The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-03-07
The Decline of English Taste.

The Decline of English Taste.
 The novel is the youngest of all our art forms, unless we except the music
 drama, which apparently received it's
 final expression from it's creator, Rich
 ard Wagner The novel is probably
 the only unexhausted art-form left;
 and so we find that 1t is the only art in
 which the writer Is assisted by the nat
 ural and spontaneous sympathy of the
 popuIace, Every one likes a good nov
 el; the noyel-writer need never feel, as
 he must truckle to other taste than his own under penalty of failure, But if good novels are liked, bad novels are liked still more; taste is decaying in the novel, as it has decayed in architec- ture, in sculpture and in painting, and in another fifty years or less the novel may be as barren of creative work as the other arts. Beethoven exhausted the symphony, and Wagner the music drama; the novel offered a more stub- born resistance, for after Balzac came Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert Turge- neff and Tolstoi. Nevertheless, the novel is showing. signs of yielding and yield it must But to what? To ex- haustion-the material having been used up-or to the decline of public taste? Enigma! That is natures ser cret.
 Nor must the deolinefof, taste which we have spoken of be attributed, as is much too frequently done, to the mid dle classes. The taste of the middle classes does not stand on q lower plane than the taste of the aristocracy The aristocracy reads the novels of Mir. Ma rion Crawford and Miss Marie Corelli with the same avidity as the middle classes; the .aristocracy admires the same pictures. Leader is as popular in a West End drawing-room as in a Peckham villa. The press Is guilty of nothing more thoughtless than it's sneers against the taste of Clapham and Peckham. Would that, bad taste were confined to these 1istricts There is no four-mile radius of taste, The duchess and the wife of the suburban stand side by side on the same low plane. With unanimous joy they would choose the same painter or painters, If their husbands gave them carte blanche for unlimited portrayal of their charms. Whose portraits are more vulgar than MT Roberts? Yet he continues substantial innings amid the titled folk, at cost of five | hundred pounds for a fun-length, train |
 
 and these portraits are admired in the l New Gallery by the merchants wives 1 from Peckhani. And if the Peckham | villas do not own as many Robertses as the West End mansions, 1t Is because | Peckham is not so rich as the West | End, and not for any other reason. | Boldini is as wretched an artist as ever | yielded a. brush, and from his abomfn- | able brush we know nothing more abominable than his portrait of Lady 1 Colin Campbell. The vulgar facility of | the drawing, of the painting, the vulgar | parade of mock knowledge--these quail ties, now unfortunately so popular with all classes, reached a climax in this portrait. Yet it was much a9, mired; it was exhibited in the Exhib- ion of Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries, and always attracted g mur- nur of common admiration.
 We merely regret all these things and wonder. We regret that the world is clearly lapsing back into savagery, a javagery more dlsagreeable to our aste than the savagery whence it We regret that our aristoc-l 'acy, the fine ladies especially who en- ertain in the West End, at whose din- Ter tables so much chatter about art is ndulged in, do not discover In them elves the ability and the inclination, Ind, in their lives, the necessary time, 70 learn the rudlments of a subject which apparently interests them. which certainly occupies their tongues, md on which they waste their money. Their husbands have no time for aes- hetic culture; they are often politl- ians; but for these ladies of leisure, or these leaders of social gossip, a se- ret class might be held in which they would be taught by rote what they hould like and what dislike in art london Saturday Review