'That Sort of Tingling Sensation to the Eye'

In Houston you’ll find a Venezuelan restaurant, Gusto Gourmet, and a Salvadoran place called Panaderia y Pupuseria El Buen Gusto. The Spanish usage of gusto is literal: “taste.” My sense is that gusto in English is now used almost exclusively in connection with preparing and consuming food and drink, which, though not wrong, is limiting. 

The word entered English as a noun early in the seventeenth century from Latin by way of the Romance languages, and originally meant, according to the OED, “keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action; zest.” That’s close to how I still think of it. In my private lexicon, gusto signals hearty enthusiasm, verve, brio. It’s the opposite of flat-footed, literal-minded earnestness. In literature, the quality is often expressed through linguistic exuberance.

 

In Monday’s post I referred to a time when novels were “written with a comparable degree of confidence and gusto.” A reader commented on my concluding word: “Fielding and Smollett had more gusto (a much abused and misunderstood word) than any twenty writers today.” The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, like Shakespeare’s era, were an Age of Gusto in literature. They were “gustful” (that’s a real, OED-certified word, as is “gustless” – so close to gutless). In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson offers  two definitions. First: “The relish of anything; the power by which any thing excites sensations in the palate.” And then, interestingly: “Intellectual taste; liking.”   

 

Gusto has another shade of meaning, roughly artistic style in the visual arts. In his essay “On Gusto” (1816), William Hazlitt writes: “Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object.” Hazlitt praises Titian’s use of color when painting the skin of his subjects as an expression of gusto:

 

“Titian’s is like flesh, and like nothing else. It is as different from that of other painters, as the skin is from a piece of white or red drapery thrown over it. The blood circulates here and there, the blue veins just appear, the rest is distinguished throughout only by that sort of tingling sensation to the eye, which the body feels within itself. This is gusto.”

 

After criticizing the flesh tones in paintings by van Dyke, Hazlitt continues:

 

“Michael Angelo’s forms are full of gusto. They every where obtrude the sense of power upon the eye. His limbs convey an idea of muscular strength, of moral grandeur, and even of intellectual dignity . . .”

 

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne likewise sees gusto in Michelangelo’s paintings: “’Tis true there is something of a hardness in his manner⁠⸺⁠and, as in Michelangelo, a want of grace⁠⸺⁠but then there is such a greatness of gusto!”

 

More recently, Marianne Moore delivered a lecture in 1949 to the Grolier Club titled “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto.” She describes that trio of virtues as the “foremost aids to persuasion.” She praises Cowper’s “The Snail” as “a thing of gusto” and detects it as well in an unlikely collection of writers: Edmund Spenser, Christopher Smart and Walter de la Mare. She writes:

 

“All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

 

[Moore’s essay is collected in Predilections (1955), A Marianne Moore Reader (1961) and The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (1986).]