Our modern communities are far from understanding this distinction. Just as in art we multiply inadequate chromolithographs and starve the modern artist, so in architecture a good part of machine-work is devoted to the production of fake handicraft, like the molded stone ornamentation used in huge Renaissance fireplaces, designed frequently for small modern apartments that are superheated by steam. In turn, the surviving worker who now practices handicraft has been debased into a servile drudge, using his skill and love, like his predecessors in Imperial Rome, to copy the original productions of other artists and craftsmen. Between handicraft that is devoted to mechanical reproduction and machinery that is set to reproduce endless simulacra of handicraft, our esthetic opportunities in art and architecture are muffed again and again. An occasional man of talent, like Mr. Samuel Yellin, the iron-worker, will survive; but the great run of craftsmen do not. Now, with due respect to the slickness and perfection of the best machine-work, we enjoy it because of the use that it fulfills: it may incidentally achieve significant form, but no one retains a pickle bottle, beautifully shaped though Messrs. Heinz and Co.’s are, for this reason: it was meant for pickles and it vanishes with the pickles. This is not merely true of today: it is true of all ages: the common utensils of life return to the dust, whereas those things that hold the imprint of man’s imagination--the amphoræ of the Greek potters, the fragile crane-necked bottles of the Persians, the seals of the Egyptians--are preserved from the rubbish heap, no matter how frail they may be or how small their intrinsic value. There is something in man that compels him to respect the human imprint of art: he lives more nobly surrounded by his own reflections, as a god might live. The very rage of iconoclasm which the Mohammedans and Puritans and eighteenth-century liberals exhibited betrayed a deep respect for the power of art; for we destroy the things that threaten our existence. Art, in a certain sense, is the spiritual varnish that we lay on material things, to insure their preservation: on its lowest terms, beauty is justified because it has “survival value.” The fact that houses which bear the living imprint of the mind are irreplaceable is what prevents them from being quickly and callously replaced. Wren’s churches are preserved beyond their period of desuetude by Wren’s personality. This process is just the opposite to that fostered by the machine-system, and it explains why, in the long run, machine-work may be unsatisfactory and uneconomical--too quickly degraded.