eraldry, and
eloquence. So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsic
value and becomes expressive. On the other hand, spontaneous action
leads to art when it acquires a rational function. Thus utterance, which
is primarily automatic, becomes the art of speech when it serves to mark
crises in experience, making them more memorable and influential through
their artificial expression; but expression is never art while it
remains expressive to no purpose.

[Sidenote: It combines utility and automatism.]

A good way of understanding the fine arts would be to study how they
grow, now out of utility, now out of automatism. We should thus see
more clearly how they approach their goal, which can be nothing but the
complete superposition of these two characters. If all practice were art
and all art perfect, no action would remain compulsory and not justified
inherently, while no creative impulse would any longer be wasteful or,
like the impulse to thrum, symptomatic merely and irrelevant to
progress. It is by contributing to the Life of Reason and merging into
its substance that art, like religion or science, first becomes worthy
of praise. Each element comes from a different quarter, bringing its
specific excellence and needing its peculiar purification and
enlightenment, by co-ordination with all the others; and this process of
enlightenment and purification is what we call development in each
department. The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit either
of utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and more
rational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneity
beneficent.

[Sidenote: Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.]

The spontaneous arts are older than the useful, since man must live and
act before he can devise instruments for living and acting better. Both
the power to construct machines and the end which, to be useful, they
would have to serve, need to be given in initial impulse. There is
accordingly a vast amount of irresponsible play and loose experiment in
art, as in consciousness, before these gropings acquire a settled habit
and function, and rationality begins. The farther back we go into
barbarism the more we find life and mind busied with luxuries; and
though these indulgences may repel a cultivated taste and seem in the
end cruel and monotonous, their status is really nearer to that of
religion and spontaneous art than to that of useful art or