e reason why great men and women are so often cynical about their
own success is this: they have been so immoderate in their enjoyment
of poor health that when the hour of victory comes, they lack the
exuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring of
achievement or of any other pleasure. I believe that the successful
invalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthy
failure about his failure. The latter is usually an optimist. But this
is a hard belief to substantiate. For the perfectly healthy failure
does not grow on every bush.

If only the physical conscientiousness of the Greeks had never been
allowed to die out, the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer,
fairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, we shall never be able to
reckon up our losses in genius: in Shakespeares whose births were
frustrated by the preventable illness or death of their possible
parents; in Schuberts who sickened or died from preventable causes
before they had delivered a note of their message; in Giorgiones whom
a suicidally ignorant conduct of physical life condemned to have their
work cheapened and curtailed. What overwhelming losses has art not
sustained by having the ranks of its artists and their most creative
audiences decimated by the dullness of mediocre health! It is hard to
endure the thought of what the geniuses of the modern world might have
been able to accomplish if only they had lived and trained like
athletes and been treated with a small part of the practical
consideration and live sympathy which humanity bestows on a favorite
ball-player or prize-fighter.

To-day there is still a vast amount of superstition arrayed against
the truth that fullness of life and not grievous necessity is the
mother of artistic invention. Necessity is, of course, only the
stepmother of invention. But men like to convince themselves that
sickness and morbidity are good for the arts, just as they delightedly
embrace the conviction, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life of
harassing poverty and anxious preoccupation is indispensable to the
true poet. The circumstance that this belief runs clean counter to the
showing of history does not embarrass them. Convinced against their
will, most people are of the same opinion still. And they
enthusiastically assault and batter any one who points out the truth,
as I shall endeavor to do in chapter eight.

Even if the ideal of physical efficiency had been revived as li