the absence of
taste, but the beginning of it.

A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions creates traditional
forms and expresses the simple pathos of its life, in unchanging but
significant themes, repeated by generation after generation. When
sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition is substituted bad taste
comes in. The essence of it is a substitution of non-aesthetic for
aesthetic values. To love glass beads because they are beautiful is
barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar; to love jewels only because
they are dear is vulgar, and to betray the motive by placing them
ineffectively is an offence against taste. The test is always the same:
Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real; it
may be different from that of others, but is equally justified and
grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is
spurious, and you are guilty, not of heresy, which in aesthetics is
orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self-excommunication
from its sphere.

Now, a great sign of this hypocrisy is insensibility to sensuous
beauty. When people show themselves indifferent to primary and
fundamental effects, when they are incapable of finding pictures
except in frames or beauties except in the great masters, we may
justly suspect that they are parrots, and that their verbal and
historical knowledge covers a natural lack of aesthetic sense.
Where, on the contrary, insensibility to higher forms of beauty
does not exclude a natural love of the lower, we have every reason
to be encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, which only
needs experience to refine it. If a man demands light, sound, and
splendour, he proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that
appearances as such interest him, and that he can pause in
perception to enjoy. We have but to vary his observation, to
enlarge his thought, to multiply his discriminations -- all of which
education can do -- and the same aesthetic habit will reveal to him
every shade of the fit and fair. Or if it should not, and the man,
although sensuously gifted, proved to be imaginatively dull, at
least he would not have failed to catch an intimate and wide-spread
element of effect. The beauty of material is thus the groundwork of
all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have
to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where
sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can
arouse delight.