ch are so strangely separate. We
ourselves all dwell in worlds of infinite variety. I do not mean the social
and professional worlds in which we move, though here, too, the world is
not one but many. There is not much in common between the world as it
appears to Sarah Ellen, who "runs" four looms in a Lancashire weaving shed
during fifty-one weeks in the year, and my Lady Broadacres, who suns
herself in Mayfair.

But I am speaking here of our individual world, the world of our private
thought and emotions. My world is not your world, nor yours mine. We sit
and talk with each other, we work together and play together, we exchange
confidences and share our laughter and our experiences. But ultimately we
can neither of us understand the world of the other--that world which is
the sum of a million factors of unthinkable diversity, trifles light as
air, memories, experiences, physical emotions, the play of light and colour
and sound, attachments and antipathies often so obscure that we cannot even
explain them to ourselves. We may feel a collective emotion under the
impulse of some powerful event or personality. We may ebb and flow as a
tide to the rhythm of a great melody or to the incantation of noble
oratory. The news of a great victory in these days would move us to our
common centre and bring all our separate worlds into a mighty chorus of
thanksgiving. But even in these common emotions there are infinite shades
of difference, and when they have passed we subside again into the world
where we dwell alone.

Most of us are doomed to go through life without communicating the
mysteries of our experience.

Alas for those who never sing.
But die with all their music in them.

It is the privilege of the artist in any medium to enrich the general life
with the consciousness of the world that he alone has experienced. He gives
us new kingdoms for our inheritance, makes us the sharers of his visions,
opens out wider horizons, and floods our life with richer glories.

I entered such a kingdom the other afternoon. I turned out of the Strand,
which was thronged and throbbing with the news of the great advance,--it
was the first day of the battle of the Somme--and entered the Aldwych
Theatre. As if by magic, I passed from the thrilling drama of the present
into a realm

Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing--

into a sunlit world, where the zephyrs fan your cheek like a benediction
and the brooks tin