ws itself in performing any work, trade, profession, art,
science.' From the meaning of the Latin word we may eliminate what
refers to spiritual things; not because literature, for instance, is not
art, as well as music and the rest, but because we have to do with
painting, sculpture, architecture, metal working, and the like, in which
actual manual skill is a most integral element.

Now it is always admitted that art grew out of handicraft, when
everything was made by hand, and when the competition between workers
was purely personal, because each man worked for himself and not for a
company in which his individuality was lost. That is nowhere more clear
than in Italy, though the conditions were similar throughout Europe
until the universal introduction of machinery. The transition from
handicraft to art was direct, quick and logical, and at first it
appeared almost simultaneously in all the trades. The Renascence appears
to us as a sort of glorious vision in which all that was beautiful
suddenly sprang into being again, out of all that was rough and chaotic
and barbarous. In real fact the Renascence began among carpenters, and
blacksmiths, and stone masons, and weavers, when they began to take
pride in their work, when they began to try and ornament their own
tools, when the joiner who knew nothing of the Greeks began to trace a
pattern with a red-hot nail on the clumsy wooden chest, when the smith
dinted out a simple design upon the head of his hammer, when the mason
chipped out a face or a leaf on the corner of the rough stone house, and
when the weaver taught himself to make patterns in the stuff he wove.
The true beginning of the Renascence was the first improvement of
hand-work after an age in which everything people used had been rougher
and worse made than we can possibly imagine. Then one thing suggested
another, and each generation found some new thing to do, till the result
was a great movement and a great age. But there never was, and never
could have been, any art at all without hand-work. Progress makes almost
everything by machinery, and dreams of abolishing hand-work altogether,
and of making Nature's forces do everything, and provide everything for
everybody, so that nobody need work at all, and everybody may have a
like share in what is to cost nobody anything. Then, in the dream,
everybody will be devoted to what we vaguely call intellectual pursuits,
and the human race will be raised to an indefinite