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 awa