Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/302

LANDSCAPE PAINTING personality is temperament, asserts that this temperament is bound hand and foot by the inherited traits and characteristics of a thousand ancestors, and that the Frenchman brought up in Holland would therefore always remain essentially a Frenchman, in spite of his Dutch surroundings. They claim also that racial personality is just as important a factor in all good art as individual personality. They assert, moreover, that no artist can possibly shake off the racial chains that bind him, and that any attempt to do so could only result in some monstrous hybrid or some feeble imitation not deserving the name of art. Each artist is, first of all, a unit of some specified human group or race. Therefore, if he truly and conscientiously records his own impressions, he will also record the accumulated [238]