An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty, etc. | Page 4

were of the sort that an enterprising lady might well
have wheedled copies from the Doctor. The important point is that the
inclusion of the letters in the 1789 printing of the Enquiry provides
incontrovertible proof of Miss Reynolds' connection with the piece.
For this second printing the entire pamphlet was reset, with numerous
minor changes of wording and punctuation, but with no major
alterations in meaning. In general the textual improvements are such as
a bluestocking lady might well wish to make. It will be noted that on
pages 25 and 49 of the copy here reproduced someone has made minor
changes in wording in ink. These corrections are made in the later

printing. Moreover, at the end of the 1789 version there is an errata list,
indicating three alterations from the 1785 text which were mistakes.
The Dedication remained unchanged, but the geometrical illustration
was now placed facing the beginning of
Chapter I.
The Enquiry was written in what is now recognized as one of the most
exciting periods in the history of aesthetics, the late eighteenth century
being a crucial point in the gradual shift from absolute classical
standards to the relative approaches of the next age. Most of the
important thinkers of the day--Hume, Burke, Lord Kames, Adam Smith,
among others--were thinking deeply about the problem of taste. And if
Miss Reynolds' essay is not one of the most perceptive of the
discussions, it is at least one of the liveliest.
In brief, the Enquiry is what one might expect from an intelligent
amateur, from one not a professional writer, yet one who has given
much thought to the problems of aesthetics. Of course, many of the
ideas are derivative, with echoes of the "moral sense" of Hutcheson, the
"line of grace" of Hogarth, and the terrible sublime of Burke. The three
divisions of the essay--the development of a mental system, the origin
of our ideas of Beauty, and the analysis of taste--follow the customary
pattern of eighteenth-century discussions. Yet the piece is no slavish
refurbishing of old phrases. It is packed with fresh arguments and novel
suggestions. If these are not always completely coherent or logical,
they do represent original thinking.
Twentieth-century readers may be astonished by some of the ideas:
witness the claim that Negroes could never arrive at true taste, because
their eyes were so accustomed to objects diametrically opposite to taste.
As a further example of Miss Reynolds' occasionally muddled thinking
there is the development of her initial assumption. While the
groundwork of man is perfection, this perfection has been blemished
and man is impelled to recapture it in the sublime. Yet instead of
analyzing this impulse, Miss Reynolds appears to take it for granted.
Nor does she consider how perfection is to be achieved in taste,
preferring to conclude with a diatribe in the manner of Rousseau on the

depravity of the times and the corrupting effect of the arts. (For this and
many of the following comments I am indebted to Mr. Ralph Cohen of
the College of the City of New York.)
The cause of some of the ambiguities in her discussion may perhaps be
traced to a rather careless use of terms. At one time "instinct" or
"impulsion," the moral force driving man toward perfection, is a
potentiality developed by cultivation, and at another a force that is
created by cultivation. Although the sublime is the apex of her
mathematically-definite program and is a moral quality attained by the
few, every human being has his point of sublimity in the idea of a
Supreme Being. On the one hand, beauty is a preconceived idea in the
human species; on the other it is not preconceived, but developed.
Finally, the rules of art are perceptions of moral virtue, yet art which
exhibits these rules can corrupt.
It is easy to pick flaws in Miss Reynolds' thinking, for the lack of
sustained logic which Johnson early recognized is apparent at every
turn. Yet for students of the history of ideas the Enquiry contains much
of interest. As a painter, Miss Reynolds throughout stresses the visual,
a concentration which leads her to several valuable insights. She
divides form into two categories, masculine and feminine, but makes a
novel use of these Ciceronian divisions. All non-human
objects--flowers, animals, etc.--are seen as exhibiting male or female
attributes. It might almost be said that with this anthropomorphic
approach she is attempting to develop a "philosophical" basis for the
pathetic fallacy. Furthermore, if the human is used to measure beauty in
the non-human, the implication is that man, not God, is the measure of
beauty. By setting up man as the mediator between the material and the
divine, she points to the concentration in the next century on human
values.
When discussing the Enquiry in his book