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
ethnology has discovered in the tattooing, the painting, the masks,
headdresses, feather skirts, cowries and beads, of all that elaborate
ornamentation with which, only a few years back, we were in the habit
of reproaching the poor, foolish, naked savages; additional knowledge
of their habits having demonstrated rather our folly than theirs, in
taking for granted that any race of men would prefer ornament to
clothes, unless, as was the case, these ornaments were really more
indispensable in their particular mode of life. For an ornament which
terrifies an enemy, propitiates a god, paralyses a wild beast, or
gains a wife, is a matter of utility, not of æsthetic luxury, so long
as it happens to be efficacious, or so long as its efficacy is
believed in. Indeed, the gold coach and liveried trumpeters of the
nostrum vendor of bygone days, like their less enlivening equivalents
in many more modern professions, are of the nature of trade tools,
although the things they fashion are only the foolish minds of
possible customers.
And this function of expressing and impressing brings us to the other
great category of utility. The sculptured pediment or frescoed wall,
the hieroglyph, or the map or the book, everything which records a
fact or transmits a feeling, everything which carries a message to men
or gods, is an object of utility: the coat-of-arms painted on a panel,
or the emblem carved upon a church front, as much as the helmet of the
knight or the shield of the savage. A church or a religious ceremony,
nay, every additional ounce of gilding or grain of incense, or day or
hour, bestowed on sanctuary and ritual, are not useful only to the
selfish devotee who employs them for obtaining celestial favours; they
are more useful and necessary even to the pure-minded worshipper,
because they enable him to express the longing and the awe with which
his heart is overflowing. For every oblation faithfully brought means
so much added moral strength; and love requires gifts to give as much
as hunger needs food and vanity needs ornament and wealth. All things
which minister to a human need, bodily or spiritual, simple or
complex, direct or indirect, innocent or noble, or base or malignant,
all such things exist for their use. They do exist, and would always
have existed equally if no such quality as beauty had ever arisen to
enhance or to excuse their good or bad existence.