nstitute it.
There would be a kind of superstitious haste in the notion that what
is convenient and economical is necessarily and by miracle
beautiful. The uses and habits of one place and society require
works which are or may easily become intrinsically beautiful; the
uses and habits of another make these beautiful works impossible.
The beauty has a material and formal basis that we have already
studied; no fitness of design will make a building of ten equal
storeys as beautiful as a pavilion or a finely proportioned tower; no
utility will make a steamboat as beautiful as a sailing vessel. But
the forms once established, with their various intrinsic characters,
the fitness we know to exist in them will lend them some added
charm, or their unfitness will disquiet us, and haunt us like a
conscientious qualm. The other interests of our lives here mingle
with the purely aesthetic, to enrich or to embitter it.

If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory -- and who is without
some Sybaris of his own? -- if the image of it is so tormenting and
in the end so disgusting, this is not because we no longer think its
marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes strong, or its roses
fragrant; but because, mingled with all these supreme beauties,
there is the ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will
and a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral
condition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt. If this
beauty did not exist, and was not still desired, the tragedy would
disappear and Jehovah would be deprived of the worth of his
victim. The sternness of moral forces lies precisely in this, that the
sacrifices morality imposes upon us are real, that the things it
renders impossible are still precious.

We are accustomed to think of prudence as estranging us only
from low and ignoble things; we forget that utility and the need of
system in our lives is a bar also to the free flights of the spirit. The
highest instincts tend to disorganization as much as the lowest,
since order and benefit is what practical morality everywhere
insists upon, while sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man
only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the
understanding. For this reason, utility keeps close watch over
beauty, lest in her wilfulness and riot she should offend against our
practical needs and ultimate happiness. And when