parts of the country are, as in the Cotswolds, where the soft stone has tempted builders to try experiments, and to touch up a plain front with a little delicate and well-placed ornament.  Or take the aspect of men, women, and children; how attractive some cannot help being, whatever they do; how helplessly unattractive and uninteresting others can be, and yet how, even so, a fine and sweet nature can make beautiful the plainest and ungainliest of faces.  And then in a further region still there are the thoughts and habits and prejudices of people, all wholly distinct, some beautiful and desirable, and others unpleasant and even intolerable.

I could multiply instances indefinitely; but my point is that art in the largest sense is or can be concerned with observing and comparing all these separate qualities, wherever they appear.  Of course every one’s observation does not extend to everything.  There are some people who are wholly unobservant, let us say, of scenery or houses, who are yet very shrewd judges of character.

It is not only the beauty of things that one may observe; they may be dreary, hideous, even horrible.  The interest of quality does not by any means depend upon its beauty.  The point is whether it is strongly and markedly itself.  What could be more crammed with quality than an enormous old pig, with its bristles, its elephantine ears, its furtive little eyes, its twitching snout?  What a look it has of a fallen creature, puzzled by its own uncleanliness and yet unable to devise any way out!

All this is only to show that life wherever it is lived affords a rich harvest for eye and mind.  And if one dives but a very little way beneath the surface, one is instantly in the presence of the darkest and deepest of mysteries.  Who set this all going, and why?  Whose idea is it all?  What is it all driving at?  What is the meaning of our being set down here, in our own particular shape, feeling entirely distinct from it all, with very little idea what our place in it is or what we are intended to do? and above all that strange sense that we cannot be compelled to do anything unless we choose—­a sense which remains with us, even though day after day and all day long we are doing things that we would not choose to do, if we could help it.

The whole thing indeed is so strange as to be almost frightening, the moment that we dare to think at all:  and yet we feel on the whole at our ease in it, and in our place; and the one thing that does terrify us is the prospect of leaving it.

What I mean, then, by art in its largest sense is the faculty we have of observing and comparing and wondering; and the people who make the most of life are the people who give their imagination wings; and then, too, comes in the further feeling, which leads us to try and shape our own life and conduct on the lines of what we admire and think beautiful; the dull word duty means that, that we choose what is not necessarily pleasant because for some mysterious reason we feel happier so; because, however much we may pretend to think otherwise, we are all of us at every moment intent upon happiness, which is a very different thing from pleasure, and sometimes quite contrary to it.