tead were grown lobelias,
geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because
any one thought them more beautiful, but because, since they were grown
in green-houses, they implied the possession of green-houses and so of
wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they could be
bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They implied only the bad taste of
snobbery which is the absence of all real taste. For it is physically
impossible for any one to like such a combination of plants better than
larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy was not the flowers
themselves but their association with gentility. But so strong was the
contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw
away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so
detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage
gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now
is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias,
calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as
it was once one of social superiority. But what it never was and never
could be was an expression of a genuine liking.

Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this account of a simple
perversion of taste to Ruskin and Morris. It was they who first made the
world aware that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was
therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction of artistic
sin, and who also in a manner entirely scientific tried to discover what
was the nature of this sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin
tentatively, and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own
vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts with certain
social conditions. It was not merely that taste had decayed or that the
arts had developed to a point beyond which there was nothing for them
but decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the decay of
taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much subject to the will of
man as the causes of any kind of social decay or iniquity. He insisted
that a work of art is not an irrational mystery, not something that
happens and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately
connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is in fact an
expression of what we value, and if we value noble things it will be
noble, if we pretend to value base things it will be base.