ption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an
odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is
extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In
persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the
gift, habit, or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of
their various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the
honorific coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
serviceability--in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its
serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him
to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It
follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness
are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or
schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic
abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in
questions of taste.

As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore indecorous,
articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are
commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy
of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their
greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail
execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible
imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted
marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this
ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up
and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for
a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work
and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the
characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when
the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.

It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of
aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said
here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but
chiefly as a characterization of t