y 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 kee