The Man of Taste

GENERAL EDITORS
ADVISORY EDITORS
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
INTRODUCTION
For what has Virro painted, built, and planted?
Only to show, how many Tastes he wanted.
What brought Sir Visto's ill got wealth to waste?
Some Daemon whisper'd, Visto! have a Taste.
(Pope, Epistle to Burlington)
Addison prefaced his series of Spectator papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination with a ground-clearing essay on taste (No. 409). In this classic account of the term, Addison defines taste as that Faculty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure, and the Imperfections with Dislike. Addison's taste is an innate proclivity towards certain kinds of aesthetic experience that has been consciously cultivated in the approved direction. It is not enough to value and enjoy the right authors; they must be valued and enjoyed for the right reasons. When he holds up to ridicule the man who assured him that the greatest Pleasure he took in reading Virgil, was in examining Aeneas his Voyage by the Map, Addison clearly expects his readers to agree that such a singular taste was in fact no taste at all. His account implies not only a standard of taste, but also general agreement, at least among men of taste, about what the standard was. It is this circularity that makes it essential to assume some innate faculty of taste.
But Addison's prescription for the cultivation of taste was a laborious one, involving prolonged reading and study. The wealthy, and especially the newly wealthy, were tempted to confuse the correct appreciation of the objects of taste with the mere possession of them; so that, as with Pope's Timon in the Epistle to Burlington (1731), owning a library became a substitute for reading books. This false taste for ostentation—especially in buildings—is a frequent target of contemporary satire.
The social importance of taste as an index of wealth was reinforced by current philosophical thinking that gave taste a moral dimension too. In his Characteristicks (1711), Shaftesbury postulated an innate moral sense, just as Addison did an innate aesthetic sense. Shaftesbury draws this analogy between the moral and the aesthetic: