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should be led to ask whether handicraft and manufacture are the 
ultimate attainment of human skill and thought, or whether 
there may not be something beyond them and above them, yet 
still related to them. The answer is—Yes, there are the fine 
arts. Then come the questions what the fine arts are, and what 
is the good of them? It has been said that the fine arts are the 
expression of man’s delight in God’s work. Well, so no doubt 
they are, but they are also the expression of man’s delight in his 
own genius and skill. ‘The human element in all true fine art is 
enormous ; and the more we know of the subject the more clearly 
we perceive this human element where others only see a reflection 
of the natural world. Nature and man combine in every good 
work of fine art. Nature gives the original suggestion, and 
teaches man how to organise things in the mimic world of art 
according to natural law ; how to make a figure that will look 
as if it could move, or a tree that will look as if it had grown. 
But beyond all this, which is the scientific half of art, lies the 
purely artistic half, which, is the free and masterful action 
of human genius expressing its preferences and tastes both by 
arranging material as it likes in that harmonious manner which 
is called artistic competition, and by laying stress or emphasis 
upon what it likes best in nature, and sacrificmg what 
it does not care for so much. The fine arts are therefore 
both studious and arbitrary; studious of natural truth and 
beauty, arbitrary in their adoption or rejection of it in their 
own human work. It follows from this double nature of 
the fine arts that they can only flourish in those places 
where there is a delight in nature and a delight in the 
highest and most perfect exercise of the human faculties. Now 
do you in the manufacturing districts take any unfeigned pleasure 
in natural beauty and human genius ? Industrial occupations, 
by what seems a fatal and inevitable law, are the destroyers of 
natural beauty everywhere. They destroy it both in landscape 
andin man. The landscape, in many parts of your manufactur- 
ing district, was formerly very beautiful, but it is now spoiled, as 
you know, in various ways. Pure air, pure water, and the 
luxuriant growth of trees and other plants are three essential 
elements of landscape beauty; a fourth, not less essential, is 
sufficient light. In a manufacturing town, and for a certain 
distance around it, the air is made impure, the streams are con- 
taminated with refuse, the trees wither and die, the plants cannot 
grow on the river’s banks, and the light is diminished by an 
opaque cloud of smoke which hangs perpetually between earth 
and sky. Then, as to the population, all medical authorities are 
agreed that the factory system has diminished the strength and 
beauty of the race. I remember that, when Mr. Byng came 
many years ago to get recruits for the Coldstream Guards, he 
