iatics and thick-lipped negroes--the sort of people with whom uncle
and cousins traffic in the big ships, or among whom grandfather helped
the Doge to raise the standard of St. Mark. Also that carpenters work
with planes and vices, and stonemasons with mallets and chisels; and
that good and wise men are remembered for ever: for here is the story
of how Solomon discovered the true mother, and here again the Emperor
Trajan going to the wars, and reining in his horse to do justice first
to the poor widow. The child looks at the capitals in order to see
with his eyes all these interesting things of which he has been told;
and, during the holiday walk, drags his parents to the spot, to look
again, and to beg to be told once more. And later, he looks at the
familiar figures in order to show them to his children; or, perhaps,
more wistfully, loitering along the arcade in solitude, to remember
the days of his own childhood. And in this manner, the things
represented, fruit, animals and persons, and the exact form in which
they are rendered: the funnel shape of the capitals, the cling and
curl of the leafage, the sharp black undercutting, the clear, lightly
incised surfaces, the whole pattern of line and curve, light and
shade, the whole pattern of the eye's progress along it, of the rhythm
of expansion and restraint, of pressure and thrust, in short, the real
work of art, the visible form--become well-known, dwelling in the
memory, cohabiting with the various moods, and haunting the fancy; a
part of life, familiar, everyday, liked or disliked, discriminated in
every particular, become part and parcel of ourselves, for better or
for worse, like the tools we handle, the boats we steer, the horses we
ride and groom, and the furniture and utensils among which and through
whose help we live our lives.

II.

Furniture and utensils; things which exist because we require them,
which we know because we employ them, these are the type of all great
works of art. And from the selfsame craving which insists that these
should be shapely as well as handy, pleasant to the eye as well as
rational; through the selfsame processes of seeing and remembering and
altering their shapes--according to the same aesthetic laws of line and
curve, of surface and projection, of spring and restraint, of
clearness and compensation; and for the same organic reasons and by
the same organic methods of preference and adaptation as these
humblest things of usef