when the
weight of his name swings the beam toward the good cause; or when the
mail brings luminous gratitude and comprehension from the perfect
stranger in Topeka or Tokyo. No; fame to the truly cultivated should
be fully as enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward fame.

In certain other cases, indeed, attainment is even more delicious than
the hope thereof. Think of the long, cool drink at the New Mexican
pueblo after a day in the incandescent desert, with your tongue
gradually enlarging itself from thirst. How is it with you, O golfer,
when, even up at the eighteenth, you top into the hazard, make a
desperate demonstration with the niblick, and wipe the sand out of
your eyes barely in time to see your ball creep across the distant
green and drop into the hole? Has not the new president's aged father
a slightly better time at the inauguration of his dear boy than he had
at any time during the fifty years of hoping for and predicting that
consummation? Does not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly the
certainty of having made the world a better place to live in, than he
had enjoyed the hope of achieving that desirable end? Can there be any
comparison between the joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring, now
hopefully, now despairingly, to port, and the joys of the same soul
which has at last found a perfect haven in the heart of God?

And still the writers go on talking of joy as if it were a pottle of
hay--a flimsy fraud--and of the satisfaction of attainment as if it
were unattainable. Why do they not realize, at least, that their every
thrill of response to a beautiful melody, their every laugh of
delighted comprehension of Hazlitt or Crothers, is in itself
attainment? The creative appreciator of art is always at his goal. And
the much-maligned present is the only time at our disposal in which to
enjoy the much-advertised future.

Too bad that our literary friends should have gone to extremes on this
point! If Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that "to travel hopefully is
an easier thing than to arrive," he would undoubtedly have hit the
truth. If Mr. Benson had said, "If you attain, God help you bountifully
to exuberance," etc., that would have been unexceptionable. It would
even have been a more useful--though slightly supererogatory--service,
to point out for the million-and-first time that achievement is not all
that it seems to be from a considerable distance. In other words, that
the laws of perspective