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CHAPTER XI.
CONCERNING THE SPIRIT IN WHICH THE AMERICANS CULTIVATE
THE ARTS.
It would be to waste the time of my readers and my own, if I
strove to demonstrate how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the
absence of superfluous wealth, the universal desire of comfort, and
the constant efforts by which every one attempts to procure it,
make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of the
beautiful in the heart of man. Democratic nations, among which
all these things exist, will therefore cultivate the arts which serve
to render life easy, in preference to those whose object is to adorn
it. They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and
they will require that the beautiful should be useful.
But I propose to go further; and after having pointed out this first feature, to sketch several others.
It commonly happens that in the ages of privilege the practice of almost all the arts becomes a privilege; and that every profession is a separate walk upon which it is not allowable for every one to enter. Even when productive industry is free, the fixed character which belongs to aristocratic nations gradually segregates all the persons who practise the same art, till they form a distinct class, always composed of the same families, whose members are all known to each other, and among whom a public opinion of their own, and a species of corporate pride soon spring up. In a class or guild of this kind, each artisan has not only his fortune to make, but his reputation to preserve. He is not exclusively swayed by his own interest, or even by that of his customer, but by that of the body to which he belongs; and the interest of that body is, that each artisan should produce the best possible workmanship. In aristocratic ages, the object of the arts is therefore to manufacture as well as possible—not with the greatest dispatch, or at the lowest rate.
