ted, involves first essentially
the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually
beautiful thing by it.

Skill and beauty, always, then; and, beyond these, the formative arts
have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined
to you--truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither
the skill nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either
legitimately reign. All the graphic arts begin in keeping the outline
of shadow that we have loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect
of life; and all the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the
cup and the platter, and they end in a glorified roof.

Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and
Likeness; and in the architectural arts Skill, Beauty, and Use: and
you _must_ have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and
all the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of
these elements.

For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are
founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill,
photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main
nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get
everything by grinding--music, literature, and painting. You will find
it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding.
Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley
first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we
have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was
trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long
ago[187] I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The
entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take
pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right
costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking
at a strong man's work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in
looking at a honeycomb or a bird's-nest; we understand that these
differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of
sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a
honeycomb or a bird's-nest,--have we not known people, and sensible
people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?

Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the
highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or
utility, which is not the mor