could apply their
intellect and will to these things if they chose.

When we say that there is no accounting for tastes we imply that tastes
are always real, that, whether good or bad, they happen to men without
any exercise of their will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must
exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our tastes
really are; that this discovery is not at all easy, but that, if we do
not make it, we are at the mercy, not of our own real tastes, but of an
unreal thing which is called the public taste, or of equally unreal
reactions against it. We think that we like what we suppose other people
to like, and these other people too think that they like what no one
really likes. Or in mere blind reaction we think that we dislike what
the mob likes. But in either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at
all and, what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad because
it is not any one's taste, because no one's will is exercised in it or
upon it. When it is good, it is always real taste, that is to say some
real person's taste. In the work of art the artist does what he really
likes to do and expresses some real passion of his own, not some passion
which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to express. Art, said
Morris, is the expression of the workman's pleasure in his work. It
cannot be real art unless it is a real pleasure. And so the public will
not demand real art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they
do not know what they really like, they will not demand of the artist
what they really like or what he really likes. They will demand
something tiresome and insincere, and by the tyranny of their demand
will set him to produce it.

That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century in
nearly all the arts and especially in the arts of use. It had happened
before in different ages and countries, especially in painting,
sculpture, architecture, and the arts of use as they were patronized by
the vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened
suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich
only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there
spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this
I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the
cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do,
because they were the flowers of the poor. Ins