Yes, but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have not yet succeeded—perhaps for want of these very qualities? I believe that a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship, acting upon a newly developed body, will presently bring to many a disheartened struggler just that increment of resilient gameness which will mean success instead of failure.
Thus, while our artists show a tendency to hark back to the Greek physical ideal, they are not harking backward but forward when they yield to the mental and spiritual influences of sportsmanship. For this spirit was unknown to the ancient world. Until yesterday art and sportsmanship never met. But now that they are mating I am confident that there will come of this union sons and daughters who shall joyfully obey the summons that is still ringing down to us over the heads of the anæmic contemporaries of the exuberant old sportsman, Walt Whitman:
"Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me."
VII
PRINTED JOY
The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than anything else in life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
