________________________________________________
Title: Bramston's "Man Of Taste"
Author: Austin Dobson [
More Titles by Dobson]
Were you to inquire respectfully of the infallible critic (if such indeed there be!) for the source of the aphorism, "Music has charms to soothe a savage beast," he would probably "down" you contemptuously in the Johnsonian fashion by replying that you had "just enough of learning to misquote";--that the last word was notoriously "breast" and not "beast";--and that the line, as Macaulay's, and every Board School-boy besides must be abundantly aware, is to be found in Congreve's tragedy of The Mourning Bride. But he would be wrong; and, in fact, would only be confirming the real author's contention that "Sure, of all blockheads, Scholars are the worst." For, whether connected with Congreve or not, the words are correctly given; and they occur in the Rev. James Bramston's satire, The Man of Taste, 1733, running in a couplet as follows:--
Musick has charms to sooth a savage beast,
And therefore proper at a Sheriff's feast.
Moreover, according to the handbooks, this is not the only passage from a rather obscure original which has held its own. "Without black-velvet-britches, what is man?"--is another (a speculation which might have commended itself to Don Quixote);[1] while The Art of Politicks, also by Bramston, contains a third:--
What's not destroy'd by Time's devouring Hand?
Where's Troy, and where's the May-Pole in the Strand?
Polonius would perhaps object against a "devouring hand." But the survival of--at least--three fairly current citations from a practically forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few words upon the writer himself, and his chief performance in verse.
The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 or 1695 at Skreens, near Chelmsford, in Essex, his father, Francis Bramston, being the fourth son of Sir Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose father again was Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, generally known as "the elder."[2]James Bramston was admitted to Westminster School in 1708. In 1713 he became a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, proceeding B.A. in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was made Vicar of Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, both of which Sussex livings he held until his death in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope. His first published verses (1715) were on Dr. Radcliffe. In 1729 he printed The Art of Politicks, one of the many contemporary imitations of the Ars Poetica; and in 1733 The Man of Taste. He also wrote a mediocre variation on the Splendid Shilling of John Philips, entitled The Crooked Sixpence, 1743. Beyond a statement in Dallaway's Sussex that "he [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame and proofs of whose colloquial wit are still remembered"; and the supplementary information that, as incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual modus of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring Park of Petworth, nothing more seems to have been recorded of him.
[Notes:
[1] Whose grand tenue or holiday wear--Cervantes tells us--was "a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match." (ch. 1).
[2] Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the "watery incoherent Autobiography"--as Carlyle calls it--published by the Camden Society in 1845.]
The Crooked Sixpence is, at best, an imitation of an imitation; and as a Miltonic pastiche does not excel that of Philips, or rival the more serious Lewesdon Hill of Crowe. The Art of Politicks, in its turn, would need a fairly long commentary to make what is only moderately interesting moderately intelligible, while eighteenth-century copies of Horace's letter to the Pisos are "plentiful as blackberries." But The Man of Taste, based, as it is, on the presentment of a never extinct type, the connoisseur against nature, is still worthy of passing notice.
In the sub-title of the poem, it is declared to be "Occasion'd by an Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that Subject" [i.e. "Taste"]. This was what is now known as No. 4 of the Moral Essays, "On the Use of Riches." But its first title In 1731 was "Of Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal antipathy, promptly attacked Pope, Burlington, and his own bete noire, Burlington's architect, William Kent. Pope, to whom Burlington acts as hodman, is depicted whitewashing Burlington Gate, Piccadilly, which is labelled "Taste," and over which rises Kent's statue, subserviently supported at the angles of the pediment by Raphael and Michelangelo. In his task, the poet, a deformed figure in a tye-wig, bountifully bespatters the passers-by, particularly the chariot of the Duke of Chandos. The satire was not very brilliant or ingenious; but its meaning was clear. Pope was prudent enough to make no reply; though, as Mr. G.S. Layard shows in his Suppressed Plates, it seems that the print was, or was sought to be, called in by those concerned. Bramston's poem, which succeeded in 1733, does not enter into the quarrel, it may be because of the anger aroused by the pictorial reply. But if--as announced on its title-page,--it was suggested by Pope's epistle, it would also seem to have borrowed its name from Hogarth's caricature.
It was first issued in folio by Pope's publisher, Lawton Gilliver of Fleet Street, and has a frontispiece engraved by Gerard Vandergucht. This depicts a wide-skirted, effeminate-looking personage, carrying a long cane with a head fantastically carved, and surrounded by various objects of art. In the background rises what is apparently intended for the temple of a formal garden; and behind this again, a winged ass capers skittishly upon the summit of Mount Helicon. As might be anticipated, the poem is in the heroic measure of Pope. But though many of its couplets are compact and pointed, Bramston has not yet learned from his model the art of varying his pausation, and the period closes his second line with the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect, noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is made to profess the errors satirised, and to be the unabashed mouthpiece of his own fatuity, "Mine," say the concluding lines,--
Mine are the gallant Schemes of Politesse,
For books, and buildings, politicks, and dress.
This is True Taste, and whoso likes it not,
Is blockhead, coxcomb, puppy, fool, and sot.
One is insensibly reminded of a quotation from P.L. Courier, made in the Cornhill many years since by the once famous "Jacob Omnium" when replying controversially to the author of Ionica, "Je vois"--says Courier, after recapitulating a string of abusive epithets hurled at him by his opponent--"je vois ce qu'il veut dire: il entend que lui et moi sont d'avis different; et c'est la sa maniere de s'exprimer." It was also the manner of our Man of Taste.
The second line of the above quotation from Bramston gives us four of the things upon which his hero lays down the law. Let us see what he says about literature. As a professing critic he prefers books with notes:--
Tho' Blackmore's works my soul with raptures fill,
With notes by Bently they'd be better still.
Swift he detests--not of course for detestable qualities, but because he is so universally admired. In poetry he holds by rhyme as opposed to blank verse:--
Verse without rhyme I never could endure,
Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.
To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see,
Milton's an universal Blank to me ...
Thompson [sic] write blank, but know that for that reason
These lines shall live, when thine are out of season.
Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet's lays
As London Ladies owe their shape to stays.
In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the reigning fashion. But if we may assume Bramston himself to approve what his hero condemns, he must have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had but sparse advocates at this time, or for some time to come. Neither Gray, nor Johnson, nor Goldsmith were ever reconciled to what the last of them styles "this unharmonious measure." Goldsmith, in particular, would probably have been in exact agreement with the couplet as to the controlling powers of rhyme. "If rhymes, therefore," he writes, in the Enquiry into Polite Learning,[3] "be more difficult [than blank verse], for that very reason, I would have our poets write in rhyme. Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain, plays highest by diminishing the aperture."[4]
[Notes:
3: Ed. 1759, p. 151.
4: Montaigne has a somewhat similar illustration: "As Cleanthes The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is said, that as the voice being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, at last issueth forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sentence cunningly and closely couched in measure-keeping Posie, darts it selfe forth more furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke". (Essayes, bk. i. ch. xxv. (Florio's translation).]
The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is Colley Cibber, who, however, deserves the laurel he wears, not for The Careless Husband, his best comedy, but for his Epilogues and other Plays.
It pleases me, that Pope unlaurell'd goes,
While Cibber wears the Bays for Play-house Prose,
So Britain's Monarch once uncover'd sate,
While Bradshaw bully'd in a broad-brimmed hat,--
a reminiscence of King Charles's trial which might have been added to Bramston stock quotations. The productions of "Curll's chaste press" are also this connoisseur's favourite reading,--the lives of players in particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in Carlyie's essay on Scott.[5] Among these the memoirs of Cibber's "Lady Betty Modish," Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster Abbey, are not obscurely indicated.
[Note:
5: "It has been said. 'There are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day.'"]
In morals our friend--as might be expected circa l730--is a Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his text-book: his breviary the Fable of the Bees;--
T' Improve In Morals Mandevil I read,
And Tyndal's Scruples are my settled Creed.
I travell'd early, and I soon saw through
Religion all, e'er I was twenty-two.
Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure,
When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,
Self-murder is an honourable way.
As Pasaran directs I'd end my life,
And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife.
He would, of course, have done nothing of the kind; nor, for the matter of that, did his Piedmontese preceptor.[6]
[Note:
6: Count Passeran was a freethinking nobleman who wrote A Philosophical Discourse on Death, in which he defended suicide, though he refrained from resorting to it himself. Pope refers to him in the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue i. 124:--
If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man,
And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran!]
Nil admirari is the motto of the Man of Taste in Building, where he is naturally at home. He can see no symmetry in the Banqueting House, or in St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even in St. Paul's itself.
Sure wretched Wren was taught by bungling Jones,
To murder mortar, and disfigure stones!
"Substantial" Vanbrugh he likes-=chiefly because his work would make "such noble ruins." Cost is his sole criterion, and here he, too, seems to glance obliquely at Canons:--
Dorick, Ionick, shall not there be found,
But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound.
But this was moderate, as the Edgware "folly" reached L250,000. In Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley:--
Does it not merit the beholder's praise,
What's high to sink? and what is low to raise?
Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood,
And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood.
Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste,
Expence and alteration show a Taste.
As a connoisseur of Painting this enlightened virtuoso is given over to Hogarth's hated dealers in the Black Masters:--
In curious paintings I'm exceeding nice,
And know their several beauties by their Price.
Auctions and Sales I constantly attend,
But chuse my pictures by a skilful Friend,
Originals and copies much the same,
The picture's value is the painter's name.[7]
Of Sculpture he says--
In spite of Addison and ancient Rome,
Sir Cloudesly Shovel's is my fav'rite tomb.[8]
How oft have I with admiration stood,
To view some City-magistrate in wood?
I gaze with pleasure on a Lord May'r's head
Cast with propriety in gilded lead,--
The allusion being obviously to Cheere's manufactory of such popular garden decorations at Hyde Park Corner.
[Notes:
7: See post, "M. Ronquet on the Arts," p. 51.
8: "Sir Cloudesly Shovel's Monument has very often given me great Offence: Instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the distinguishing Character of that plain, gallant Man, he is represented on his Tomb [in Westminster Abbey] by the Figure of a Beau, dressed in a long Perriwig, and reposing himself upon Velvet Cushions under a Canopy of State" (Spectator, March 30, 1711).]
In Coins and Medals, true to his instinct for liking the worst the best, he prefers the modern to the antique. In Music, with Hogarth's Rake two years later, he is all for that "Dagon of the nobility and gentry," imported song:--
Without Italian, or without an ear,
To Bononcini's musick I adhere;--
though he confesses to a partiality for the bagpipe on the ground that your true Briton "loves a grumbling noise," and he favours organs and the popular oratorios. But his "top talent is a bill of fare":--
Sir Loins and rumps of beef offend my eyes,[9]
Pleas'd with frogs fricass[e]ed, and coxcomb-pies.
Dishes I chuse though little, yet genteel,
Snails[10] the first course, and Peepers[11] crown the meal.
Pigs heads with hair on, much my fancy please,
I love young colly-flowers if stew'd in cheese,
And give ten guineas for a pint of peas!
No tatling servants to my table come,
My Grace is Silence, and my waiter Dumb.
He is not without his aspirations.
Could I the priviledge of Peer procure,
The rich I'd bully, and oppress the poor.
To give is wrong, but it is wronger still,
On any terms to pay a tradesman's bill.
I'd make the insolent Mechanicks stay,
And keep my ready-money all for play.
I'd try if any pleasure could be found
In tossing-up for twenty thousand pound.
Had I whole Counties, I to White's would go,
And set lands, woods, and rivers at a throw.
But should I meet with an unlucky run,
And at a throw be gloriously undone;
My debts of honour I'd discharge the first,
Let all my lawful creditors be curst.
[Notes:
9: As they did those of Goldsmith's "Beau Tibbs." "I hate your immense loads of meat ... extreme disgusting to those who are in the least acquainted with high life" (Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 241).
10: The edible or Roman snail (Helix pomatia) is still known to continental cuisines--and gipsy camps. It was introduced into England as an epicure's dish in the seventeenth century.
11: Young chickens.]
Here he perfectly exemplifies that connexion between connoisseurship and play which Fielding discovers in Book xiii. of Tom Jones.[12] An anecdote of C.J. Fox aptly exhibits the final couplet in action, and proves that fifty years later, at least, the same convenient code was in operation. Fox once won about eight thousand pounds at cards. Thereupon an eager creditor promptly presented himself, and pressed for payment. "Impossible, Sir," replied Fox," I must first discharge my debts of honour." The creditor expostulated. "Well, Sir, give me your bond." The bond was delivered to Fox, who tore it up and flung the pieces into the fire. "Now, Sir," said he, "my debt to you is a debt of honour," and immediately paid him.[13]
[Notes:
12: "But the science of gaming is that which above all others employs their thoughts [i.e. the thoughts of the 'young gentlemen of our times']. These are the studies of their graver hours, while for their amusements they have the vast circle of connoisseurship, painting, music, statuary, and natural philosophy, or rather unnatural, which deals in the wonderful, and knows nothing of nature, except her monsters and imperfections" (ch. v.).
13: Table Talk of Samuel Rogers [by Dyce], 1856, p. 73.]
But we must abridge our levies on Pope's imitator. In Dress the Man of Taste's aim seems to have been to emulate his own footman, and at this point comes in the already quoted reference to velvet "inexpressibles"--(a word which, the reader may be interested to learn, is as old as 1793). His "pleasures," as might be expected, like those of Goldsmith's Switzers, "are but low"--
To boon companions I my time would give,
With players, pimps, and parasites I'd live.
I would with Jockeys from Newmarket dine,
And to Rough-riders give my choicest wine ...
My ev'nings all I would with sharpers spend,
And make the Thief-catcher my bosom friend.
In Fig, the Prize-fighter, by day delight,
And sup with Colly Cibber ev'ry night.
At which point--and probably in his cups--we leave our misguided fine gentleman of 1733, doubtless a fair sample of many of his class under the second George, and not wholly unknown under that monarch's successors--even to this hour. Le jour va passer; mais la folie ne passera pas!
A parting quotation may serve to illustrate one of those changes of pronunciation which have taken place in so many English words. Speaking of his villa, or country-box, the Man of Taste says--
Pots o'er the door I'll place like Cits balconies,
Which Bently calls the Gardens of Adonis.
To make this a peg for a dissertation on the jars of lettuce and fennel grown by the Greeks for the annual Adonis festivals, is needless. But it may be noted that Bramston, with those of his day,--Swift excepted,--scans the "o" in balcony long, a practice which continued far into the nineteenth century. "Contemplate," said Rogers, "is bad enough; but balcony makes me sick."[14] And even in 1857, two years after Rogers's death, the late Frederick Locker, writing of Piccadilly, speaks of "Old Q's" well-known window in that thoroughfare as "Primrose balcony."
[Note:
14:Table Talk, 1856, p. 248.]
[The end]
Austin Dobson's essay: Bramston's "Man Of Taste"
________________________________________________
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
