Victor Hugo has made no utterances more grandly true than when he pleads for the beautiful being made the servant of progress as voiced in the following sentiment: "Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when so much depends upon being efficient and good. Art for art's sake may be very fine, but art for _progress_ is finer still. Ah! you must think? Then think of making man better. Courage! Let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just; it is well for us to do so. Some pure lovers of art, moved by a solicitude which is not without its dignity, discard the formula, 'Art for Progress,' the Beautiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble to see the drudge's hand attached to the muse's arm. According to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact with _reality_. They are solicitous for the sublime, if it descends as far as to humanity. They are in error. The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, enlarges it. But critics protest: To undertake the cure of social evils; to amend the codes; to impeach law in the court of right to utter those hideous words, 'penitentiary,' 'convict-keeper,' 'galley-slave,' 'girl of the town'; to inspect the police registers; to contract the business of dispensaries; to study the questions of wages and want of work; to taste the black bread of the poor; to seek labor for the working-woman; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to improve the food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and drink; to demand solutions for problems and shoes for naked feet,--these things they declare are not the business of the azure. Art is the azure. Yes, art is the azure; but the azure from above, whence falls the ray which swells the wheat, yellows the maize, rounds the apple, gilds the orange, sweetens the grape. Again I say, a further service is an added beauty. At all events, where is the diminution? To ripen the beet-root, to water the potato, to increase the yield of lucern, of clover, or of hay; to be a fellow-workman with the ploughman, the vinedresser, and the gardener,--this does not deprive the heavens of one star. _Immensity does not despise utility_,--and what does it lose by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or electric flash through the cloud-masses with less splendor because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and to keep constant to the north the little needle intrusted to it, the gigantic guide? Yet the critics insist