Again, it is good to train the body by means of exercise, play, singing and handicraft; all these things react both upwards and downwards, outwards and inwards.  For example, one of the special virtues of tennis, if it be played at all keenly, is the necessity for making one’s feet (those neglected members!) quick and responsive to the messages of eye and brain.  In an increasingly sedentary age the rapidly growing popularity of tennis is, for this one reason alone, a good omen.  But if you play tennis, or any other healthy outdoor sport, or learn how to sing, or how to breathe, or if you do Mueller’s exercises daily, for the sole purpose of benefiting your liver or developing your muscles, or of “keeping fit,” you will miss the real prize.

It is good, also, to train the mind to be logical, critical and balanced:  it is good to cultivate a retentive memory and to store up useful facts.  But if while you are aiming at intellectual fitness and alertness you allow these good things to obscure other and better things, if, in short, you let means become ends, you will never be healthy, because you will miss half the joys of living.

There are many very skilful performers on musical instruments.  They have set themselves, or their parents have set them, to gain certain prizes, distinctions or qualifications.  No music is now too difficult for them to execute.  But that is exactly what they do—­they execute it:  destroy its head and heart by sheer mechanical perfection.  They have mastered the piano, or the organ, or the violin, or their own voice; but music eludes them.

You see why I began with that tale of the curtained doors, the mysterious music, and the quivering statuary.  There is an elusive, haunting quality about life and all living things which, if we look for it and listen to it, imparts a glamour, a rhythm, a beauty to everything that is worth doing.  The great danger is that in the pressure of work, the hurry of play, the pursuit of health, or the training of the mind we miss the very thing which can give meaning and value to all these things.  The severely matter-of-fact people don’t go near the curtained doors, and if they did, would discover only a lot of cold, lifeless statues.  Whoever heard of statues dancing?  Whoever heard of music without instruments?  And yet this very sense of a lyrical movement imperfectly seen, and of a temporarily frozen music, is not only the very secret of all art:  it is a slender guiding clue to the centre of everything....

 And in the house of every man, and of every woman, are the curtained
 doorways.

 EDGAR J. SAXON.

 HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT?

 This discussion arose out of the article with above title, by “M.D.,”
 which was published in our July number.—­[EDS.]

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