February, 1917 
3L 
WHAT IS GOOD TASTE? 
A Discussion Over Corned Beef and Cabbage 
That Led To Complete Befuddlement 
T here were three of us at luncheon 
—the critic, his artist wife, and my¬ 
self—and we had deliberately resolved to 
be vulgar. 
If you ever made a business of weighing 
esthetic considerations, day in, day out, 
you will understand perfectly. One needs 
a vacation. As it seemed to us, no vacation 
could be more complete than sitting down 
in the ultra-exquisite dining-room of the 
Carcassonne and ordering corned beef and 
cabbage. 
But alas for tlie best-laid schemes of mice 
and men! Scarcely had we begun wallow¬ 
ing in vulgarity when the suspicion stole 
over us, were we vulgar? 
I blush to own that it was I who raised 
the question first. I grieve to add that— 
instantly, almost—^ the artist wife asked, 
“What is bad taste, anyhow ?” and that her 
husband rejoined with, “What on earth is 
good ?” 
Thus perished our vacation. A moment 
more, and we were deep in discussion. 
I should violate confidence were I to 
divulge just who said just what, but I can 
nevertheless trot out the subject matter, bit 
by bit, and allow it to lead up gradually to 
the solemn and awful befuddlement in which 
we were left. Such, indeed, is my object. 
Befuddled, myself, I hope to promote be¬ 
fuddlement in others. We are much too 
cock-sure about our so-called “principles of 
taste.” We should pause, now and then, 
and feel sheepish. 
Looking back, it is hard to say which was 
cockiest—the critic, his artist wife, or I— 
at the outset. We started in by assuming 
that good taste must of course be the taste 
of the best people. Is it, though? 
T he more you look at it, the more you 
will see that the best people cannot 
be relied upon. They marched through 
Greece, once—thousands of them—on their 
way to the Holy Land. They saw the 
Parthenon. They saw the Erechtheum. 
They saw the choragic monument of Lysi- 
crates. None of these lovely creations ap¬ 
pealed to them in the least. They went 
home and invented a style of architecture 
which was out-and-out anti-Grecian in 
every way—namely, the Gothic. 
Later on, behold what a change overtook 
the taste of the best people! They sneered 
at Notre-Dame. They ridiculed York 
Minster. They had only contempt for 
Chartres, Canterbury, and the Antwerp 
Cathedral. “Barbarous,” they called the 
Gothic. They admired only the Renais¬ 
sance. When the west front of Saint- 
Rtienne du Mont fell into decay, they rebuilt 
it in Renaissance and were sorry that it 
still retained Gothic outlines. In modern 
days, the esthetic tomfooleries of the best 
people almost stagger credulity. Parisians, 
when the Czar paid them a visit, tied 
millions of paper roses to the branches of 
their leafless trees. Italians blasphemed the 
works of Tiepolo, Correggio, and Tintoret 
with Turkey-red window shades. Boston¬ 
ians, at a never-to-be-forgotten musical 
ROLLIN LYNDE HARTT 
festival, boasted an “Anvil Chorus” with 
three hundred real anvils. 
A wonderful crew, our best people! 
Winckelmann had the time of his life get- 
ing them to tolerate Greek sculpture. They 
starved Millet, Corot, Daubigny, Rousseau 
and Diaz; then shocked them with sudden 
riches. During the reign of terror—I mean 
that of “decorative art” (pronounced 
“de-cor-ative”)—they hung gilded rolling- 
pins on drawing-room walls, adorned chairs 
with pink ribbons, and thought nothing so 
tasteful as a plush-framed mirror, with 
morning-glories daubed on the plush and 
spilling over on the glass. 
E ven in their lucid intervals it appears 
that the best people made queer arbiters 
of taste. They are cultured in spots, rarely 
cultured all over. Whistler, the delicate 
tone-poet of color, crammed his den with 
graphophones long, long before the grapho- 
phone had ceased to be a squawking abomin¬ 
ation. Edgar Allan Poe, gifted with a 
genius for the music of sweet vocables, 
betrayed a surprising sort of taste when he 
wrote his little essay on “The Philosophy 
of Furniture.” Said he, “There is present 
to the mind’s eye a small and not ostenta¬ 
tious chamber with whose decoration no 
fault can be found.” I have the document 
before me. Otherwise, I could hardly 
believe in that room. Can you? 
It had crimson-paned windows, curtained 
by “a thick silver tissue” and “exceedingly 
rich crimson silk, fringed with a deep net¬ 
work of gold.” At the “junction of the 
ceiling and walls,” it had “a broad entabla¬ 
ture of rich gilt-work.” It had a Saxony 
carpet “of the same crimson ground, 
relieved simply by the appearance of a gold 
cord” forming “a succession of short irreg¬ 
ular curves, one occasionally overlying the 
other.” Two “large low sofas of rosewood 
and crimson silk, gold flowered,” were “the 
only seats with the exception of two light 
conversation chairs, also of rosewood.” An 
“octagonal table, formed altogether of the 
richest gold-threaded marble,” stood near 
one of the sofas. “Four large and gorgeous 
Sevres vases” occupied “the slightly 
rounded angles of the room.” To complete 
the composition, add pictures, a mirror, a 
piano, “some light and graceful hanging 
shelves, with golden edges and crimson silk 
cords with golden tassels,” a “tall candela¬ 
brum, bearing a small antique lamp with 
highly perfumed oil,” and, finally, an 
Argand lamp “with a plain crimson-tinted 
ground-glass” dangling “from the lofty 
vaulted ceiling by a single slender gold 
chain” and “throwing a tranquil but magical 
radiance over all.” Wonderful! Perfect! 
With that adorable chamber of horrors, “no 
fault could be found!” 
And yet this same Poe, at another time 
and in another mood, wrote delightedly of 
Landor’s cottage in the woods, “Nothing 
could well be more simple—more utterly 
unpretending. Its marvelous effect lay 
altogether in its artistic arrangement as’ a 
picture. I could have fancied, while I 
looked at it, that some eminent landscape 
painter had built it with his brush.” 
L ike a candle in the wind, is taste. 
4 Circumstance, a chance word, or even 
such a trifle as sex will waft it this way or 
that. At the Grande Chaumiere, when a 
girl i§ posing, you count among the students, 
six women and forty men; when a man is 
posing, six men and forty women. The 
young lady from Kalamazoo will say, “I 
prefer the male model, the feminine curves 
are so insipid.” The young gentleman from 
Philadelphia will say, “I detest the male 
model. Those brusque, angular, over- 
obvious contours are much too uninterest¬ 
ing.” There may be such a thing, abstractly, 
as inherent beauty, finer in the one case than 
the other. Practically and humanly, there 
is nothing of the sort. 
At times, a mere noise may jostle the 
candle-flame. “Fools! Blind leaders of 
the blind !” shouts Ruskin. “Listen to me !” 
Forthwith, the world tags after Ruskin. 
“Now—I—tell—you, these Post-Impres¬ 
sionists have struck something big and fun¬ 
damental !” cries a self-appointed critic. 
Sure enough, there are people who, at his 
lusty bidding, fall down and worship Van 
Dongen. Or some one bellows, “The 
Primitives—ah!” In consequence, tourists 
rush to admire bandy-legged saints and 
tuberculous madonnas afflicted with Pott’s 
disease of the spine, while others, more 
zealous, “wish all the Titians could be 
destroyed.” And, mind you, these are 
not cranks and gullibles alone. Among 
them our best people are represented. 
When the noise has a tang of fun in it, 
you witness a phenomenon still more 
remarkable. A little banter, a little chaffing, 
and away flies beauty. There was a certain 
fierce splendor in the Laocoon, once. It 
departed when a sinful wag declared, 
“Brethren, this snaky group has nothing 
whatever to do with old man Laocoon and 
his brats. It celebrates humanity’s first 
encounter with spaghetti!” Years ago, 
Boston erected a Museum of Fine Arts in 
red brick charmingly embellished with terra 
cotta. Some villain remarked, “If archi¬ 
tecture is frozen music, as Madame de 
Stael asserted, then this is frozen ‘Yankee 
Doodle’.” Thereafter, no one could tolerate 
the exquisite building. 
J UST here came in a further element—- 
novelty. Terra cotta was new in Bos¬ 
ton then, and while novelty may delight, 
it may shock. Put a name to the shock.—■ 
“Yankee Doodle,” for instance—and it is 
all up with beauty. On the other hand, an 
innovation may begin by shocking and end 
by pleasing. The automobile was hideous 
at first. Now it is magnificent. The 
inflated tire of a bicycle called forth peals of 
laughter at first. Now it looks well and the 
old-style tire is ridiculous. When I first put 
on the owlish, shell-rimmed glasses I wear, 
I was greeted with whoops and jeers. Today, 
no one notices. Tomorrow, like as not, you 
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