OF GOOD HEALTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 556, 17 February 1950, Page 7

OF GOOD HEALTH

am is the first of several extracts from the unpublished third volume (1939-1950) of D’ARCY CRESSWELL’S Autobiography. Copyright is reserved.

Every morfiing on that voyage I rose an hour before breakfast and exercised on the deck, then todk a cold bath, as my habit has long been: exercisihg first to get warm in any space which is large enough, then plunging under the water once, and then again to rinse off the soap. I had devised thése exercises many years ago rather with a view-to health and fitness than to strength or beauty, which it would be absurd of me to desire. But good health is something which all should desire, and spare no pains to possess, particularly artists, to whom like most things it comes easiest, unless they be doomed to ill-health from the first. : 2. Good health was never the question with Keats; his spirit was born to ill-health and knew what it worked in. For the spirit works in, and through, the body; and it works the more rapidly, with a strange, incandescent splendour, if the body be involuntarily diseased. But with a body or mind which is wilfully diseased "it will have little or nothing to do. Which is not to say that an artist should shrink from ill-health, or neglect his duties, or circumscribe his experiences, or set any limit to his enjoyment to attain good health. This last is indeed the whole matter. All comes to him through the pursuit of enjoyment; delight and sorrow, riches and poverty, honour and dishonour, health and disease, as to other men, and both self-knowledge and a knowledge of life, whereby his spirit encounters the extremes it best works in. And the more of this kind he would offer his spirit the more he will care for the good health he was born with, or else seek to acquire it, by regular exercise and bathing after any debauch and prudent eating and drinking between feasts, in which extremes his spirit most delights. A wholesome fear of disease as well a8 a love of enjoyment are his best means to this end. But to pursue self-indulgence and pleasure without a wholesome regard for discipline and restraint is the mark of a worldly and unspiritual mind, as much as total abstinence and the fear of en-

joyment are — one incapable of the highest enjoyment ot the deepest grief. The highest physical Pleasure demans that we bring the healthiest and fairest sacrifices to her altar, not sickly digestions and feeble, . misshapen limbs; as the highest mental Pleasure demands we bring well-ordered and careful thoughts and not hateful _-prejudices and witty armpusements; while our Spirits demand we bring _ both. Oscar Wilde was the most famous of those who hoped to satisfy Pleasure with

less than her due, and could ‘neither gratify his Spirit in this »nor in his sufferings afterwards. For indeed he was no artist in this sense, but a worldly, unspiritual man, although a great critic. And Edith Sitwell is another whom a life-long concern for a shallow and conceited pleasure in words has well-nigh ° reduced to incohererice in grief, They were both indifferent to Nature, and that health of body and mind in the squandering of which true pleasure consists. It was never true pleasure they served, and so their sorrows are either artificial or far-fetched. No more, then, from that connoisseur of the arts who was lately proclaiming in London that art is a product of ill-health. Such a doctrine is unworthy of a New Zealander, however befitting a middle-aged aesthete recollecting his boyhood at Eton. I well remember the laughter which arose from that quarter when Housman died, concerning the exercises he was said to have done every morning. They thought they had uncovered the weakness of the man and his verse, which they could never have done without uncovering their own. For his great weakness was a want of courage in not pursuing the highest pleasure he knew, the love in his heart. Instead he dulled it with eating and drinking in France and being a Don at Kings. His exercises were all right, but his diet was all wrong. And as for his verse, he knew ' better in what poetry consists than those fashionable apes now do who dabble in words and ideas. 3, After breakfast I would write all the morning in a corner of the dining saloon, leaving the decks and other rooms to the rest of the steerage passengers. After lunch I invariably retired to my cabin, which I had to myself, and read and slept until afternoon tea, after which I would walk on the decks by myself until dinner, reflecting on what

was writing, my thoughts encouraged to flow by the sight and sound of the sea. After dinner I would go at ‘once to bed in my cabin and read until midnight or after. I did my serious reading then, "mainly the Boswell John 8. gave me and the Epictetus from Miranda, and some Plato and Plutarch so far as I -remember. I must have been thought a very unsociable person by the other passengers, but in truth I had no lack of society from my (continued on next page)

THE POETS PROGRESS

(continued from previous page) books, and I was never happier nor had loftier feelings in my life. After

seven years in New Zealand it was like dying and being in Paradise! 4, In this manner I reached England once more. But by now I had hardly enough money to land with and to tip my stewards for the services I had required. So while we were still a good distance out at sea I sent a wireless message to Sir Edward Marsh requesting him to send a sum of money to the ship, which he did; and with this, and what I had, and my large winter overcoat which I gave as well to my cabin steward, I had enough to land with till I reached the bank and the twenty-five pounds Grannie G. had given me, which I had sent there in advance. I didn’t wireless the bank for what I required, since by getting it from Marsh I had ythat much mors, which I repaid him soon after. As for the twenty-five -pounds which Elaine G. had given me, on my ‘promise to stop -dfinking (which was truthfully given," whatever the sequél) this werlt’ towards yy" rei’ for the voyage." \ : . (Te be continued). 1 sand