“Yes,” I answered; “and you see how easily and well one can use the word in that sense.”
Ruth asked: “If the great genius is really one who understands better than the rest of us, and has a more harmonious vision, how is it that so many geniuses are incomplete and very imperfect in their personal lives?”
“I think it is,” I said, “for the same reason that I gave you for disease in highly developed beings.”
“I see,” said Marian; “it is one part developed at the expense of another.”
They wanted to know why so many artists were peculiar, erratic, “Bohemian”—Marian used that word. Virginia spoke again of the happy-go-lucky people down at the art league.
I said I thought one reason for this manner among artists was that, as they were always looking for the new, the beautiful—which is ever new—they had no patience with so-called respectable people, who clung to old things because they were old, and so these artists often purposely went to the other extreme.
I said: “You must see that there is the tendency in all of us to make of life a work of art, to live a complete, beautiful life.”
“I know some people,” said Virginia, “whose lives do not seem to me in the least artistic.”
“That may be,” I answered, “but the tendency is there to make of life a complete expression.”
“That isn’t all I mean,” said Marian. “I want to know what is meant by the artistic temperament.”