Literary taste

“ Free from extravagance of conception or diction, pervaded with a tone of natural and manly feeling, and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the best literary productions, they claim a favorable reception from the public on the ground of their purity of taste, their refinement of expression, and their genial and appreciative principles of criticism. ”

“ He who has been accustomed to read and admire the finest models of composition in various languages, and to dwell on those niceties of method and expression which form so large a part of the charm of literary works; acquires a critical delicacy of taste, which renders him fastidiously sensitive to those crudities and roughnesses of speech, which almost necessarily attend an extemporaneous style. ”

“ Their efforts betoken a craving for that which they could not supply. Vile imitations of French taste, extravagant romances, exaggerated sentiment, are the characteristics of the works wherewith it was attempted to supply the national want of a literature. ”

“ But he shows his less critical mood in setting this down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at about the time when he writes. ”

“ The philosophical condemnation of artistic and literary classes is found in the formulation and demonstration of what artistic activity has ever sought and good taste ever recognized. What is to be done if good taste and the real fact, put into formulas, sometimes assume the air of paradoxes? ”

“ So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist himself. ”

“ Feminine taste and royal patronage combined to free poetry from the pollution of the minstrel and his circle of vulgar auditors, to cause it to be cultivated by studious men and women, whose tastes had become refined by the study of the Latin classics, and who were themselves emulous of gaining a literary reputation by the cultivation of the art of serious composition. ”

“ and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought—frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste. ”

“ The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. ”

“ In two words—and we shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this observation on the two kinds of literature that are called classic and romantic,—regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of genius. ”

“ And not only these faculties have been brought into severe exercise, but the strictest good taste and good sense were called into play, together with a certain final gift which we hardly know how to name, and which is by no means common, even among very clever poets,—a comprehensive sense of form, of proportion, and of real completeness, without which the most brilliant efforts of the imagination are a mere agglomeration of ill-reconciled beauties. ”

“ I here allude to those poems, purely descriptive of a prospect placed before the poet's eyes: our language contains many fine descriptive poems, where the scenery lived only in the imagination of the author; and this is a very considerable distinction of descriptive poetry.
There are few things in which men differ more, than in their opinions upon poetry: the taste of individuals is confined, and like the genius, it is frequently shewn most strongly, upon particular subjects. ”

“ To transform the rich creations of a poet's fancy into ribaldry and jest—to metamorphose the harmonious expression of his grandest thoughts into clownish barbarism,—^this surely is offence enough against good taste. But it is not alone good taste which here receives a shock. Every opening which the original might give, or seem to give, for licentious description is seized upon; every page is more or less mud-bespattered. ”

“ All that we call purity of taste, vigour of style, and force of thought, has either been taught to the modern world by the study of the classics, or has been guided and restrained by those illustrious models. ”

“ Finally, your judgment will be, of course, much affected by your taste in literature. Indeed, I know many persons who have the purest taste in literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon which puzzles me not a little: but I have never known any one with false taste in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also of the greatest importance to you, not only for art's sake, but for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a rocky island of your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good. ”

“ There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. ”

“ Their claims are not, perhaps, of that superior kind, which will find a place among the first orders of poetry; but the pieces breathe throughout the true spirit of virtuous sensibility, vigour of fancy, and that characteristic manner, which always accompanies strong power of invention;—they display richness of imagery, and elegance of style, while the language has an{vii} easy flow, and unaffected simplicity, free from that artificial splendor, and obscure magnificence, which modern taste seems to establish as the excellence of poetical diction. ”

“ The freshness and animation of the author’s mind are displayed on every page, lending life to the discussion of the most abstract questions of taste, and prompting continually the heartiest bursts of eloquence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is not only an act of justice, but, in our decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce, in a high degree, to the improvement of our own taste: for an accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by thought and a long-continued intercourse with the best models of composition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They summoned their best artists to illustrate it, and illuminate it in pen-and-ink, half-tones, startling colors, and photographic reproductions, sketches theatrical, humorous, and poetic, caricatures, pictures of tropical luxury and aristocratic pretension; in short, all the bewildering affluence of modern art which is brought to bear upon the aesthetic cultivation of the lowest popular taste. ”

“ So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two centuries ago. ”

“ In poetry or eloquence, to determine how far figurative or metaphorical language may proceed, and when it begins to be affectation or beside the truth, must be determined by taste, though this taste we must never forget is regulated and formed by the presiding feelings of mankind, by those works which have approved themselves to all times and all persons. ”

“ When we say taste, we mean not crudely the knowledge of what is right in art: taste estimates the degrees of excellence, and by comparison proceeds from justness to refinement. Our language, or rather those who use it, generally confound, when speaking of the art, copy with imitation, though essentially different in operation and meaning. ”

“ What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,—like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations. ”

“ Yet the play has a marked severity of taste; the style, though by no means so great as in some others, is singularly faultless; the graces of wit and poetry are distilled into it with indescribable delicacy, as if they came from a hand at once the most plentiful and the most sparing: in short, the work is everywhere replete with "the modest charm of not too much" ”

“ The public does ask, however, and asks justly, that there shall be no meaningless agony; and if it prefers tales which inevitably come to a cheerful last chapter, this taste is in the line with the great principle that it is the function of art to uplift and inspire. ”

“ And thus men of such taste, or rather such want of taste, naturally fall in with the genius of sensationalism; which, whatever form it takes on, soon wears that form out, and has no way to sustain itself in life but by continual transmigration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. ”

“ The passions, characters, and manners, are in this production natural, striking, and impressive; the fable in its principal constituents, sufficiently probable to interest the reader in the fortunes of the actors; the descriptions of external nature, perhaps too exuberant; but it is the exuberance of genius prompted by taste and sensibility, exquisitely susceptible of the beauties of nature; she cannot restrain her fancy from expatiating on subjects which have afforded to herself so delightful sensations and images. ”

“ In order to this, let us do all we can to cultivate their taste, and innocently indulge their fancy. Let us contend with impure writers, those deadliest enemies to the youthful mind, by opposing to them in the chaster author, images more attractive, wit more acute, learning more various; in all which excellences our first-rate poets certainly excel their vicious competitors. ”

“ The popular taste is not to be despised; for, undoubtedly, the versified story is the natural poem—if anything so artificial in form as a poem can be said to have a natural character. The world loves a story ”

“ THE words, classical and romantic, although, like many other critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, to express a greater opposition between those tendencies than really exists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into opposite camps. ”

“ Under its prolixity and lack of dramatic climax, she recognized in it the taste and flavor of real life—a quality which is particularly thrilling against the unfamiliar background of another epoch.
She had fallen in love with the play and she had not been entirely unconscious of the existence of the author. ”

“ The greater the determination, the greater the poetry; individuals absolutely determined (omnimodo determinata) are very poetical, as are images or fancies, and everything which refers to feeling. The judgment of sensible and imaginative representations is taste. ”

“ Such emotions are awakened by certain objects in nature, by certain works of art, and by the use of language which recalls conceptions of these objects. Those objects which awaken such emotions are called objects of taste, and those arts which enable us to produce combinations that will awaken such emotions are called the fine arts. ”

“ Every man who reads much has his fairy-tale period and his romantic period followed by a strong taste for realism, which in turn is followed by a new and finer appreciation of purely imaginative literature. ”

“ There are stories nowadays, but few novels, and plenty of spectacles, but no plays; and how should we know the difference, never having heard what a novel ought to be? But let the aesthetic critic give us a firm foundation for criticism, a real understanding of the conditions of literary art ”

“ Their taste in literature is that which would prevail among persons of low intellectual calibre. Startling tales, romances with a plentiful spice of horrors, thrilling love-stories, highly wrought and exaggerated narratives, are their taste. ”

“ Those in whom it is largely developed manifest the artistic taste and temperament, the love of art, beauty and the ideal, the poetic spirit, the love of the refined and choice—and a corresponding dislike for all opposed to these tastes and qualities. ”