Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/243

 XVIII CHARACTER

you should ask a dozen painters what mental qualification was most essential to an artist's success, the chances are that every man of them would reply "temperament"—in other words, genius and imagination. Transposed, these terms all mean the same thing—a peculiarly sensitive sub-conscious organization—one that is at once keenly alive to beauty, and capable of that rapid and intuitive coordination of impressions whose visible and tangible result is the work of genius. And in a way the painters would be right; for without temperament no man can be an artist; but temperament alone will [189]