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The Discussion of Taste, from 1750 To 1770, and the New Trends in Literary Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward Niles Hooker
Edward Niles Hooker*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

The attempts to define and to arrive at a standard of taste lie at the heart of the aesthetic inquiries that were being carried on in eighteenth-century England. That such inquiries, by examining certain fundamental assumptions of traditional æsthetics, exerted an influence on the theory and practice of literary criticism, is a commonplace. But why and how this influence was felt has not been explained. Its importance can be gauged by the fact that within a period of twenty years several of the ablest minds in England and Scotland, including Burke, Hume, Hogarth, Reynolds, Kames, and Gerard—most of them interested in literary criticism—were focussed upon the problem of taste. It was not a coincidence that in the years from 1750 to 1770, when the search for a standard of taste was at its height, the old assumptions of literary criticism were crumbling and the new “romantic” principles were being set forth, sometimes timidly and sometimes boldly, by the Wartons, Young, Hurd, Kames, and many others. The relation between these two phenomena is the subject of this study.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1934 , pp. 577 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934

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References

1 History of Criticism, iii, 164, 169.

2 Aisso Bosker, Literary Criticism in the Age of Johnson (Groningen and The Hague, 1930), p. 142.

3 History of Aesthetic (London and New York, 1892), p. 181.

4 This struggle for and against standards was not confined to the field of æsthetics but was part of a general movement in which the forces of uniformitarianism, favorable to standards and rules, were opposed to the forces making for diversitarianism. The movement is exemplified in such trends as the conflict between rationalistic or deistic theology and that based on mysticism or revelation, and the conflict between the idea of a primitivistic society of natural impulse with few or no restrictions on individual liberty and the idea of a civilized, orderly, and rational society. One principle of great importance in the period is designated by Professor Lovejoy as the “doctrine of plenitude,” which insists that all things in the world are needful, both good and bad, and which emphasizes the existence and necessity of endless varieties of form in nature; the repeated expression of this principle is considered by Professor Lovejoy to be one of the chief forces in the transition from universalism to diversitarianism (see his “Optimism and Romanticism,” in PMLA, xlii [1927], 921–945). In the field of general æsthetics the reaction against uniformitarianism, exemplified in the taste for the landscape painting of Poussin et al, for natural and Chinese gardening, and for Gothic architecture (all leading to a conception of nature as wild, irregular, and diversified), has been ably described in several recent works.

5 That defining taste seemed also to involve defining rules of composition may be illustrated by a remark of Whitehead in the World for 1753 (no. 12): “Taste in my opinion, ought to be applied to nothing but what has as strict rules annexed to it, though perhaps imperceptible to the vulgar, as Aristotle, among the criticism, would require or Domenichino, among the painters' practice.

6 Such an aim is indicated in the full title of Hogarth's essay, The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste.

7 There had, of course, been a group of critics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century who had emphasized the grace beyond the reach of art, the je-ne-sais-quoi, the charm that appealed to the heart rather than to the head; this group Mr. Spingarn has denominated the School of Taste. But their views were widely different from those of the writers of whom I take account here. In the first place, they did not analyse what they meant by taste, and therefore they did not come to grips with the essential problems of criticism; in the second place, they tended to believe, like Addison, that the charm of art was an added element not inconsistent with the rules. More or less typical was the position of John Dennis, who stressed the need in literature of “enthusiasm,” a quality appealing to the heart, and who yet accepted the Aristotelian rules, based upon the practice of the ancients and upon a priori reasoning.

8 DuBos' work was quoted or referred to by (among others) John Gilbert Cooper, Joseph and Thomas Warton, David Hume, Gerard, Blair, Johnson, Kames, and Pinkerton. As LeBossu lost favor, DuBos came to be considered, as Pinkerton called him, the most judicious of the French critics. It is important to note that Cooper hailed DuBos, Blackwell, and Hurd (each one of whom represented the ideal of historical criticism, which served to weaken the rationalistic uniformitarianism of the Augustans) as modern critics who had penetrated “deeper into the Laurel Grove of Science than any of their Predecessors ever ventured” (Letters concerning Taste [third edition, 1757], Letter xix). Some of the more important statements of DuBos' method are to be found in his Réflexions, i, xxxiv, xxxv, xlix; and ii, xxiii.

9 Bosker, p. 64.

10 The skepticism was extended to uniformitarianism in general. Commenting on the paucity of men who really know the world, and on the infinite differences apparent among individuals, the popular William Melmoth remarked: “The reason, perhaps, of the general ignorance which prevails in this sort of knowledge, may arise from our judging too much by universal principles. Whereas there is a wonderful disparity in mankind, and numberless characters exist which cannot properly be reduced to any regular and fixed standard.” (Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzoborne [London, 1795], Letter xxxviii—the two volumes of this was were first combined in their present form in 1749.)

11 Kames, Elements of Criticism (1788), i, 12.

12 Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, Part i, Section xix.

13 Essay on Taste (Edinburgh, 1780), p. 129.—The first edition is of 1759.

14 vii (1759), 440–447.

15 Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. Green and Grose (London, 1875), iii, 271.“—Hume's essay on taste appeared in his Four Dissertations (1757).

16 Ibid., 278–279.

17 Ibid., 269.

18 Ibid., 270–271.

19 Ibid., 280–281.

20 Ibid., 279.

21 The idea that the standard of taste may be found in general approbation is probably connected with the various theories supporting Common Sense, and may be related to the rise of democratic sentiment in the eighteenth century. An interesting note connecting the appeal to the consensus gentium with the ideas of classicism and deism is found in A. O. Lovejoy's “The Parallel of Deism and Classicism,” in MP, xxix (1932), 281–299.

22 Kames, ii, 498–500. The first edition of Kames was published in 1762.

23 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Lecture ii, on “Taste.”—Though this work did not appear until 1783, the lectures were delivered from about 1760 and were apparently widely known.

24 Letter xxxix.

25 Gerard, p. 245.—This occurs in Part iv, first published in the third edition, 1780, but the ideas are implicit in the earlier parts.

26 “On Taste” (1770), in The Works of Edmund Burke (New York, 1837), i, 40.—The principles were first evolved in his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful (1756).

27 It had been pointed out by DuBos that universal principles of beauty are either subject to exception or are too vague and indeterminate to be applied in art criticism: “Les principes géneraux sur lesquels on peut se fonder pour raisonner conséquemment touchant le mérite d'un poëme, sont en petit nombre. Il y a souvent lieu à quelque exception contre le principe le plus universel. Plusieurs de ces principes sont si vagues, qu'on peut soutenir également que le Poëte les a suivis, ou qu'il ne les a suivis dans son ouvrage” (Réflexions, ii, xxiii).

28 Letter xxxix.

29 Pp. 259–260.

30 Lecture ii, “Taste,” in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Philadelphia, 1850), p. 25.

31 Ibid., pp. 22–23.

32 Bosanquet, p. 207–208.

33 Analysis of Beauty (1753), 20. For other remarks directed against regularity and symmetry, see pp. 18, 19, and 67.

34 Part iii, Sections ii to vi.

35 Gerard, p. 33.

36 Ibid., p. 22.

37 Ibid., p. 147, note.

38 iii, ix.

39 Gerard, p. 17.

40 Reynolds' position was in keeping with the trend of the times.—In an article contributed to MLN for November, 1932, Professor Lovejoy has shown how, in connection with the first Gothic revival, the earlier conception of nature as “regular” and mathematically proportioned was giving way to a conception of it as irregular, unconstrained, and diversified.

41 Idler, no. 82.

42 Cf. Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (third edition, 1729), Section vi, Article xiii.

43 Kames, i, 214.

44 Lecture iii.

45 Ibid.

46 Essay on the Subline and Beautiful, ii, ii.

47 Lecture iii.

48 Cf. Gerard, p. 17.

49 Ugliness, according to Burke (Part iii, Section ii), though it constitutes the opposite of the qualities of beauty, yet is consistent with the idea of the subline; it may actually become sublime when it is united with other qualities which excite terror. In other words, ugliness is merely ugly except in certain indefinable circumstances, when it becomes sublime.

50 Blair, Lecture iv.

51 Essay on the Subline and Beautiful, i, xiii.

52 Lecture ii.

53 Cooper, Letter i.

54 Ibid., Letter iv.

55 Gerard, pp. 139–140.

56 Ibid., p. 89.

57 Hutcheson, iv, vi.

58 Gerard, p. 39.

59 Réflexions, ii, xxiii.

60 Sir Harry Beaumont (Joseph Spence), Crito: or, a Dialogue on Beauty (1752), in Dodsley's Fugitive Pieces (1761), i, 7.

61 Ibid., 8.

62 Ibid., 38.

63 No. 120.

64 Part iii, Section i.

65 xx, 533–45.

66 xxxvii, 75.

67 x (1754), 100–110.

68 Monthly Review, xvi (1757), 473–480; Critical Review, iii (1757), 361 ff.

69 iii (1757), 209–216.

70 xx (1759), 533–545.

71 vii (1759), 440–447.

72 xxvi (1762), 413–428; xxvii (1762), 13–24, 105–117.

73 vii (1759), 440–447.

74 This belief in the competence of individual taste should not be confused with the rationalistic individualism of the Augustans. In the latter, as it is described by Professor Lovejoy (“The Parallel of Deism and Classicism”), “the reader or beholder is sometimes bidden to rely solely upon his own judgment or feeling—once it has been purified of prejudices and is a genuine expression of ‘common nature’—in judging of the value or ‘beauty’ of a work of art”; whereas in the former belief, individual taste is recognized as valid even though it departs from what has been accepted as beautiful for two thousand years (cf. Dr. Armstrong's poem “Taste”).