verywhere and at all times
save these present European days) art has existed spontaneously, it
has brought with it that initiation and training. The initiation and
training, the habit of understanding given qualities of form, the
discrimination and preference thereof, have come, I maintain, as a
result of practical utility.

Or rather: out of practical utility has arisen the art itself, and the
need for it. The attention, the familiarity which made beauty
enjoyable had previously made beauty necessary. It was because the
earthenware lamp, the bronze pitcher, the little rude household idols
displayed the same arrangements of lines and surfaces, presented the
same patterns and features, embodied, in a word, the same visible
rhythms of being, that the Greeks could understand without being
taught the temples and statues of Athens, Delphi or Olympia. It was
because the special form qualities of ogival art (so subtle in
movement, unstable in balance and poignant in emotion that a whole
century of critical study has scarce sufficed to render them familiar
to us) were present in every village tower, every window coping, every
chair-back, in every pattern carved, painted, stencilled or woven
during the Gothic period; it was because of this that every artisan of
the Middle Ages could appreciate less consciously than we, but far
more deeply, the loveliness and the wonder of the great cathedrals.
Nay, even in our own times we can see how, through the help of all the
cheapest and most perishable household wares, the poorest Japanese is
able to enjoy that special peculiarity and synthesis of line and
colour and perspective which strikes even initiated Westerns as so
exotic, far-fetched and almost wilfully unintelligible.

I have said that thanks to the objects and sights of everyday use and
life the qualities of art could be perceived and enjoyed. It may be
that it was thanks to them that art had any qualities and ever existed
at all. For, however much the temple, cathedral, statue, fresco, the
elaborate bronze or lacquer or coloured print, may have reacted on the
form, the proportions and linear rhythms and surface arrangements, of
all common useful objects; it was in the making of these common useful
objects (first making by man of genius and thousandfold minute
adaptation by respectful mediocrity) that the form qualities came to
exist. One may at least hazard this supposition in the face of the
extreme unlikeliness that the comp