The Man of Taste

The Man of Taste
James Bramston

James Bramston

The Man of Taste

INTRODUCTION

For what has Virro painted, built, and planted?
Only to show, how many Tastes he wanted.
What brought Sir Visto's ill got wealth to waste?
Some Daemon whisper'd, "Visto! have a Taste."

    (Pope, Epistle to Burlington)
The idea of "taste" and the ideal of the "man of taste" have fallen considerably in critical esteem since the eighteenth century. When F. R. Leavis calls Andrew Lang "a scholar and a man of taste, with a feeling for language and a desire to write poetry,"[1] it is clear that for Leavis these attributes disqualify Lang from being taken seriously as a poet. But for the age of Pope, "taste" was a key term in its aesthetic thinking; the meaning and application of the term was a lively issue which engaged most of the ablest minds of the period.

Addison prefaced his series of Spectator papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" with a ground-clearing essay on "taste" (No. 409). In this classic account of the term, Addison defines "taste" as "that Faculty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure, and the Imperfections with Dislike." Addison's "taste" is an innate proclivity towards certain kinds of aesthetic experience that has been consciously cultivated in the approved direction. It is not enough to value and enjoy the right authors; they must be valued and enjoyed for the right reasons. When he holds up to ridicule the man who assured him that "the greatest Pleasure he took in reading Virgil, was in examining Aeneas his Voyage by the Map," Addison clearly expects his readers to agree that such a singular taste was in fact no taste at all. His account implies not only a standard of "taste," but also general agreement, at least among "men of taste," about what the standard was. It is this circularity that makes it essential to assume some innate faculty of "taste."

But Addison's prescription for the cultivation of taste was a laborious one, involving prolonged reading and study. The wealthy, and especially the newly wealthy, were tempted to confuse the correct appreciation of the objects of taste with the mere possession of them; so that, as with Pope's Timon in the Epistle to Burlington (1731), owning a library became a substitute for reading books. This false taste for ostentation – especially in buildings – is a frequent target of contemporary satire.

The social importance of "taste" as an index of wealth was reinforced by current philosophical thinking that gave "taste" a moral dimension too. In his Characteristicks (1711), Shaftesbury postulated an innate moral sense, just as Addison did an innate aesthetic sense. Shaftesbury draws this analogy between the moral and the aesthetic:

The Case is the same here [in the mental or moral Subjects], as in the ordinary Bodys, or common Subjects of Sense. The Shapes, Motions, Colours, and Proportions of these being presented to our Eye; there necessarily results a Beauty or Deformity, according to the different Measure, Arrangement and Disposition of their several Parts. So in Behaviour and Actions, when presented to our Understanding, there must be found, of necessity, an apparent Difference, according to the Regularity or Irregularity of the Subjects.[2]

The correct training of this capacity would enable men to make the right choices in both moral and aesthetic matters. This analogy is also the basis of Francis Hutcheson's Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728).

It is against the philosophical background of the writings of Addison, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson that the satire on "taste" of Pope, Bramston, and others must be seen. But by the time Pope wrote his Epistle to Burlington, Addison's "Faculty of the Soul" had been somewhat debased as a critical term, and the decline of "taste" was a common topic. "Nothing is so common as the affectation of, nor any thing so seldom found as Taste" was the complaint of the Weekly Register in 1731, deploring "the degeneracy of Taste since Mr. Addison's time."[3]

The publication of Pope's Epistle to Burlington in December 1731 was a literary event of some importance, especially since it was his first poem since the Dunciad Variorum of 1729. The Epistle gave "taste" a renewed currency as a vogue word. "Of Taste" is found only on the half-title of the first edition. But, significantly changed to "Of False Taste" for the second edition, this designation found its way onto the title-page of the third edition, and became the poem's popular title (it is so described on the advertisement leaf of Bramston's The Man of Taste).

Several attacks on Pope and his poem were published in the following year or so. A Miscellany on Taste (1732) reprinted Pope's Epistle with combative critical notes. Pope himself was attacked, as "Mr. Alexander Taste," in an anonymous pamphlet Mr. Taste the Poetical Fop (1732), reissued in 1733 as The Man of Taste, apparently borrowing the title of Bramston's poem.[4] Bramston's The Man of Taste (1733) is an early example of the more positive reaction to Pope's Epistle, joining him rather than attempting to beat him. Bramston's poem in its turn occasioned an anonymous The Woman of Taste (1733), and suggested some details for the character of Lord Apemode in James Miller's comedy The Man of Taste (1735). Pope himself borrowed an idea from it (see p. 14, 11. 5-6) for a passage in the Dunciad (the allusion to Free-Masons and F.R.S.; IV, 567-71).

The cluster of works provoked by Pope's Epistle is evidence of the topicality of "taste" at the time Bramston wrote his poem, and it is his Man of Taste that retains most interest today. The later history of "taste" in eighteenth-century aesthetics and satire can only briefly be glanced at here. Important philosophical discussions are Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (in Four Dissertations, 1757), Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; a "Discourse Concerning Taste" was prefaced to the second edition, 1759), and Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste (1759). Foote's farce Taste (1752) exposed the sham taste for the antique. There are numerous satiric portraits of the "Man of Taste": Mr. Sterling in The Clandestine Marriage (1766) is a good example clearly in the tradition of Pope's Timon, as is General Tilney in Northanger Abbey (1818, but written much earlier).

By the time of Jane Austen, of course, "taste" had developed away from the Addisonian rules, and indeed the whole tenor of the aesthetics of the imagination had changed. What had happened can be suggested by juxtaposing two significant statements about "taste" as metaphor. In his Spectator essay (No. 409) Addison speaks of "a very great Conformity between that Mental Taste, which is the Subject of this Paper, and that Sensitive Taste which gives us a Relish of every different Flavour that affects the Palate." But in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth deprecates those "who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry."[5] But the breakdown of the metaphor of "taste" is too large a subject to be explored here.

James Bramston (?1694-1743) was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1717 and his M.A. in 1720. He took orders, and was for a time a military chaplain. In 1724 he obtained the living of Lurgashall, and in 1739 those of Harting and Westhampnett.[6] He published (all anonymously) only three poems in English:

1. The Art of Politicks, in Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry. London: Lawton Gilliver, 1729.

2. The Man of Taste. Occasion'd by an Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that Subject. London: Lawton Gilliver, 1733.

3. The Crooked Six-pence. With a Learned Preface Found among Some Papers Bearing Date the Same Year in which Paradise Lost Was Published by the Late Dr. Bently. London: Robert Dodsley, 1743.

Bramston also wrote Latin verses, and at least two unpublished poems survive; but his reputation rests on The Art of Politicks and The Man of Taste. Both poems are of interest to the political and cultural historian, but from a literary point of view The Man of Taste is probably the better poem. This is largely because of Bramston's success in creating the persona of a self-consciously affected Man of Taste, who, however, exposes himself more than he intends. Joseph Warton mistook this effect for a failure of technique when he called Bramston "guilty of the indecorum and absurdity of making his hero laugh at himself and his own follies."[7] The poem is deliberately the "confessions" of a self-styled Man of Taste. It begins in a casual, cynical tone, but as the speaker is gradually seduced by his own rhetoric (especially when he imagines himself a nobleman) he strikes an almost rhapsodic note, so that he is revealed as the victim, not the exploiter, of "taste."

Both in his targets and his techniques, Bramston is a disciple of Pope. Sometimes there is a conscious recollection of the master:

I squal'd in Distichs, and in Triplets wept. (p. 6)

Elsewhere the imitation is less happy:

Sure wretched Wren was taught by bungling Jones,
To murder mortar, and disfigure stones! (p. 10)

Here the stylistic habit of antithesis works against the meaning instead of reinforcing it. But there are many good things in the poem; Bramston's treatment of the idea of the stage as a "school of morality," for example, is clever and amusing. His hero derives his "Hereditary Taste" from being "tragi-comically got" by a player-poet and an orange-woman (p. 6). This gives point to his later claim:

Oxford and Cambridge are not worth one farthing,
Compar'd to Haymarket, and Convent-garden:
Quit those, ye British Youth, and follow these,
Turn players all, and take your Squires degrees. (p. 18)

There are also a number of verbal successes, such as:

Nor barb'rous birch e'er brush'd my brawny bum. (p. 6)

Here insistent alliteration and strong rhythm are combined to excellent onomatopoeic effect. Another couplet:

Tho' Blackmore's works my soul with raptures fill,
With notes by Bently they'd be better still. (p. 7)

shows considerable appreciation of the Art of Sinking; the second line especially is fine bathos.

The poem as a whole provides an interesting portrait of contemporary fashionable "taste" that supplements, at a lower social level, Pope's portraits of such magnates of tastelessness as Timon. Bramston's Man of Taste is an odd amalgam of the singular and the trite. He begins by professing to despise laws, and ends by attempting to enact his own. In drawing a character whose tastes are at one moment shamelessly perverse, at another servilely imitative, and in depicting a wide range of "tastes," Bramston has developed significantly the idea that he took from the Epistle to Burlington, which is largely concerned with false taste in building.

This is not to deny that most of the victims of Bramston's satire are somewhere Pope's too. At times one even begins to suspect that Bramston's knowledge of London derives as much from the Dunciad Variorum as from first-hand experience of the city. There is certainly a strong traditional element in some of his themes. The ironic praise of Sir Cloudesley Shovell's tomb, for example (p. 12), was probably suggested by the Spectator (No. 26) rather than a visit to Westminster Abbey; the tomb had offended Addison because it portrayed the admiral in an alien character.

But the traditional is combined with the topical. If Sir Cloudesley's tomb had been a butt for twenty years, Sir Balaam is an allusion to Pope's Epistle to Bathurst, only published in February, 1733, the month before the Man of Taste. Further evidence that Bramston was making additions to the poem as late as February 1733 (the poem was published on 8 March) are the lines:

Not so my mind, unsatisfied with hints,
Knows more than Budgel writes, or Roberts prints. (p. 10)

These lines hit at a new readers' digest, The Bee: or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet. Containing Something to Hit Every Man's Taste and Principles, which was edited by Budgell and published by Roberts. The first number came out in February 1733. There is a similar mixture of past and current with the musical satire (p. 13). Handel's Esther and the novelty of oratorio were as recent as 1732; Heidegger's ugliness ("Prince Phyz!") was proverbial, and his renaming of the masquerade a decade old.

This mixture is confusing, but certainly intentional, since it would have made the Man of Taste more ridiculous to a contemporary audience. There is also a vertical mixture of the tastes of different levels of society; the writer in the Weekly Register for February 1731, already quoted above, makes this distinction: "The gaming-table, and the royal diversion at Newmarket, are the ambition of the majority; and the rest prefer Senesino to Shakespear, as the highest proof of modern politeness."[8] Bramston's Man of Taste is a concertina-brow, enjoying Senesino, gaming, and Newmarket (pp. 13, 15, 17).

The usefulness of notes for a full understanding of Bramston's satire was recognized as early as 1733, when a few were added to Faulkner's Dublin reprint. Faulkner's notes are remarkable for their xenophobic bias, for apart from those on Mrs. Oldfield ("Ophelia," p. 9), they mostly call attention to evils of continental origin: Pasaran's recommendation of suicide (p. 9); Heidegger's role as corrupting entertainer (p. 13); the imposter Count D'Ughi (the "Di'mond Count," p. 16); and Misaubin (p. 17), "famous for curing the venereal Disorders." These men were Italian, Swiss, Italian, and French respectively. This xenophobia is a remarkably constant feature of eighteenth-century satire on "taste."

The Man of Taste (together with The Art of Politicks) was included in Dodsley's Collection; in the 1782 edition, notes (unsigned, but by Isaac Reed) were added, identifying many allusions which no longer passed current. These are often helpful, but sometimes miss the point – as they do with the Budgell-Roberts joke, discussed above. But although notes are useful for a complete understanding of all Bramston's satiric points, a familiarity with the world of Pope and his victims removes most of the difficulties for a modern reader. Only occasionally does Bramston sound a more personal note, as in the list of doctors (p. 17), where he includes two of his contemporaries at Christ Church; and even here, Arbuthnot is a sufficient signpost.

Bramston is a minor poet, but there is no need to apologize for The Man of Taste. It is a lively and amusing poem in its own right, and its association with Pope and its place in the corpus of eighteenth-century satire on "taste" raise its claim to the attention of students of the period.

University of Queensland

Brisbane

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. New Bearings in English Poetry (1932; new ed., London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), p. 11.