which do not
express themselves in any of the recognized mediums of art, but which
apply their powers direct to life itself. I do not mean successful,
professional people, who win their triumphs by a happy sanity and
directness of view, to whom labour is congenial and success enjoyable;
but I mean those who have a fine perception of quality in innumerable
forms; who are interested in the salient points of others, who delight
to enter into appropriate relations with those they meet, to whom life
itself, its joys and sorrows, its gifts and its losses, has a certain
romantic, beautiful, mysterious savour. Such people have a strong sense
of the significance of their relations with others, they enjoy dealing
with characters, with problems, with situations. Having both interest
and sympathy, they get the best out of other people; they pierce
through the conventional fence that so many of us erect as a protection
against intrusion. Such people bring the same perception to bear on
technical art. They enjoy books, art, music, without any envious desire
to produce; they can enjoy the noble pleasure of admiring and praising.
Again and again, in reading the lives of artists, one comes across
traces of these wise and generous spirits, who have loved the society
of artists, have understood them, and whose admiration has never been
clouded by the least shadow of that jealousy which is the curse of most
artistic natures. People without artistic sensibilities find the
society of artists trying; because they see only their irritability,
their vanity, their egotism, and cannot sympathize with the visions by
which they are haunted. But those who can understand without jealousy,
pass by the exacting vagaries of the artist with a gentle and tender
compassion, and evoke what is sincere and generous and lovable, without
any conscious effort.

It is not, I think, often enough realized that the basis of the
successful artistic temperament is a certain hardness combined with
great superficial sensitiveness. Those who see the artistic nature
swiftly and emotionally affected by a beautiful or a pathetic thing,
who see that a thought, a line of poetry, a bar of music, a sketch,
will evoke a thrill of feeling to which they cannot themselves aspire,
are apt to think that such a spirit is necessarily fair and tender, and
that it possesses unfathomable reserves of noble feeling. This is often
a great mistake; far below the rapid current of changing and