l education can raise judgments on musical
compositions above impertinent auto-biography. The Japanese know the
beauty of flowers, and tailors and dressmakers have the best sense for
the fashions. We ask them for suggestions, and if we do not always take
their advice, it is not because the fine effects they love are not
genuine, but because they may not be effects which we care to produce.

[Sidenote: Tastes differ also in purity or consistency.]

This touches a second consideration, besides the volume and vivacity of
feeling, which enters into good taste. What is voluminous may be
inwardly confused or outwardly confusing. Excitement, though on the
whole and for the moment agreeable, may verge on pain and may be, when
it subsides a little, a cause of bitterness. A thing's attractions may
be partly at war with its ideal function. In such a case what, in our
haste, we call a beauty becomes hateful on a second view, and according
to the key of our dissatisfaction we pronounce that effect meretricious,
harsh, or affected. These discords appear when elaborate things are
attempted without enough art and refinement; they are essentially in bad
taste. Rudimentary effects, on the contrary, are pure, and though we may
think them trivial when we are expecting something richer, their defect
is never intrinsic; they do not plunge us, as impure excitements do,
into a corrupt artificial conflict. So wild-flowers, plain chant, or a
scarlet uniform are beautiful enough; their simplicity is a positive
merit, while their crudity is only relative. There is a touch of
sophistication and disease in not being able to fall back on such things
and enjoy them thoroughly, as if a man could no longer relish a glass of
water. Your true epicure will study not to lose so genuine a pleasure.
Better forego some artificial stimulus, though that, too, has its charm,
than become insensible to natural joys. Indeed, ability to revert to
elementary beauties is a test that judgment remains sound.

Vulgarity is quite another matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirty
hand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric without
cogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things we
should have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind of
dishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may be excellent in
isolation, so that an untrained or torpid mind will be at a loss to
understand the critic's displeasure. Oftentimes b