Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that genius is born, not
made, and that some peoples have artistic capacity, some have not. Now
it is true that nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in
the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the nations which
have little artistic capacity and little desire to produce art have in
their more primitive state produced charming works of real art. Whistler
gave the case of the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity
for art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and beauty, and
there are churches in Switzerland which have all the beauty of the
Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks and other Swiss articles of commerce
which Whistler despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss,
but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen who express no
pleasure of their own in them for visitors who buy them only because
they think they are characteristic of Switzerland. They are, in fact,
not the expression of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the
tourist trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the Swiss
would never be capable of producing works of art like Chartres Cathedral
or Don Giovanni, but they have in the past possessed a genuine and
delightful art of their own like nearly every European nation in the
Middle Ages.

So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though nations differ in
artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they
know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so
long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism.
This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of
seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part
of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the
nineteenth century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning in
any art of the past that did not resemble the art of their own time and
country. The whole art of the Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to
be merely barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of all
the past so far as it was known, except the later art of Greece and
Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed happen as art happened, and
they could not escape from the taste which circumstances imposed on
them; any art that was not according to that taste was for them as it
were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this g