'I don't think it helps,' was the [late] Queen's response to a question about the importance of taste. But to the rest of us, this most elusive and treacherous commodity has harrowing significance. In the preindustrial era when only one class had the economic power to acquire discretionary goods, there were no disputes about taste because there was only one variety: the aristocrat's. But as soon as Victorian mass consumption made choice available across a broader spectrum, a single standard was no longer viable. The Duke of Devonshire and the south London railway clerk tended, for whatever reason, to make different choices. And it showed. Aspirational gentility - as that Victorian clerk dreamt of living like the Duke - was a result and it brought us fish knives, ever since an accurate indicator of social divisions. In his autobiography, Well, I Forget the Rest, Quentin Crewe explained that his mother 'had never seen fish knives until she got married'. Bravura snobbery is an English art form: Lord Beauchamp thought it middle class not to decant Champagne. Work that one out.
It is not true that the English are visually illiterate. On the contrary, our social hierarchy is intricate, subtle and deadly, but more often expressed in manners and houses than in art or, despite Lord Beauchamp, gastronomy. The Duchess of Devonshire once told Brian Masters, 'For a long time it was thought vulgar to comment on the food.' Then she added: 'And the world of art.' The English have had in Addison, Steele, Burke and Hogarth aestheticians who have theorised about taste, but it is usually a matter more practical than philosophical. For the English, the country house has always been the great laboratory of taste.
A virulent dislike for urban industrial civilisation has characterised and tormented the English ever since they created it. In 1859, John Ruskin described his nightmare vision of a future with no meadows or trees, corn grown on rooftops and farmed by steam while people travel on viaducts and in tunnels. There is no sunlight because of the factory smoke and soon, he worried, 'no acre of English ground shall be without its shaft and its engine.' Suburbia, a Home Counties rus in urbe, was one historical response to this: an acknowledgment of the horrors of the city and a means of escape from it. You could say the same for the Range Rover today.
This car is as revealing of English taste as Chatsworth. Americans had large, high-performance, comfortable four wheel-drives long before the Range Rover appeared in 1970, but none of them ever acquired the potent meanings of the English car. And, reflecting typical English disdain for technology, the reasons for its success have very little to do with engineering or design. On the contrary, ownership suggests precious access to the countryside; 'precious' because, for the English, rural associations are rich with prestige. To an Italian, a contadino is a disgusting walnut-coloured throwback to living in a pigsty, practising bestiality on weekdays and incest at the weekends, driving an unwashed 10-year-old Fiat van. The Romantic movement bestowed a nobility on the English rustic or smallholder, and 'landowner' suggests to the English something altogether different from any existence which implies close, daily contact with livestock. The landowner's carriage is the Range Rover, the semantics of which have come to suggest for the socially ambitious a winning combination of cosmopolitan sophistication when in the countryside and possession of a country estate while in Knightsbridge or Chelsea.
The size, climate and balling geological complexity of the British Isles have influenced national taste, too. The latter has given us a fabulous range of building materials so marvellously described by Alec Clifton-Taylor. The terrible weather has forced us indoors. Cosy is a not a word that translates easily. And when not indoors we are gardening, as if in miniature expiation of the industrial urges that despoiled so much natural landscape. As both Shakespeare and Kipling knew, 'Adam was a gardener.' So, too, is the Englishman. The French and Italians have their superb formal gardens, but only the English do 'gardening', an altogether more improvisational and personal activity. They do not trust the cold symmetry of Le Nôtre, preferring the artful untidiness of Gertrude Jekyll, whose partnership with Edwin Lutyens produced elegiac compositions that can be fully understood only when you have seen the Rhondda Valley slag heaps - evidence of the riches which made them possible.
But more than the garden exterior, it is the country-house interior that documents English taste most perfectly. Even John Blatchley, the legendary Rolls-Royce designer, said he modelled his cars' interiors on drawing rooms. Americans have often expressed status with collections of classic French furniture, what Edith Wharton in The Custom of the Country (1913) called 'the Looey suites'. Indeed, pioneer decorator Elsie de Wolfe made her fortune by introducing old French furniture to new American money. But the English are different. While Germans, French and Italians take pleasure in novelty, the English prefer hand-me-downs. Indeed, our royal family has a tradition of redistributing heirlooms as wedding presents, a transmission of taste by genetic drip. It is a very short step from Nancy Mitford's belief that ‘All nice rooms are a bit shabby’ to that devastating criticism of the self-made potentate that he is 'the sort of man who buys his own furniture'. This preference for the mildly tatty over the vulgarly brand-new can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century. Typically, commenting on Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, a moralising painting of 1856 showing a strumpet leaping from her lover's knees as he strikes a chance chord on the piano, Ruskin said the picture's hero is a cad because of the 'fatal newness of his furniture'.
When not despising their neighbours' fatal newness, the English are keen on reviving the past, another example of nostalgic access to an imaginary Arcadia that they felt industrialisation destroyed. At the founding of The Victorian Society in 1957, attendees included the poet John Betjeman and the decorator John Fowler, a one-time salesman at Peter Jones. Betjeman was the perfect poet-topographer of English taste: his sentimental doggerel about a cup of tea, a sunny afternoon, a snooze and comfy chairs was utterly persuasive and, of course, retardataire. His personal achievement was neatly complemented by The National Trust, whose chief decorator was that same John Fowler.
The National Trust began as an amenity society to protect the landscape for the working classes but, through its country house scheme (pioneered by James Lees-Milne, because he liked having tea with dukes as much as the dukes enjoyed the prospect of being rescued from financial oblivion), became an antiquarian cult. And it was a cult of huge influence. After the Second World War when many country houses had been requisitioned and their interiors ruined by the NAAFI, owners had the chance to rethink the matter of decoration. Fowler's light-on-the-carpet 'humble elegance' filled a vacuum left by the clodhopping military. He created a style that was very much of his own invention, as calculated and as winning as Betjeman's verse. This shabby chic did not come cheap: Fowler discriminated between 16 shades of white and insisted that a cornice was moved a mere two inches to achieve an exquisite effect he had in mind. The National Trust invented a version of the past for generations which had never had one of their own.
Eccentricity has been another influence on English taste. In the lives of travel writers Bruce Chatwin or Patrick Leigh Fermor, both heroes of English taste, it often found expression in boggling connoisseurship. When Leigh Fermor needed to replace an old Victorian mahogany dining table, he did not go to Habitat. Instead he acquired something of 'inlaid marble ... made by Dame Freya Stark's marmorista in Venice', which was 'based on a tondo in the chancel of S Anastasio in Mantua' from which 'white flames of Udine stone radiate from the centre of a design of subtle grey ... and rosso di Verona'. You will not find that sort of thing in Tottenham Court Road.
William James, brother of novelist Henry, published The Principles of Psychology in 1890. He describes the 'self ' as 'the sum total of all that [an individual] can call his, not only his body and his psychic power, but his clothes, and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his land and horses and yacht and bank account'.
And that is English taste. It is eclectic: its unity is in its diversity, but there are recurrent characteristics. English taste looks back wistfully and is based in the country. Novelty is as unwelcome as excessive tidiness. Our hostess has dirty nails since she has been planting bulbs; the boot room is the pumping heart of her house; its exhibits are its treasures. We have loose covers: they are a bit scruffy because of the dogs. As I write this, a smell comes to mind. It is an intoxicating mixture of hot Aga and cold, wet labrador. I can hear a Range Rover grumbling up the drive. This business of taste is more about attitude than style. No one knew this better than Alexander Pope:
'Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace;
If not, by any means get wealth and place.'
And when you get there: keep your covers loose and, no matter how expensive, shabby.
