people happy, but there is never any doubt about their own happiness; and when one meets them and parts company with them, it is impossible to think of them as lapsing into any dreariness or depression; they are obviously going back to comfortable schemes and businesses of their own; and we know that whenever we meet them, we shall have just that half-envious feeling that they know their own mind, never want to be interested or amused, but are always occupied in something that continues to interest them, even if they are ill or unfortunate.

To be happy, we all need a certain tenacity and continuity of aim and view; and I would like to persuade people who are only half-aware of it, that they have a power which they could use if they would, and which they would be happier for using.  For the best of the art of which I speak is that it does not need rare experiences of expensive materials to apply it, but can be applied to commonplace and quiet ways of life just as easily as to exciting and exceptional circumstances.

Let me say then that art, as a method and a point-of-view, has not necessarily anything whatever to do with poetry or painting or music.  These are all manifestations of it in certain regions; but what it consists in, to put it as simply as I can, is in the perception and comparison of quality.  If that sounds a heavy sort of formula, it is because all formulas sound dull.  But the faculty of which I am speaking is that which observes closely all that happens or exists within range—­the sky, the earth, the trees, the fields, the streets, the houses, the people; and then it goes further and observes not only what people look like, but how they move and speak and think; and then we come down to smaller things still, to animals and flowers, to the colour and shape of things of common use, furniture and tools, everything which is used in ordinary life.

Now every one of these things has a certain quality—­of suitability or unsuitability, of proportion or disproportion.  Let me take a few quite random instances.  Look at a spade, for instance.  The sensible man proceeds to call it a spade, and thinks he has done all that is necessary; the wise man considers what length of experience and practice has gone to make it perfectly adapted for its purpose, its length and size, the ledge for the foot to rest on, the hole for the fingers to pass through as they clasp it; all the tools and utensils of men are human documents of far-reaching interest.  Or take the strange shapes and colours of flowers, the snapdragon with its blunt lips, the nasturtium with its round flat leaves and flaming horns—­they are endless in variety, but all expressing something not only quite definite, but remotely inherited.  Or take houses—­how perfectly simple and graceful an old homestead can be, how frightfully pretentious and vulgar the speculative builder’s work often is, how full of beauty both of form and colour almost all the houses in certain