EDUCATING THE LITERARY TASTE

Paz Latorena

It was a Spanish thinker and moralist, Baltazar Gracian, who first used and popularized the term,
hombre de buen gusto, during the seventeenth century, although by it, he simply meant a tactful
person. The adoption of the term in the aesthetic field took place in France, according to literary
history, and La Biuyere affirms that during his time discussions centered on good taste and bad
taste until the term grew into wide use, and, by the beginning of the following century had
established itself in Europe.
Certainly Addison, in one of his essays published in the Spectator, defined literary taste as the
discernment and appreciation of that which is fundamentally excellent in literature in another
essay, he defined it as a faculty which discerns the beauties of literature with pleasure and its
imperfections with dislike. These two definitions, according to Coleridge, make of literary taste a
rational activity but with a distinctively subjective bias.

It remained for Ruskin, however to make the distinction, between literary taste and literary
criticism with which it is being continuously confounded. He said that literary criticism is a formal
action of the intellect, a deliberate search for perfections and imperfections by the application of
universally accepted standards to a literary composition; on the other hand, taste is the instant,
almost instinctive preferring of one literature to another, apparently for no other reason except that
the first is more proper to human nature. To have literary taste, therefore, from the foregoing
definition and distinctions, is to have a feeling and an inclination for what is fine and beautiful in
literature, to savor and to appreciate it, and to dislike and reject what is vulgar and tawdry in it.

There comes a time in the life of every man when he discovers for himself or is led to discover
the wide and varied world of literature, a world ass wide and varied as the life from which it draws
its sustenance. It is a world of prose and poetry in which the interplay of human passions, the
greatness and the misery of man, his heroism and his wickedness, his strength and his weakness,
are portrayed with relentless analysis by those whose minds have probed human life to its deepest
and most hidden springs of action. When he finds himself in that world, and eventually he will,
man will stand in need of good literary taste. For unless he knows how to discriminate, how to
separate truth from falsehood, good from bad, the specious from the true, the meretricious from
the sincere; unless he knows how not to take the truth of the portrayal for the truth of the thing
portrayed, unless he is convinced that aptness of expression and brilliance of diction do not turn
falsehood into truth, his sense of literary values runs the risk of being falsified.
Fortunately, according to Sir Joshua Reynolds, taste can be taught. It can be acquired by
determined intercourse with good models. And it is one of the more important functions of
educations; that is, to train the student, the seeker of light, to distinguish between pleasures that
are becoming to a man and pleasures that are unbecoming to him, to find delight in what ought to
delight him, and to feel repulsion for what ought to repel him, especially in the field of literature.

The popularity of literature courses in high school and college augurs well for the development of
a sound, wholesome, literary taste. A great deal of the works and the responsibility falls on the
teacher whose attitude towards the teaching of literature should be, that the interpretation and the
appreciation of the individual authors and their works are important nor so much in themselves,
but as means to the refinement of a taste that will make of literature, when school days are over, a
source of pure pleasure and spiritual adventure for the student.

What literary ideals, then, should the teacher emphasize? What literary standards should guide him
in the selection of the literature, intercourse with which would develop good literary taste? In other
words, what literary values make the literature that can serve that end?
First, there is the intellectual value of literature. By intellectual value we mean something in a
literary composition which makes the reader think to some purpose so that his mental life is
enriched and enlarged as a result.

The other arts do not place great emphasis on intellectual value, Music, painting, sculpture, the
dance — all these appeal primarily through the sense and they convey beauty through ear and eye.
The sound and sight in themselves enrich the senses. Yet all arts have some intellectual appeal.
How much more must literature, appealing through the physical or the mind’s eye to the mind
itself and setting up a train of ideas, consider intellectual content important? This does not mean,
however, that all literature must present a profound truth, solve a pressing intellectual problem,
make its readers think a long and deeply. In intellectual value, as in other matters, there are degrees.
We would be very reluctant to condemn a charming romance by Stevenson, a sparkling comedy
of the Quinter brothers, the delightful society versus of the French, even the glamorous poetry of
Swinburne from all of which we have had so much and so many kinds of pleasure even though the
intellectual value be slight.

But all great literature, that of universal and enduring appeal, will, upon close scrutiny, be found
to contain a high degree of intellectual value. No play of Shakespeare or Calderon de la Barca, no
perm of Dante or Milton, no novel of Tolstoy or Hardy is without the quality that appeals to the
human mind and enlarges it.
And the high quality that appeals to the human mind and enlarges it is truth; better still the truth
as presented by literature. Not the truth that is mere information or that is factual, but the truth that
imagination and art transmute from merely dry bines put together into breath and life. Not the truth
supplied by romanticism alone, or realism, or idealism or naturalism, but a truth that does not
depend on such methods but on something more fundamental. The romantic may be as true as the
realistic; the idealist may look at life as truly as naturalist. The point is that human life and human
experience which is the stuff of literature is a complex thing; It is neither wholly material nor
wholly spiritual; it is neither completely ascribed by the details of physical existence nor entirely
given to dream. It is compounded experience, invariably the more sordid side – and this is our first
brief against much of the literature of our own days – contains only part of the truth and falsifies
values.

From literature sans intellectual value, and therefore not literature at all, from literature that
contains half-truths and falsified human values, from literature that leaves the reader unsatisfied,
food taste should be trained to shrink from. Second, there is the emotional value of literature which
is as significant as its intellectual value. An appeal to the emotions is the distinguishing mark of
any literature worth its name. And even the dullness of novels, the flattest of dramatic failures, and
the worst poem show an endeavor to express and to arouse emotion. For purposed of literature, the
term “emotion” may be made largely inclusive. Under the shadows of the two main classes,
pleasant and unpleasant emotions, there walk many experiences that we commonly call moods,
feelings, and attitude. Strangely enough, the so-called pleasant emotions have had very little appeal
for writers. Fried, pathos, fear,, even horror have stirred the creative faculty more than happiness
and serenity, from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound to Sheriff’s Journey’s End. And the obvious
explanation is that life is more of the material of tragedy and of pathos and the writer takes what
gives him most and uses it.

However, literature proves that it can take the unpleasant and the painful from life and so represent
them that pleasure and not pain is the resulting emotion of the reader, Otherwise tragedy would
repel and not attract. But in art, literature in particular, there is always, associated with the painful,
even with the horrible, something which arouses desirable emotions. The desirable element may
be closely associated with the painful stimulus itself or it may be in the effect which the painful
stimulus have upon the reader. The figure of a weak man might be contemptible, but in arouses
pity. An act of cruelty and injustice may give painful emotions to the reader and at the same time
stir moral indignation which in itself is healthy, the war poems of Siegfried Sasson would be almost
unbearable because of the horrors they depict were it not for the suggestions of heroism and
sacrifice and for the hope they carry, the eventual abolition of war. Here are emotions growing out
of and involved without contempt but they satisfy, enlarge, and ennoble. So in larger scenes of
horror, tragedy or pathos, our pleasure in the nobility that withstands pain and evil, our sympathy
with suffering lift us out of the realm of the merely unpleasant or painful. Thus almost any emotion
may be represent in art, no matter how painful, no matter how unpleasant, if the imagination of the
writer finds it in meanings and associations that arouse wholesome and pleasurable feelings.

The statement that literature should appeal to the noble and higher emotions invariably brings forth
the question of what the nobles and higher emotions are. To which the answer is that they are those
emotions and feelings and attitudes which are ours because we are human beings and not animals,
those emotion which control our conduct as moral beings, those emotions that move us to right
and happy living. And those are the emotions which a good literary taste instinctively looks for in
literature and without which literature would have very little account for its being.

Third, there is the ethical value of literature which has more frequently been a storm center than
either of the other content values. Emphasis on the ethical significance of literature has been
derided as frequently as it has been demanded. Art of art’s sake has been a cry raised on and off,
especially in modern times, but it has been countered by the works of great didactic writers, from
Plato to Tolstoy. It is not for us here to take sides as to which the correct concept of the end of
literature is, didactic, that is for instruction as Plato says, or aesthetic, that is for pleasure Aristotle
holds. We have always favored Horace who believes in literature that both teaches and delights.
But this we know, that literature that is immoral does not and cannot delight man, much less
instruct him. Judgment as to what constitutes immorality in literature varies greatly. Let us, for
one, consider the morality of expression. There are those who believe that frankness of speech
does not consulate immorality. In fact, they hold, it is healthier to speak frankly of the normal facts
of life than to veil in imperfectly, even maliciously. The use of concealing phrases which probably
deceive nobody is often far more suggestive, far more over stimulating to the imagination that
modern frankness.

We believe that there is a grain of truth in that contention. However, when language goes beyond
the normal express of abnormality, and so gives the reader unhealthy information and stimulates
the morbid imagination, then it is immoral. Its aim becomes not that expressing of truth but
obscenity. The conclusion of this matter of morality or immorality in expression is that it is not so
much a question of the words that are used as the purposes for which they are used. Which brings
us to the consideration of the morality of the theme. There are those who hold that a literary
composition, the theme of which is immorality is not necessarily immoral. The history of literature,
they contend, shows that there are a few books that deals with vice and crime of some sort. Were
we therefore reject as immoral all the literature dealing with vice and crime we would have to
banish creative writing as a whole. The Illiad, Oedipus Tyrannus, Macbeth, Faust are not immoral
books.
That we admit. But there are books that deal with similar themes and are definitely immoral. What
makes the difference? Obviously, the answer lies in the purpose and aim of the writer and in his
emphasis. If the aim of the writer is to focus this attention of the readers upon evil for evil’s own
sake, his purpose is degrading; consequently his book is immoral.

The realist will say that the writer portraying life should present vice as attractive. True. But the
attractiveness of vice is not the whole truth about it. Great writers have presented vice as attractive
but they have also presented the ashes into which that attractiveness turns, if we yield to its lure.
That is representing the whole of life, which usually includes reaction, and later, retribution.

An appeal to facts shows that all supreme literatures have a positive ethical value. Creative writing,
emanating from and dealing with man’s experience, must have some reference to his conduct. And
since we are men and not animals, since we are moral beings with a conscience, good literary taste
demands that in all literature there should be found a positive influence that will bring us higher
values, both as individuals and as members of a social order.

There are witnesses in the world today a cult of the formless and the ugly in the various arts of
human life, but in manifests itself more strongly and shamelessly in literature, particularly in the
novel and the drama. And as for the motion picture, it fairly reeks with it. The effect on society
and individual is distressing.

I conclude, education must erect barriers against rampant vulgarity. And good taste is not only a
barrier but a means of devulgarization; a taste that is attuned to the fine and beautiful, a taste out
of sympathy with the false and the ignoble, a taste that would be one of the instruments for richer
living.