But here we are confronted by the enormous unrestricted weight of the limitation which is felt least by the architect--personal taste. We do not dictate much to our builders, most of us; but we do dictate as to the inside of the house and all that is in it. The dominating influence in home decoration is of course the woman. She is the final arbiter of the textures, colours, proportions, sizes, shapes, and relations of human production. How does she effect our output? What is her influence upon art--the applied art that is found, or should be found, in everything we make and use?
We may buy, if we can afford it, specimens of art, pictorial or sculptural art, or any other, and place them in our houses; but the mere accumulation of beautiful objects is not decoration; often quite the contrary. There are many beautiful vases in the shop where you bought yours; there is but one in the Japanese room--and there is beauty.
The magpie instinct of the collector has no part in a genuine sense of beauty. An ostentatious exhibit of one's valuable possessions does not show the sense of beauty. A beautiful chamber is neither show-room nor museum. That personal "taste" in itself is no guide to beauty needs but little proof. The "taste" of the Flathead Indian, of the tattooed Islander, of all the grades of physical deformity which mankind has admired, is sufficient to show that a personal preference is no ground for judgment in beauty.
Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not possessed equally by all. The more primitive and ignorant a race, or class, the less it knows of true beauty.
The Indian basket-makers wove beautiful things, but they did not know it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they do not consciously select it.
Our women are far removed from the primitive simplicity that produces unconscious beauty; and they are also far removed from that broad culture and wide view of life which can intellectually grasp it. They have neither the natural instinct nor the acquired knowledge of beauty; but they do have, in million-fold accumulation, a "personal taste." The life of the woman in the home is absolutely confined to personal details. Her field of study and of work is not calculated to develop large judgment, but is calculated to develop intense feeling; and feeling on a comparatively low plane. She is forced continually to contemplate and minister to the last details of the physical wants of humanity in ceaseless daily repetition. Whatever tendency to develop artistic feeling and judgment she might have in one line of her work, is ruthlessly contradicted by the next, and the next; and her range of expression in each line is too small to allow of any satisfying growth.