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often think only of the emotional delight which their works will awaken in the hearts of their brethren. But these works, in the very act of delighting, serve those whom they delight. It is surely as useful a thing, on occasion, to fill the eager car with music, or the longing eye with the glories of form and colour, or the aching heart with thoughts of joy, as it is to fill the hungry stomach with food, or to clothe the naked body.
It is not, then, because the utility of the Fine Arts is questioned, that they are excluded from the domain of Technology. Neither is it because the feeling of their usefulness is lost in that of their delightfulness; but because they are not useful in the sense of being indispensable. The Utilitarian Arts do not stand contrasted with them, as loving ugliness or hating beauty: they have no direct concern with either. Their defining characteristic is not that they deal with what is beautiful or unbeautiful, but with what is essential to man's physical existence. The Fine Arts are, in a certain sense, superfluous Arts. The savage does not know them. The great mass of civilised mankind pass from the cradle to the grave, almost untouched by their charms. Few men can spend more than a small portion of their lives upon them. Even the greatest artists are such only at long intervals. Shakspeare was not always poetising, or Raphael painting, or Mendelssohn singing. Lengthened seasons of unproductive sadness mark the lives of them all. Like the fabled pelican, they feed others with their life-blood; and it would almost seem as if, in proportion to the delight which they gave to others, they were miserable themselves. Wordsworth, whose own life was a happy exception to this rule, declares of his brethren as a class, that "they learn in suffering what they teach in song." "A thing of beauty," Keats has tolds us, "is a joy for ever," but no poet has affirmed that it is a joy at all times.
The Industrial Arts are necessary Arts. The most degraded savage must practise them, and the most civilised genius cannot dispense with them. Whatever be our gifts of intellect or fortune, we cannot avoid being hungry, and thirsty, and cold, and weaiy every day, and we must fight for our lives against the hunger, and thirst, and cold, and weariness, which wage an unceasing war against us. But we can live down the longest day without help from music, or painting, or sculpture, and it is only in certain moods of mind that we demand or can enjoy these noble arts.
The Industrial Arts, then, are named Utilitarian or Useful Arts,
