man 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.

100. 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 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?

101. 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 moral, but the vital element; and this desire