TASTE, IDEALS, STTLE, CHARACTER 25 



munity or even national taste, recognizable as a fairly constant and 

 definite thing. 



The taste of individuals and of communities develops, or at any DevelopmefU 

 rate changes, with time, coordinately with their changing fund of ex- °/ ^^^ 

 perience. People with undeveloped and simple minds are likely to 

 prefer obvious effects, bright colors, evident and man-made composi- 

 tions. As their experience of beautiful things increases, they may 

 come to enjoy more subtle and complicated harmonies, more restrained 

 designs, and develop an esthetic sensitiveness which will enable them 

 to see and enjoy beauty in objects which before would have given them 

 no pleasure.* 



A person's taste may also be developed by being intentionally modeled " Schools '* 

 on that of another. The taste of some artist or group of artists may 1^^,. . 

 become especially noted and may collect a group of disciples following 

 a master and forming a "School." A definite body of taste of this 

 kind tends to perpetuate itself for a considerable time in the same way 

 that community or national taste does. Such traditions of taste for 

 work along definite lines are exceedingly valuable to the progress of 

 art. The individual artist who is willing to base his work on the work 

 of his predecessors can profit by their experience ; and the conception 

 on which the school is founded may thus ultimately be carried, perhaps 

 through generations of artists, to its most complete expression. But 

 a school so perpetuated may end by producing nothing but bad work, 

 because its fundamental conception, which was at first a life-giving prin- 

 ciple, has been supplanted by some of its mere outward manifestations, 

 some trick of the trade, and has become only a dead formula. Or 

 it may be that the constantly changing needs and thoughts of the com- 

 munity may no longer be expressed by the tradition, so that this dies 

 because it finds no new artists to carry it on. 



There will always be certain men whose individual likes and dis- 

 likes are so strong, whose minds organize their experiences so definitely 

 and so originally, that they refuse to be bound by the common taste 

 of their community. If they have also the gift of artistic expression, 

 and if their ideas prove to be in some measure an expression of the 



* Cf, the section Experience, Emotion, and Association, Chapter II, p. 12, and 

 reference to Shaler. 



