these treasures from their weaker fellows. So
the great, glad, strong world, the vast majority, cares
most for strength, for sanity, for gladness in art and
letters, as it does in life; while the utterances of
sorrow and the voices of doubt are obscured and lost.
We care in the long run only to preserve the work of
the masters; while the work of the minor artists, however
charming, passes with its age.
True,
there is always a note of wistfulness in art, as there
is in life; and it must be present even in the strongest,
gladdest utterances, else they could have no profound
hold upon us. The great works of art and literature
are those which represent life in its entirety, with
its dominant desires and joys, indeed, but with its
heaviness and sorrow and dejection as well. Any piece
of art which should be wholly given over to the predominance
of animal spirits, or of unmitigated joyousness, with
no trace of the tedium of time or the bleak loneliness
of the soul, could have no abiding claim [Page
127] to universal regard. It could not speak
to universal man in his common tongue. For joy, after
all, is aristocratic; and those immortal teachers on
whom the world has loved to lean have also been well
versed in the democracy of sadness. They have taught
us that it is a prime duty of the heart to rejoice,
yet they themselves have ever known how hard that duty
is.
So
in art, in letters, those who teach us through means
of beauty have always left a trace of sorrow in their
work, which else had been hardly human. They have felt,
perhaps, the sublime faith which is unperturbed in the
face of the enormous riddle; they have been sure of
the ultimate triumph of reason, of beauty, of goodness;
but they have been aware, also, of the terribleness
of actual ugliness and evil. And through their admonitions
to gladness, their helpful assurances to bravery and
effort, there has always sounded the undernote of human
pathos — the ground tone of mortality. [Page
128]
These
are the great ones, these are the masters, these are
they to whom we must turn for consolation and counsel.
They have known and suffered life even as ourselves,
and yet they have been able to endure and to smile.
Their dicta about life, therefore, are infinitely
valuable in this difficult task of living. And I think
it behooves us, in however small a way we may be called
on to serve the world in art, to follow so far as we
can their splendid examples of gladness and courage.
Let the burden of sadness be what it may, let the final
solution seem never so impossible, let our spirits be
submerged in all but utter despair, there yet remains
the obligation which none may escape, — to bear
witness to a still more universal truth, to testify
to a gladness in life underlying all our sorrows. We
may not be able to hold it, or call it ours, or give
expression to any of its phrases; our own destiny may
preclude that; none the less must we acknowledge its
overlordship, and admit that doubt and sorrow are merely
of the moment. [Page 129]
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