The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which
hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes
of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires
training and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to
what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of
daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their
excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given
due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial
inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of
skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish
of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and
permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of
conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however
pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste
for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this
norm of pecuniary reputability.
The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to
"commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production,
has been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine
products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such
goods. What is common is within the (pecuniary) reach of many people.
Its consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the
purpose of a favorable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence
the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an
odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is
extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In
persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the
gift, habit, or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of
their various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the
honorific coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
serviceability--in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its
serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him
to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It
follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness
are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or
schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic
abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in
questions of taste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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