Bad taste

“ This is how luxury acquires its power and makes us love what is rare and costly; this so-called beauty consists, not in following nature, but in disobeying her. Hence luxury and bad taste are inseparable. Wherever taste is lavish, it is bad.
Taste, good or bad, takes its shape especially in the intercourse between the two sexes; the cultivation of taste is a necessary consequence of this form of society. But when enjoyment is easily obtained, and the desire to please becomes lukewarm, taste must degenerate; and this is, in my opinion, one of the best reasons why good taste implies good morals. ”

“ The history of letters evinces, that the false taste which has preceded the brilliant ages of literature, has ever been eradicated by the true; but that after a purity of taste had triumphed for some time, a bad taste, different from the first, began to insinuate itself, increased by little and little, and at last obtained an evil ascendancy. ”

“ There are some people, who go to the opposite extreme, and represent any attention to dress as unworthy of a strong mind; becoming costume is in their eyes a mark of frivolity. I hardly know which of the two extremes is the worse. Extravagance in dress does great mischief both to fortune and character; but want of neatness, and want of taste are peculiarly disgusting. If finery betrays a frivolous mind, sluttishness and bad taste certainly betray an ill-regulated one. Neatness and taste naturally proceed from a love of order. ”

“ A bad taste seizes with avidity these frivolous beauties, and even perhaps a good taste, ere surfeited by them: they multiply every day more and more in the fashionable compositions: nature and good sense are neglected: labored ornaments studied and admired: and a total degeneracy of style and language prepares the way for barbarism and ignorance. ”

“ Bad taste, in fact, whether in literature or the arts, is always ready to seize upon the public, being, in many cases, no more than a pleasure in faults which are really fitted to please us, and of which it can only be said that they hinder or impair the greater pleasure we should derive from beauties. ”

“ Bad taste is a confusion of fashion, which lives only by change, with the lasting beauty produced by such and such a government, guided by such and such a climate. A building in fashion to-day, in ten years will be out of fashion. ”

“ Many writers use the terms indifferently, as when we say such a one is a man of taste, meaning of good taste, or such a one has no taste whatever, meaning that he is a man of bad taste. Strictly speaking, the savage who rejoices in the disfigurement of his person by tattooing, paint, and feathers, is a man of taste, as really as the Broadway dandy, or the Parisian exquisite. He has his faculty of judging in such matters, and exercises it—his standard of judging, and comes up to it. He is a man of taste, but not of correct taste. ”

“ Or: "Taste's about the same thing as table manners. Good taste! Bad taste! There's nothing good or bad in taste but thinking makes it so." And: "Never mind about taste, about beauty, about esthetics—all that dogmatic theology of art. Get to life. ”

“ There are too many of Kipling's Tomlinsons in the world, whose consciences are wholly compact of on dits, on whom the devil himself, sinned they never so sadly, would refuse to waste his good pit-coal. "Bad taste"—that opprobrious phrase which, worse than the accusation of a crime, cannot be refuted, for it is the king of the question-beggars,—"bad taste" is responsible for half the reticence that marks current writing, for the failure to prick the bladders of every species that bloat themselves all around us. ”

“ Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material [Page 27] sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection. He who receives little pleasure from these sources, wants taste; he who receives pleasure from any other sources, has false or bad taste. ”

“ A defective taste is incurable; and it hurts none but the possessor, because it carries no authority to impose upon others. I know not if there be such a thing as a taste naturally bad or wrong; a taste, for example, that prefers a groveling pleasure before one that is high and elegant. Groveling pleasures are never preferred: they are only made welcome by those who know no better. Differences about objects of taste, it is true, are endless: but they generally concern trifles, or possibly matters of equal rank where the preference may be given either way with impunity. ”

“ Whilst we consider taste merely according to its nature and species, we shall find its principles entirely uniform; but the degree in which these principles prevail, in the several individuals of mankind, is altogether as different as the principles themselves are similar. For sensibility and judgment, which are the qualities that compose what we commonly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people. From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong or a bad one. ”

“ He had one taste which may be pardoned in a boy, but which, when habitually and deliberately indulged by a man of mature age and strong understanding, is almost invariably the sign of a bad heart—a taste for severe practical jokes. ”

“ A taste once formed for reading light literature destroys the relish for solid reading; and usually the taste, once lost, is never regained. The fascination of bad companionship once formed around a person is broken with the greatest difficulty. Hence the necessity for watching for the very beginnings of evil and promptly checking them. ”

“ As to the floods of false jewelry, glass beads, and tinsel finery which seem to be sweeping over the toilet of our women, I must protest that they are vulgarizing the taste, and having a seriously bad effect on the delicacy of artistic perception. ”

“ This may appear paradoxical, but it is proved by experience, and is consistent with reason. To be without any received canons of taste is good for the few who can create, but bad for the many who can only imitate and judge. ”

“ His taste is bad; he loves society, but has no selection, and swallows wine for quantity, not quality: he is gross in everything. The Dss.’s madness has taken a sombre, farouche turn; she hates all mankind. ”

“ I wonder, by the way, whence has arisen the notion so common to people of very small taste or no taste at all, that so long as they stick to greys and drabs and slate colour, they are perfectly unimpregnable, however terribly they may mingle the shades, or, which is almost as bad, distress more sensitive organizations by unbroken monotony of dingy gloom. ”

“ There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious, or nice only. ”

“ He who sees much, especially new things, will soon be able to reproduce the things seen, and will, moreover, soon learn to distinguish between good and bad. About taste, so-called, it is not worth while arguing, as taste is mostly dictated by fashion and is often fashionable folly. ”

“ Some persons are naturally deficient in true taste, and others have had their taste perverted by a bad education; some are naturally of an amiable temper, while others have much that is perverse to contend with. ”

“ And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone—that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded—it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. ”

“ Finally, your judgment will be, of course, much affected by your taste in literature. Indeed, I know many persons who have the purest taste in literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon which puzzles me not a little: but I have never known any one with false taste in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also of the greatest importance to you, not only for art's sake, but for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a rocky island of your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good. ”

“ What is man needed for? And why, being needed as it seems, must he be a coarse and brutal being as compared with woman? And yet again, being as he is coarse and brutal, what is it that attracts woman toward him. To say that her taste is depraved, affords no answer. How came her taste to be depraved? Low qualities for low beings, but the architype of nature can have no business with depraved tastes, unless in the very wide sense that universal good includes all evil. ”

“ Now the case which I have called an error of taste, namely, where the actual qualities we admire (whether possessed by the ‘object’ or not) are ugly, can in any case have no value, except such as may belong to the emotion by itself; and in most, if not in all, cases it is a considerable positive evil. In this sense, then, it is undoubtedly right to think that seeing beauty in a thing which has no beauty is inferior in value to seeing beauty where beauty really is. ”

“ How gradually does the eye grow reconciled even to a disagreeable dress, as it becomes more and more the fashion, and how soon return to its dislike of it, when it is left off, and a new one has taken possession of the mind?—so vague is taste, when it has no solid principles for its foundation! ”

“ These pretty nothings—these caricatures of the real beauty of sensibility, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and overstretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action. ”

“ Whenever we see any thing distorted from its original shape, or represented in circumstances in which it could not have been placed, without thinking, of why, our taste revolts as from something impossible and untrue. ”

“ I am persuaded there can be found no proof so decisive of the degradation of our taste as the cool indifference with which we tolerate the representation of dramas, in which modesty, the gentler affections, good faith, decency, and all the virtues and principles belonging to a sound morality, are openly trampled under foot. ”

“ In matters of thought the caprices of "taste" are no doubt an evil, and they must of necessity darken the intelligence; but these same caprices applied to the maxims of the will become really pernicious and infallibly deprave the heart. Yet this is the dangerous extreme to which too refined an aesthetic culture brings us directly we abandon ourselves exclusively to the feelings for the beautiful, and directly we raise taste to the part of absolute lawgiver over our will. ”

“ Just in that degree to which sense impressions fail to produce in us 184immediate pleasures and aversions, fail to provoke us to instinctive emotions of joy and disgust, fail to stir in us moods of irritation and acquiescence,—in just that degree do they declare themselves to be adequate raw materials for the fine arts. If, as we are often told, the primary purpose of art is to please, this must be an entirely unexpected state of affairs, and the low position of taste in the æsthetic scale becomes quite unintelligible. ”

“ The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. ”

“ In this respect, for the most part, it is impossible to instance an example of worse taste than such an attempt to make visible in all directions a studied purpose in that which is without purpose, and to force that which refuses to be compelled. ”

“ The odium which France—always the protector of civilisation—has stamped upon the word "bourgeois" is no mere passing levity of an irresponsible Latin Quarter. It is the judgment of classic taste—the taste of the great artists and poets of all ages—upon the worst type of person, the type most pernicious to true human happiness, that has ever yet appeared upon the planet. ”

“ He neglects that other element, a grain of natural worth, which somehow delights in good for itself. This taste, I think, is quite as innate, and as active in us, as that other taste for evil which causes there to be something not wholly displeasing in the misfortunes of our friends. ”

“ It has been the main scope and principal end of this discourse to demonstrate the reality of a standard in taste, as well as in corporeal beauty; that a false or depraved taste is a thing as well known, as easily discovered, as any thing that is deformed, misshapen, or wrong in our form or outward make; and that this knowledge is derived from the uniformity of sentiments among mankind, from whence proceeds the knowledge of what are the general habits of nature; the result of which is an idea of perfect beauty. ”

“ There is a definite standard of taste and beauty, which consists in a certain relation between our nature—it may be weak or strong, but such as it is—and the thing that pleases us. All that is formed to this standard delights us,—house, song, writing, verse, prose, women, buds, rivers, trees, rooms, dress, etc. All that is not formed by this standard disgusts men of good taste. ”

“ I am no advocate for a utilitarianism which excludes just taste: but I believe our tastes to be depraved by the fall, no less than our affections; that they are not, as some suppose, free from sin—though less sinful, perhaps, than our moral tastes and preferences. I believe that a taste which is not conformed to the nature of things and to the law of God, is a perverted taste; and that the modern taste in regard to dress and ornament, is, to a great extent, of this description. ”