THE BEAUTY OF LIFE {5}



'--propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.'--Juvenal.

I stand before you this evening weighted with a disadvantage that I
did not feel last year;--I have little fresh to tell you; I can
somewhat enlarge on what I said then; here and there I may make bold
to give you a practical suggestion, or I may put what I have to say
in a way which will be clearer to some of you perhaps; but my
message is really the same as it was when I first had the pleasure
of meeting you.

It is true that if all were going smoothly with art, or at all
events so smoothly that there were but a few malcontents in the
world, you might listen with some pleasure, and perhaps advantage,
to the talk of an old hand in the craft concerning ways of work, the
snares that beset success, and the shortest road to it, to a tale of
workshop receipts and the like: that would be a pleasant talk
surely between friends and fellow-workmen; but it seems to me as if
it were not for us as yet; nay, maybe we may live long and find no
time fit for such restful talk as the cheerful histories of the
hopes and fears of our workshops: anyhow to-night I cannot do it,
but must once again call the faithful of art to a battle wider and
more distracting than that kindly struggle with nature, to which all
true craftsmen are born; which is both the building-up and the
wearing-away of their lives.