e years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when
it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic
catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the
whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary
literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They
talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the
letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings
of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe
would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied
with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was
passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle
to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not
aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all
things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased
them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is
no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When
science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are
more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation;
their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to
work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But
when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with
it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they
lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers
did excellently.

But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history.
The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has
ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw
the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly
he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He
was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first
to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he
was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more
science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was
that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what
they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they
suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they