Taste (aesthetic)

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Taste is intellectual pleasure, an approving sense of truth, of good, and of beauty. The latter seems the visible or ostensible principle of the two former, and is that in which the universal idea of taste is comprised. ”

“ If you have tried how smooth globular bodies, as the marbles with which boys amuse themselves, have affected the touch when they are rolled backward and forward and over one another, you will easily conceive how sweetness, which consists in a salt of such nature, affects the taste ”

“ For in judging of any new thing, even of a taste similar to that which he has been formed by habit to like, he finds his palate affected in the natural manner and on the common principles. Thus the pleasure of all senses, of the sight, and even of the taste, that most ambiguous of the senses, is the same in all, high and low, learned and unlearned. ”

“ We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the one hand, and French cooks and pâté de foie gras on the other. But while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever recognise that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The very diversity in taste proves its deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with the soul—nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body. And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed, silent lips ”

“ Developing as one of the earliest forms of sensitiveness, intimately associated with the vital processes of life and growth, affording manifold richness of pleasure and aversion, full of paradoxical surprises and puzzling problems, and figuratively expressing one of the rarest of human qualities, “the sense of taste” constitutes one of man’s most interesting contacts with the outer world. ”

“ Men's taste is regaled with the most delicious fruits, which, without art, they have in great variety and perfection. And then their smell is refreshed with an eternal fragrancy of flowers and sweets, with which nature perfumes and adorns the woods and branches almost the whole year round. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you accustom your eye only or mainly to contemplate what is satisfactory in colour and form to the highest tastes, it will gradually become allured to such delicacy of organization as to reject unintentionally all that is repugnant to perfect taste. ”

“ The presence and operation of taste can thus be traced in every act of the mind, and are intimately associated with the feelings of our moral nature. The exercises of taste have ever been regarded as productive generally of pleasurable emotion. Hence we consider ourselves justified in defining, at the beginning of this chapter, taste to be 'the perception of intellectual pleasure.' The common use of language, also—an authority always to be respected in tracing the extent or import of ideas—and even the best theories of taste, when rightly understood, coincide with this definition. ”

“ Taste is, in a great measure, acquired, cultivated, an art; sensibility, a native endowment. It may be developed, strengthened, educated, but not acquired. Genius produces, sensibility admires, taste judges or decides. Their action is reciprocal. If taste corrects and restrains the too ready or too extravagant sensibility, the latter, on the other hand, furnishes the ground and data upon which, after all, taste must rely in its decisions.
Cultivation of Taste.—We have investigated, with some care, as was proposed, the nature of that power of the mind which takes cognizance of the beautiful. ”

“ That you should possess such varieties of taste is no wonder, considering what an abundance of intellectual honours you inherit; nor might the world have been the better for it, had they been tastes, and nothing more. ”

“ Briefly, taste is a metaphor taken from one of our mixed senses, and applied to objects of the more purely organic senses, and of our moral sense, when we would imply the co-existence of immediate personal dislike or complacency. In this definition of taste, therefore, is involved the definition of fine arts, namely, as being such the chief and discriminative purpose of which it is to gratify the taste, ­ that is, not merely to connect, but to combine and unite, a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves, with the perception of external arrangement. ”

“ Now taste is of two kinds, the first consisting in the negative avoidance of all that is ill-considered and discordant, the other positive and a by-product; it is that harmony which always results from the expression of intense and disinterested emotion. ”

“ Smell is that specialization of touch, uniquely delicate, supposed by Maeterlinck to be still in its earlier stage of development in human kind, which responds to the stimulus of those otherwise intangible exhalations called odor. Lastly, taste is touch specialized so as to discern the inner properties of food stuff; taste is the testing sense. Mere touch determines the existence, specialized [15] touch the character and niceties of matter of the physical universe. ”

“ It is a universal rule in psychology that when sense qualities combine to form what is called a perception, the result of their combination is not a sum but a system, not a patchwork but a pattern.... 30Hence, just as it would be absurd to say that the plan of the locomotive is a new bit of steel or the pattern of the carpet a new bit of colored stuff, so is it wrong to say that the peach character of a certain taste blend is a new taste quality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Similarly, without the sense of taste, sweet or sour has no meaning, and in like manner only those who can hear know what music is, and only those who have a sense of smell are able to enjoy the perfume of a flower. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By taste, therefore, as applied to the fine arts, we must be supposed to mean an intellectual perception of any object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensibility of pain or pleasure, or, vice versa, a sense of enjoyment or dislike co-instantaneously combined with, and appearing to proceed from, some intellectual perception of the object; ­ intellectual perception, I say; for otherwise it would be a definition of taste in its primary rather than in its metaphorical sense. ”

“ The judgement, as I observed, perceives the truth of the object, the imagination its beauty; they may be said to relate to each other, in the perception of an object of taste, as a luminous polish does to the substance from whence it proceeds: the substance can exist without its polish, but the polish cannot exist without its substance. The perception of taste seems to me, if I may so express myself, to be illusive, but not erroneous; in a word, to exist in our idea of true honour, i.e. in the polish, lustre, or ornament, of true virtue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ OF TASTE. Our notion of taste may be easily understood by what has been said upon the subject of genius; for mere good taste is nothing else but genius without the power of execution.
It must be born; and is to be improved chiefly by being accustomed, and the earlier the better, to the most exquisite objects of taste in its various kinds. For the taste in writing and painting, and in every thing else, is insensibly formed upon what we are accustomed to; as well as taste in eating and drinking. ”

“ So in all grades are there various matters of taste which become extravagance if rushed into by persons unbreeched for the occasion. Luckily for the present day, the tastes of the gourmand and epicure are merged in more manly sports; the great class of Corinthian aristocrats cull sweets from the blackened eyes of policemen—raptures from wrenched-off knockers—merriment in contusions—and frantic delight in fractured limbs! ”

“ The smell of new-mown hay, coffee, flowers, whiffs of the salt sea breeze, the odors of animals, foods, spices, and 183herbs move us to strong emotions. The stroking of fur, the cool of evening, the delicious languor of a sun bath—all these have high and immediate affective value that can hardly be exceeded by any emotions provoked by colors, forms, noises, and tones. In general, those senses that are closely connected with our personal and bodily welfare, as is the case with taste, provoke strong affective reactions and convey to us a strong sense of reality. ”

“ The possession of taste insures grace and beauty in the works of an artist, and the avoidance of all that is low or mean. It is as [Pg 118] often the result of an innate sense of beauty or propriety as of art education, and no genius can compensate for the want of it. * * * Tastes differ so much among individuals, nations, or in different ages and conditions of civilization that it is utterly impossible to set up a standard of taste applicable to all men and to all stages in the evolution of society. ”

“ But even those who are endued with good natural taste, often judge implicitly and by rote, without ever consulting their own taste. Instances of this passive indolence, or rather this unconsciousness of one's own faculties, appear every day; not only in the fine arts, but in cases where the mere taste, according to the original meaning of the word, is alone concerned. ”

“ The taste, the sense by which we distinguish the flavor of our food, has produced, in all known languages, the metaphor expressed by the word "taste"—a feeling of beauty and defects in all the arts. It is a quick perception, like that of the tongue and the palate, and in the same manner anticipates consideration. Like the mere sense, it is sensitive and luxuriant in respect to the good, and rejects the bad spontaneously ”

“ The foundation of taste in the fashions, however, being what I have now stated, it is obvious that a quick perception of their ever-varying changes and a ready and careful accommodation to them, can belong, whether in man or woman, only to a mind essentially frivolous; and that such a taste, if not absolutely incompatible with a perception of all that is permanently grand and beautiful in the works of God, is yet seldom connected with it. ”

“ As little can we exercise our sense of taste on a work of art as such, because taste is unable to leave the object in its free independence, but is concerned with it in a wholly active way, resolves it, in fact, and consumes it. ”

“ For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it—a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations belonging—so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste for the live beautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. ”