Vegetarian: Because I understand that you cultivate the artistic sense. You love to have beautiful things about you, do you not? So you must needs wish to be a vegetarian.
Æsthete: I love beautiful things, certainly. Art is my vocation. But what has vegetarianism to do with it?
Vegetarian: Have the arrangements of the dinner-table nothing to do with it—the cloth, the silver, the glasses, the dessert, the flowers?
Æsthete: A great deal, obviously. There is much art in dining well.
Vegetarian: Yet the meats that are served at the table have nothing to do with it! Is not that rather contradictory?
Æsthete: I did not say that. The cookery is an essential point, of course.
Vegetarian: But what of the meat—the thing cooked? What is it? What was it? And how did it come to be on your plate?
Æsthete: I never think of such questions. So long as it is nice, I am content. It must satisfy my taste, that is all.
Vegetarian: But are you sure that it does satisfy your taste in the same way that other things do? I think not, for you have never put it to the trial. In no other branch of art do you take things wholly on trust, but you try them by the standard of an independent and educated intelligence. In diet, and in diet only, you "shut your eyes and open your mouth," as the children say, and never distinguish between a real innate liking and the liking that is merely traditional.
Æsthete: De gustibus non est disputandum.