e
up more into himself; he brings more into the unity of his
personality, and thus he expands into the universal harmony.

The unity which underlies the cosmos--to define once more the
conception which is the basis of the preceding chapters--is of the
spirit. The material world which we see and touch is but the symbol
and bodying forth of spiritual relations. The tranquillizing, satisfying
power of art is due to the revelation which art accomplishes of a
spiritual harmony which transcends the seeming chaos of instant
experience. So it comes about that harmony, or beauty, which is of
the spirit, is apprehended by the spirit. That faculty in the artist by
which he is able to perceive beauty is called _temperament._ By
temperament is to be understood the receptive faculty, the power to
feel, the capacity for sensations, emotions, and "such intellectual
apprehensions as, in strength and directness and their immediately
realized values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like
sensations." The function of temperament is to receive and to
transmit, to interpret, to create in the sense that it reveals. In the
result it is felt to be present only as the medium through which the
forces behind it come to expression.

Art, the human spirit, temperament,--these terms are general and
abstract. Now the abstract to be realized must be made concrete. Just
as art, in order to be manifest, must be embodied in the particular
work, as the statue, the picture, the building, the drama, the
symphony, so the human spirit becomes operative in the person of
the individual, and temperament may be best studied in the character
of the individual artist.

As temperament is the receptive faculty, the artist's attitude toward
life is what Wordsworth called "wise passiveness,"--Wordsworth,
the poet of "impassioned contemplation." Keats, too,--and among
the poets, whose vision of beauty was more beautiful, whose grasp
on the truth more true?--characterizes himself as "addicted to
passiveness." It is of temperament that Keats is writing when he says
in a letter: "That quality which goes to form a man of achievement,
especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so
enormously, is _Negative Capability_ ." In another letter he writes:--

"It has been an old comparison for our urging on--the Beehive;
however, it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the
Bee--for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving tha