it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers did excellently. But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history. The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they 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.