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 æsthetic 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 usefulness, do the proudest and seemingly freest
works of art come to exist; come to be _just what they are_, and even
come _to be at all_.
I should like to state very clearly, before analysing its reasons,
what seems to me (and I am proud to follow Ruskin in this as in so
many essential questions of art and life) the true formula of this
matter. Namely: that while beauty has always been desired and obtained
for its own sake, the works in which we have found beauty embodied,
and the arts which have achieved beauty's embodying, have always
started from impulses or needs, and have always aimed at purposes or
problems entirely independent of this embodiment of beauty.