also an entirely base
and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged
contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an "unmannered,"
or "immoral" quality. It is "bad taste" in the profoundest sense--it
is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian's,
or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses
delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing.
That is an entirely moral quality--it is the taste of the angels And
all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple
love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which
we call "loveliness"--(we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness,
to be said of the things which deserve to be hated); and it is not an
indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is
just the vital function of all our being. What we _like_ determines
what we _are_, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is
inevitably to form character.

As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day,
my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller's
window. It was--"On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all
classes." "Ah," I thought to myself, "my classifying friend, when you
have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who
likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think.
Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by
the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other
work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger or a
costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and
'Pop goes the Weasel' for music. You think you can make him like Dante
and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have
made a gentleman of him:--he won't like to go back to his
coster-mongering."

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time
to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any
vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever,
either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national
virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the
art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to
produce. Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and
patient courage. You have at present in England only one a