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The Modern Taste FROM the standpoint of artistic and literary taste and culture, the present world is a thing of extremes. On one side, it is trying hard to discover something very noble, and on the other, it is sinking into a vulgarity which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, of two or three centuries ago. In those times people who were not cultured were crude, but their crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much perversion in it-there was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, perversion also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, remains on level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that is to say, it is not only ignorant or stupid, it is ugly, dirty, repulsive, it is deformed, it is vile, it is extremely low. What makes it so is the wrong use of the mind. If there were no mind, this perversion would not exist. Now what is ugly is ugly from all points of view. There are things that are considered beautiful these days. I have seen photographs and reproductions which are frightfully vulgar in the perverted sense, and yet people are uproarious about them and find them beautiful. That means there is something there which has not only no culture and development, but has developed in the wrong way, that is to say, is deformed, which is worse, for it is much more difficult to straighten a perverted and deformed object than to enlighten that which is merely ignorant or without education. I believe there are certain things that have become
great instruments of perversion and among them I name the Cinema. The Cinema
could have been, and I hope one day it will be, an instrument of education and
culture. But for the moment it is largely an instrument of perversion, a truly
hideous perversion: perversion of taste, perversion of consciousness, a moral
Page – 146 and even a physical ugliness. And yet it is something which can be serviceable for education, for progress, for artistic culture and growth. It can be made a means for the spread of the sense of the beautiful and the creation of things beautiful in a way much more general and accessible to all than was possible by the older methods. But what could have been better, is not better but has become worse. As I said, we are in a period of excesses; we move
from one excess to another. If it is not an excess of zeal towards perfection,
we fall back into the opposite excess of perversion. As we live in the midst of
such a world, if we carefully note we shall find that we automatically share in
the universal vulgarism, unless we are watchful over ourselves and bring down
into our being the light of our highest consciousness; at every step we run the
risk of grave errors of taste, in matters spiritual also.
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