“So advantageous is practice to the discernment of beauty, that, before we can give judgment on any work of importance, it will even be requisite that that very individual performance be more than once perused by us, and be surveyed in different lights with attention and deliberation.”
This is well illustrated by Burke, who observes: “It is known that the taste (whatever it is) is improved exactly as we improve our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.
“To illustrate this—(that there is a difference, not in the causes, nor in the manner of men’s being affected, but in the degree, owing to natural sensibility, or greater attention to the object)—to illustrate this by the procedure of the senses in which the same difference is found, let us suppose a very smooth marble-table to be set before two men; they both perceive it to be smooth, and they are both pleased with it because of this quality. So far they agree.
“But suppose another, and after that another table, the latter still smoother than the former, to be set before them. It is now very probable that these men, who are so agreed upon what is smooth, and in the pleasure thence, will disagree when they come to settle which table has the advantage in point of polish.... Nor is it easy, when such a difference arises, to settle the point, if the excess or diminution be not glaring.
“In these nice cases, supposing the acuteness of the sense equal, the greater attention and habit in such things will have the advantage. In the question about the tables, the marble-polisher will unquestionably determine the most accurately.
“In the imagination, beside the pain or pleasure arising from the properties of the natural object, a pleasure is perceived from the resemblance which the imitation has to the original.
“All men are nearly equal in this point, as far as their knowledge of the things represented or compared extends.
“The principle of this knowledge is very much accidental, as it depends upon experience and observation, and not on the strength or weakness of any natural faculty; and it is from this difference in knowledge that what we commonly, though with no great exactness, call a difference in taste, proceeds.
“A man to whom sculpture is new sees a barber’s block, or some ordinary piece of statuary; he is immediately struck and pleased, because he sees something like a human figure; and entirely taken up with this likeness, he does not at all attend to its defects. No person, I believe, at the first time of seeing a piece of imitation, ever did. Some time after, we suppose that this novice lights upon a more artificial work of the same nature; he begins to look with contempt on what he admired at first; not that he admired it even then for its unlikeness to a man, but for that general though inaccurate resemblance which it bore to the human figure. What he admired at different times in these so different figures, is strictly the same; and though his knowledge is improved, his taste is not altered. Hitherto his mistake was from a want of knowledge in art, and this arose from his inexperience; but he may be still deficient, from a want of knowledge in nature. For it is possible that the man in question may stop here, and that the masterpiece of a great hand may please him no more than the middling performance of a vulgar artist; and this not for want of better or higher relish, but because all men do not observe with sufficient accuracy on the human figure, to enable them to judge properly of an imitation of it.”
On other points, Hume makes the following observations:—