Thus
wrote the educator, Horace Mann. And his words apply with special
force to the worker in the arts. One should bear in mind that the
latter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve-racking, confining,
exhausting work always tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But the
claims of the work are so exacting that it is no use for him to spare
intensity. Unless he is doing his utmost he had better be doing
nothing at all. And to do his utmost he must keep his body in that
supremely fit condition which the work itself is always tending to
destroy. The one lasting solution is for him to reduce his working
time to a safe maximum and increase his recreation and sleeping-time
to a safe minimum, and to train "without haste, without rest."

"The first requisite to great intellectuality in a man is to be a
good animal," says Maxim the inventor. Hamerton, in his best-known
book, offers convincing proof that overflowing health is one of the
first essentials of genius; and shows how triumphant a part it played
in the careers of such mighty men of intellectual valor as Leonardo da
Vinci, Kant, Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott.

Is the reader still unconvinced that physical exuberance is necessary
to the artist? Then let him read biography and note the paralyzing
effect upon the biographees of sickness and half sickness and three
quarter wellness. He will see that, as a rule, the masters have done
their most telling and lasting work with the tides of physical vim at
flood. For the genius is no Joshua. He cannot make the sun of the mind
and the moon of the spirit stand still while the tides of health are
ebbing seaward. Indeed biography should not be necessary to convince
the fair-minded reader. Autobiography should answer. Just let him
glance back over his own experience and say whether he has not
thought his deepest thoughts and performed his most brilliant deeds
under the intoxication of a stimulant no less heady than that of
exuberant health.

There is, of course, the vexed question of the sickly genius. My
personal belief is firm that, as a rule, he has won his triumphs
_despite_ bad health, and not--as some like to imagine--because of bad
health. To this rule there are a few often cited exceptions. Now, no
one can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer in
the works of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. The white plague
is a powerful mental stimulant. It is a double-distilled extract of
baseless optimism.