Aesthetic taste

“ In the balance of true taste one cannot weigh more than the other, considering that both here and there is wanting that which forms the aesthetic value of a work of art, the intimate union of spirit with matter, and the twofold relation of the work with the faculty of perception as well as with the faculty of the ideal. ”

“ In his book, Les problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine, he speaks seriously of touch, taste, and smell as giving, or being capable of giving, aesthetic impressions: “Si la couleur manque au toucher, il nous fournit en revanche une notion que l’œil seul ne peut nous donner, et qui a une valeur esthétique considérable, celle du doux, du soyeux du poli. ”

“ It is true that our own highly complex æsthetic feelings are largely composed of elevated intellectual and emotional elements; but it may perhaps be shown that aesthetic tastes quite sufficient for the production of the known results do actually exist in many cases, and consist almost entirely of very simple sensuous factors. ”

“ Just in that degree to which sense impressions fail to produce in us 184immediate pleasures and aversions, fail to provoke us to instinctive emotions of joy and disgust, fail to stir in us moods of irritation and acquiescence,—in just that degree do they declare themselves to be adequate raw materials for the fine arts. If, as we are often told, the primary purpose of art is to please, this must be an entirely unexpected state of affairs, and the low position of taste in the æsthetic scale becomes quite unintelligible. ”

“ To-day those who believe in the possibility of rational aesthetic criticism think that reflection upon the purpose and methods of the arts results in the formulation of broad principles by means of which judgments of taste can be appraised and a community of taste achieved. ”

“ Whether the judgment be exercised in the choice of color harmony or musical composition, costume or personal ornament, architecture, monument, design or arrangement, poetry or passing jest, rug, menu, pastime or associates, it is the sense of taste which furnishes the apt name for the critical capacity. ”

“ In England, during this period, the writers on æsthetics define beauty more and more frequently, not by its own qualities, but by taste, and the discussion about beauty is superseded by a discussion on taste. ”

“ Hence we have said that the object of taste is beauty, as perceivable in the works of nature and art: thus confining its province to literature and the fine arts, which reflect nature either by direct imitation, or by more remote association. ”

“ That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value, of the whole Pleiad school of poetry, of the whole phase of taste from which that school derives—a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. ”

“ How gradually does the eye grow reconciled even to a disagreeable dress, as it becomes more and more the fashion, and how soon return to its dislike of it, when it is left off, and a new one has taken possession of the mind?—so vague is taste, when it has no solid principles for its foundation! ”

“ The beauties and sublimities of nature are like the stars, which the storm shuts out, but when the heavens are serene, they come out, one after another, to the eye that is watching for them, till the firmament glows with their light. He, therefore, and he only, who, in a proper state of mind, will place himself in the presence of beautiful or sublime objects, and will compare the effects produced under different circumstances, will improve his taste, both in its susceptibility to emotion, and in its power of discrimination. ”

“ And if it be not, still, unbecoming to destroy the untouched sweep and grace of one of the most beautiful of creatures, and turn what is natural and decent into the indecently grotesque—what significance has all our talk of beauty, and all our so-called taste? ”

“ What information do we gain by the sense of taste? The eye and the ear conduce to our mental improvement, to our store of knowledge, to our appreciation of the sublime and beautiful. Eloquence, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, scenery—the glory of the sun, and the moon, and the stars—these appeal to our mind through the organs of sight and hearing; but the sense of taste administers rather to our animal than to our intellectual being, and, doubtless, the pleasures of taste contribute greatly to the enjoyments of our existence. ”

“ The action of the body is quick with naturalness, and yet the disposition of every part, even to such a detail as the fingers, reveals the shrewd arrangement of a choicely refined taste—an instinctive taste, operating almost unconsciously, with a frank, boyish impulsiveness, high spirited and not without a spice of mischievous humour. ”

“ Besides a fine taste, which belongs to them by nature, she has a good share of literary attainments, which, as her beauty fails, will smooth a track from coquetry to pedantry, from the courted beauty to the courted blue. ”

“ From these observations, founded, as they are, on experience, follows as a corollary the truth of the previous definition, that, in the fine arts, beauty is always resolvable into some effect or relation discerned and approved by the understanding. For since it has been shown that taste is but another name for intellectual cultivation and knowledge in a given pursuit, the perception of beauty, which forms the peculiar object of taste, must ultimately be referred to the understanding. ”

“ The finest fruit of the culture of the esthetic emotions, culled from their sunniest sides and served as “human nature’s daily food,” is what we call “good taste.” What an admirable faculty! It is the best of good sense, and walks hand in hand with good manners and good morals. It prunes away exaggerations and affectations, it erases superlatives, it modifies antipathies, and lessens prejudices. The modest home lighted by its fairy lamp shines with a radiance that the luxury of the vulgar plutocrat can never approach. ”

“ If taste attains its full maturity before truth and morality have been established in our heart by a better road than that which taste would take, the sensuous world would remain the limit of our aspirations. We should not know, either in our ideas or in our feelings, how to pass beyond the world of sense, and all that imagination failed to represent would be without reality to us. But happily it enters into the plan of nature, that taste, although it first comes into bloom, is the last to ripen of all the faculties of the mind. ”

“ ON THE NECESSARY LIMITATIONS IN THE USE OF BEAUTY OF FORM.
The abuse of the beautiful and the encroachments of imagination, when, having only the casting vote, it seeks to grasp the law-giving sceptre, has done great injury alike in life and in science. It is therefore highly expedient to examine very closely the bounds that have been assigned to the use of beautiful forms. These limits are embodied in the very nature of the beautiful, and we have only to call to mind how taste expresses its influence to be able to determine how far it ought to extend it. ”

“ May it not be owing to these expressions, so familiar to every eye, that the general sense of good taste eternally exists? They are the legible characters of human excellence, no where visible but in the human countenance, every observation of which improves and confirms the moral sentiment, or image of beauty, implanted by nature in the mind of man.
The origin of the idea of beauty is the same in every breast, savage and civilized. Every nation's characteristic Form or expression of beauty will be a representation, or portrait, of their characteristic virtue, their happiness, their good. ”

“ And scenes, too, that escape the general eye, or only excite the exclamation "how beautiful," press upon me till I wish that I had the genius and skill to fix the picture which Nature has drawn, and show that our own land and own vicinity are full of those beauties which true taste admires, which, transferred to canvas, become in turn the stimulant to taste. ”

“ Taste is a term universally applied in criticism of the fine-arts, such as painting, sculpture, architecture, &c., &c., of which there are many schools—of taste, we mean—some of them, perhaps natural, but chiefly conventional, and all more or less arbitrary. ”

“ The fact that taste changes, and as a consequence that artistic styles and types vary, is simply due to the everlasting desire on the part of the public for some new thing, and their equally permanent appreciation of novelty of idea or sensation. ”

“ This obvious consideration has disposed them to pause; they have endeavoured to discover the original of taste, and have found that there is not only a stable and immutable beauty, as there is a common understanding in all times and places, which is never obsolete; but there is another kind of beauty, such as we are now treating, which depends upon times and places, and is, therefore, changeable. Such is the imperfection of every thing below, that one mode of beauty is never found without a mixture of the other, and from these two, blended together, results what is called the taste of an age. ”

“ What remains positive in the impression is a sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste which are in the essence of all that she signed. ”

“ As it perceives other objects of a like nature, it classes them with the preceding, compares them severally, judges of their respective merits, their respective degrees and kinds of beauty. This discriminating power of the mind, as exercised upon the various objects of beauty and sublimity, whether in nature or art, we may designate by the general name of taste. ”

“ We may, however, observe, that he who has enjoyed a sumptuous banquet in a hall decked with flowers, mirrors, paintings, and statues, embalmed in perfume, enriched with pretty women, filled with delicious harmony, will not require any great effort of thought to satisfy himself that all sciences have been put in requisition to exalt and to enhance the pleasures of taste. ”

“ The taste which overloads dress and architecture with superfluous irrelevancies, is often quite in opposition to that true sense of beauty which is indispensable to the artist and precious to the philosopher. ”

“ All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were the quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste—a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as regards colour and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the ancient world. ”

“ But is there no other physical property by which these luminaries directly contribute to the gratification of taste? It is true that light, abstractedly from all objects is agreeable, and agreeable on the same principle that sweetness is to the taste, i. e., from the mere character of the nervous impression. But this is a pleasure merely passive, and in an active being it is, perhaps, on that account, one grade lower than the gratification afforded by the beauty of form, and is more allied to the gross pleasure of literal taste. ”

“ Or: "Taste's about the same thing as table manners. Good taste! Bad taste! There's nothing good or bad in taste but thinking makes it so." And: "Never mind about taste, about beauty, about esthetics—all that dogmatic theology of art. Get to life. ”

“ Its fundamental definition is that taste consists chiefly ‘in the improvement of those principles which are commonly called the powers of imagination,’ including the sense of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. ”

“ To delineate the particular beauties of these gardens would, indeed, require as much pains, and as much paper too, as to rehearse all the good actions of their master, whose life proves the truth of an observation which I have read in some ethic writer, that a truly elegant taste is generally accompanied with an excellency of heart; or, in other words, that true virtue is, indeed, nothing else but true taste. ”

“ But such a long representation of the moral sense by the sense of the beautiful has made us forget this master. When we have so long practised this rule of obeying at once the suggestions of taste, and when we have found the result always satisfactory, taste ends by assuming a kind of appearance of right. ”

“ There is likewise great judgment in the smell, the taste, and the touch; to indulge and gratify which senses more arts have been invented than I could wish: it is apparent to what excess we have arrived in the composition of our perfumes, the preparation of our food, and the enjoyment of corporeal pleasures. ”

“ And, as those affections refine by culture, hence the different degrees of the sentiments which beauty creates in the rustic, and in the man of taste. The former perceives only the physical charm of beauty, the freshness of colour, the bloom of youth, &c. but, to the man of taste, the physical pleases only through the medium of the moral: the body charms because the soul is seen; beauty, in his breast, is the source from whence endless streams of fair ideas flow, extending throughout the whole region of taste, no object of which but is more or less related to the principles of human beauty. ”

“ When this idea is applied to dress, it immediately suggests to the mind a neatness, taste, and simplicity of dress, alike opposed both to extravagance and finery, and to negligence and vulgar coarseness. The exercise of a refined taste, in the adaptation and adjustment of apparel, may also be justified by the analogy of nature. Look abroad over the landscape, and see with what exquisite taste God has clothed the flowers of the field. There is a symmetry of proportion, a skilfulness of arrangement, and a fitness and adaptation of colors, which strike the eye with unmingled pleasure. ”