On Taste
It is a modern corruption to imagine “taste” belongs solely to the mouth. In my youth it still retained its older sense, that of touch, of tactility—the subtle judgment of the fingers as much as of the tongue. To have “taste” was not to favour one dish over another but to distinguish with delicacy, to feel what others could not perceive.
A gentleman of taste was not merely a man with a cellar of claret but one who handled life with discernment: who could tell at once the silk from the counterfeit, the sound judgment from the rash impulse, the word that would soothe from the word that would wound.
Later generations reduced this to gustus—to appetite and ingestion. They forgot that taste is not consumption but discrimination. This decline from tact to palate marks, I think, the collapse of refinement into fashion. One may cultivate appetite with money; one cultivates taste only with discipline.
Thus when I say a man has “taste,” I mean that he touches the world with judgment—not that he chews it with his teeth.
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