e, who have not half buried their talents in the earthy
darkness of mediocre health. When we survey the army of modern genius,
how little of the sustained ring and resilience and triumphant
immortal youth of real exuberance do we find there! Instead of a band
of sound, alert, well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit,
behold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers painfully limping along with
lack-luster eyes, or eyes bright with the luster of fever. And the
people whom they serve are not entirely free from blame. They have
neglected to fill the soldiers' knapsacks, or put shirts on their
backs. As for footgear, it is the usual campaign army shoe, made of
blotting paper--the shoe that left red marks behind it at Valley Forge
and Gettysburg and San Juan Hill. I believe that a better time is
coming and that the real renaissance of creative art is about to dawn.
For we and our army of artists are now beginning to see that if the
artist is completely to fulfill his function he must be able to
run--not alone with patience, but also with the brilliance born of
abounding vitality--the race that is set before him. This dawning
belief is the greatest hope of modern art.

It does one good to see how artists, here, there, and everywhere, are
beginning to grow enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodily
efficiency, and physically to "revive the just designs of Greece." The
encouraging thing is that the true artist who once finds what an
impulse is given his work by rigorous training, is never content to
slump back to his former vegetative, death-in-life existence. His
daily prayer has been said in a single line by a recent American poet:

"Life, grant that we may live until we die."

In every way the artist finds himself the gainer by cutting down his
hours of work to the point where he never loses his reserve of energy.
He now is beginning to take absolute--not merely relative--vacations,
and more of them. For he remembers that no man's work--not even
Rembrandt's or Beethoven's or Shakespeare's--is ever _too_ good; and
that every hour of needed rest or recreation makes the ensuing work
better. It is being borne in on the artist that a health-book like
Fisher's "Making Life Worth While" is of as much professional value to
him as many a treatise on the practice of his craft. Insight into the
physiological basis of his life-work can save the artist, it seems,
from those periods of black despair which he once used to employ in