THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
"Conventions mean very little to the artist, because
conventionality arises either from mental laziness or fear of what
others will say and think. Moreover the true genius must ever have
the capacity to feel deeper love and emotions than the man in the
street"
Eaglefield Hull
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.