II
Before we can appreciate the truth of that assertion—that the quality of public taste has been influenced by mechanical methods of reproduction—we must be prepared to view the art-life of the community as a whole. Too often we tend to regard only the better elements, the top layer, and to ignore the lower strata. We segregate a section of the populace—that which appreciates, or pretends to appreciate, Art (with a capital A)—and forget that the remainder, which indulges in jazz, ‘the pictures’, light fiction, Bovril pictures, and tin-chapel architecture, is actuated by the same motives. The quality of their artistic experiences and the standard of their taste and artistic education may be very different, yet they seek the same kind of experience as the others. It is entirely a matter of degree.
Therefore we must regard the art-life of a community, as we must and do regard its social, religious, or political life, as comprising a little good, much bad, and more that is indifferent. Once this is realized, and only then, the full significance of the mechanical factor is apparent.
Let us go back to the pre-mechanical era, when only a small number of people had any opportunity for contact with art and only a few had developed a love for and the ability to appreciate its higher manifestations. At the same time a similarly limited populace found satisfaction in the second, third—and fifth-rate. Probably then, as now, more enjoyed the second-best than the finest, and so on, though probably the contrast was not so great as it is now. However that may be, when a new reproductive process was introduced it was naturally applied to the lower types rather than to the better, for an obvious reason. It enabledmore peopleto be brought into contact, and these newcomers must naturally be unaccustomed to and incapable of appreciating the best. The education of taste is a slow process,whereas the new invention was a sudden force, applied immediately in whatever direction offered it the greatest scope. And so we find at once an increase in the lower grades of appreciation which is out of proportion to the benefits bestowed upon the higher.
The trouble did not end there, however. Greater familiarity tends to form taste, especially in these matters. Art serves most men chiefly as a luxury, a relaxation, a recreation; and in our quest for these we are apt to take that which is most easily obtained. The mechanical factor, by making the fourth-rate accessible,generated a desire for the fourth-rate: this desire stimulated further reproduction, and this, in turn, brought more into the artistic fold, at each step lowering the quality of the most accessible and the most desired.
The result is that to-day the average quality of the whole artistic consumption of the populace is considerably lower than it had ever been before in civilized times. Though every day more and more people are reading some kind of printed matter, witnessing plays—silent and audible—of a sort, looking at pictures,penny plain or twopence coloured, though the time is not far distant when every man will be interested to some extent in art in one or other of its forms, our art-life is developing not so much in quality as in quantity.