l are helping to lower the death-rate and
enrich the life-rate the world over. Health has fought with smoke and
germs and is now in the air. It would be strange if the receptive
nature of the artist should escape the benignant infection.

There is an excellent reason why human efficiency should appeal less
to the industrial than to the artistic worlds. Industry has a new
supply of human machines always available. Their initial cost is
nothing. So it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, and install
fresh ones. Thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in the
Southern mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap little boys
and girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four
or five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is,
like Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It is
dawning upon him that one chief reason why the old Greeks scaled
Parnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, and
kept, their human machines in good order for the climb. They trained
for the event as an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the Marathon.
One other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancient
Greece is that the non-artists trained also, and thus, through their
heightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers, became
masters by proxy. But that is another chapter.

Why has art never again reached the Periclean plane? Chiefly because
the artist broke training when Greece declined, and has never since
then brought his body up to the former level of efficiency.

Now, as the physiological psychologists assure us, the artist needs a
generous overplus of physical vitality. The art-impulse is a
brimming-over of the cups of mental and spiritual exuberance. And the
best way to insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to gain the
physical. The artist's first duty is to make his body as vim-full as
possible. He will soon find that he is greater than he knows. He will
discover that he has, until then, been walking the earth more than
half a corpse. With joy he will come to see that living in a glow of
health bears the same relation to merely not being sick that a plunge
in the cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag in a hall
bedroom.

"All through the life of a feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with
memory's grave-stones which mark the spots where noble enterprises
perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds."