Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/192

172 wastefulness of material or of energy. A cathedral will absorb more stone, and the labour of more men's lives, before it is finished, than a tenement of equal housing capacity which aims only at providing warmth and a cover from the elements. To provide so much joy and enlargement to the human spirit, a kind of waste, upon the material plane, is necessary; and the man without joy or imagination in his composition is likely to say on beholding it: "Why was all this waste made?"

Bear in mind this accusation of waste which can constantly be made, from a certain stand-*point against all forms of joy evolved by the art of living—possibly against all forms of joy that you can name; for all joy entails an expenditure of energy, and for those who do not realise the value of joy such expenditure must necessarily seem wasteful.

But when a man employs hand or brain worthily, straightway he discovers (latent within that connection) the instinct of delight, of ornament. He cannot rejoice in his craftsmanship without wishing to embellish it—to place upon it the expression of the joy which went with the making. All that he does to this end is apparently (from the material point of view) useless; but from the spiritual it is profoundly useful; and from the spirit (and this I think is important) it tends to re-act and kindle the craftsman to finer craftsmanship than if he had worked for utility alone.

Now if spirit thus acts on matter—achieving