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." 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.