10Did an Edinburgh Debate on Taste Delay Response to Burke?
Yes, and the reasons are to be found in the precise contexts of the discussions because, in all the arts and crafts and all the professions and callings, identification of contexts is central to discerning what happens, and why. Only by establishing what routes writers believe they have already travelled can one understand the directions they subsequently take. To identify pre-suppositions is both an historical and a logical enquiry; but to identify the examples actually available, tacitly assumed or eventually cited to support a view, requires challengeable interpretations of how those examples were regarded in contexts very different from our own. What counts as a legitimate question, and as a proper way of answering it, differs greatly across time and place. Problems, like the concepts in terms of which they are formulated, have histories, evolve and become obsolescent.
In 1755, the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture proposed a medal for ‘the best essay on taste’: in fact, they did not award the medal until the following year, when they gave it to Alexander Gerard, Professor of Philosophy at Aberdeen. The driving force of the discussion society was Allan Ramsay, a widely respected and successful scholar and portrait painter, who later became the Royal portrait painter in London; other founding members were David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames and William Robertson. Ramsay, Hume, Smith and Kames all published their own views on taste before or shortly after Gerard published his revised prize essay in 1759.1 Gerard had read most of his book to his Aberdeen colleagues in 1758 and 1759 and many of them immediately responded. John Gregory, Thomas Reid and George Campbell all published their 1758 papers, as did James Beattie his 1762 paper, variously updated with allusions to other authors if appropriate. Adam Ferguson had incorporated his own views in his lectures published in 1767.2 Gregory, who had been Professor of Medicine, refers to both La Mettrie and Stahl on considering uniting ‘the philosophy of the Human Mind, with that of the Human Body’ (1765, 6), a view that might have appealed to Burke. But in the early 1760s, the Scottish debates about taste dropped out of fashion and thereafter almost no one knew anything about them. Scotland was geographically isolated from both London and the continent, and first-hand knowledge of the arts was, by later standards, limited.3 Hume and Smith only lived in France in the mid-1760s, where they experienced the unrivalled luxuries of Paris. Only Ramsay had lived in Italy (1736–38, 1754–57, and 1775–77) or for any extended period in London; Ferguson travelled to both the continent and America much later. In essence, Scotland was a land still dominated by dour Calvinist bans on personal pleasures or displays, in which the wealth discernible in London or Paris was unimaginable. In the 1760s, there were only five or six collectors in the whole of Scotland of what, today, we would call works of art: that is, paintings, sculptures, antiquities and furniture.4 Apart from folk singing and dances, all music took place in private music societies, membership of which was limited to performers who were required to play regularly. Reflection on matters of taste was almost inevitably restricted to writings, and Hume took the term ‘literature’ to mean, primarily, history and philosophy, and only subordinately poetry and drama. By contrast, and as a land owner, Kames was keen to discuss both architecture and gardening, and Smith, Gregory and Gerard all tried to comment seriously on painting and music.
Most of the Scottish disputants knew of Burke’s Enquiry, at least by means of the 1757 reviews, if not ownership.5 They were not primarily interested in the sublime,6 however, but in the topic of taste and the nature of human responses to, and judgements about, works of art, which Burke addressed only briefly in his prefatory ‘Introduction on taste’ in the second edition of 1759. None of them focused in any detail on Burke’s text. When in 1784 and 1785, after election as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, Burke visited Scotland for the first time, and met many of the leading lights including Adam Smith and Thomas Reid no one raised the earlier discussions.7 But Burke’s Enquiry had appeared too late to influence Smith, Ramsay or Hume at that time, and although Gerard acknowledged it in 1759, he was mainly concerned to locate his views in the contexts of already established classical, French and English works. Kames was primarily interested in responding to Smith and Hume and, even if he is alluding to Burke, never names him in his own book of 1762. Like Burke, Gerard and Gregory were certainly interested in sensations, the latter exploring their role in music in ways which echoed lively discussion in France, but Reid had little interest in the topic and, at the time, seemed most concerned to combat Hume’s epistemology, which he seriously misunderstood, as Kant pointed out. Hugh Blair borrowed from Burke in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, delivered from 1760 onwards – but not published until 1783 – and, because those lectures were used in university rhetoric courses, they indirectly disseminated the views of Smith and Hume in America. But sustained Scottish philosophical responses to Burke did not occur until thirty years after their appearance, with, for example, Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790).
The view that emerged from the late 1750s among the leading Scottish thinkers was this: objective judgements are possible in all realms of experience and enquiry. As social beings, anchored in our own contexts, we all have to learn what counts as objectivity in different realms of enquiry, but whether we bother to learn depends largely on how important we think the context is. Hume and many others held that we can learn to make justifiable judgements about what is good – in art, for example – but that such judgements very often do not match our transient and personal likes. Although ‘taste’ functioned as an undefined metaphor in so many contexts, the important point was that there can be no argument about tastes, understood literally, because these refer to purely sensory events. There can and should be argument, however, about misleadingly labelled judgements-of-taste, because such judgements are not, contrary to appearances, merely reports of those sensory events.
There are four other important features of the Edinburgh view:
1.Objective judgements must rest upon an account of the causal relations between work and observer by reference to the mental response of the observer to the work.
2.Attention must be given to the diverse contexts in which works are made and encountered, and to the consequences of such diversity for both our causal reactions and our mental responses.
3.Empiricists must emphasize that general principles can be legitimately formed only from particular cases; Burke explicitly endorsed this same view. But since no two particulars are identical, the scope and value of any principle or generalization are always justifiably challengeable.
4.Any tendency to impute theories to artists, or anyone else, where none existed, must be resisted: one source of this trend, detected by several artists and musicians, was the tyranny of the written text, which was indefensibly proclaimed as the model and zenith of artistic achievement.
Debate about judgements of taste had raged in England since Joseph Addison’s essays in the Spectator of 1712, and had been further fuelled by Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Burlington (1731). Ramsay reflects on the influence of the socio-economic climate on fashion, and argues for a sharp distinction between feeling and judgement. He holds that what we take to be standards in our judgements are merely the effects of our ‘early education, and so early, that no man is able to remember its first establishment in his mind’ (1755, 22). Although cultural conditioning is contingent, it is curiously re-enforced by another feature: something initially neutral, or even mildly disagreeable, can become agreeable simply through habit. So, if habit is the main explanation of both original and changing fashion, neither initial nor later judgements can be credited with recognizing inherent qualities – a remark that Sir William Chambers, who knew Ramsay well, repeated in his A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture (1759, 54), albeit ascribing it to Gerard. ‘After-admiration’, as Ramsay calls it, resulting from familiarity, is commonplace not only in cookery, dress and furniture, ‘but also in things that are at first extremely nauseous and disagreeable, such as tobacco, coffee and other drugs’ (25). Burke discussed many of these issues explicitly. For Ramsay, so-called ‘good taste in architecture’ can be explained similarly by reference to custom; for both architect and cook, the ‘rules are plainly no more than the analysis of certain things which custom rendered agreeable’ (33):
The fashions in building, tho’ more durable than those in dress, are not the less fashions, and are equally subject to change. But … we must have recourse to history for the knowledge of those changes, which we can learn but very imperfectly from our own proper experience (36).
Ramsay agrees with Hume that preferences based on first appearances rarely pass the test of time: we are often seduced by superficialities and fail to perceive subtleties or complexities or compare the present case with other examples. Burke entirely agreed.
Did the disputants think it mattered whether we settle discussions about taste? Their view was that the behaviour of others matters to us on some occasions more than others: it especially matters if the metaphor of ‘taste’ has disguised an essential distinction between ‘reaction’ and ‘response’, or feeling and judgement. We are often interested in our sensations, their intensity, their duration and their causes: but ‘responses’ are directed at or to something, and they therefore involve the mind. Hume holds that discussions of matters of taste require us to examine both the physical causes of pleasurable sensations, and the thoughts of both the maker and the spectator. That is because works of art are not accidents, but are made intentionally by fellow human beings, for certain purposes, in certain contexts, using their minds and their skills to the utmost – they here resemble any other human activity: sometimes we may need to examine many aspects of the context in order to establish the nature of an achievement. Thought, judgement and the engagement of the mind are necessarily involved in such enquiry, and questions of meaning necessarily arise, at least twice, in connection with both the process and the product: for the agent may mean something by doing what he does, and the result itself may carry meaning. And, of course, there can be no meaning without interpretation, nor any estimate of value: value and meaning are not sensory properties. On this last point Smith completely changed his mind in the decade after his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, delivered in the late 1740s but published only in 1761. He originally held that ‘the fine arts, matters of taste and imagination … require little labour’ (1983, 55), and he placed the onus exclusively on the artist to engage, inform, entertain and instruct. By 1759, and his Moral Sentiments, he acknowledged the importance of a spectator correctly identifying the context and intention of the artist, and of comparing them with his own context of response.8
Hume and his friends believed that the foundations of all practices lie in the acquisition of learned skills, practised, challenged and modified over time in the public arena of comparative judgements made by those qualified to judge. Not everyone is qualified to judge, and few candidates ever achieve the highest standards attainable in their chosen fields. But all of us have to learn what the standards are in any given field, and we are taught by experts: Burke’s ‘marble polisher’ (22). We are not qualified to judge by ourselves until we have proved ourselves over time by means of discriminating perception and rational discussion; only then are we entitled to modify the existing repertoire of judgements, and seek endorsement from our peers. Are there no occasions for someone to express ‘a purely personal opinion’ and ‘a mere matter of taste’? Certainly, but they are rarely of interest to anyone else: reports of likes, as Ramsay declared, are about private biographies inaccessible to others, discussions of merit are about public achievements.
What were the larger contexts into which these views fitted, anchored as they were in explicit epistemological tenets which Burke overtly sought to side-step in his own claims about beauty and the sublime?
Almost all writers in the eighteenth century were deeply anchored in the traditions of Ciceronian rhetoric, which emphasized attention to the different and changing contexts in which communication was to be attempted. This meant that two unavoidable questions arose on every single occasion: ‘What to tell?’ and ‘How to sell?’ Moreover, whether writers saw themselves as engaged in broadly public communication, or in a more specialized pedagogical enterprise, they accepted that human beings do not orchestrate their lives around disengaged thought. In other words, from Aristotle and Cicero to Hume, from Montaigne to Diderot, thought is to be undertaken in the service of action, not the other way round. This view fuelled anxiety about the passivity which seemed to be spreading throughout society. Being seduced by art was becoming one of the pleasurable anxieties affordable to the newly leisured bourgeois. That is why one question obsessed every non-practising spectator from the early 1700s onwards: the question ‘How should I behave?’ or, more explicitly, ‘What should I think?’ and ‘What should I say?’ Since the moral domain covered both thought and action, the behaviour of both artist and audience fell within it: producer, programme, process and product were all candidates for moral engagement and assessment. In the moral domain, human agency is central, and agency itself was accepted as a form of communication: whatever one did could convey something to somebody. Phrases such as ‘the language of gesture’ and ‘the language of dress’ were commonplace. But within the moral domain, however, the central challenge of casuistry would never go away: what are the relations between particular cases and general principles?
Until the nineteenth century, however, only the middle and upper classes in great cities had opportunities for personal experience of such pleasures as public concerts, exhibitions and the new invention of museums; elsewhere, they could only be read about, and that factor itself distorted the nature of both response and discussion: texts dominated contexts, and talk was substituted for thought. Remarkably, several French writers predicted these dangers more than fifty years earlier: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1688); Claude Perrault in his notes to his two editions of Vitruvius (1673/84) and his essay on architectural orders (1683); Abbé Dubos (1719); and their British acquaintances such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) and Addison, most of whom greatly admired Locke, and sensed trouble ahead.
It is notable that few philosophers, painters or poets heralded as aesthetic such aspects of poorer people’s lives as the form, medium, colour, texture or arrangement of their clothes, utensils, living conditions or gardens: none of these could be readily conceived as ‘texts’ with ‘meaning’.
Two major factors combined to distort developments: in order to assert their social superiority over mere doers, and to disguise the fact that their amateur skills could no longer match the professional expertise increasingly demanded and rewarded, the new chattering classes inevitably exaggerated the importance of talk. Practitioners themselves soon abandoned hopes of instructing their potential audiences in anything regarded as technical, and critics followed them, concentrating on the emotional effects on audiences. Even before he published his views on criticism and connoisseurship in his Two Discourses (1719), Jonathan Richardson had been trying to persuade people that looking at paintings was a learnable skill, but by the 1760s John Gregory’s resigned complaint was commonplace: if we ‘cannot teach people to think and to feel’ we can at least ‘teach them what to say’ (1765: 168), and a good way to retain their interest was to encourage them to talk about themselves: ‘Tell me what you feel about it’. Talk about responses to the arts was intended to re-direct attention back to the works themselves: but it did the opposite. Criticism and theory became autonomous, and critics were comfortably transformed from being dispensable intermediaries into indispensable oracles. At musical performances, audiences rarely knew the names of the composers.
Since at least the time of Locke, British philosophers had insisted that learning is at the centre of our socialization as human beings. Only from other people can we learn about the practices, attitudes and beliefs transmitted from one generation to another – in brief, about our culture: that was always one goal of formal apprenticeships. Learning about communication, an anchor of society, requires recognition that there can be expression only when there is both content and skill: something to express and the command to achieve it; Gerard made just this point (1759, 175–76). Moreover, skill is a necessary condition of merit, and knowledge of the inherited traditions is necessary for any justifiable departure from them. Contrary to the propaganda trumpeted from the 1770s onwards, no one, not even artists, can afford to be ignorant of what fellow practitioners have done, because the works of rivals and ancestors provide the conditions of both understanding and merit. To apprehend anyone else’s achievement requires us to use our minds. In the presence of a possible human artefact, attempting to answer several questions helps us decide precisely what it is: who made it, for whom, how, when, why, where, of what? By providing us with perceptual co-ordinates, answers to such questions help us to place the thing in one or more contexts. But, as mentioned above, meaning and value cannot themselves be sensorily perceived: they require thought and interpretation. The concentrated attention demanded by complex human achievements is sometimes said to necessarily detach them from their contexts, just as absorption excludes distraction, but the judgements formulated on the basis of close attention are syntheses of many processes, and must not disregard the contexts in which the achievements are embedded.
Salient features of the Edinburgh position are, perhaps over-concisely, embodied in Hume’s essay ‘Of the standard of taste’ (Jones 1982; 2009). A majority of his conclusions come from Dubos’s Réflexions Critiques of 1719, albeit he rejected the Abbé’s Cartesian assumptions. Ramsay had offered a sociological explanation of changes in taste, but Hume, Smith and Kames all aimed to ground that view by seeking explanations in human nature. They held that our sensory reactions to a work must be transformed into a mind-guided interaction: judgement about or response to a work calls for self-conscious attention and the fullest engagement of our intelligence. An approximation to the original context is a first condition of discerning what has been achieved; moreover, practice in sharpening our perception is necessary to identify the unique character of the object, and comparison to establish the categories it belongs to: these are the philosophical tasks of individuation and identity. Judgement of a work, Hume asserts, requires skills precisely parallel to those required for making it. Moreover, works must ‘have a sufficient unity to make them be comprehended’ (Hume 2000 [1748], sect. 3, p. 22). Whether such unity or structure is sometimes projected by the judge, or always displayed by the artist, he does not say, although in Dialogues concerning natural religion, also of 1757, he inclined to the former view. Although he stresses the need for intelligibility, Hume never discusses questions about the meaning of works of art, even though he was familiar with long-running battles over the interpretation of biblical and historical texts. Smith, after 1759, argues that our overriding concern in making critical judgements of art is with their meaning, although he fails to address the special characteristics of different mediums of art, apart from music. Thus, while he comes to appreciate expressive meaning in music and gesture, he is constantly drawn to the view that unless an art form can be regarded as a language or closely analogous to a language, it cannot have meaning.
Hume’s overall position explains why he politely ignored Burke’s work: there was enough in common to do so, and a great deal of little relevance to the main topic. For Hume, in the broadest sense, works of art are pleasurable means of communication between human beings, and so the preconditions of effective communication apply to art as much as to other means. Those works which please us do so because of their particular properties; one task is to identify these causes in order to enable others to share in our enjoyment. Hogarth aside, notions of beauty and the sublime were associated more with people and nature than with works of art. Crucially, we cannot comprehend a work of art merely by being in its presence, however. The mind must be actively involved. Just as inference beyond the present data is necessary for all factual reasoning, so interpretation is necessary to establish the meaning of what another person has done.
Early in his Enquiry Burke asks who ‘would have been our surest guides’? He holds:
artists have been too much occupied in the practice; the philosophers have done little, and what they have done, was mostly with a view to their own schemes and systems; and as for those called critics, they have generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they sought it among poems, pictures, engravings, statues and buildings. But art can never give the rules that make an art. (53–54)
It is true that few philosophers and critics writing on anything other than literature had either first-hand knowledge of any particular art form or medium, or the practical skills necessary for understanding the processes used in making them; and they often looked in the wrong places for the application and testing of ideas. Things did not improve over the decades. The travel writings of the musical historian Dr Charles Burney in the 1770s, for example, which are full of philosophical insights about taste and the various arts derived from his earlier studies, were ignored by his own contemporaries. And yet a century earlier, several painters and architects were proclaiming loudly that they had neither formulated any theories about their work nor sought to implement them: later, the Scottish thinkers, self-conscious about grounding their own reflections on empirical evidence, became increasingly hostile to the projection of theories by critics onto artists. Precisely what such theories were supposed to motivate, explain or illuminate invariably remained obscure. Hume held that a theory never motivated anyone: indeed, on his account of human nature and the inert character of reason, it could not. His deeper insight, however, was readily appropriated by his friend Smith: the search for intelligibility, which is itself an act of the understanding, inclines us to project on to events the influence of the understanding. We over-intellectualize our findings.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, new opportunities for mere spectators – concert halls, museums and so on – required new modes of attention; audiences had to learn to listen, and learn to look. But to literary audiences, printed commentary about the non-verbal and the performing arts seemed more durable than the works themselves. The temporal character of wordless music lacked the fixity of painting or literature. Both Kant’s friend J.-G. Sulzer (1720–79), who translated Hume for him, and Charles Burney make this very point independently in 1776:
To the reputation of a Theorist, indeed, longevity is insured by means of books, which become obsolete more slowly than musical compositions. Tradition only whispers, for a short time, the name and abilities of a mere Performer … whereas, a theory once committed to paper and established, lives, at least in libraries, as long as the language in which it was written. (Burney 1957 [1776–79]:1, 705.)9
From at least the 1650s, it had been a central tenet of practising painters, architects and composers that appropriate responses to their works could justifiably not be detached from the general context in which they were made, and that critics who lacked first-hand know-how tended to substitute theory for practice, where no theory in fact existed. This often consisted in attributing pretentious intentions to the works, which then required clever deciphering by critics. Like Burke, Gregory deplored the failure of philosophers to cement ‘the natural union between philosophy and the fine arts, an union extremely necessary to their improvement’. He states:
When Music, Dancing and Poetry, came to be considered as only subservient to pleasure, a higher degree of proficiency in them became necessary, and consequently a more severe application to each. This compleated their separation from one another, and occasioned their falling entirely into the hands of such Men as devoted their whole time to their cultivation. (1765, 107, 121)
Gregory held that when ‘music, dancing and poetry’ were encountered as constituent parts of much more complex events and processes, attention would neither typically nor justifiably be focused on them as isolable elements. Musical elements contribute in numerous ways to religious or other social ceremonies, along with many other elements such as food, dress and decoration. When any of these is singled out and becomes the sole focus of attention, audiences inevitably become aware of and demand higher standards of performance. Gregory holds that although ‘one end of music is to communicate pleasure’, ‘the far nobler and more important is to command the passions and move the heart’ (115). On occasion this required that ‘music should be subservient to the Poetry’.
But Gregory lamented the fact that:
Music, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, have been left in the hands of ignorant artists unassisted by philosophy, or even an acquaintance with the works of great masters … It is the business of philosophy to analyse and ascertain the principles of every art where Taste is concerned; but this does not require a philosopher to be a master of the executive part of these arts or to be an inventor of them. (107)
This was a contentious point with which most of the Aberdeen group agreed – Gerard asserting that ‘they may judge, who cannot themselves perform’ (179) – but artists themselves entirely disagreed. Behind the Aberdeen view, of course, was a legacy of the ancient distinction between mere makers or doers, and thinkers. There is also allusion to Dubos’s advocacy of ‘the public’.
Gregory believed that ‘the influence of Music over the Mind is perhaps greater than that of any of the Fine Arts’, but unfortunately discussion by ‘practical musicians themselves’ ‘has now become a Science scarcely understood by any but a few composers and performers’ (111–12). He thinks that when music ‘came to be considered as only subservient to pleasure, a higher degree of proficiency in them became necessary’ (121), accelerating professionalism: this in turn fosters public surrender to pretence, nowhere more obviously than among opera-goers in London, who understand not a word of Italian, but ‘talk of it in raptures which their hearts never felt’ (130). Addison had canvassed such a view almost fifty years before in the context of Handel’s early operas in Italian. In addition to insisting on the important ends of commanding the passions, Gregory concedes that ‘distinct from the pleasure which the ear receives here from the Music, there is another which arises from the perception of the contrivance and ingenuity of the composer’ (148–49) the resulting enjoyment, however, is of ‘a more sober and sedate kind, which proves of longer duration’ (149). Gregory’s observation is crucial: from the 1740s onwards, the rapidly increasing non-performing public experienced and enjoyed music primarily as a circus act, and composers hastened to write music for virtuoso performances. Until then, music had most often been embedded in complex social processes, sometimes as background decoration, sometimes as foreground structure: encounters with music were primarily social, however singular the executant might be, and other activities would be going on (133). The social dimension crucially influenced what the composer wrote, how it was performed and how it was received. In this respect its roles resembled those played by painting, sculpture and architecture (or what alone counted as ‘architecture’, as distinct from mere building) in private or public, secular or religious contexts. Any of these works could function in different ways on different occasions, and be noticed and assessed accordingly. In the modern era almost everything surviving from, and encountered in, the mid eighteenth century by the authors and artists we are considering has been de-contextualized, albeit often re-contextualized in new ways.
Throughout Europe, composers were admired as skilled craftsmen, able to produce on demand, and willing to satisfy both the connoisseur and amateur. Until at least the 1790s, the same kinds of melodies, harmonies and rhythms were used in all kinds of music, because the primary test for eighteenth-century music was its suitability, not originality. Composers were as concerned about immediate rhetorical impact as about harmonic experiment: the pragmatic need for entertainment embraced concern for the strengths and weaknesses of particular performers, and the tastes of known audiences. Composers composed because they needed to earn money, be of civic use, gain a reputation and secure a job – not primarily because they were inspired. There was little, if any, philosophical speculation. Charles Burney represents the un-Germanic view that theories are unnecessary obstacles which tend to perpetuate the assumption that music must be subservient to verbal texts; Stendhal later made a pertinent observation: ‘The German, who lives by theories, treats music as material for erudition’ (1956 [1824], 175n). Excellent performing techniques, of the kind Burney witnessed in Mannheim, for example, were in his view detachable from any theoretical commitments.
If, as Gregory was inclined to do, thought had been given to opera, arguably the most complex of the performing arts, a number of other factors for consideration would have been recognized. Above all, the tyranny of the text in thought about the arts might have been weakened. Although Burke confessed that music ‘is an art in which I can say I have [not] any great skill’ (Enquiry, 123), he could have included opera in his reflections on sensations of sound and eloquence and conversation (part II, sects. xvii, xviii; part III, sects. xiv, xv, xxiv, xxv; part IV, sect. xi; part V, sects.v, vii).
For fifty years up to the 1780s, opera was the most popular art form and the dominant musical form enjoyed by urban minorities in the major European cities, such as Naples, Rome, Venice, Dresden, Stuttgart, Vienna, Paris and London – but not in Scotland (Jones 2004). Some 10,000 operas were composed, although many were ‘the same ones’ under different names in different towns, sometimes with characters and voices reversed in order to use the resources available. They constituted the fabric of cultural experience for the educated elite. From the 1640s the musical forms of both opera seria and opera buffa had evolved quite quickly, away from the masques of the past, but often incorporating popular tunes. Apart from knowledgeable enthusiasts, however, like James Harris in London in the 1740s or Count Zinzendorf in Vienna in the 1780s,10 the majority of spectators only witnessed a work once: they cannot be said to have ‘known’ the works in ways we like to think appropriate today. Like the seasonal festival events from which they emerged, the opera season continued to be a complex social, political, cultural event; performances were enjoyed for exotic sets, enticing dresses, memorable tunes, dramatic stories, bravura singing and excitable audiences. There was, and still is, something for everyone. But every musical performance is ephemeral and vanishes with the night. How were they absorbed into mentalités? The question has much wider implications: all experience is evanescent, all acts of communication and thought. Can texts be adequate surrogates?
For centuries, texts had been not only an anchorage for discussion, but they were often credited with special authority: plays were as often judged by their texts as by their performances, and paintings by the presumed texts they were taken to illustrate. The assumption insensibly evolved that discussions of texts might warrant a higher status than face-to-face encounters, and that if something could not be regarded as a text, discussion was futile. It is not surprising that, outside the special contexts of the guilds, sculptures and furniture, silver or leather work, jewellery, glass and mosaics were not considered as candidates for learned discussion, and only in self-consciously artificial contexts were architecture or music considered. Three principal reasons were cited for all this: first, the so-called crafts involved manual skills, not intellectual insight; second, existing, albeit unanalysed, notions of meaning and interpretation resisted application to works in these mediums, even when a stretched sense of ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’ was adopted; third, existing links between morality and ‘the fine arts’ seemed to disqualify works in all these other mediums from candidacy.
By the 1750s, a debate had been raging for more than a century over whether music had to be attached to, or supported by, words if, in any way, it could be said to be intelligible or to have meaning– almost everyone assumed that the arts had meaning because they involved mimesis or representation.11 The debate echoed claims from at least the twelfth century that the representational or imitative character of painting might require verbal accompaniment to achieve its goals, and that if no narrative elements could be discerned, the work could probably be dismissed as merely decorative furniture. So, either music itself would have to be a language – which few then wanted to claim – or music could acquire meaning only when attached to a genuine language. A popular view emerged that music could enhance the force of linguistic meaning and vice-versa (Gregory 1765, 155). Adam Smith was still worrying about the possible meaninglessness of wordless music in the 1780s (Smith 1980 [1795]).
Between 1702 and 1705 a debate occurred in France which resonated through Europe for another eighty years. François Raguenet argued that the superiority of Italian over French opera could be readily explained. More could be, and was, achieved in Italy because more was properly appreciated by informed audiences, surrounded as they were from infancy by music in which they participated in diverse ways.12 In France, by contrast, audiences are ‘mere spectators’ – that is, passive – and professional musicians never get beyond being ‘scholars’. Le Cerf de la Vieville, Seigneur de Freneuse, conceded that
without attention there is no way of judging of things. One judges of them better by being accustomed to see others of their kind and even for having several times seen the things which are under discussion.13
He insisted that whilst the precepts which function in every craft have been formulated by the skilled masters of the relevant craft, on the basis of their experience, they have neither the authority nor certainty of law: mistakes occur. However, inward feeling is even less trustworthy as a criterion of merit, subject as it is to prejudice and false impressions. Freneuse’s solution is to define good taste as the correction of inner feeling: by reasoning from comparative judgements, one’s initial feelings are confirmed or challenged. The people – le public – consist of the multitude lacking special knowledge, reliant only on feeling as the warrant of their judgement; he agreed that the greater the unanimity of public response, the more faith can be placed in it. Versions of all these views, prominent in Dubos in 1719, remained common currency up into the 1780s, and emphasis on sustained acquaintance with works in any medium, preferably from an early age, became central in discussions of how to promote informed, reliable and justifiable judgement.
When composers themselves, such as François Couperin and J. J. Quantz, were urged to set down their intentions, it became obvious that many terms prominent in discussion of music had changed meaning over the centuries, even in recent times: ‘harmony’, ‘melody’, ‘modulation’ and ‘symphony’, to name but a few. Views of musical notation and its interpretation had also changed, and continued to do so. Quantz wisely published his 1752 essay in both the lingua franca, French, and in German, which few outside Germany knew. Echoing much older views, he insisted that ‘we should always pay particular attention to three points, namely, to the piece itself, to the performer, and to the listener’ (Strunk 1950, 581).14 Not everyone is equipped by knowledge, musical skill, or temperament to perform or to judge. Nevertheless, he insisted, in the now commonplace distinction, everyone has a right to say ‘It pleases me’, although not to say of a piece or performance that ‘It is worthless’ (Strunk, 582). He also insisted that wordless ‘instrumental music, quite as much as vocal music, should express certain passions, and transport the listener from one to another’, adding that a more enduring reward than sensory amusement was music which engages ‘musical understanding’: something ‘conducive to reflection’ by ‘the musical expert’, calling for reflection on precisely what, and how, something had been done (Strunk 1950, 583, 594).
If writers could almost never predict in detail the contexts in which they would be read, nor do much about any diverse interpretations, composers confronted an even more challenging scenario: not only because they had to be aware of the multiple factors influencing the context of their performances, but also because every performance would be different. Even when they tried to make their intentions clear, they invariably found themselves hampered by the notational conventions of the time – endlessly debated ever since: what, indeed, could or should notation do? In these respects, musicians illustrated some of the basic tenets of classical rhetoric, and it was no accident that parallels between conversation and musical performance were commonplace by the seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth century. There was much discussion in the court of Frederick the Great at Sans Souci about the nature and limits of interpretation, with a majority favouring an author’s intentions as the criterion of authenticity. But how were these to be identified in the domain of music? In a musical ‘master-class’ today, pupils have to be qualified to attend; pupils demonstrate both capacities and understanding by performing the piece; the master may, at any point, stop a pupil and play or sing the passage himself. Crucially, pupils are expected (a) to detect differences between the two performances, and (b) to adjust their own in the light of what the master has shown, but not in imitation or replication of it. There is very little and often no verbal comment. There are obvious parallels with many other contexts in which someone is shown how to do something, from surgery to hedge cutting. What, then, are non-performers supposed to do, and what areas are they entitled and enabled to judge?
Almost all the Scots philosophers at mid-century, except Hume, had some interest in music and, aside from such British favourites as Handel and Corelli, were familiar with works by Pergolesi, Astorga, Caldara and even Palestrina (Gregory 1765, 162; Johnson 1972). They were also familiar, as amateur performers themselves, with the practical writings of Geminiani, Brown and Avison (all cited by Gregory) as well as Couperin, Quantz and Rousseau. Most had seen an opera, presumably in London and, moreover, acknowledged differences between the arts. Gerard stated that:
Painting requires a mechanical skill, produced by exercise: music a knowledge of the power of sounds, derived from experience: poetry and eloquence an acquaintance with all the force of words and instituted signs, an advantage which can be obtained only by careful study. (1759, 176)
He adds that a critic ‘must … possess that accuracy of discernment, which enables a person to reflect upon his feeling with distinctness, and to explain them to others’; ‘taste … supplies the facts, for which we are to account; and the experiments, from which our conclusions are to be deduced’ (181). Gerard, Gregory and others approached the issues of criticism with the conceptual tools of the empirical sciences of their day, however much these remained discoloured by inherited metaphysics and epistemology. Ramsay contrasts the 1750s with the recent past when ‘philosophy, still a stranger to experiment, continued to be only a less absurd sort of metaphysics’. By promoting experimental philosophy, he observes, the Royal Society had slowly challenged authority with fact, and after the Glorious Revolution ‘metaphysics, now no longer necessary in support of opinions that were now no longer useful in the acquisition of power and riches, sunk by degrees into contempt’ (1755, 62, 66).
Ramsay, in a view barely distinguishable from Burke’s, had excited interest in the 1755 Edinburgh Society prize by his provocative claim that
whatever has a rule or standard to which it may be referred, and is capable of comparison, is not the object of taste, but of reason and judgment … the proper objects of taste, or feeling, are such as are relative to the person only who is actuated by them, who is the sole judge whether those feelings be agreeable, or otherwise; and being informed of this simple fact from himself, no farther consequence can be drawn from it; neither does it admit of any dispute. (1755, 9)
He adds that if the question concerns something’s use, one can establish that one thing is comparatively better than another, because specific contexts are presupposed. The ‘accidental conjunction’ of words and an ‘original impression’ – that is, the particular contexts in which we learned the vocabulary, and the examples – inclines us to ‘form’ ‘a general system of beauty’. The issue is an ‘entirely practical’ matter of historical fact. Regrettably, non-practising spectators are misled by the apparent agreement among painters and sculptors about beauty, because the inescapable historical fact is that painters, sculptors and composers, always need to please their patron. There are no universal tastes or standards of taste. But, Ramsay concedes, ‘it is the nature of all fashions … to take their rise from the sovereign will and pleasure of the rich and powerful’ (1755, 28, 32, 34). We must study history to detect slow changes in fashion and their causes, and the differences between times, places and cultures: only historical enquiry can answer many of the dilemmas fabricated by ‘abstract reasoning’, or fostered by tyrants: ‘canon law to defend the worldly pretensions of church-men, and metaphysics to promote and defend their spiritual absurdities’. There is ‘no foundation in fact’ for any special ‘sense’ of the kind postulated by Hutcheson, Shaftesbury and Plato which enables us to evaluate objects (1755, 43, 44, 48).
Ramsay insists that: ‘betwixt musick and painting there is no likeness at all; and I am to suspect that musick passes for the sister of poetry, rather from their being often seen in company, than from any resemblance they bear to each other’ (54). Music is an art, in the Renaissance, Latin sense, ‘so far as geometry is concerned in it’:
but as the mathematical part of musick is totally unknown to 999 in a thousand of those who set up for connoisseurs in musick, including the performers, we may venture to say that it is, with regard to them, no art at all. These virtuosos, therefore, have nothing but their own taste, that is, their own private liking, to set up for a standard, or, what is little more mathematical, the liking which those of their club, city, or nation have acquired by habit, that is, by the daily repetition of a certain strain of music. (55)
Ramsay suggests at least four senses in which the notion of ‘taste’ is often used: the faculty of distinguishing things simply and without comparison; that which pleases simply; that which pleases by particular habit; that which pleases by general habit, or fashion (59).
Cicero was ceaselessly quoted for lamenting that only by texts (letters) could he converse with friends and family at a distance. Since time immemorial, it was agreed that human beings do and should explore, communicate and exchange their thoughts by means of conversation. Smith constantly adverts to this fact, allowing him to locate our moral lives in a theatre of common life (Jones 2012). Families instruct their children from infancy in how to converse; students are trained in schools; professors are immersed in tomes on the subject. This is where music and conversation come together (Gregory 1765, 124). The distinctive feature of musical performance – even singing – up to the late 1770s was improvisation: all the great composers were famous for their extempore playing, and most of the still extant manuscript scores, often inaccurately copied by scribes, indicate where a player was expected to improvise. Moreover, as Couperin had insisted, it was essential for a player to understand the differences between appropriate ornaments, such as mordants, slides, accents, appogiaturas, trills, turns, slurs and suspensions, along with the fingering and phrasing needed to execute them. C. P. E Bach’s suggestions were only one set among many, albeit arguably the best.15 The requirements include skill in playing, a mnemonic repertoire on which to draw, intense concentration on the immediate past and present in order to judge what might be appropriate, and further judgement on when to stop or revert to course: constraint, not showmanship, defined propriety. Constant adaptation to a context which the player is changing, and intense attention to oscillation between what has been done, what is being done and what might come – all characterize both musical and conversational performance. The constantly improvisatory performance of properly educated conversationalists is not only tailored to the context, but coloured by vocabulary and all the features of body language including gesture and posture – as well as by pace, pitch, volume, tone and rhythm – all musical requirements. What might follow? Conversation requires participation by all present, albeit appropriate participation might occasionally be silence: could it be that response to a musical performance itself required a performance of some kind, not the report of a private sensory event, resulting from non-participatory passivity? Attempts to textually stabilize the perpetual motion of thought lead to distortion and deception: books could forestall thought, as well as promote it, as Ephraim Chambers warned in his Cyclopaedia: or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728). The particularities, dynamics and fluctuations of thought and feeling cannot be frozen in texts: abstract distillations might be made, which others would have to interpret. In conversation, however, neither closure nor victory are goals, and thus exploration and revision, repetition and clarification, withdrawal and reversal, doubt and conviction can all be conveyed; and all invite response by participation. Everyone knows that meanings operate only contextually, with the same words conveying different messages in different contexts. Conversation can provide models and means of understanding to which texts, at best, can only approximate. Burke’s Enquiry, and certainly his later speaking experiences, harmonize with many of these ideas.
Such thoughts were often opposed as being sceptical, subversive of theologically underwritten morality and thus of stable government. Promotion of such ideas proved an uphill task and, as earlier noted, John Gregory could no longer hide his own frustration:
The bulk of Mankind are incapable of thinking or judging for themselves on any subject. There are a few leading spirits and the rest must follow. This makes systems so universally agreeable. If they cannot teach people to think and to feel, they teach them what to say, which answers all the purposes of vanity. (1765, 68)
If, in contrast to purely sensory reaction, response is required, then minds must be engaged and, at the most general level, all art becomes open for use, whether the subsidiary categories are those of vanity, self-fulfilment, sensuous pleasure, politics, profit or status.
Notes
1Allan Ramsay, Dialogue on Taste, The Investigator, 322 (1755); David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Four Dissertations (1757); Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976 [1759]); Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762); Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759).
2Ulman (1990); Gregory (1765); Campbell (1776); Beattie (1776); Reid (1785); Ferguson (1767).
3In 1755 the population of Scotland, at almost one million, was roughly the same as that of London. Edinburgh was a walled, medieval, 150-acre town of 55,000 inhabitants, four times larger than any other Scottish town, and up to a month’s travelling distance by boat from London.
4See Pears (1988); Holloway (1989).
5The reviews appeared in: The London Chronicle, or Universal Evening Post, 1:556–58; 580–81; 595–96; 2: 26–27; 50–53; Critical Review: or Annals of Literature, 3:361–74; Monthly Review: or Literary Journal, 16:473–80. All subsequent references to Burke in this chapter are to Burke (1958).
6For Hume’s views on beauty and the sublime, mostly dating from 1739–42, see Jones (1982).
7See Lock (1998, 2006).
8For Smith’s views, see Jones (1992).
9Sulzer’s remarks occur in his articles ‘Architecture’, ‘Art’ and ‘Esquisse’ in the Supplément à L’Encyclopédie (1776–77).
10See Burrows and Dunhill (2002); Link (1998).
11Yet James Beattie insisted that ‘Music is not an imitative art’ (1776, 119–20).
12See Gregory (1765, 136, 147), acknowledging Brown (1763).
13Extracts from Raguenet (1702) and Freneuse (1704–05) in Strunk (1950, 473–88, 489–507); translations by Strunk.
14For a fully annotated translation of Quantz’s German edition, and comparisons with the French edition, see Reilly (1966). It should be emphasized that only some 50 pages of the original 334 pages are devoted specifically to the flute. For a fully annotated translation of Couperin’s editions of 1716 and 1717, see Halford (1995).
15Extracts from Bach (1753) in Strunk (1950, 609–15). For a fully annotated translation see Mitchell (1949). Bach covers all the points that follow, in Chapters 3, 6 and 7 on ‘Performance’, ‘Accompaniment’ and ‘Improvisation’ respectively.