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 away 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.