Bring back the gusto!

WE HAVE GROWN used to the power of advertising to strip words of their meaning, beauty, and power. But of all the words that have been denuded in the long history of that industry, none may have been so completely and thoroughly gutted as ''gusto." Celebrated by the essayist William Hazlitt in 1816 as one of the highest qualities of art --''Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object," wrote Hazlitt--the word remains in most of our minds thanks to an almost extinct brand of beer called Schlitz. How can Hazlitt's prose compare with this immortal copy: ''You only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get!"

The Oxford English Dictionary defines gusto (derived from the Latin word gustus, ''taste") as ''individual or particular liking, relish, or fondness" and ''keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action; zest." Closer to Hazlitt's is the third meaning: ''Style in which a work is executed; artistic style." But Hazlitt, a great imaginative thinker who spent his life wearing ill-fitting journalist's clothes, saw it as much more than that.

Gusto was the artistic ability to re-create life in paintings and words so that it felt like more than a re-creation. Titian, for instance, painted the flesh on a human arm so that ''the blood circulates here and there, and blue veins just appear." (Hazlitt found a similarly lifelike quality in Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Michelangelo.) By contrast Vandyke's flesh color, ''though it has great truth and purity, wants gusto.... It is a smooth surface, not a warm, moving mass. It is painted without passion, with indifference." Without gusto.

Despite Hazlitt's championing, the word never really caught on. Even Keats, who believed that Hazlitt himself was ''one of the great spirits of the age" and whose own odes were influenced by Hazlitt's thinking on the imagination, recoiled slightly at the word. Though Keats originally picked up the word from Hazlitt, he preferred the sharper ''intensity." In contrast gusto is undeniably round and unforgivably bouncy. Still, gusto remained in general use. It was a fine, functional word, a word that might have bumbled pleasantly along for centuries. But this was not gusto's fate.

Enter the Schlitz Brewing Company. Founded in the 1800s, Schlitz was by 1952 the world's largest brewer of beer, producing, according to beer historian Jerry Apps of the University of Wisconsin, almost 6.5 million barrels a year. For years the huge Midwestern brewers had had trouble fighting down insurrections from local breweries, which made fresher stuff, but it was the introduction of a single radical innovation, the can, that allowed beer to be shipped cheaply and that finally crushed the hopes of the local microbreweries.

Advertising was another weapon of the international breweries and few wielded it as effectively as Schlitz. Though there were occasional failures--like 1957's ill-fated ''Schlitzerland" campaign in which the company pushed a Bavarian village theme, complete with clog-wearing waitresses--throughout the '50s and '60s Schlitz fought Anheuser-Busch for the title of king of the beer world. In 1895 Schlitz introduced one of the most famous slogans in advertising history: ''The beer that made Milwaukee famous." Almost 70 years later, they would turn their attention to Hazlitt's favorite word.

The brewer's first use of the word occurred in 1963 and was fairly innocuous: Inscribed on serving trays, below the familiar brand name with its elaborate S and slashing tail of a Z, was the sentence ''real gusto in a great light beer." But the '60s were the beginning of the great TV age of beer advertising and soon gusto was everywhere. ''Grab for all the gusto you can get" was pounded into the national psyche. It was both the word's heyday (never had it been projected so widely) and its downfall (who could ever use it seriously again?).

By 1967 Schlitz had moved on to a new, soon-to-be famous jingle: ''There's just one Schlitz, yeah, yeah, nothing else comes near/When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer." The old phrase--''real gusto in a great light beer"-- was tacked on to the end of the song, but the truth was that the gusto days were over. Soon after, the brewery adopted something called ABF, accelerated batch fermentation, which allowed them to brew more beer more quickly and which soon enough would be adopted by all other giant breweries. But it turned out that the Schlitz faithful didn't like the change in taste: According to Apps, ''the rumor was the beer was still 'green,' not properly aged." Some suggested the new beer lacked gusto. Worse, Schlitz appeared to be compromising quality in order to increase profits.

Although the ''gusto" campaign ended almost 40 years ago, the damage to the word was done. There may be some who are able to stick ''gusto" into a sentence without thinking beer, but certainly no one who was born before 1960. Hazlitt--who praised the word's ''hard and masculine qualities"--might at least have consoled himself that the word had not been effeminated. Quite the opposite in fact: By being so associated with a popular cheap beer, it had become ''manly" and ''hearty" to the point of caricature.

But I, for one, haven't given up on gusto. As an essayist, I feel attached to it both because of Hazlitt's attachment and because I feel it is a quality lacking in today's essays, which seem tame to me compared to Hazlitt himself writing on, say, the pleasures of hating. And as a son, I feel attached because growing up my father was passionately loyal to his brand of beer: Schlitz.

I can still see the maroon word Schlitz slashing at a jaunty angle across the greyish cans and can remember the clicking noise followed by the slight tearing when he opened the then ''new" pull tabs. My own first sips of beer came from cans of Schlitz before I was a teenager when I went on fishing trips on Cape Cod Bay with my father and his buddies. Hydration was not a big priority in those days, and if the child was thirsty and warm beer was the only thing to sip then so be it. (My father and his fellow Schlitz drinkers were relative environmentalists since they filled their empty cans with seawater and sunk them to the sea floor--unlike most of the boaters, who just left them floating on the ocean's surface.) Years later, when I moved back to my hometown of Worcester, I was strangely comforted when I discovered, not a hundred yards down the road from my apartment, a liquor store--with a sign sporting a 10-foot-tall photo of a can of Schlitz.

My father is 10 years dead now, however, and I have long moved out from under the shadow of Schlitz. My hopes are that the word gusto can do the same. It may not rise to Hazlittian glory, but maybe enough time has passed for it to at least become de-Schlitzified. I believe it is a word worth saving since it gets at something, in Hazlitt's sense, that often seems missing in both contemporary art and life: sheer passion, intensity, willingness to risk. We want what Emerson wrote of Montaigne's sentences: ''If you cut them they will bleed." In short, we want gusto.

David Gessner's most recent book is ''The Prophet of Dry Hill," a memoir of his friendship with Cape Cod nature writer John Hay, to be published next month by Beacon Press.