we all mean by
_craft_?

To this objection, perfectly justified by the facts of our own day, I
would answer quite simply: There is no necessary or essential
distinction between what we call _art_ and what we call _craft_. It is
a pure accident, and in all probability a temporary one, which has
momentarily separated the two in the last hundred years. Throughout
the previous part of the world's history art and craft have been one
and the same, at the utmost distinguishable only from a different
point of view: _craft_ from the practical side, _art_ from the
contemplative. Every trade concerned with visible or audible objects
or movements has also been an art; and every one of those great
creative activities, for which, in their present isolation, we now
reserve the name of _art_, has also been a craft; has been connected
and replenished with life by the making of things which have a use, or
by the doing of deeds which have a meaning.

IV.

We must, of course, understand _usefulness_ in its widest sense;
otherwise we should be looking at the world in a manner too little
utilitarian, not too much so. Houses and furniture and utensils,
clothes, tools and weapons, must undoubtedly exemplify utility first
and foremost because they serve our life in the most direct,
indispensable and unvarying fashion, always necessary and necessary to
everyone. But once these universal unchanging needs supplied, a great
many others become visible: needs to the individual or to individuals
and races under definite and changing circumstances. The sonnet or the
serenade are useful to the romantic lover in the same manner that
carriage-horses and fine clothes are useful to the man who woos more
practically-minded ladies. The diamonds of a rich woman serve to mark
her status quite as much as to please the unpleasable eye of envy; in
the same way that the uniform, the robes and vestments, are needed to
set aside the soldier, the magistrate or priest, and give him the
right of dealing _ex officio_, not as a mere man among men. And the
consciousness of such apparent superfluities, whether they be the
expression of wealth or of hierarchy, of fashion or of caste, gives to
their possessor that additional self-importance which is quite as much
wanted by the ungainly or diffident moral man as the additional warmth
of his more obviously needed raiment is by the poor, chilly, bodily
human being. I will not enlarge upon the practical uses which recent
e