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 little as a century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If Richard Wagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching cold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary places to overlook in "The Ring," and would, instead, have three or four more immortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to write. One hates to think what Poe might have done in literature if he had taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket. Tuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said so before the death of Keats!...