430 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



also among the peoples most highly civilized. In Athens, for instance, 

 all work was assigned to slaves. Among the nobility in Lacedemonia 

 the women were not allowed to spin or weave for fear of degrading their 

 rank. In Eome the trades were called the dirty arts (sordidce artes). 

 Plato and Cicero were alike in regarding the useful occupations as 

 degrading. Even the ' chosen people ' imagined that to eat one's bread 

 in the sweat of one's face is one of the severest curses, while people of 

 modern times do not fully realize that under fair conditions it is a 

 blessing, and that under almost any conditions it is better than to eat 

 one's bread in the sweat of another's face. With such ideas of labor it 

 is not surprising that the arts identified with it, or associated with it in 

 thought, should be put in a class by themselves. 



On the other hand, leisure being originally, as it is now in some 

 quarters, a badge of respectability, the arts of the leisure class have 

 naturally partaken of this distinction and been regarded as superior to 

 the useful arts. The leisure class could not display its freedom from 

 toil more aptly than by pursuing arts not essential to physical existence. 

 Hence, while all the arts were originally useful, the arts to which 

 members of the leisure class were drawn were those least obviously so. 

 They selected those arts which could be pursued only by those who 

 could command their own time. Hence, painting, sculpture, music, 

 poetry and the like were properly called the elegant, that is, the elected, 

 arts, and they soon came to hold the same relation in thought to the 

 useful arts as the leisure class held to the laboring class. 



This, then, is the explanation of the long-accepted division of the 

 arts into fine and useful : the monopolization of the fine arts by the 

 leisure class, and the compulsory practise of the useful arts by the slave, 

 the serf and the wage laborer. It is a division based primarily upon a 

 class distinction. The fine arts, speaking generally, involve a greater 

 play of the imagination, a freer expression of individuality, more 

 pleasure than the useful arts, but this is due to the greater leisure and 

 freedom of those who monopolized them as well as to the nature of those 

 arts themselves. If laborers in the industrial arts had more freedom, 

 culture and leisure, and the conditions of their work were made con- 

 ducive to pleasure, these arts would become fine arts ; not so ' fine ' as 

 painting and sculpture, perhaps, but fine arts, nevertheless. ' Work 

 without art,' said Euskin, and by this I suppose he meant work unac- 

 companied by pleasure, ' is brutality.' But work ought not to be 

 divorced from art. The joy and beauty now associated with the fine 

 arts must become elements of the useful arts as well. " Beauty must 

 come back to the useful arts," said Emerson, " and the distinction 

 between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly 

 told, if life were nobly spent, it would no longer be easy or possible to 



