Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/233

TEMPERAMENT need it, but let us hear no more of this drivel about giving up art."

As artists grow older, and after a dozen repetitions of the same experience, they come to regard this recurrent waxing and waning of the divine flame as a normal condition of their being; and presently they recognize the fits of depression as periods of incubation, out of which they are apt to emerge with added strength, with some new light on difficult problems that have long harassed them. They also discover that these off times can be very profitably employed in many ways—in absorbing the great literature of the world for instance, a pleasure for which they have scant leisure at other times; in studying the great masters of painting and delving after the secret of their greatness; and last, but not least, in simple physical relaxation and recuperation—tramps [181]