The Joyful Heart | Page 2

Joy to-day is a
serious matter. For we are coming to realize that she is a far more
important person than we had supposed; that she is, in fact, one of the
chief managers of life. Instead of doing a modest little business in an
obscure suburb, she has offices that embrace the whole first floor of
humanity's city hall.
Of course I do not doubt that our writer-friends note down the truth as
they see it. But they see it imperfectly. They merely have a corner of
one eye on a corner of the truth. Therefore they tell untruths that are the
falser for being so charmingly and neatly expressed. What they say
about joy being the bribe that achievement offers us to get itself
realized may be true in a sense. But they are wrong in speaking of the
bribe as if it were an apple rotten at the core, or a bag of counterfeit
coin, or a wisp of artificial hay. It is none of these things. It is sweet
and genuine and well worth the necessary effort, once we are in a
position to appreciate it at anything like its true worth. We must learn
not to trust the beautiful writers too implicitly. 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.
Of course I am not for one moment denying that achievement is harder
to enjoy than the hope of achievement. Undoubtedly the former lacks
the glamour of the indistinct, "that sweet bloom of all that is far away."
But our celebrated writer-friends overlook the fact that glamour and
"sweet bloom" are so much pepsin to help weak stomachs digest strong
joy. If you would have the best possible time of it in the world, develop
your joy-digesting apparatus to the point where it can, without a qualm,
dispose of that tough morsel, the present, obvious and attained. There
will always be enough of the unachieved at table to furnish balanced
rations.
"God help the attainers!"--forsooth! Why, the ideas which I have
quoted, if they were carried to logical lengths, would make heaven a
farcical kill-joy, a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable morgue of
disappointed hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that the old heaven
of the Semitic poets was constructed somewhat along these lines. But
that was no real heaven. The real heaven is a quiet, harpless, beautiful
place where every one is a heaven-born creator and is engaged--not
caring in the least for food or sleep--in turning out, one after another,
the greatest of masterpieces, and enjoying them to the quick, both while
they are being done and when they are quite achieved.
I would not, however, fall into the opposite error and disparage the joy
of traveling hopefully. It is doubtless easy to amuse one's self in a
wayside air-castle of an hundred suites, equipped with self-starting
servants, a Congressional Library, a National Gallery of pictures, a
Vatican-ful of sculpture, with Hoppe for billiard-marker, Paderewski to
keep things going in the music-room, Wright as grand hereditary
master of the hangar, and Miss Annette Kellerman in charge of the
swimming-pool. I am not denying that such a castle is easier to enjoy
before the air has been squeezed out of it by the horny clutch of reality,
which moves it to the journey's end and sets it down with a jar in its
fifty-foot lot, complete with seven rooms and bath, and only half an
hour from the depot. But this is not for one moment admitting the

contention of the lords of literature that the air-castle has a monopoly of
joy, while the seven rooms and bath have a monopoly of disillusionized
boredom and anguish of mind. If your before-mentioned apparatus is
only in working order, you can have no end of joy out of the cottage.
And any morning before breakfast you can build another, and vastly
superior, air-castle on the vacant land behind the woodshed.
"What is all this," I heard the reader ask, "about a joy-digesting
apparatus?"
It consists of four parts. Physical exuberance is the first. To a
considerable extent joy depends on an overplus of health. The joy of
artistic creation, for instance, lies not so intensely and intoxicatingly in
what you may some