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 enabled _more people_ to 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.