Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

as composition. As Sarah Pierce put it at the close of one school term, the goal of studying rhetoric and composition had been “to create or direct taste.”²⁴ Toward that end, students at academies and seminaries throughout the country read in, if not all the way through, the eighteenth-century British aesthetic canon. This project was facilitated by an expansive print culture that made works by Joseph Addison; Edmund Burke; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Archibald Alison; and, most especially, Hugh Blair available in multiple forms that were more or less comprehensive and more or less costly. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Kames’s Elements of Criticism, for example, were available as full-length books, in either imported or domestic imprints; as abridged editions; or excerpted into volumes like the one compiled in 1784 by James Rivington, which included extracts from Blair, Sterne, “Kaimes,” Burke, Chesterfield, Addison, Steele, and the “Authors of the Connoisseur.”²⁵

      This extensive, transatlantic discourse on taste, elaborated over the course of the long eighteenth century, was hardly monolithic. It encompassed significant disputes over whether the capacity for taste was the result of nature or nurture and generated arguments over whether there was a single standard of taste or many. But by and large, Americans were far less interested in the disagreements within this discourse than in its overriding consensus on the importance of taste as a measure of character and civilization. After all, as Blair observed in his enormously popular Lectures, educators “in every age” had been duty-bound to “tincture” youth “early with relish for the entertainments of Taste” because it was “more or less connected with every good and virtuous disposition.” Taste increased “sensibility to all the tender and humane passions” and diminished the “more violent and fierce emotions.” If these capacities made taste central to civilized society, they made it critical to a republican one.²⁶

      Given the stakes, debating taste was less important than affirming it. One mode of affirmation was explicitly textual. To recognize the connections between beauty, sensibility, and taste or to understand the standards of taste that governed the production of polite letters and fine arts, scholars were directed year after year to works by Addison, Kames, Alison, or the ubiquitous Blair. From these longer texts, they excerpted key passages, which they then read silently and aloud, memorized, recited, and transcribed. When Caroline Chester spent an afternoon in 1815 writing that a good letter called for “ease and familiarity, simplicity, sprightliness and wit” and that poetry was the “language of passion, or of enlivened imagination, formed most commonly into regular numbers,” she demonstrated her knowledge of polite letters and her ability to reproduce their generic conventions in her own writing. But she also demonstrated that she had internalized the precepts from Blair’s lectures on “Epistolary” and “The Nature of Poetry.” More than fifteen years later, a Philadelphia student, Sara Gratz Moses, transcribed extracts from Addison, John Dryden, and William Cowper along with Blair’s assessment of their rhetorical strengths and weaknesses. Sandwiched between these critiques were her own attempts to craft prose that would meet the standards that had been set out by Blair more than fifty years previous.²⁷

      Other modes of affirmation operated at the intersection of the textual and the visual, for one sign of a good stylist was the ability to communicate in tasteful words what the tasteful eye perceived. Indeed, according to Blair, the “high power” of prose and poetry obtained precisely in their capacity for “Imitation and Description,” which allowed a writer to “represent” an original “in colours very strong and lively.” Accordingly, student diaries, letters, and essays reveal a sustained and self-conscious attempt to train their eyes, articulate sensation, and thereby register taste. Henry Cheever, whose reading of John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Oliver Goldsmith inspired his description of a summer sunset, was hardly alone in using the books he read to help him recognize and describe the beauty of the natural world. While studying at Litchfield, Mary Ann Bacon regularly began her morning with a walk in the garden of the house where she boarded; after each walk, she recorded in her diary that she “went upstairs contemplating the beauties of nature.”²⁸

      These habits of seeing and writing, conditioned by reading, stayed with young women and men outside the confines of school. Hetty Anne Barton, for one, took them with her on a family junket from Pennsylvania to Virginia in 1803. Standing on the banks of the Susquehanna River, she adopted the perspective of the picturesque tourist: “The scenery from the middle of the river is very beautiful, the eye can scarcely reach the misty distance, so extensive is the view while nearer objects seem more immediately to command attention. … The hills along the bank are richly fringed with woods,” while “those more distant, assum[ed] the different shades of blue and purple, the warm colouring of the setting sun.” The next morning, the shifting light of sunrise combined with the movement of the carriage to create a landscape that was “continually changing before us.” This play of light and motion, a by-product of travel, was itself worthy of comment: “Every moment … unfolded new beauties, each scene, varying in richness, and highly cultivated, formed a continual picture for the eye to rest on.” Barton parsed her field of vision according to the precepts laid out by eighteenth-century picturesque writers like Thomas Whately or William Gilpin; she described it in rhetoric informed by Blair.²⁹

      It was no accident that Cheever, Bacon, Barton, and countless other academy students were attuned to the “beauties of nature” or to beauty in general. For eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, the beauty that one encountered on the page was connected to the beauty one saw in the world. Beauty was connected, in other words, to visual perception. Consider Hugh Blair. His Lectures focused on elevating rhetoric and imbuing it with taste. But because he defined taste as the “power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of art or nature,” he had no choice but to consider beauty. And beauty was, in the first instance, visual. Thus, hundreds of pages of lectures detailing sentence structure, cautioning against hyperbole, and explicating genres ranging from lyric poetry to legal summation were preceded by a discussion of “sublimity in objects” and a disquisition on beauty as it was grounded in color, shape, and motion and as it was manifested in the human countenance and in “artful design.”³⁰

      Texts that expounded on beauty had to look the part. Academies thus placed great emphasis on penmanship, which one authority declared was “generally considered a strong evidence of a polite education.”³¹ Projecting the abstract realm of sentiment and thought onto the smooth surface of the page, penmanship demonstrated more than a writer’s physical mastery of pen, ink, and letter-forms. It also revealed his or her social rank, education, taste, and character. Penmanship signified so powerfully partly because writing had been an exceptional skill in the colonial era and partly because it acquired new meanings after the Revolution. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Anglo-Americans viewed reading and writing as separate and only tangentially related skills. Although significant percentages of colonial men and women learned to read, if only to read the Bible, writing remained the province of a far more select group. Ministers, doctors, lawyers, wealthy women and men, and, especially, merchants could wield a pen. As the expansion of commerce increased the demand for writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of education increased opportunities to acquire it. But if writing became less rarified, it did not become less resonant. The proliferation of print in the second half of the eighteenth century tightened the association between handwriting and selfhood. Unlike the mechanized, impersonal regularity of a typeface, the small idiosyncrasies that marked one man’s round or Italian hand also signaled his temperament. In the years following the Revolution, this association became far more urgent. Educational theorists who posited republican society as the guarantor of a republican state attempted to identify the particular script best suited for a republic. At the same time, pervasive anxieties about authenticity compelled some readers to seize on a “good hand” as one more proof of an individual writer’s character. Thus, a “good hand” rendered both text and writer legible.³²

      With so much riding on the stroke of a pen, handwriting could not be left to chance. Although the ability to write was a prerequisite for admission to an academy, an ongoing emphasis on penmanship was a routine component of the curriculum. Some academies hired writing masters outright; others made do with teachers already on staff who claimed some competence