under
different circumstance, dictates a different performance. The deviations
between races and men are not yet so great as is the ignorance of self,
the blindness to the native ideal, which prevails in most of them. Hence
a great man of a remote epoch is more intelligible than a common man of
our own time.

[Sidenote: Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i.e._,
harmonious with all other interests.]

Both elementary and ultimate judgments, then, contribute to a standard
of taste; yet human life lies between these limits, and an art which is
to be truly adjusted to life should speak also for the intermediate
experience. Good taste is indeed nothing but a name for those
appreciations which the swelling incidents of life recall and
reinforce. Good taste is that taste which is a good possession, a friend
to the whole man. It must not alienate him from anything except to ally
him to something greater and more fertile in satisfactions. It will not
suffer him to dote on things, however seductive, which rob him of some
nobler companionship. To have a foretaste of such a loss, and to reject
instinctively whatever will cause it, is the very essence of refinement.
Good taste comes, therefore, from experience, in the best sense of that
word; it comes from having united in one's memory and character the
fruit of many diverse undertakings. Mere taste is apt to be bad taste,
since it regards nothing but a chance feeling. Every man who pursues an
art may be presumed to have some sensibility; the question is whether he
has breeding, too, and whether what he stops at is not, in the end,
vulgar and offensive. Chance feeling needs to fortify itself with
reasons and to find its level in the great world. When it has added
fitness to its sincerity, beneficence to its passion, it will have
acquired a right to live. Violence and self-justification will not pass
muster in a moral society, for vipers possess both, and must
nevertheless be stamped out. Citizenship is conferred only on creatures
with human and co-operative instincts. A civilised imagination has to
understand and to serve the world.

The great obstacle which art finds in attempting to be rational is its
functional isolation. Sense and each of the passions suffers from a
similar independence. The disarray of human instincts lets every
spontaneous motion run too far; life oscillates between constraint and
unreason. Morality too often puts up with being a constraint an