THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT

We frequently hear the "artistic temperament" referred to in ordinary conversation as if it were some kind of a vice, a mental aberration or a disease: and it is certainly doubtful whether those who so casually discuss the subject have any clear idea as to what constitutes this particular equipment. That no great work of artistic merit can be accomplished in its absence is more or less tacitly agreed, but it may be interesting to consider in what this essential basis of artistic success consists.

We have before pointed out that the function of an interpreter is to act as a link between the spiritual and the material: he is the prophet to reveal the otherwise hidden message. The interpreter is the artist, and the artist is the interpreter. The ability to come into contact with the finer things, tangible or intangible, is simply a capacity of response finer than normal. A trained sense-perception is more acute than a non-trained: and quite apart from training there are very wide divergences in the innate range of activity of the various senses. Again, keen interest and attention tend to make a particular sense more alert, and even to extend the boundaries of its response. A man who is particularly interested in some maiden's voice or footstep will be able to make correct distinctions which simply do not exist for anyone less actively interested in that particular lady. Concentration enables any sense to become more acute. This increased acuteness naturally gives its possessor the power to receive impressions which would otherwise escape record. In the sense of not being usual, this acute sensitiveness of the artist is thus an abnormality: but it is only a variation in the direction of progress, for the whole story of the evolutionary climb up life's ladder is one of ever-increasing sensibility and response. The artistic temperament is thus, in essence, a phase of evolution somewhat in advance of its day.

Any departure from the normal, even though it be in the forward direction and carrying with it certain privileges, yet entails its disadvantages. The man who breaks out is generally made to pay pretty dearly for his temerity: but, if there were none to advance and thus break out, civilisation itself would stagnate and there could be no progress. The artist, the dreamer, the visionary, the poet, the genius, these all are the advance guard of humanity. As such they frequently receive the pioneers' scanty reward, but their eyes are scarcely fixed upon mundane munificence, already their scale of values is a spiritual one. But it is just these delicate, sensitive folk, susceptible to the gossamer impulses that would never even ruffle the surface of the average man's mind, who are open to the urge of spirit and responsive to its "drive." So they answer to the helm and steer out into the unknown, while the more sleek, comfortable, and well-fed do not so much as guess that there has been any impulse at all. "H'm," say the corpulent, "why can't they leave well alone and be comfortable?" But it is no part of the great plan that the wheels of progress should ever slow down, it is much more to the point that they should be made to turn more quickly. Spirit is the force behind evolution, the force that makes the acorn unfold into the oak, and it is the urge of spirit which compels man to unfold his own divinity.

The artistic temperament, then, is the super-sensitive, and by this very virtue it creates its own difficulties. The artist is too responsive, too widely responsive unless he knows how to safeguard himself. Nature herself in her thousand moods plays upon the sensitive mind: she moulds it with her beauties, leads it out into the open with the call of the wild, or terrifies it with the grandeur of her anger. The artist replies to the appeal of beauty, but is seared with the degradation of ugliness or the sordid. He is thrilled with love, and wounded to the core by hatred. He responds to praise, but is depressed by sneers to a degree which the ordinary man is unable to comprehend. Thus his daily life is pierced with a thousand exquisite emotions to which your well-fed plebeian is stranger indeed. He lives on more exalted heights and yet sinks to inconceivably greater depths. Life truly consists more in our wealth of impression than in the length of our days, and therefore the artist lives at greater intensity, and consequently with a greater nervous wear and tear.

This sensitiveness is more easily moved to tears, since it is in essence more feminine than masculine, being more a matter of the heart than the head: but because of this element of the feminine it partakes more of the magnetic temperament than the electric. It possesses to a greater degree the capacity for holding on. Thus the sensitive artist, for the sake of his ideal, will peg away at the forlorn hope, and, sustained by the spirit, may bring off the thousand-to-one chance. He has the capacity to endure to the end, while the man without this "drive" will weigh things up, eventually playing for safety and, incidentally, comfort. Our friend of the artistic temperament will be acutely sympathetic, and thus an easy prey for the importunate: he may even give everything away and so have nothing for himself. The world will furnish him with countless opportunities both of great joy and bitter grief, so the readings of the temperament-chart of the artist will be apt to resemble the variations of a barometer when changeable weather is about. Genius is thus as a rule variable to the verge of the irrational.

Erratic as it may seem to the ordinary person, the vision of the artist is often inherently near the truth. His sensitiveness enables him to see this "more of truth," even if it becloud his vision occasionally with mundane perversions. He possesses his own standards, and when these conflict with the conventional it is convention that must be sacrificed. Thus the conventional mind brands the artistic temperament as immoral. But morality is not absolute, it is conventional and relative: we do not, as once, punish the sheep-stealer with the gallows nor the heretic with red-hot irons, for our standards have changed with the years. So also do they vary with our locality: what is right in this place is wrong over the border. The vision of the artist sees beyond the formularies to the substance, and so he is prepared to brave criticism for his stand upon what he knows to be true.

Love and beauty call to him with other meaning than they bear to the prosaic and self-satisfied, and so he answers to the call of affection when perhaps it would have been better for his peace of mind that caution and prudence should have held sway. But again it is an open question whether the man who follows the gleam, with inspiration to beckon him, does not come nearer to the truth than the man of calculating caution who sums up and weighs. Sometimes crabbed age awakes to the realisation that the cocksure aim of youth is on occasion nearer to the mark than the aim directed by cold intellect, plotted out on a diagram, and worked out correct to three places of decimals. It is perfectly possible for the cautious and orthodox pedestrian to spend so much time and effort in dodging the dangers of life's path, and in endeavouring to keep off the grass, that he makes no solid progress. On the other hand, the artistic temperament lives in the world and is not entitled to follow its own laws where those conflict with the interests of others. The mere possession of this type of temperament involves its Bohemian owner in many difficulties which do not beset the path of those who fit into the routine of life as they find it. Certainly it is advisable for the artist to temper his ways with discretion, for genius is altogether too apt to make a meteoric blaze and end up in a fizzle.

The possessor of the artistic temperament is frequently deemed unreliable and capricious, and to a certain extent this is true. It is the sensitiveness first to one impact and then another, the susceptibility to the manifold forces that play upon the individual, which turn him now in the one direction and then in the other. He is lured and led by this, and then by that. Yet at times he is capable of the greatest concentration: immersed in his subject he may even forget the outer world and omit to eat his dinner, or perhaps like the philosopher he may eat it twice.

It is, however, quite possible to cultivate some of the advantages of this temperament and to restrict the disadvantages. It is not necessary, for example, that anyone should be at the mercy of every transient impulse: this involves an enormous waste of energy, as would the voyage of a ship which should suffer itself to be blown hither and thither by every passing breeze. We only respond to that to which we are mentally attuned, and our minds pick up out of the welter of errant thought only those which correspond to the note we sing. This, then, suggests that by attuning the mind to certain things we automatically throw it out of tune with conflicting ideas. The successful artist, as a rule, is one who has learnt to render himself oblivious to distractions, and so is enabled to concentrate his attention solely on the work in hand. The artist who will be permanently unsuccessful is the one whose enthusiasms attract him first to one thing and then another, never allowing him to remain absorbed by the one thing long enough to bring it to a satisfactory issue. Auto-suggestion applied to this point of inculcating response to certain things, and immunity from the influence of others, is an easy and extremely practical help.

One characteristic of genius is an extreme fertility in making mental associations. A central object comes into mind, and immediately the mind of the genius, by contrast, comparison, analogy, inference, and imagination, weaves around it a wealth of possibility: the dull-witted man sees the same, but his mind travels no farther than the actual vision. The quick mind supplies the apt repartee, while the dullard thinks of the appropriate reply next morning—if at all. The disadvantage of the latter mind is that it does not work easily, the danger of the former is that it may work too easily and get out of control. Where the central control does not suffice to keep a strong hand upon this easy-running mental machinery, it may quickly merge into eccentricity and possibly into madness. The insane show this same tendency to rapid, but irrelevant, association which lands them in incoherency: they make, or indulge in, associations which no normal person would allow. A genius is only a genius while the necessary selection and control over these associations is retained, when this is lost the genius passes into that insanity to which it is so closely associated. The same conditions and remarks apply to the artistic temperament, which itself is a mark of possible genius.

The artistic impulse is essentially creative, and in this it demonstrates its relationship to the question of sex. It is well recognised that many of the inspirations of genius in the various forms of Art have come at a time when the artist was in the throes of the gentle passion. This "love neurosis," as the cold specialist dubs it, is in essence a condition of exaltation, and therefore of exceptional sensitiveness. Need we wonder, then, that our artist-friend makes perhaps more frequent excursions than the humdrum individual into the realms of amorous exuberance? By nature he is more susceptible to the influence of the finer emotions, and he will find a thousand graces in the curve of an arm or the turn of an ankle, where, were you to appraise such in cold blood, there might be after all little enough to rave about.

It seems probable that the inspiration of the opposite sex in the artistic direction lies more in this mood of exaltation than in any specific influence. In the exalted condition there is the greater capacity of response to inspiration from outside ourselves, and also from within. Under all circumstances we are being played upon by the waves of the sea of thoughts in which we daily live, and therefore inspiration from this outside source is somewhat of a commonplace. But under certain conditions one can undoubtedly be inspired by one's own greater (subconscious) mind, which contains as treasure all the lore of its own experience, and probably a good deal more beside.

However, the artistic temperament, with all that may be said for or against it, is a gift of the high gods, and while it does not of necessity imply a greater degree of spirituality and spiritual impulse than the normal, it does at any rate make this possible. The conditions are provided for finer work than is open to the majority, but so long as man has a measure of free will he is able to turn the use of his gifts upward or down. The freedom of the artist may of course degenerate into license, and the spiritual impulse may be turned to perverted ends. There is a distinct difference between the truly spiritual and what may be termed the psychic: there are hidden powers and latent possibilities which the specially sensitive are beginning to unfold. But the danger is exactly on a par with that which up-to-date chemists and scientists foresee in the physical world. There are tons of energy, we are told, locked up in the atom of the physical world, and the scientist prays that mankind may not find the secret of unlocking that power until his moral sense is developed to such a degree as to prevent his using it for destructive ends. It is comparatively easy to stimulate the psychic side of our natures, but unless these powers be tuned by an accompanying spirituality to a high note, unexpected and even undesirable results may follow. The artist has taken a step forward in the exploration of a new realm, and new discoveries—even though he does not fully comprehend their import—are falling to his lot. The safeguard of the pioneer lies in his recognition of the spiritual nature of his quest: if he realises that he is making contact with a new realm of thought and idea, then he will rate his calling high, and not run unnecessary risk by pursuing it in any unworthy or selfish aim.