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    Essays on Taste
    Essays on Taste
    Essays on Taste
    Ebook62 pages43 minutes

    Essays on Taste

    By John Gilbert Cooper, Ralph Cohen and John Armstrong

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    Essays on Taste

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      Book preview

      Essays on Taste - John Gilbert Cooper

      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 with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: Essays on Taste

      Author: John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen

      Release Date: September 15, 2004 [EBook #13464]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON TASTE ***

      Produced by S.R.Ellison, David Starner, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

      The Augustan Reprint Society

      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

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