ld.

In practice servile art is usually mitigated by combining these two
methods; the demand subserved, being but ill supported, learns to
restrain itself and be less importunate; while at the same time habit
renders the labour which was once unwilling largely automatic, and even
overlays it with ideal associations. Human nature is happily elastic;
there is hardly a need that may not be muffled or suspended, and hardly
an employment that may not be relieved by the automatic interest with
which it comes to be pursued. To this automatic interest other
palliatives are often added, sometimes religion, sometimes mere dulness
and resignation; but in these cases the evil imposed is merely
counterbalanced or forgotten, it is not remedied. Reflective and
spiritual races minimise labour by renunciation, for they find it easier
to give up its fruits than to justify its exactions. Among energetic and
self-willed men, on the contrary, the demand for material progress
remains predominant, and philosophy dwells by preference on the
possibility that a violent and continual subjection in the present might
issue in a glorious future dominion. This possible result was hardly
realised by the Jews, nor long maintained by the Greeks and Romans, and
it remains to be seen whether modern industrialism can achieve it. In
fact, we may suspect that success only comes when a nation's external
task happens to coincide with its natural genius, so that a minimum of
its labour is servile and a maximum of its play is beneficial. It is in
such cases that we find colossal achievements and apparently
inexhaustible energies. Prosperity is indeed the basis of every ideal
attainment, so that prematurely to recoil from hardship, or to be
habitually conscious of hardship at all, amounts to renouncing
beforehand all earthly goods and all chance of spiritual greatness. Yet
a chance is no certainty. When glory requires Titanic labours it often
finds itself in the end buried under a pyramid rather than raised upon a
pedestal. Energies which are not from the beginning self-justifying and
flooded with light seldom lead to ideal greatness.

[Sidenote: Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its
problem.]

The action to which industry should minister is accordingly liberal or
spontaneous action; and this one condition of rationality in from two
the arts. But a second condition is implicit in the first: freedom means
freedom in some operation, ideality m