EDUCATING THE LITERARY TASTE by 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, how...