As for the tradesman, he is no longer an expert any more than the critic or the impressario is.  No longer a merchant, no longer a shop-keeper even, he is to-day a universal provider.  Fifty years ago the nice housewife still prided herself on knowing the right place for everything.  There was a little man in a back street who imported just the coffee she wanted, another who blended tea to perfection, a third who could smoke a ham as a ham should be smoked.  All have vanished now; and the housewife betakes herself to the stores.  We no longer insist on getting what we like, we like what we get.  The March Hare’s paradox has ceased to be paradoxical.  For five years Europe has been doing what it was told to do; for five years our experts have subjected their critical sense to a sense of patriotism and a desire to keep in with the majority; at last the producers themselves have lost their sense of values and can no longer test the quality of their own productions.  There are no standards.

Let no one imagine that standards are, like police regulations, things that can be imposed by authority.  Standards exist in the mind, where they grow out of that personal sense of values which is one of the twin pillars on which civilization rests.  All that authority can do is to stimulate and sharpen that sense by subtle education and absolute sincerity.  The critic can put good things in another man’s way and present them in a sympathetic light; also, he can resolutely refuse ever to pretend that he likes what he does not like.  Standards are imposed from above in the sense that people who have the ability and leisure to cultivate their sense of values will, if they take advantage of their opportunities, inevitably influence those less favourably placed.  In the fine arts, certainly, taste is bound to be very much directed by people blest with peculiar gifts and armed with special equipment.  But, besides taste in the fine arts, there is such a thing as taste in life; a power of discerning and choosing for one’s self in life’s minor matters; and on this taste in life, this sense of the smaller values, is apt to flourish that subtler and more precious aesthetic sense.  Without this taste no civilization can exist; for want of it European civilization is seemingly about to perish.

Take the thing at its lowest.  A rich, good-humoured fellow, replete with a fabulously expensive but distressingly ill-chosen dinner in a magnificently ill-furnished and over-lit restaurant, excited by Saumur (recommended as “Perrier Jouet, 1911”) and a great deal of poor conversation drowned, for the most part, by even noisier music, may be heard to say, as he permits the slovenly waiter to choose him the most expensive cigar—­“That will do, sonny, the best’s good enough for me.”  The best is not good enough for anyone who has standards; but the modern Englishman seems to have none.  To go to the most expensive shop and buy the dearest thing there is his notion of getting the best.  You may dine