Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/236

LANDSCAPE PAINTING portentous and threatening to the man in the street, such an one would receive with a smile of gentle humor, for he would see through the disguise and know it as a harmless humbug; while something else which to the ordinary mortal might appear a mere triviality he would lift gravely into a place of high honor, divining its fundamental seriousness and importance. These regularly recurring fits of depression seem to depend in no wise upon the state of the bodily health. In Robert Louis Stevenson and Theodore Robinson we have examples of wonderful temperamental resilience coupled with wretched physical condition.

In fact, as a noted painter once said to me, "These semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration, for in reality the beggars have the advantage of us. Their nerves are always sensitive [184]