I came away with the master-printer, and asked him idly whether the boy knew what book he was printing.  He laughed.  “No,” he said, “and the less he is interested the better—­his business is just to feed the machine, and it becomes entirely mechanical.”  I felt a kind of shame at the thought of a human being becoming so entirely and completely a machine; but the boy looked cheerful, well, and intelligent, and as if he had a very decisive little life of his own quite apart from the whizzing engine, for ever bowing over and putting a new sheet in the box.

But it is just that dull and mechanical handling of life which I believe we ought to avoid.  It is harder to avoid it for some people than for others, and it is more difficult to escape from under certain conditions.  But all art and all artistic perception is just a sign of the irresponsible and irrepressible joy of life, and an attempt, as I said at first, to perceive and distinguish and compare the quality of things.  What I am here maintaining is that art is not necessarily the production of something artistic; that is the same impulse only when it rises in the heart of an inventive, accomplished, deft-fingered, eager-minded craftsman.  If a man or a woman has a special gift of words, or a mastery of form and colour, or musical phrases, the passion for beauty is bound to show itself in the making of beautiful things—­and such lives are among the happiest that a man can live, though there is always the shadow of realising the beauty that is out of reach, that cannot be captured or expressed.  And if it could be captured and expressed, the quest would vanish!

But there are innumerable hearts and minds which have the perception of quality, though not the power of expressing it; and these are the people whom I wish to persuade of the fact that they hold in their hands a thread, which, like the clue in the old story, can conduct a searcher safely through the dark recesses of the great labyrinth.  He tied it, the dauntless youth in the tale, to the ancient thorn-tree that grew by the cavern’s mouth; and then he stepped boldly in, and let it unwind within his hand.

For many people, indeed for all people who have any part in the future of the world, the clue of life must be found in beauty of some kind or another; not necessarily in the outward beauties of colours, sounds, and words, but in the beauty of conduct, in the kind, sweet-tempered, pure, unselfish life.  Those who choose such qualities do so simply because they seem more beautiful than the spiteful, angry, greedy, selfish life.  There is a horror of ugliness about that; and thus beauty of every kind is of the nature of a signal to us from some mighty power behind and in the world.  Evil, ugly, hateful, base things are strong indeed; but no peace, no happiness, lies in that direction.  It is just that power of distinguishing, of choosing, of worshipping the beautiful quality which has done for the world all that has ever been