favourable bargains.  In those artists whose medium is words this hardness is not so often detected as it is in the case of other artists, for they have the power of rhetoric, the power of luxuriously heightening impressions, indeed of imaginatively simulating a force which is in reality of a superficial nature.  One of the greatest powers of great artists is that of hinting at an emotion which they have very possibly never intimately gauged.

I have sometimes thought that this is in all probability the reason why women, with all their power of swift impression, of subtle intuition, have so seldom achieved the highest stations in art.  It is, I think, because they seldom or never have that calm, strong egotism at the base of their natures, which men so constantly have, and which indeed seems almost a condition of attaining the highest success in art.  The male artist can believe whole-heartedly and with entire absorption in the value of what he is doing, can realize it as the one end of his being, the object for which his life was given him.  He can believe that all experience, all relations with others, all emotions, are and must be subservient to this one aim; they can deepen for him the channels in which his art flows; they can reveal and illustrate to him the significance of the world of which he is the interpreter.  Such an aspiration can be a very high and holy thing; it can lead a man to live purely and laboriously, to make sacrifices, to endure hardness.  But the altar on which the sacrifice is made, stands, when all is said and done, before the idol of self.  With women, though, it is different.  The deepest quality in their hearts is, one may gratefully say, an intense devotion to others, an unselfishness which is unconscious of itself; and thus their aim is to help, to encourage, to sympathize; and their artistic gifts are subordinated to a deeper purpose, the desire of giving and serving.  One with such a passion in the heart is incapable of believing art to be the deepest thing in the world; it is to such an one more like the lily which floats upwards, to bloom on the surface of some dim pool, a thing exquisitely fair and symbolical of mysteries; but all growing out of the depths of life, and not a thing which is deeper and truer than life.

It is useless to try to dive deeper than the secrets of personality and temperament.  One must merely be grateful for the beauty which springs from them.  We must reflect that the hard, vigorous, hammered quality, which is characteristic of the best art, can only be produced, in a mood of blind and unquestioning faith, by a temperament which believes that such production is its highest end.  But one who stands a little apart from the artistic world, and yet ardently loves it, can see that, beautiful as is the dream of the artist, true and pure as his aspiration is, there is yet a deeper mystery of life still, of which art is nothing but a symbol and an evidence.  Perhaps that very belief may of itself weaken a man’s