Chapter XI: Of 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 everyone attempts to procure it, make the taste for the
useful predominate over the love of the beautiful in the heart of man.
Democratic nations, amongst 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 everyone 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
amongst 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