with those innumerable fleeting shades of meaning and deep resounding echoes that make it something altogether our own?  We should all, were it so, be novelists or poets or musicians.  Mostly, however, we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mental state.  We catch only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect which speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same, in the same conditions, for all men.  Thus, even in our own individual, individuality escapes our ken.  We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, externally also to ourselves.  From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.  Not with that intentional, logical, systematical detachment—­the result of reflection and philosophy—­but rather with natural detachment, one innate in the structure of sense or consciousness, which at once reveals itself by a virginal manner, so to speak, of seeing, hearing or thinking.  Were this detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen.  It would excel alike in every art at the same time; or rather, it would fuse them all into one.  It would perceive all things in their native purity:  the forms, colours, sounds of the physical world as well as the subtlest movements of the inner life.  But this is asking too much of nature.  Even for such of us as she has made artists, it is by accident, and on one side only, that she has lifted the veil.  In one direction only has she forgotten to rivet the perception to the need.  And since each direction corresponds to what we call a sense—­through one of his senses, and through that sense alone, is the artist usually wedded to art.  Hence, originally, the diversity of arts.  Hence also the speciality of predispositions.  This one applies himself to colours and forms, and since he loves colour for colour and form for form, since he perceives them for their sake and not for his own, it is the inner life of things that he sees appearing through their forms and colours.  Little by little he insinuates it into our own perception, baffled though we may be at the outset.  For a few moments at least, he diverts us from the prejudices of form and colour that come between ourselves and reality.  And thus he realises the loftiest ambition of art, which here consists in revealing to us nature.  Others, again, retire within themselves.  Beneath the thousand rudimentary actions which are the outward and visible signs of an emotion, behind the commonplace, conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which