Essays on Taste | Page 9

thousands
who, if they were to bring their own palate to a severe examination,
would discover that they really find a more delicious flavour in mutton
than in venison, in flounder than in turbut, and yet prefer middling or
bad venison to the best mutton; that is, what is scarcest and dearest, and
consequently what is, from the folly of mankind, the most in vogue, to
what is really the most agreeable to their own private taste.
In matter of taste, the public, for the most part, suffers itself to be led
by a few who perhaps are really no judges; but who, under the favour
of some advantages of title, place, or fortune, set up for judges, and are
implicitly followed even by those who have taste. These washy
dictators have learnt at school to admire such authors as have for ages
been possessed of an indisputed renown: but they would never have
been the first to have discovered strokes of true genius in a
co-temporary writer, though they had lived at the court of AUGUSTUS
or of Q. ELIZABETH.
So undistinguishing is our taste, that if the most torpid dunce this
fruitful age can boast of, could by some artful imposture prepossess the
public, that the most insipid of all his own bread-sauce compositions, to
be published next winter, was a piece MILTON's, or any other
celebrated author, recovered from dust and obscurity, it would be
received with universal applause; and perhaps be translated into French
before the town had doated six weeks upon it. One might venture to say
too, that if a work of true spirit and genius was to be introduced into the
world, under the name of some writer of low reputation, it would be
rejected even by the greatest part of those who pretend to lead the taste.

And no wonder, while an eminent vintner has mistaken his own old
hock at nine shillings the bottle for that at five.

OF WRITING TO THE TASTE OF THE AGE.
Whatever some have pretended, one may reasonably enough doubt
whether ever an author wrote much below himself from any cause but
the necessity of writing too fast. When this happens to a writer who,
with the advantages of leisure and easy circumstances, is capable of
producing such works as might charm succeeding ages, it is a disgrace
to the nation and the times wherein such a genius had the misfortune to
appear.
It belongs to true genius to indulge its own humour; to give a loose to
its own sallies; and to be curbed, restrained and directed by that sound
judgment alone which necessarily attends it. It belongs to it to improve
and correct the public taste; not to humour or meanly prostitute itself to
the gross or low taste which it finds. And you may depend upon it, that
whatever author labours to accommodate himself to the taste of his
age--suppose it, if you please, this present age--the sickly wane, the
impotent decline of the eighteenth century: which from a hopeful boy
became a most insignificant man; and for any thing that appears at
present will die a very fat drowsy block-head, and be damned to eternal
infamy and contempt: every such author I say, though he may thrive as
far as an author can in the present age, will by degrees languish into
obscurity in the next. For though naked and bare-faced vanity; though
an active exertion of little arts, and the most unremitting perseverance
in them; though party, cabal, and intrigue; though accidental
advantages, and even whimsical circumstances; may conspire to make
a very moderate genius the idol of the implicit multitude: works that
lean upon such fickle props, that stand upon such a false foundation,
will not be long able to support themselves against the injuries of time.
Such buildings begin to totter almost as soon as their scaffolding is
struck.
But if you find it necessary to comply with the humour of your age; the

writing best calculated to please a false taste is what has something of
the air of good writing, without being really so. For to the vulgar eye
the specious is more striking than the genuine. The best writing is apt to
be too plain, too simple, too unaffected, and too delicate to stir the
callous organs of the generality of critics, who see nothing but the
tawdry glare of tinsel; and are deaf to every thing but what is
shockingly noisy to a true ear. They are struck with the fierce glaring
colours of old _Frank_; with attitudes and expressions violent, distorted,
and unnatural: while the true, just and easy, the graceful, the moving,
the sublime representations of Raphael have not the least power to
attract them. The bullying, noisy march in Judas Macchabeus has
perhaps