‘Nor seem’d
Less than archangel ruin’d, and the excess
Of glory obscur’d,’
till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur, I saw no extravagance in this, but the utmost truth of feeling. When the same author, or his friend Mr. Southey, says, that the Excursion is better worth preserving than the Paradise Lost, this appears to me, I confess, a great piece of impertinence, or an unwarrantable stretch of friendship. Nor do I think the preference given by certain celebrated reviewers, of Mr. Rogers’s Human Life over Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, founded on the true principles of poetical justice; for something is, after all, better than nothing.
To hasten to a conclusion of these desultory observations. The highest taste is shown in habitual sensibility to the greatest beauties; the most general taste is shown in a perception of the greatest variety of excellence. Many people admire Milton, and as many admire Pope, while there are but few who have any relish for both. Almost all the disputes on this subject arise, not so much from false, as from confined taste. We suppose that only one thing can have merit; and that, if we allow it to any thing else, we deprive the favourite object of our critical faith of the honours due to it. We are generally right in what we approve ourselves; for liking proceeds from a certain conformity of objects to the taste; as we are generally wrong in condemning what others admire; for our dislike mostly proceeds from our want of taste for what pleases them. Our being totally senseless to what excites extreme delight in those who have as good a right to judge as we have, in all human probability implies a defect of faculty in us, rather than a limitation in the resources of nature or art. Those who are pleased with the fewest things, know the least; as those who are pleased with every thing, know nothing. Shakespeare makes Mrs. Quickly say of Falstaff, by a pleasant blunder, that ‘Carnation was a colour he could never abide.’ So there are persons who cannot like Claude, because he is not Salvator Rosa; some who cannot endure Rembrandt, and others who would not cross the street to see a Vandyke; one reader does not like the neatness of Junius, and another objects to the extravagance of Burke; and they are all right, if they expect to find in others what is only to be found in their favourite author or artist, but equally wrong if they mean to say, that each of those they would condemn by a narrow and arbitrary standard of taste, has not a peculiar and transcendent merit of his own. The question is not, whether you like a certain excellence, (it is your own fault if you do not), but whether another possessed it in a very eminent degree. If he did not, who is there that possessed it in a greater—that ranks above him in that particular? Those who are accounted the best, are the best in their line. When we say that Rembrandt was a master of chiaro-scuro, for instance, we do not say that he joined to this the symmetry of the Greek statues, but we mean that we must go to him for the perfection of chiaro-scuro, and that a Greek statue has not chiaro-scuro. If any one objects to Junius’s Letters, that they are a tissue of epigrams, we answer, Be it so; it is for that very reason that we admire them. Again, should any one find fault with Mr. Burke’s writings as a collection of rhapsodies, the proper answer always would be, Who is there that has written finer rhapsodies? I know an admirer of Don Quixote who can see no merit in Gil Blas, and an admirer of Gil Blas who could never get through Don Quixote. I myself have great pleasure in reading both these works, and in that respect think I have an advantage over both these critics. It always struck me as a singular proof of good taste, good sense, and liberal thinking, in an old friend, who had Paine’s Rights of Man and Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, bound up in one volume, and who said, that, both together, they made a very good book. To agree with the greatest number of good judges, is to be in the right; and good judges are persons of natural sensibility and acquired knowledge.[[53]] On the other hand, it must be owned, there are critics whose praise is a libel, and whose recommendation of any work is enough to condemn it. Men of the greatest genius and originality are not always persons of the most liberal and unprejudiced taste; they have a strong bias to certain qualities themselves, are for reducing others to their own standard, and lie less open to the general impressions of things. This exclusive preference of their own peculiar excellencies to those of others, in writers whose merits have not been sufficiently understood or acknowledged by their contemporaries, chiefly because they were not common-place, may sometimes be seen mounting up to a degree of bigotry and intolerance, little short of insanity. There are some critics I have known who never allow an author any merit till all the world ‘cry out upon him,’ and others who never allow another any merit that any one can discover but themselves. So there are connoisseurs who spend their lives and waste their breath in extolling sublime passages in obscure writers, and lovers who choose their mistresses for their ugly faces. This is not taste, but affectation. What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity, had in general much better remain in it.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
Taste relates to that which, either in the objects of nature, or the imitation of them or the Fine Arts in general is calculated to give pleasure. Now, to know what is calculated to give pleasure, the way is to enquire what does give pleasure: so that taste is, after all, much more a matter of fact and less of theory than might be imagined. We may hence determine another point, viz.—whether there is any universal or exclusive standard of taste, since this is to inquire, in other words, whether there is any one thing that pleases all the world alike, or whether there is only one thing that pleases anybody, both which questions carry their own answers with them. Still it does not follow, because there is no dogmatic or bigoted standard of taste, like a formula of faith, which whoever does not believe without doubt he shall be damned everlastingly, that there is no standard of taste whatever, that is to say, that certain things are not more apt to please than others, that some do not please more generally, that there are not others that give most pleasure to those who have studied the subject, that one nation is most susceptible of a particular kind of beauty, and another of another, according to their characters, &c. It would be a difficult attempt to force all these into one general rule or system, and yet equally so to deny that they are absolutely capricious, and without any foundation or principle whatever. There are, doubtless, books for children that we discard as we grow up; yet, what are the majority of mankind, or even readers, but grown children? If put to the vote of all the milliners’ girls in London, Old Mortality, or even Heart of Midlothian, would not carry the day (or, at least, not very triumphantly) over a common Minerva-press novel; and I will hazard another opinion, that no woman ever liked Burke. Mr. Pratt, on the contrary, said that he had to ‘boast of many learned and beautiful suffrages.’[[54]] It is not, then, solely from the greatest number of voices, but from the opinion of the greatest number of well-informed minds, that we can establish, if not an absolute standard, at least a comparative scale, of taste. Certainly, it can hardly be doubted that the greater the number of persons of strong natural sensibility or love for any art, and who have paid the closest attention to it, who agree in their admiration of any work of art, the higher do its pretensions rise to classical taste and intrinsic beauty. In this way, as the opinion of a thousand good judges may outweigh that of nearly all the rest of the world, so there may be one individual among them whose opinion may outweigh that of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine; that is, one of a still stronger and more refined perception of beauty than all the rest, and to whose opinion that of the others and of the world at large would approximate and be conformed, as their taste or perception of what was pleasing became stronger and more confirmed by exercise and proper objects to call it forth. Thus, if we were still to insist on an universal standard of taste, it must be that, not which does, but which would please universally, supposing all men to have paid an equal attention to any subject and to have an equal relish for it, which can only be guessed at by the imperfect and yet more than casual agreement among those who have done so from choice and feeling. Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination, &c. It is time, however, to apply this rule. There is, for instance, a much greater number of habitual readers and playgoers in France, who are devoted admirers of Racine or Molière than there are in England of Shakspeare: does Shakspeare’s fame rest, then, on a less broad and solid foundation than that of either of the others? I think not, supposing that the class of judges to whom Shakspeare’s excellences appeal are a higher, more independent, and more original court of criticism, and that their suffrages are quite as unanimous (though not so numerous) in the one case as in the other. A simile or a sentiment is not the worse in common opinion for being somewhat superficial and hackneyed, but it is the worse in poetry. The perfection of common-place is that which would unite the greatest number of suffrages, if there were not a tribunal above common-place. For instance, in Shakspeare’s description of flowers, primroses are mentioned—
‘That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty:’
Now, I do not know that this expression is translatable into French, or intelligible to the common reader of either nation, but raise the scale of fancy, passion, and observation of nature to a certain point, and I will be bold to say that there will be no scruple entertained whether this single metaphor does not contain more poetry of the kind than is to be found in all Racine. As no Frenchman could write it, so I believe no Frenchman could understand it. We cannot take this insensibility on their part as a mark of our superiority, for we have plenty of persons among ourselves in the same predicament, but not the wisest or most refined, and to these the appeal is fair from the many—‘and fit audience find, though few.’ So I think it requires a higher degree of taste to judge of Titian’s portraits than Raphael’s scripture pieces: not that I think more highly of the former than the latter, but the world and connoisseurs in general think there is no comparison (from the dignity of the subject), whereas I think it difficult to decide which are the finest. Here again we have a common-place, a preconception, the moulds of the judgment preoccupied by certain assumptions of degrees and classes of excellence, instead of judging from the true and genuine impressions of things. Men of genius, or those who can produce excellence would be the best judges of it—poets of poetry, painters of painting, &c.—but that persons of original and strong powers of mind are too much disposed to refer everything to their own peculiar bias, and are comparatively indifferent to merely passive impressions. On the other hand, it is wholly wrong to oppose taste to genius, for genius in works of art is nothing but the power of producing what is beautiful (which, however, implies the intimate sense of it), though this is something very different from mere negative or formal beauties, which have as little to do with taste as genius.