Taste: is there a real standard, or is criticism finally a report of what a cultivated person happens to like?

Hugh Blair, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Taste is a faculty common to all men and improvable by exercise. Its standard is not the sentiment of any one critic but the concurring judgment of cultivated men across nations and ages, and that concurrence is a fact about human nature rather than an accident of fashion.12345

Sources

  1. They sometimes strike in the same manner the philosopher and the peasant; the boy and the man. Hence the faculty by which we relish such beauties, seems more nearly allied to a feeling of sense, than to a process of the understanding; and accordingly from an externa) sense it has borrowed its name; that sense by which we receive and distinguish the pleasures of food, having, in several languages, uor. ii.] TASTE.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  2. TASTE. The nature of the present undertaking leads me to begin with some inquiries concerning taste, as it is this faculty which is always anpealed to, in disquisitions concerning the merit of discourse in writing.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  3. Taste, as I before explained it, is ultimately founded on an inter- nal sense of beauty, which is natural to men, and which, in its application to particular objects, is capable of being guided and en- lightened bv reason. Now were there any one person who possessed in full perfection all the powers of human nature, whose internal senses were in every instance exquisite and just, and whose reason t 94 TASTE. [leot.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  4. The difference is so great, that there is perhaps no one par- ticular in which these two classes of men are so far removed from each other, as in respect of the powers and the pleasures of taste: and assuredly for this difference no other general cause can be assigned, but culture and education.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  5. In those states of society, taste has no materials on which to operate. It is either totally sup- pressed, or appears in its lower and most imperfect form. We refer to the sentiments of mankind in polished and flourishing nations; when arts are cultivated and manners refined; when works of genius are subjected to free discussion, and taste is improved by science and philosophy.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

Where the argument is made

  • Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres II-V (taste, criticism, genius), and the practical criticism of Addison in XX-XXIV

How the argument was received

Held throughout the Lectures and treated as the ground on which criticism is possible at all.