To-day, however, we are escaping from the old superstition. We begin to see that there is no complete dignity for man without a dignified physique; and that there is no physical dignity to compare with that of the hard-trained athlete. True, he who trains can hardly keep up the old-time pose of the grand old man or the grand young man. He must perforce be more human and natural. But this sort of grandeur is now going out of fashion. And its absence must show to advantage in his work.
As a rule the true artist is a most devoted and self-sacrificing person. Ever since the piping times of Pericles he has usually been willing to sacrifice to the demands of his art most of the things he enjoys excepting poor health. Wife, children, friends, credit—all may go by the board. But his poor health he addresses with solemn, scriptural loyalty: "Whither thou goest I will go: and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried." Not that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor health. But he most thoroughly enjoys a number of its causes. Sitting up too late at night is what he enjoys; smoking too much, drinking too much, yielding to the exhausting sway of the divine efflatus for longer hours at a time than he has any business to, bolting unbalanced meals, and so on.
But the artist is finding out that poor health is the very first enjoyment which he ought to sacrifice; that the sacrifice is by no means as heroic as it appears; and that, once it is accomplished, the odds are that all the other things he thought he must offer up may be added unto him through his own increased efficiency.
No doubt, all this business of regimen, of constant alertness and petty self-sacrifice, is bound to grow irksome before it settles down in life and becomes habitual. But what does a little irksomeness count—or even a great deal of irksomeness—as against the long, deep thrill of doing better than you thought you ever knew how—of going from strength to strength and creating that which will elevate and delight mankind long after the pangs of installing regimen are forgotten and you have once and for all broken training and laid you down to sleep over?
The reason why great men and women are so often cynical about their own success is this: they have been so immoderate in their enjoyment of poor health that when the hour of victory comes, they lack the exuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring of achievement or of any other pleasure. I believe that the successful invalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthy failure about his failure. The latter is usually an optimist. But this is a hard belief to substantiate. For the perfectly healthy failure does not grow on every bush.
If only the physical conscientiousness of the Greeks had never been allowed to die out, the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer, fairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, we shall never be able to reckon up our losses in genius: in Shakespeares whose births were frustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possible parents; in Schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causes before they had delivered a note of their message; in Giorgiones whom a suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have their work cheapened and curtailed. What overwhelming losses has art not sustained by having the ranks of its artists and their most creative audiences decimated by the dullness of mediocre health! It is hard to endure the thought of what the geniuses of the modern world might have been able to accomplish if only they had lived and trained like athletes and been treated with a small part of the practical consideration and live sympathy which humanity bestows on a favorite ball-player or prize-fighter.
To-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed against the truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the mother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only the stepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves that sickness and morbidity are good for the arts, just as they delightedly embrace the conviction, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life of harassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the true poet. The circumstance that this belief runs clean counter to the showing of history does not embarrass them. Convinced against their will, most people are of the same opinion still. And they enthusiastically assault and batter any one who points out the truth, as I shall endeavor to do in chapter eight.
Even if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as little as a century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If Richard Wagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching cold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary places to overlook in "The Ring," and would, instead, have three or four more immortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to write. One hates to think what Poe might have done in literature if he had taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket. Tuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said so before the death of Keats!...
It makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in a stuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how the sole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game of l'hombre with the philosopher Schelling. And then he wondered why he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever catching cold (einen starken Schnupfen); and why his head was so thick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. In his correspondence with Goethe it is exasperating to observe that these great poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight change of temperature or humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdraw their health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it would have been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made them health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourish inspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case their published works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of their Sämmtliche Werke than they do. And the second part of "Faust" would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom having wings to match those of the spirit.
"Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht
Kein korperlicher Flügel sich gesellen."