ng creative. Therefore a record of the most ordinary person's
enthusiasms should prove as well worth reading as the ordinary record
we have of the extraordinary person's life if written with the usual
neglect of this important subject. Now I should like to try the
experiment of sketching in outline a new kind of biography. It would
consist entirely of the record of an ordinary person's enthusiasms.
But, as I know no other life-story so well as my own, perhaps the
reader will pardon me for abiding in the first person singular. He may
grant pardon the more readily if he realizes the universality of this
offense among writers. For it is a fact that almost all novels,
stories, poems, and essays are only more or less cleverly disguised
autobiography. So here follow some of my enthusiasms in a new
chapter.

IV

A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS

I

In looking back over my own life, a series of enthusiasms would appear
to stand out as a sort of spinal system, about which are grouped as
tributaries all the dry bones and other minor phenomena of existence.
Or, rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, sparkling stream which
carries along and solves and neutralizes, if not sweetens, in its
impetuous flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all kinds, such as
school, the Puritan Sabbath, boot and hair-brushing, polite and
unpolemic converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and shorter
catechists--and so on all the way down between the shores of age to
the higher mathematics, bank failures, and the occasional editor whose
word is not as good as his bond.

My first enthusiasm was for good things to eat. It was stimulated by
that priceless asset, a virginal palate. But here at once the medium
of expression fails. For what may words presume to do with the flavor
of that first dish of oatmeal; with the first pear, grape, watermelon;
with the Bohemian roll called _Hooska_, besprinkled with poppy and
mandragora; or the wondrous dishes which our Viennese cook called
_Aepfelstrudel_ and _Scheiterhaufen_? The best way for me to express
my reaction to each of these delicacies would be to play it on the
'cello. The next best would be to declare that they tasted somewhat
better than Eve thought the apple was going to taste. But how absurdly
inadequate this sounds! I suppose the truth is that such enthusiasms
have become too utterly congealed in our _blase_ minds when at last
these minds have grown mature enough to grasp the principles of
penman