Essays on Taste

Essays on Taste

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Taste, by John Gilbert
Cooper This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
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Title: Essays on Taste
Author: John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
Release Date: September 15, 2004 [EBook #13464]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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ON TASTE ***

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ESSAYS ON TASTE
from
John Gilbert Cooper
Letters Concerning Taste Third Edition (1757)
&
John Armstrong

Miscellanies (1770)
With an Introduction by
Ralph Cohen

Publication Number 30
Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California

GENERAL EDITORS H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial
Library RICHARD C. BOYS., University of Michigan EDWARD
NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ JOHN
LOFTIS, _University of California, Los Angeles_
ASSISTANT EDITOR W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of
Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, Duke University LOUIS I.
BREDVOLD, University of Michigan CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale
University JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR
FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton
University SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota ERNEST
MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen
Mary College, London_ H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of
California, Los Angeles_

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