timid, or lacking it may be; and the more imperious these rules are,
the wider these impulses are spread, the more vigorously alive will
be the art they produce; whereas in times when they are felt but
lightly and rarely, when one man's maxims seem absurd or trivial to
his brother craftsman, art is either sick or slumbering, or so
thinly scattered amongst the great mass of men as to influence the
general life of the world little or nothing.

For though this kind of rules of a craft may seem to some arbitrary,
I think that it is because they are the result of such intricate
combinations of circumstances, that only a great philosopher, if
even he, could express in words the sources of them, and give us
reasons for them all, and we who are craftsmen must be content to
prove them in practice, believing that their roots are founded in
human nature, even as we know that their first-fruits are to be
found in that most wonderful of all histories, the history of the
arts.

Will you, therefore, look upon me as a craftsman who shares certain
impulses with many others, which impulses forbid him to question the
rules they have forced on him? so looking on me you may afford
perhaps to be more indulgent to me if I seem to dogmatise over much.

Yet I cannot claim to represent any one craft. The division of
labour, which has played so great a part in furthering competitive
commerce, till it has become a machine with powers both reproductive
and destructive, which few dare to resist, and none can control or
foresee the result of, has pressed specially hard on that part of
the field of human culture in which I was born to labour. That
field of the arts, whose harvest should be the chief part of human