Erratic as it may seem to the ordinary person, the vision of the artist is often inherently near the truth. His sensitiveness enables him to see this "more of truth," even if it becloud his vision occasionally with mundane perversions. He possesses his own standards, and when these conflict with the conventional it is convention that must be sacrificed. Thus the conventional mind brands the artistic temperament as immoral. But morality is not absolute, it is conventional and relative: we do not, as once, punish the sheep-stealer with the gallows nor the heretic with red-hot irons, for our standards have changed with the years. So also do they vary with our locality: what is right in this place is wrong over the border. The vision of the artist sees beyond the formularies to the substance, and so he is prepared to brave criticism for his stand upon what he knows to be true. Love and beauty call to him with other meaning than they bear to the prosaic and self-satisfied, and so he answers to the call of affection when perhaps it would have been better for his peace of mind that caution and prudence should have held sway. But again it is an open question whether the man who follows the gleam, with inspiration to beckon him, does not come nearer to the truth than the man of calculating caution who sums up and weighs. Sometimes crabbed age awakes to the realisation that the cocksure aim of youth is on occasion nearer to the mark than the aim directed by cold intellect, plotted out on a diagram, and worked out correct to three places of decimals. It is perfectly possible for the cautious and orthodox pedestrian to spend so much time and effort in dodging the dangers of life's path, and in endeavouring to keep off the grass, that he makes no solid progress. On the other hand, the artistic temperament lives in the world and is not entitled to follow its own laws where those conflict with the interests of others. The mere possession of this type of temperament involves its Bohemian owner in many difficulties which do not beset the path of those who fit into the routine of life as they find it. Certainly it is advisable for the artist to temper his ways with discretion, for genius is altogether too apt to make a meteoric blaze and end up in a fizzle. The possessor of the artistic temperament is frequently deemed unreliable and capricious, and to a certain extent this is true. It is the sensitiveness first to one impact and then another, the susceptibility to the manifold forces that play upon the individual, which turn him now in the one direction and then in the other. He is lured and led by this, and then by that. Yet at times he is capable of the greatest concentration: immersed in his subject he may even forget the outer world and omit to eat his dinner, or perhaps like the philosopher he may eat it twice.