56 BEYIEWS — TECHNOLOGY. 



domain of Technology; for no arts call for more skilful workmen than Painting, 

 Sculpture, aud Music, and none are more technical in their modes of procedure. 

 Far less are the Fine Arts excluded, because they are regarded as useless or hurtful. 

 The Technologist avoids them for exactly the opposite reason. Poetry, Painting, 

 Sculpture, Music, and the sister arts, are in the highest degree useful, inasmuch as 

 they minister to the wants of the noblest parts of our nature ; but in so ministering 

 they excite such emotions of pleasure, or its inseparable correlative, pain, that the 

 sense of their usefulness is lost in the delight, or awe, or anguish, which they occa- 

 sion. So much is this the case, that while men thank each other for the gift of 

 bread when hungry, or of water when they are thirsty, or of a light to guide them 

 in the dark, they return no thanks for a sweet song, or a great picture, or a noble 

 statue ; not that they are unthankful for these, but that the duty of thanksgiving 

 is forgotten in the pleasure of enjoying, or the strangely fascinating pain of trembling 

 before a work of creative genius. 



"And the artist himself, singularly enough, in a multitude of cases, makes no 

 complaint at this thanklessness, and counts it no compliment to his work to calJ 

 it useful. The end of ^Esthetic or Fine Art, he will tell you, is the realisation of 

 beauty, not utility ; as if the latter were rather an accidental or unavoidable and 

 unfortunate accompaniment of the former, than the welcome inseparable shadow 

 which attends it, as the morning and evening twilight, tempering his brightness, go 

 before and after the sun. But such a description of the aim of his labours, though 

 natural to the arti3t, is unjust to his art. The true object of ^Esthetic or Fine 

 Art is not beauty, but utility, through or by means of beauty. 



" It may be that the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, often think 

 only of the emotional delight which their works will awaken in the hearts of their 

 brethren. But these works, in the very act of delighting, serve those whom they 

 delight. It is surely a3 useful a thing, on occasion, to fill the eager ear with music, 

 or the longing eye with the glories of form and colour, or the aching heart with 

 thoughts of joy, a3 it is to fill the hungry stomach with food, or to clothe the 

 naked Iwdy. 



" It is not, theD, beeause the utility of the Fine Arts is questioned, that they 

 are excluded from the domain of Technology. Neither is it because the feeling uf 

 their usefulness is lost in that of their delightfulness ; but beeause they are not 

 useful in the sense of being indispensable. The Utilitarian Arts do not stand 

 contrasted with them, as loving ugliness or hating beauty; they have no direct 

 concern with either. Their defining characteristic is not that they deal with what 

 is beautiful or unbeautiful, but with what is essential to man's physical existence. 

 The Fine Art3 are, in a certain sense, superfluous arts. The savage does not know 

 them. The great mass of civilized mankind pas* from the cradle to the grave, 

 almost untouched by their charms. Few men can spend more than a small por- 

 tion of their lives upon them. Even the greatest artists are such only at long 

 intervals. Shakespeare was not always poetising, or Raphael painting, or Men 

 delssohn singing. Lengthened seasons of unproductive sadness mark the lives of 

 them all. Like the fabled pelican, they feed others with their life-blood ; and it 

 would almost seem as if, in proportion to the delight which they <(ave to others, 

 they were miserable themselves. Wordsworth, whose own life was a happy ex- 

 ception to this rule, declares of his brethren as a class, that ' they learn in suffer- 

 ing what they teach in song.' ' A thing of beauty,' Keats has told us, ' is a joy 

 for ever,' but no poet has affirmed that it is a joy at all times." 



