But besides all these, there are artistic temperaments 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 glittering emotion there often lies, in the artistic nature, a reserve, not of tenderness or depth, but of cold and critical calm.  There are very few people who are highly developed in one faculty who do not pay for it in some other part of their natures.  Below the emotion itself there sits enthroned a hard intellectual force, a power of appraising quality, a Rhadamanthine judgment.  It is this hardness which has so often made artists such excellent men of business, so alert to strike