I. The Shift to Somatic Criticism
In our upcoming October circular, we print and examine William Hazlitt's 1816 essay, "On Gusto." To prepare for this, it is necessary to examine how Hazlitt's work marked a critical transition in English letters: the shift from classicist evaluation of form, moral architecture, and proportion to the valuation of raw sensory impact, which Hazlitt famously defined as "gusto."
For Hazlitt, the quality of art is measured by its capacity to bypass the analytical mind and strike the senses with undiminished force. Michelangelo is praised because his figures make the viewer feel the strain of muscles; Titian’s color is described as having a taste and a smell. Art is no longer an object of Socratic distance and critical contemplation; it is a somatic experience that demands a bodily response.
Babbitt traces the decline of criticism to this shift. When the critical intellect surrendered to the raw power of sensation, the boundary between art and mere stimulation began to dissolve.
II. Babbitt's Critique: The Loss of Restraint
Irving Babbitt, in his classicist critique, attacks this celebration of gusto as a form of intellectual abdication. By making the intensity of the sensation the sole measure of artistic quality, Hazlitt and the Romantics dismantled the structures of critical restraint. The artist's task was no longer to select, refine, and organize experience through the ethical will, but to maximize the emotional and physical impact on the audience.
Babbitt warns that unchecked gusto leads to the reign of the sensational. When the intellect is bypassed, the audience is reduced to a passive receptor of increasingly intense sensory shocks. The artist becomes a mere stimulator, and the critical distance necessary for wisdom is lost.
Is this not a defense of dry academicism? Without "gusto," art becomes a sterile exercise in copying rules. Sensation and passion are what make art alive, not intellectual rules.
[Reply]Sensation is the material, not the master. A heap of raw copper is not a circuit board; it requires traces, layout, and control to route the energy. Without intellectual structure, gusto is just noise.
III. The Application: The Quantification of Gusto
This October, we will reflect on how Hazlitt's "gusto" has been fully codified and monetized by modern technology. The "attention economy" is the industrialization of gusto. Algorithmic feeds do not evaluate the truth, depth, or moral utility of content; they optimize strictly for "engagement"—which is simply the nervous system's immediate, somatic reaction to sensory stimulation.
We live in a world of maximum gusto and zero critical distance. By surrendering our attention to these automated feedback loops, we fulfill Babbitt's worst fear: the total collapse of intellectual control into passive, sensory consumption. The task of these readings is to re-establish the critical distance necessary to think clearly.
The modern feed is a closed loop of gusto: it measures our physiological attention and feeds us content to maximize that response, trapping our minds in a state of perpetual somatic reaction.
Key Passage from Hazlitt's Essay on Gusto:
"Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object. It is not the same thing as representation, which is a mere copying of nature. There is gusto in the representation of things when the power of the sensation is felt, and the impression is communicated to the mind in its full force. In this sense, gusto is the impression which the truth of nature makes on the senses, and which is transmitted by the imagination to the canvas or the page."