That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour.  I do not believe he can be happy in his labour without expressing that happiness; and especially is this so when he is at work at anything in which he specially excels.  A most kind gift is this of nature, since all men, nay, it seems all things too, must labour; so that not only does the dog take pleasure in hunting, and the horse in running, and the bird in flying, but so natural does the idea seem to us, that we imagine to ourselves that the earth and the very elements rejoice in doing their appointed work; and the poets have told us of the spring meadows smiling, of the exultation of the fire, of the countless laughter of the sea.

Nor until these latter days has man ever rejected this universal gift, but always, when he has not been too much perplexed, too much bound by disease or beaten down by trouble, has striven to make his work at least happy.  Pain he has too often found in his pleasure, and weariness in his rest, to trust to these.  What matter if his happiness lie with what must be always with him—­his work?

And, once more, shall we, who have gained so much, forego this gain, the earliest, most natural gain of mankind?  If we have to a great extent done so, as I verily fear we have, what strange fog-lights must have misled us; or rather let me say, how hard pressed we must have been in the battle with the evils we have overcome, to have forgotten the greatest of all evils.  I cannot call it less than that.  If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect.  Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of it in the end.

If I could only persuade you of this, that the chief duty of the civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all, to do its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour—­nay, if I could only persuade some two or three of you here present—­I should have made a good night’s work of it.

Do not, at any rate, shelter yourselves from any misgiving you may have behind the fallacy that the art-lacking labour of to-day is happy work:  for the most of men it is not so.  It would take long, perhaps, to show you, and make you fully understand that the would-be art which it produces is joyless.  But there is another token of its being most unhappy work, which you cannot fail to understand at once—­a grievous thing that token is—­and I beg of you to believe that I feel the full shame of it, as I stand here speaking of it; but if we do not admit that we are sick, how can we be healed?  This hapless token is, that the work done by the civilised world is mostly dishonest work.  Look now:  I admit that civilisation does make certain things well, things which it knows, consciously or unconsciously, are necessary to its present unhealthy condition.