Rutland Barrington regards it as a
mixed blessing.
The artistic temperament is a most decidedly “mixed” blessing, and the more artistic the more mixed! This is strongly demonstrated to me personally in the person of a friend of my school days who has become in later years an acquaintance only; a falling away, due entirely to the abnormal development of his artistic temperament, which will not allow him to see any good in anything or anybody that does not come up to his ideal, the artistic temperament in his case taking the form of a kind of mental yellow jaundice! Of course, I consider that I myself possess this temperament, and am willing to admit that the natural friction caused by the meeting with a less highly developed temperament (?) than his own may have led to the feeling of mental and artistic superiority which has convinced one of us that association with the other is undesirable! I fancy that the two classes most strongly influenced by this temperament are the painters and the actors, who display characteristics of remarkable resemblance, as, for instance, all painters (I use the word “painters” because “artists” is applied equally to both classes) are fully alive to the beauties of Nature in all her varied moods, but, when those beauties are depicted on the canvasses of others, are somewhat prone to discover a comprehension of those beauties inferior to their own! So, too, with actors, the majority of whom possess the feeling, though they may not always express it, that, although Mr. Garrick Siddons’s efforts were distinctly good, there are people, not a hundred miles off, who might have shone to more advantage in the part! There is no doubt that the artistic temperament magnifies all the pleasures of one’s life by the infusion of a keener zest for enjoyment, the natural outcome of such temperament, but the reverse of the medal is equally well cut, and the misfortunes and disappointments of life are the more keenly felt in consequence of the possession of this temperament! Whether the balance is equally maintained or not is a question only to be answered by the individual, but I incline to the belief that life is smoother to the phlegmatic than the artistic temperament!—though I should not believe it would be possible to find any person possessing the latter who would be willing to renounce it, in spite of its disadvantages, so I must perforce conclude it to be a blessing! Q.E.D.
Miss Helen Mathers looks upon it as a curse.
If the artistic temperament will enable a man to be rendered profoundly happy by one of those trifles that Nature strews each day in our path—say a salmon-pink sunset seen through the lacing of tall black boles of leafless trees, or a flower, happed upon unexpectedly, that reads you a half-forgotten lesson in “country art”—that same man will be reduced to abject misery and real suffering by a dirty tablecloth, a vulgar, uncongenial companion, or even the presence of a bright blue gown in a chamber subdued to utmost harmonies in gold and yellow. The curse with him follows all too swiftly on the blessing of enjoyment—and lasts longer. And in matters of love, the artistic temperament is a doubtful blessing. The shape of a man’s nose will turn a woman’s eyes away from the goodness of his character, and a badly-fitting coat so outrage her beauty-loving propensities, that she is provoked into mistaking her mind’s approval for real heart affection, and she chooses the artistic man, only to find, probably, that, like the O’Flaherty, one cannot comfortably worship a lily, without a considerable amount of mutton chops as well—and in the end she may sigh for the tasteless man who yet had the taste to love her.
We worship the
“beautiful” too much.
I think most of us carry this tendency to worship the beautiful too far, and our scorn for the physically unsatisfactory is one of our cruellest and most glaring latter-day faults. It is true we are equally cordially hard on ourselves, and hate our vile bodies, when their aches and pains intrude themselves between us and our soul’s delight—for it is from the Pagan, not the Christian, point of view that most lovers of beauty regard life. And if a man’s taste require costly gratification of it, say by pictures, by marbles, by the thousand and one sumptuous trifles that go to make the modern house beautiful, then that man is not possessed of true taste, and he will be poorer in his palace than if he dwelt ragged in Nature’s lap, with all her riches, and those of his own mind, at his disposal. For the true artistic sense impels one to work always—and always to better and not worsen, what it touches. The artistic sense that lazes, and lets other people work to gratify it, is a bastard one, more, it is immoral, and neither bestows, nor receives, grace. It cannot be fashioned, it may not be bought, this strange sense of the inward beauty of things; nor a man’s wife, nor his own soul, nor his beautiful house shall teach it him, and he will never be one with the Universe, with God, understanding all indeed, but not by written word or speech, but by what was born in him. And though he may suffer through it too, though to the ugly, the deaf, and the afflicted, such a gift may seem bestowed in cruellest irony, still when all is said and done I can think of no better summary of the whole than that given by Philip Sydney’s immortal lines on love. You all know them—
“He who for love hath undergone
The worst that can befall
Is happier thousandfold than he
Who ne’er hath loved at all ...
For in his soul a grace hath reigned
That nothing else could bring.”