nised about the human heart in an ingenuous and sincere
fashion would involve every fine art and would render the world
pervasively beautiful--beautiful in its artificial products and
beautiful in its underlying natural terrors. The closer we keep to
elementary human needs and to the natural agencies that may satisfy
them, the closer we are to beauty. Industry, sport, and science, with
the perennial intercourse and passions of men, swarm with incentives to
expression, because they are everywhere creating new moulds of being and
compelling the eye to observe those forms and to recast them ideally.
Art is simply an adequate industry; it arises when industry is carried
out to the satisfaction of all human demands, even of those incidental
sensuous demands which we call aesthetic and which a brutal industry, in
its haste, may despise or ignore.

Arts responsive in this way to all human nature would be beautiful
according to reason and might remain beautiful long. Poetic beauty
touches the world whenever it attains some unfeigned harmony either with
sense or with reason; and the more unfeignedly human happiness was made
the test of all institutions and pursuits, the more beautiful they would
be, having more numerous points of fusion with the mind, and fusing with
it more profoundly. To distinguish and to create beauty would then be no
art relegated to a few abstracted spirits, playing with casual fancies;
it would be a habit inseparable from practical efficiency. All
operations, all affairs, would then be viewed in the light of ultimate
interests, and in their deep relation to human good. The arts would thus
recover their Homeric glory; touching human fate as they clearly would,
they would borrow something of its grandeur and pathos, and yet the
interest that worked in them would be warm, because it would remain
unmistakably animal and sincere.

[Sidenote: Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts.]

The principle that all institutions should subserve happiness runs
deeper than any cult for art and lays the foundation on which the latter
might rest safely. If social structure were rational its free expression
would be so too. Many observers, with no particular philosophy to
adduce, feel that the arts among us are somehow impotent, and they look
for a better inspiration, now to ancient models, now to the raw
phenomena of life. A dilettante may, indeed, summon inspiration whence
he will; and a virtuoso will neve