Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/235

TEMPERAMENT chief glories of our day. In the final summing up, when reputations are resorted and re-classed, he will be given his true place; and it will be the place of a great if a mistaken hero.

But most of us have now grown wiser. In either literature or art it is no longer considered necessary unduly to burn the midnight oil or to wear the hair long. And when the inevitable fits of temperamental depression are upon us we have learned that the only thing to do is to keep a level head, to see things in their true proportions, and to trust in the Lord—to be a philosopher, in a word. I do not mean a philosopher of the cold and aristocratic Nietzsche type, nor a pessimist like Schopenhauer, but a genial, sane, and whole-souled optimist like Socrates. All true philosophers are levellers levellers up as well as down. A condition of affairs which might loom [183]