INTRODUCTION
The essays on taste taken from the work of John Gilbert Cooper and John Armstrong and reprinted in this issue are of interest and value to the student of the eighteenth century because they typify the shifting attitudes toward taste held by most mid-century poets and critics. Cooper, who accepts the Shaftesbury-Hutchesonian thesis of the internal sense, emphasizes the personal, ecstatic effect of taste. Armstrong, while accepting the rationalist notions of clarity and simplicity, attacks methodized rules and urges reliance on individuality.
Following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson closely, Cooper treats taste as an immediate, prerational response of an internal sense to the proportion and harmony in nature, a response from an internal harmony of the senses, imagination, and understanding to a similar harmony in external nature. Cooper defines the effect of good taste as a "Glow of Pleasure which thrills thro' our whole Frame." This "Glow" is characterized by high emotional sensibility, and it thus minimizes the passivity which Hutcheson attributes to the internal sense.
Armstrong's sources are more eclectic than Cooper's. Armstrong shows similarities to Pope in his rationalism, to Dennis in his treatment of poetry as an expression of the passions, and to Hutcheson in his emphasis on benevolence and the psychological basis of perception. But to these views, he frequently adds personal eccentricities. For example, Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic reveals its Popean descent in its tone and form; however, its gastronomic ending displays Armstrong's interest, as a physician, in the relation of diet to literary taste. If Armstrong's boast that "I'm a shrewd observer, and will guess What books you doat on from your fav'rite mess," is a personal eccentricity, his attack on false criticism and his exhortation to judge for oneself are typical harbingers of late eighteenth-century individualism and confidence in the "natural" man.
An honest farmer, or shepherd [writes Armstrong in "Of Taste">[, who is acquainted with no language but what is spoken in his own county, may have a much truer relish of the English writers than the most dogmatical pedant that ever erected himself into a commentator, and from his Gothic chair, with an ill-bred arrogance, dictated false criticism to the gaping multitude.[1]
[Footnote 1: John Armstrong, Miscellanies (London, 1770), II, 137.]
Cooper and Armstrong both hold a historically intermediate position in their attitudes toward taste, accepting early eighteenth-century assumptions and balancing them with late eighteenth-century emphases. Neither of them abandons the moral assumption of art which, as Armstrong explains it, is a belief in "a standard of right and wrong in the nature of things, of beauty and deformity, both in the natural and moral world."[2] Cooper, who defines taste as a thrilling response to art, falls back upon Hutcheson in minimizing the importance of art and making it secondary to moral knowledge. Armstrong, while describing taste as the sensitive discrimination of degrees of beauty and deformity, bases this discrimination not on artistic, but on moral qualities.
[Footnote 2: Ibid., II, 134.]
The complete transition from classic to romantic premises of taste is characterized by the separation of art from morals. This step neither Cooper nor Armstrong takes. But they do exhibit tendencies which explain how the shift was made possible. Both writers insist on a felt response to a work of art. Cooper emphasizes that this response must be to the whole work. This assumption implies that a work of art is an entity complete in itself; it makes possible the argument that art conveys artistic, not moral knowledge. Cooper, by stressing sensibility as an effect of taste, suggests the Wordsworthian notion that the poet is more sensitive than other people.
Armstrong, in addition to his hostility to formal criticism and his confidence in the natural man, reveals three other tendencies which later eighteenth-century critics elaborated. Like Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition, 1759, Armstrong opposes slavish imitation of ancient models and declares that the writer should "catch their graces without affecting it [them]" so that his "own original characteristical manner will still distinguish itself."[3] Armstrong emphasizes exquisiteness of perception as the basis for taste: the more exquisite the mind, the more is it able to discriminate among the various degrees of the beautiful and the deformed. Although later critics repudiate Armstrong's moral discrimination, they transform it into a refined discrimination of aesthetic qualities. Finally, by suggesting that the man of genius differs from the man of taste by his ability to handle a medium, Armstrong implies the possibility of a technical criticism in terms of the writer's craft, apart from moral judgment.
[Footnote 3: Ibid., II, 168.]
Although the works of Cooper and Armstrong elicited contrasting popular reactions—Letters concerning Taste running into four editions from 1755 to 1771 and Armstrong's writings, with the exception of The Art of Preserving Health, never winning much public favor—neither writer exerted a strong critical influence. Cooper did not reassess or change significantly the assumptions of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. His work was primarily a popularization of their ideas, and, in its enthusiastic language, its emphasis on sensibility, and its epistolary form, it seems directed at flattering a female audience. Armstrong's remarks on taste, written in imitation of the simplicity and clarity of the rational tradition, are personal assertions and opinions rather than well-defined or clearly thought-out critical positions. They are random thoughts rather than a coherent critical theory.
The significance of Cooper and Armstrong rests, therefore, on certain representative attitudes toward taste which exhibit the change "from classic to romantic." On the one hand, they accept the moral postulates of art, and, on the other, they emphasize the emotional basis of taste. Cooper treats art as a secondary form of knowledge, yet emphasizes the thrill that art gives. Armstrong accepts the standards of clarity and simplicity, while emphasizing the individuality of response and the need for discriminating particular, rather than general, qualities. Though Cooper and Armstrong fail to revaluate the traditions they accept, they exemplify trends which led others to perform this revaluation and to transform the moral assumptions into aesthetic criteria.
Bibliographical Note
The two reprints from the twenty letters of John Gilbert Cooper's Letters concerning Taste. To which are added Essays on similar and other Subjects are from the third edition, dated 1757; the first edition was published in 1755 as Letters concerning Taste. The selections by John Armstrong are taken from the two-volume Miscellanies published in 1770. "The Taste of the Present Age" received its first publication in this edition, but the other prose had previously been published in 1758 under the pseudonym of Launcelot Temple in the first volume of Sketches: or Essays on Various Subjects. The poem Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic was first published in 1753.
Ralph Cohen
LETTERS CONCERNING TASTE.
LETTER I.
To EUPHEMIUS.
Whence comes it, EUPHEMIUS, that you, who are feelingly alive to each fine Sensation that Beauty or Harmony gives the Soul, should so often assert, contrary to what you daily experience, that TASTE is governed by Caprice, and that BEAUTY is reducible to no Criterion? I am afraid your Generosity in this Instance is greater than your Sincerity, and that you are willing to compliment the circle of your Friends, in giving up by this Concession that envied Superiority you might claim over them, should it be acknowledged that those uncommon Emotions of Pleasure, which arise in your Breast upon the Observation of moral or natural Elegance, were caused by a more ready and intimate Perception of that universal TRUTH, which the all-perfect CREATOR of this harmonious System ordained to be the VENUS of every Object, whether in the Material World; in the imitative Arts; or in living Characters and Manners. How irreconcileable are your Doctrines to the Example you afford us! However, since you press me to justify your Practice against your Declarations, by giving a Definition of what is meant by TASTE, I shall not avoid the invidious Office of pointing out your superior Excellence to others, by proving that TRUTH and BEAUTY are coincident, and that the warmest Admirers of these CELESTIAL TWINS, have consequently Souls more nearly allied to ætherial Spirits of a higher Order. The effect of a good TASTE is that instantaneous Glow of Pleasure which thrills thro' our whole Frame, and seizes upon the Applause of the Heart, before the intellectual Power, Reason, can descend from the Throne of the Mind to ratify it's Approbation, either when we receive into the Soul beautiful Images thro' the Organs of bodily Senses; or the Decorum of an amiable Character thro' the Faculties of moral Perception; or when we recall, by the imitative Arts, both of them thro' the intermediate Power of the Imagination. Nor is this delightful and immediate Sensation to be excited in an undistempered Soul, but by a Chain of Truths, dependent upon one another till they terminate in the hand of the Divine COMPOSER of the whole. Let us cast our Eyes first upon the Objects of the Material World. A rural Prospect upon the very first Glance yields a grateful Emotion in the Breast, when in a Variety of Scenes there arises from the whole ONE Order, whose different Parts will be found, by the critical Eye of Contemplation, to relate mutually to one another, and each examined apart, to be productive of the Necessaries, the Conveniencies, and Emoluments of Life. Suppose you was to behold from an Eminence, thro' a small range of Mountains covered with Woods, several little Streams gushing out of Rocks, some gently trickling over Pebbles, others tumbling from a Precipice, and a few gliding smoothly in Willow-shaded Rivulets thro green Meadows, till their tributary Waters are all collected by some River God of a larger Urn, who at some few Miles distance is lost in the Ocean, which heaves it's broad Bosom to the Sight, and ends the Prospect with an immense Expanse of Waters. Tell me, EUPHEMIUS, would not such a Scene captivate the Heart even before the intellectual Powers discover Minerals in the Mountains; future Navies in the Woods; Civil and Military Architecture in the Rocks; healing Qualities in the smaller Streams; Fertility, that the larger Waters distribute along their serpentising Banks; Herbage for Cattle in the Meadows; and lastly, the more easy Opportunities the River affords us to convey to other Climates the Superfluities of our own, for which the Ocean brings us back in Exchange what we stand in need of from theirs. Now to heighten this beautiful Landscape, let us throw in Corn Fields, here and there a Country Seat, and, at proper Distances, small Hamlets, together with Spires and Towers, as MILTON describes them,
"bosom'd high in tufted Trees."
Does not an additional Rapture flow in from this Adjunct, of which Reason will afterwards discover the latent Cause in the same manner as before. Your favourite Architecture will not fail to afford less remarkable Instances, that Truth, Beauty, and Utility are inseparable. You very well know that every Rule, Canon, and Proportion in building did not arise from the capricious Invention of Man, but from the unerring Dictates of Nature, and that even what are now the ornamental Parts of an Edifice, originally were created by Necessity; and are still displeasing to the Sight, when they are disobedient, if I may use that moral Expression, to the Order, which Nature, whose Laws cannot be repealed, first gave to supply that Necessity. Here I appeal to your own Breast, and let me continue the Appeal by asking you concerning another Science analogous to this, which is founded upon as invariable Principles: I mean the Science of living well, in which you are as happily learned as in the former. Say then, has not every amiable Character, with which you have been enamoured, been proved by a cool Examination to contain a beautiful Proportion, in the Point it was placed in, relative to Society? And what is it that constitutes Moral Deformity, or what we call Vice, but the Disproportion which any Agent occasions, in the Fabric of Civil Community, by a Non-compliance to the general Order which should prevail in it?
As the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry are imitative of these, their Excellence, as ARISTOTLE observes, consists in Faithfulness to their Original: nor have they any primary Beauty in themselves, but derive their shadowy Existence in a mimetic Transcript from Objects in the Material World, or from Passions, Characters, and Manners. Nevertheless that internal Sense we call TASTE (which is a Herald for the whole human System, in it's three different Parts, the refined Faculties of Perception, the gross Organs of Sense, and the intermediate Powers of Imagination) has as quick a Feeling of this secondary Excellence of the Arts, as for the primary Graces; and seizes the Heart with Rapture long before the Senses, and Reason in Conjunction, can prove this Beauty by collating the Imitations with their Originals.
If it should be asked why external Objects affect the human Breast in this Manner, I would answer, that the ALMIGHTY has in this, as well as in all his other Works, out of his abundant Goodness and Love to his Creatures, so attuned our Minds to Truth, that all Beauty from without should make a responsive Harmony vibrate within. But should any of those more curious Gentlemen, who busy themselves With Enquiries into Matters, which the Deity, for Reasons known only to himself, has placed above our limited Capacities, demand how he has so formed us, I should refer them, with proper Contempt, to their more aged Brethren, who may justly in Derision be stiled the Philosophers of ultimate Causes. To you, my dear Friend, whose truly philosophical and religious Taste concludes that whatever GOD ordains is right, it is sufficient to have proved that Truth is the Cause of all Beauty, and that Truth flows from the Fountain of all Perfection, in whose unfathomable Depth finite Thought should never venture with any other Intention than to wonder and adore. But I find I have been imperceptibly led on from Thought to Thought, not only to trespass upon the common Stile of a Letter, by these abstruse Reasonings and religious Conclusions, but upon the ordinary length of one likewise; therefore shall conclude by complimenting my own Taste in Characters, when I assure you that I am,
Your most affectionate Friend, &c.