artists seem trying to puff their names into reputation from an instinctive knowledge of this principle, by talking incessantly of themselves and doing nothing. It is not, indeed, easy to deny the merit of the works-which they do not produce. Those which they have produced are very bad.

THOUGHTS ON TASTE

The Edinburgh Magazine.]

[Oct. 1818.

TASTE is nothing but sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of excellence in the works of art or nature. This definition will perhaps be disputed; for I am aware the general practice is to make it consist in a disposition to find fault.

A French man or woman will in general conclude their account of Voltaire's denunciation of Shakespeare and Milton as barbarians, on the score of certain technical improprieties, with assuring you, that 'he (Voltaire) had a great deal of taste.' It is their phrase, Il avait beaucoup du goût. To which the proper answer is, that that might be; but that he did not shew it in this case; as the overlooking great and countless beauties, and being taken up only with petty or accidental blemishes, shews as little strength of understanding as it does refinement or elevation of taste. The French author, indeed, allows of Shakespeare, that he had found few pearls on his enormous dunghill.' But there is neither truth nor proportion in this sentence, for his works are (to say the least),

'Rich as the oozy bottom of the sea,

With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.'

Genius is the power of producing excellence: taste is the power Xof perceiving the excellence thus produced in its several sorts and degrees, with all their force, refinement, distinctions, and connections. In other words, taste (as it relates to the productions of art) is strictly the power of being properly affected by works of genius. It is the proportioning admiration to power, pleasure to beauty it is entire sympathy with the finest impulses of the imagination, not antipathy, not indifference to them. The eye of taste may be said to reflect the impressions of real genius, as the even mirror reflects the objects of nature in all their clearness and lustre, instead of distorting or diminishing them;

'Or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat.'

To take a pride and pleasure in nothing but defects (and those perhaps of the most paltry, obvious, and mechanical kind)—in the disappointment and tarnishing of our faith in substantial excellence, in the proofs of weakness, not of power, (and this where there are endless subjects to feed the mind with wonder and increased delight through years of patient thought and fond remembrance), is not a sign of uncommon refinement, but of unaccountable perversion of taste. So, in the case of Voltaire's hypercriticisms on Milton and Shakespeare, the most common-place and prejudiced admirer of these authors knows, as well as Voltaire can tell him, that it is a fault to make a sea-port (we will say) in Bohemia, or to introduce artillery and gunpowder in the war in Heaven. This is common to Voltaire, and the merest English reader: there is nothing in it either way. But what he differs from us in, and, as it is supposed, greatly to his advantage, and to our infinite shame and mortification, is, that this is all that he perceives, or will hear of in Milton or Shakespeare, and that he either knows, or pretends to know, nothing of that prodigal waste, or studied accumulation of grandeur, truth, and beauty, which are to be found in each of these authors. Now, I cannot think, that, to be dull and insensible to so great and such various excellence,—to have no feeling in unison with it, no latent suspicion of the treasures hid beneath our feet, and which we trample upon with ignorant scorn, to be cut off, as by a judicial blindness, from that universe of thought and imagination that shifts its wondrous pageant before us, to turn aside from the throng and splendour of airy shapes that fancy weaves for our dazzled sight, and to strut and vapour over a little pettifogging blunder in geography or chronology, which a school-boy, or a village pedagogue, would be ashamed to insist upon, is any proof of the utmost perfection of taste, but the contrary. At this rate, it makes no difference whether Shakespeare wrote his works or not, or whether the critic, who ‘damns him into everlasting redemption' for a single slip of the pen, ever read them;-he is absolved from all knowledge, taste, or feeling, of the different excellencies, and inimitable creations of the poet's pen-from any sympathy with the wanderings and the fate of Imogen, the beauty and tenderness of Ophelia, the thoughtful abstraction of Hamlet; his soliloquy on life may never have given him a moment's pause, or touched his breast with one solitary reflection ;— the Witches in Macbeth may lay their choppy fingers upon their skinny lips' without making any alteration in his pulse, and Lear's heart may break in vain for him;-he may hear no strange noises in Prospero's island,-and the moonlight that sleeps on beds of flowers, where fairies couch in the Midsummer Night's Dream, may never once have steeped his senses in repose. Nor will it avail Milton to

'have built high towers in Heaven,' nor to have brought down heaven upon earth, nor that he has made Satan rear his giant form before us, majestic though in ruin,' or decked the bridal-bed of Eve with beauty, or clothed her with innocence, likest heaven,' as she ministered to Adam, and his angel guest. Our critic knows nothing of all this, of beauty or sublimity, of thought or passion, breathed in sweet or solemn sounds, with all the magic of verse in tones and numbers hit;' he lays his finger on the map, and shews you, that there is no sea-port for Shakespeare's weather-beaten travellers to land at in Bohemia, and takes out a list of mechanical inventions, and proves that gunpowder was not known till long after Milton's battle of the angels; and concludes, that every one who, after these profound and important discoveries, finds anything to admire in these two writers, is a person without taste, or any pretensions to it. By the same rule, a thorough-bred critic might prove that Homer was no poet, and the Odyssey a vulgar performance, because Ulysses makes a pun on the name of Noman. Or some other disciple of the same literal school might easily set aside the whole merit of Racine's Athalie, or Moliere's Ecole des Femmes, and pronounce these chefd'œuvres of art barbarous and Gothic, because the characters in the first address one another (absurdly enough) as Monsieur and Madame, and because the latter is written in rhyme, contrary to all classical precedent. These little false measures of criticism may be misapplied and retorted without end, and require to be eked out by national antipathy or political prejudice to give them currency and weight. Thus it was in war-time that the author of the Friend' ventured to lump all the French tragedies together as a smart collection of epigrams, and that the author of the Excursion, a poem, being portion of a larger poem, to be named the Recluse,' made bold to call Voltaire a dull prose-writer-with impunity. Such pitiful quackery is a cheap way of setting up for exclusive taste and wisdom, by pretending to despise what is most generally admired, as if nothing could come up to or satisfy that ideal standard of excellence, of which the 1 Why is the word portion here used, as if it were a portion of Scripture ? "Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, He wales a portion with judicious care.'

Cottar's Saturday Night.

Now, Mr. Wordsworth's poems, though not profane, yet neither are they sacred, to deserve this solemn style, though some of his admirers have gone so far as to compare them for primitive, patriarchal simplicity, to the historical parts of the Bible. Much has been said of the merits and defects of this large poem, which is 'portion of a larger ;'-perhaps Horace's rule has been a double bar to its success -Non satis est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto. The features of this author's muse want sweetness of expression as well as regularity of outline.

person bears about the select pattern in his own mind. Not to admire any thing' is as bad a test of wisdom as it is a rule for happiness. We sometimes meet with individuals who have formed their whole character on this maxim, and who ridiculously affect a decided and dogmatical tone of superiority over others, from an uncommon degree both of natural and artificial stupidity. They are blind to painting-deaf to music-indifferent to poetry; and they triumph in the catalogue of their defects as the fault of these arts, because they have not sense enough to perceive their own want of perception. To treat any art or science with contempt, is only to prove your own incapacity and want of taste for it to say that what has been done best in any kind is good for nothing, is to say that the utmost exertion of human ability is not equal to the lowest, for the productions of the lowest are worth something, except by comparison with what is better. When we hear persons exclaiming that the pictures at the Marquis of Stafford's or Mr. Angerstein's, or those at the British Gallery, are a heap of trash, we might tell them that they betray in this a want not of taste only, but of common sense, for that these collections contain some of the finest specimens of the greatest masters, and that that must be excellent in the productions of human art, beyond which human genius, in any age or country, has not been able to go. Ask these very fastidious critics what it is that they do like, and you will soon find, from tracing out the objects of their secret admiration, that their pretended disdain of first-rate excellence is owing either to ignorance of the last refinements of works of genius, or envy at the general admiration which they have called forth. I have known a furious Phillippic against the faults of shining talents and established reputation subside into complacent approbation of dull mediocrity, that neither tasked the kindred sensibility of its admirer beyond its natural inertness, nor touched his self-love with a consciousness of inferiority; and that, by never attempting original beauties, and never failing, gave no opportunity to intellectual ingratitude to be plausibly revenged for the pleasure or instruction it had reluctantly received. So there are judges who cannot abide Mr. Kean, and think Mr. Young an incomparable actor, for no other reason than because he never shocks them with an idea which they had not before. The only excuse for the over-delicacy and supercilious indifference here described, is when it arises from an intimate acquaintance with, and intense admiration of, other and higher degrees of perfection and genius. A person whose mind has been worked up to a lofty pitch of enthusiasm in this way, cannot perhaps condescend to notice, or be much delighted with inferior beauties; but then neither will he dwell upon, and be preposterously offended with, slight faults.

So that the ultimate and only conclusive proof of taste is even here not indifference, but enthusiasm; and before a critic can give himself airs of superiority for what he despises, be must first lay himself open to reprisals, by telling us what he admires. There we may fairly join issue with him. Without this indispensable condition of all true taste, absolute stupidity must be more than on a par with the most exquisite refinement; and the most formidable drawcansir of all would be the most impenetrable blockhead. Thus, if we know that Voltaire's contempt of Shakespeare arose from his idolatry of Racine, this may excuse him in a national point of view; but he has no longer any advantage over us; and we must console ourselves as well as we can for Mr. Wordsworth's not allowing us to laugh at the wit of Voltaire, by laughing now and then at the only author whom he is known to understand and admire! 1

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

[July, 1819.

The Edinburgh Magazine.] INSTEAD of making a disposition to find fault a proof of taste, I would reverse the rule, and estimate every one's pretensions to taste by the degree of their sensibility to the highest and most various excellence. An indifference to less degrees of excellence is only excusable as it arises from a knowledge and admiration of higher ones; and a readiness in the detection of faults should pass for refinement only as it is owing to a quick sense and impatient love of beauties. In a word, fine taste consists in sympathy, not in antipathy; and the rejection of what is bad is only to be accounted a virtue when it implies a preference of and attachment to what is better.

There is a certain point, which may be considered as the highest point of perfection at which the human faculties can arrive in the conception and execution of certain things: to be able to reach this point in reality is the greatest proof of genius and power; and I imagine that the greatest proof of taste is given in being able to appreciate it when done. For instance, I have heard (and I can believe) that Madame Catalani's manner of singing 'Hope told a flattering tale,' was the perfection of singing; and I cannot conceive that it would have been the perfection of taste to have thought nothing at all of it. There was, I understand, a sort of fluttering of the voice

1 A French teacher, in reading Titus and Berenice with an English pupil, used to exclaim, in raptures, at the best passages, What have you in Shakespeare equal to this? This showed that he had a taste for Racine, and a power of appreciating his beauties, though he might want an equal taste for Shakespeare.