'No Secret Element of Gusto Warms Up the Sermon'

Gusto is one of my favorite virtues, especially among writers. Italo Svevo has it. John Steinbeck does not. A.J. Liebling has it. Woodward and Bernstein have never heard of it. Gusto is taking pleasure in the job at hand. About writers it suggests energy and enjoyment in playing with words and ideas. There’s something celebratory about gusto. It can be contagious, like a good laugh. One can be a dedicated pessimist or depressive and still evince gusto. It suggests but isn’t limited to a comic sense. The OED defines gusto (Italian for “taste”) as “keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action; zest.” Dr. Johnson gives us “the relish of any thing.” The basic texts to consult are, first, William Hazlitt’s “On Gusto” (1816): “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.”

 

The other elemental text on gusto is Marianne Moore’s essay “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto” (1949): “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.”

 

She adds: “Humility is an indispensable ally, enabling concentration to heighten gusto.”

 

In the twelfth chapter of Across the Plains (1892), “A Christmas Sermon,” Robert Louis Stevenson gives us a nice build-up to his deployment of gusto: “A strange temptation attends upon man,” he writes, “to keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age.” Scolds and busybodies emanate anti-gusto, sweating hard to eradicate primal human enjoyment. He continues:

 

“I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic — envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the back-biter, the petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life — their standard is quite different. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in themselves that they reserve the choicest of their indignation.”

 

Stevenson was born on this date, November 13, in 1850 and died in 1894 at age forty-four.

 

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