THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS 433 



consideration. They have been the instruments of trade and gain, 

 rather than the ministers of joy and life. They have thus been de- 

 graded. They are the Cinderella of the household of art. None the 

 less they are noble; and when clothed in beauty, as some day, let us 

 hope, they will be, they will win their full share of admiration and 

 devotion. The repulsion which some profess to feel toward the machine 

 arts is based upon a misconception. It is not these arts which should 

 excite disdain: it is the purpose for which they are employed and the 

 conditions under which they are practised. They could free men from 

 drudgery if properly used; they outrank the genii of fable in serving 

 their master ; and they are not in themselves incompatible with pleasure 

 and beauty. But as industrial conditions are to-day, men are not the 

 masters of the machine. They are enslaved by it. Machinery has 

 more slaves than any dominant class ever possessed. Thus it has been, 

 and thus it will be as long as men are ' an appendage to profit-grind- 

 ing.' Once free men from the machine, give them leisure and culture, 

 and the machine arts will become fine arts. Under normal conditions 

 the element of the beautiful would manifest itself in all work, mechan- 

 ical or manual, because man is a beauty-loving animal. 



It appears, then, that the arts now known as the fine arts must, in 

 our present classification, be distributed among the handicrafts and 

 the mechanical occupations, since they have been selected out because 

 of their idealistic character. They are physical arts, because, like all 

 such arts, they realize the ideal by the exercise of manual or mechanical 

 operations upon brute matter. The artist who paints a picture em- 

 ploys pigment and canvas and brush. To be sure he is supposed to 

 ' mix his paint with brains/ but there is nothing essentially unique in 

 this. Mortar should be so mixed — and dough. The sculptor uses stone 

 and a chisel. The mechanical part of his work is turned over to the 

 machine, from which he himself is free. His art differs in no inherent 

 and absolute respect from that of the industrial artist. Carving a 

 statue to please the eye ought not to differentiate the ' artist ' from the 

 laborer who carves a chair to relieve us of ' that tired feeling.' If the 

 one act is accompanied by pleasure, and a manifestation of the beauti- 

 ful, while the other is not, it is due to factitious circumstances. 



It is not to be denied, of course, that the fine arts are the most highly 

 cultivated of all the arts. Their possibilities have, perhaps, been more 

 completely realized than those of the other arts. Certainly this is true 

 with respect to the vital and the social arts. They have drawn to them- 

 selves much of the talent freed from the grosser forms of labor. They 

 have touched the highest levels of skill in execution, and of idealistic 

 conception. Zeuxis, it is said, imitated nature so successfully that the 

 birds pecked at his painted grapes, while Parrhasius, his Athenian 

 rival, deceived with his pictured curtain even the practised eye of 



VOL. LXX. — 28 



