VIM AND VISION
fficiency is to-day the Hallelujah Chorus of industry. I know a manufacturer who recently read a book on business management. Stop-watch in hand he then made an exhaustive study of his office force and their every action. After considering the tabulated results he arose, smashed all but one of the many office mirrors, bought modern typewriters, and otherwise eliminated works of supererogation. The sequel is that a dozen stenographers to-day perform the work of the former thirty-two.
This sort of thing is spreading through the business world and beyond it in every direction. Even the artists are studying the bearing of industrial efficiency on the arts of sculpture, music, literature, architecture, and painting. But beyond the card catalogue and the filing cabinet the artists find that this new gospel has little to offer them. Their sympathies go out, instead, to a different kind of efficiency. 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. Health has fought with smoke and germs and is now in the air. It would be strange if the receptive nature of the artist should escape the benignant infection.
There is an excellent reason why human efficiency should appeal less to the industrial than to the artistic worlds. Industry has a new supply of human machines always available. Their initial cost is nothing. So it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, and install fresh ones. Thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in the Southern mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap little boys and girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four or five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is, like Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It is dawning upon him that one chief reason why the old Greeks scaled Parnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, and kept, their human machines in good order for the climb. They trained for the event as an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the Marathon. One other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancient Greece is that the non-artists trained also, and thus, through their heightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers, became masters by proxy. But that is another chapter.
Why has art never again reached the Periclean plane? Chiefly because the artist broke training when Greece declined, and has never since then brought his body up to the former level of efficiency.
Now, as the physiological psychologists assure us, the artist needs a generous overplus of physical vitality. The art-impulse is a brimming-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance. And the best way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain the physical. The artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full as possible. He will soon find that he is greater than he knows. He will discover that he has, until then, been walking the earth more than half a corpse. With joy he will come to see that living in a glow of health bears the same relation to merely not being sick that a plunge in the cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag in a hall bedroom.
"All through the life of a feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's grave-stones which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds." Thus wrote the educator, Horace Mann. And his words apply with special force to the worker in the arts. One should bear in mind that the latter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve-racking, confining, exhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But the claims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spare intensity. Unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doing nothing at all. And to do his utmost he must keep his body in that supremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending to destroy. The one lasting solution is for him to reduce his working time to a safe maximum and increase his recreation and sleeping-time to a safe minimum, and to train "without haste, without rest."
"The first requisite to great intellectuality in a man is to be a good animal," says Maxim the inventor. Hamerton, in his best-known book, offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of the first essentials of genius; and shows how triumphant a part it played in the careers of such mighty men of intellectual valor as Leonardo da Vinci, Kant, Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott.