Knowledge, where it exists, undermines satisfaction in what does
violence to truth, and it renders such representations grotesque. If
knowledge were general and adequate the fine arts would accordingly be
brought round to expressing reality.

[Sidenote: which in turn would be suffused with beauty.]

At the same time, if the rendering of reality is to remain artistic, it
must still study to satisfy the senses; but as this study would now
accompany every activity, taste would grow vastly more subtle and
exacting. Whatever any man said or did or made, he would be alive to its
aesthetic quality, and beauty would be a pervasive ingredient in
happiness. No work would be called, in a special sense, a work of art,
for all works would be such intrinsically; and even instinctive mimicry
and reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness
prompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the
exercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be
no division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-demented
poets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make
who have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of human
action. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art of
life, the only one wholly useful or fine among them.

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

[Sidenote: AEsthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones.]

The greatest enemy harmony can have is a premature settlement in which
some essential force is wholly disregarded. This excluded element will
rankle in the flesh; it will bring about no end of disorders until it is
finally recognised and admitted into a truly comprehensive regimen. The
more numerous the interests which a premature settlement combines the
greater inertia will it oppose to reform, and the more self-righteously
will it condemn the innocent pariah that it leaves outside.

Art has had to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort.
Sometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded it
from their programme, thereby making their programme unjust and
inadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most premature is that
which the fine arts are wont to establish. A harmony in appearance only,
one that touches the springs of nothing and has no power to propagate
itself, is so partial and momentary a good that we may justly call it an
illusion. To gloat on rhythms and d