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