Many of us believe we are debarred from the exercise of this divine birthright, the joy of creation. We have neither talent nor genius--not even that variety which consists in the ability to take infinite pains. Are we not mistaken in this? I think we may each have our share of the immortal stimulus.
To understand this, we must go back and back in the history of the race, and there we shall find that this satisfaction, this sane and virile delight in construction, was possible to the meanest member of the tribe. Its enjoyment came chiefly in the exercise of a laborious persistency in little things. The combination or addition of the simplest elements achieved a positive pleasurable result. The neolithic man chipped and chipped at his flint until the arrow-head was perfected, and his joy, had he been able to analyze it, was not so much in the last stroke as in every stroke. Not so much that he had himself with his own hands made something, as that he had been making something of use and beauty, and the possibility of that joy abiding with him as long as he lived. The makers of ancient pottery repeated the same shapes and designs, or, if their fancy soared, dared new inventions, but the satisfaction was in the doing. The carvers and joiners of the Middle Ages worked as amateurs in cottage and hovel, and in their work lay their content; no tyranny could wrest from them this well-spring of pleasure. Old age could but weaken the hand; I doubt if it could tame the immemorial joy of creation.
We cannot all be professional mechanics, for the division of labour has cast our lot more and more with the workers in intellectual pursuits. But we might make handicraft an avocation, if not a vocation, and that regimen would help our digestion, perhaps, more than pepsin or a course of the German baths. Were I a physician I should often recommend the craft cure--a panacea for dyspepsia, ennui and nostalgia.
Here is my modern health resort, my sanitorium for these most desperate of diseases; a little hamlet of shops and tents on the foothills of the Coast Range in California, where as you work you can look across a green valley to the blue Pacific. Here in this new land nature calls fondly to your soul, and you may turn to the primitive delights of living and taste the tang of the dawn of civilization, fresh and wholesome as a wild berry.
Here, squatting on the bare sun-parched ground, with an Indian blanket over his shoulders, is a corpulent banker with a flint hammer battering a water-worn boulder. Thus, less than a hundred years ago, the Temecula Indians hollowed out their stone mortars on this very mesa. Thus they spent happy days, slept like bears, and were up with the birds, each morn a day younger than yesterday. In this lodge of deerskins, where the ground is spread with yellow poppies, sits an ex-secretary of legation, who has known everything, seen everything, done everything but this--to cut with a knife of shell strange patterns upon a circular horn gorget. Finished, his wife might wear it with pride at the Court of St. James, yet it is but the reproduction of a prehistoric ornament, its figures smeared with ochre, cobalt and vermilion, and inlaid with lumps of virgin copper by the mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley. In this open shelter of bamboo, a trysting-place for meadow-larks and song-sparrows, lies stretched upon the ground an East India warehouseman, all his gout and lumbago forgotten in the rapturous delight of printing a pattern of checquered stripes with a carved wooden block upon a sheet of tapa which he himself--unaided, mind you--has pounded from the fibrous bark of the paper mulberry. His strenuous daughter, once world-worn and frozen, has left Nietsche, Brahms, and the cult of the symbolists, to sit cross-legged and weave the woolly zigzags of a Navajo blanket. It is the first thing she has made with her ten fingers since she baked mud pies in the sun! Had she a scrap of mirror in her bungalow she could now face it without mortification. An open-air hand-loom is good for the complexion.
But you need not journey to California. Rather make a pilgrimage to your own south attic. If you do but construct cardboard model houses with isinglass windows in your breakfast-room, you will perhaps find that more diverting than collecting cameos or first editions. If you can only compile a concordance to Alice in Wonderland you may achieve a hygienic and rejuvenative distraction. Can you cut, stamp, gild, paint, lacquer and emboss a leather belt? Can you hammer jewelry out of soft virgin silver? No? But you could, though, if you tried! Can you forget the impositions of convention in the rapt glow of pride in sawing and nailing together a wooden box? No matter how small it might be, how leaky of joint or loose of cover, it would hold all your worries!
The Deserted Island
A friend of mine is curiously hampered by a limitation precluding him from association with any one conversant with the details of the manufacture of cold-drawn wire. To show that this self-imposed abstinence may indicate a most charming devotion to an ideal, rarely shown by the commonplace, is the object of this thesis, and that, too, despite the fact that an indiscriminating extension of the same principle would lead the radical to eschew the society of most of his acquaintances, as well as bar out the whole domain of didactic literature.
When the day is done, and that entrancing hour is come for which some spend many of their waking hours in anticipation, to those blessed with fancy, the curtain of the dark arises, and within the theatre of the Night are played strange comedies. To a select performance I invite all uninitiated who have never enjoyed the drama of the Deserted Island--the perfect and satisfactory employment for the minutes that elapse after retiring and before the anchor is weighed and the voyage begun upon the Sea of Dreams.
There are undoubtedly more than I am aware of who are happy enough to maintain deserted islands of their own--many more, perhaps, than would confess to the possession. To some the history may be well under way; they have long since discovered their island, and many improvements have already been successfully completed. Others, more adventurous, handicapped by stricter limitations and more meagre outfit, are still struggling with the primal demands of food and shelter. But to those whose imaginations have never put so far out to sea, and would welcome this modest diversion, I advise an expedition of discovery and exploration this very night. You have but to go to bed, close your eyes, and after a few preliminaries you are there!