convertible, and console
themselves with color-bags and blocks of marble. They reject life as
prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They despatch the
day's weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink,
that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the
name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it stands in the
imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with death from
the first. Would it not be better to begin higher up,--to serve the
ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and
drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty
must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine
and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life
were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish
the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It
is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it
is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will
not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or
America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and
spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that
we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its
instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the
field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious
heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office,
the joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce,
the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's
retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish
and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to
mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses
which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a
steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving
at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into
harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the
Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is
learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear
the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

End of Project Gutenberg's Essays, First Serie