The Hundred Best Books as per Swinburne, Ruskin, and others - "jumping shrimps on a sandy shore express great satisfaction in their life"

In the fourth volume of Algernon Swinburne’s letters the alcoholic poet’s friends and family staged an intervention, saving his life at the cost of making his letters more dull.  I assumed that the final two volumes, with Swinburne living in the suburbs under the care of his friend Theodore Watts, writing more criticism than poetry, growing increasingly deaf and obsessing over babies – he really enjoys meeting babies – would lose the narrative thrust that made the earlier volumes often read like a good novel.  That is certainly the case with Volume 5.

Not that it is not good fun to see Swinburne tear into filthy Zola or execrable Byron (“I really know of nothing so execrable in literature as Byron’s plays,” letter 1308, Jan. 6, 1885, to William Rossetti, p. 93), or to watch him badger his publisher for “some few of Trollope’s numberless  novels” and the latest Gilbert and Sullivan play (“without the music,” 1426, June 21, 1887, p. 195).

Even better, I was led to an amusing document.  The Pall Mall Gazette published a list of the hundred best books by Sir John Lubbock and then asked writers, clergymen, librarians, and lunatics to comment on it.  The results were published as The Best Hundred Books By the Best Judges (1886).  “There is no more delightful pastime than to lecture other people on the choice of books” – no, no, not true.

The original list is too ordinary to be of much interest.  Swinburne’s is also surprisingly standard, to the point that I have read all but ten of his choices and all but one of his top fifty.  Shakespeare, Aeschylus, “Selections from the Bible,” Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and on like that.  No Euripides.  No Horace, since his childhood Latin instruction poisoned him against Horace.

Look, there’s Byron, but just “’Don Juan,’ cantos I-VII, XI-XVI, inclusive, and ‘Vision of Judgment.’”  I wonder what Swinburne has against Canto VIII.

Swinburne is a genuine expert on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, so his list is packed with the plays and poetry of the period, but he is fair enough to novelists: Rabelais, Voltaire, Diderot, Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas; Defoe, Swift, Goldsmith, Fielding, Sterne, Scott, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Eliot, E. and C. Brontë; Wilhelm Meinhold – that one stumped me.  Childhood favorite, I’ll bet.

Conventional.  Perhaps Swinburne takes the exercise too seriously.  Or not seriously enough, as I see in the great find of the supplement, the annotated list of John Ruskin.  He does not submit his own list but rather mangles the original, and the Pall Mall just publishes it (larger, legible image here):

Ruskin is “[p]utting my pen lightly through the needless – and blottesquely through the rubbish and poison.”  The “Moralists,” theology, and Eastern epics are lightly excluded, while the historians and philosophers are hilariously blotted, as is Darwin – The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’! – and the journals of Captain Cook.  Why, why?  He murders every novelist except for Dickens and Scott,  A letter explains some but not all of his choices – “Gibbon’s is the worst English that was ever written by an educated Englishman” – and concludes with a call for someone to write an “intelligible” book about “the biography of a shrimp,” since he “was under the impression of having seen jumping shrimps on a sandy shore express great satisfaction in their life.”

Ruskin is the greatest.

I am sure there are other treasures in this pamphlet.  Wilkie Collins, William Morris, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, contribute lists.  Surely nothing as good as Ruskin, though.

Anka Muhlstein's book on Proust's reading - a secret society that allows immediate and otherwise unaccountable complicity

Anka Muhlstein’s Monsieur Proust’s Library (2012) is deceptively titled.  There is never a hint of a library, except for the one in Proust’s head.  The book is about Proust’s reading, particularly as it formed or was poured into In Search of Lost Time.  What role do Ruskin, Racine, Balzac, the Goncourt’s journal, etc. play in Proust’s fiction.

That’s another deception, actually.  The little book is actually a piece of close reading, tracing Racine or whoever through the Search.  It’s just literary criticism.

I loved it.  I wish there were similar short, punchy books  filling me in on the reading of every other writer.  Or maybe a searchable website with this sort of thing:

In fact, he [Proust] learned entire volumes of Ruskin by heart, and was able to recite from memory all of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens.  (31)

I assume that Monsieur Proust’s Library would be gibberish to anyone who has not read Proust – and I mean read to the end.  For the younger Proust reader, meaning me in the past, the book would be an outstanding source for a reading project, a focused tour of French literature.  Madame de Sévigné, Racine, Saint-Simon, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Baudelaire, and then the big detour into Ruskin.  The older me could profitably return to these books, too.  I have only read some of the relevant Balzac, for example.  I suppose that will always be true.  Still: remember, The Deserted Woman and Lily in the Valley, alongside Père Goriot, Lost Illusions, and The Girl with the Golden Eyes.

Proust was my introduction to almost all of these writers.  What did I know about Racine or Ruskin when I first read Proust?  Madame de Sévigné and the Duc de Saint-Simon might as well have been fictional characters.  My second time through the Search, I had twenty years of good reading salted away, I can at least say that.

One of Muhlstein’s chapters is “Good readers and bad readers,” which describes the hierarchy of readers in Search.  “Readers are ranked according to their attitudes toward books, and he catalogues with delight those he finds wanting” (48).  The catalogue of bad readers includes the ignorant, the willfully ignorant, the pedant, the fop whose “feelings for books are artificial,” merely fashionable, the vulgar avant-gardist, the escapist (“Why should I pay three hundred francs for a bunch of asparagus?” 58), and worst of all, the reader who “judges authors who were her contemporaries by the figure they cut in society” (58).

Meanwhile the good readers belong to “a secret society that allows immediate and otherwise unaccountable complicity,” with “a species of telegraphic communications among readers” (59).  Muhlstein’s book is flattering.  Maybe I should be more suspicious of it.  Instead, I came away thinking that I would like to write a book like it, except about some writer no one wants to read about.  John Galt’s Library, something like that.  Ronald Firbank’s Library.

The book begins with a cast of characters from In Search of Lost Time that ought to be published with the novels.

Reading Ruskin candidly - none of these things very glorious

Ruskin is arguing that “Letters are always ugly things,” meaning in paintings, not in a book.  Maybe also in a book.  This is in Volume 5, Chapter 7, “Of Vulgarity.”  In a long footnote attached to this point, Ruskin finally answers a question of mine:

I do not wonder at people sometimes thinking I contradict myself when  they come suddenly on any of the scattered passages, in which I am forced to insist on the opposite practical applications of subtle principles of this kind.

Ruskin traces his ideas about the ugliness of letters through a number of texts, or actually insists that I do the same, after which “you… will be brought, I hope, into a wholesome state of not knowing what to think.”  Suitably confused, I am prepared to read a few more passages in The Stones of Venice and thus to a resolution, maybe:

If truths of apparent contrary character are candidly and rightly received, they will fit themselves together in the mind without any trouble.  But no truth maliciously received will nourish you, or fit with others.

Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?  But perhaps it is.  How should I read Ruskin (or anyone) if not candidly?

Ruskin ends Modern Painters with a chapter titled “Peace,” his openly religious call for social change (“When the time comes for us to wake out of the world’s sleep, why should it be otherwise than out of the dreams of the night?”).  A few chapters earlier, though, is an alternative, non-Utopian argument, Chapter 9, “The Two Boyhoods.”

One boy is Giorgione, the other Turner.  Giorgione grows up in 15th century Venice, surrounded by beauty, constantly confronted with beauty, natural and man-made.  “All ruins were removed, and its place filled as quickly as in our London; but filled always by architecture loftier and more wonderful than that whose place it took, the boy himself happy to work upon the walls of it,” for example.  Thus the Venetian kid becomes the painter Giorgione.

Now, Turner.

Ruskin directs me to his childhood home in Covent Garden – “a square brick pit,” “a few rays of light,” “an iron gate,” “a narrow door,” a window “filled in this year (1860), with a row of bottles.”  “No knights to be seen there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies”:

of things beautiful, besides men and women, dusty sunbeams up or down the street on summer mornings; deep furrowed cabbage leaves at the greengrocer’s; magnificence of oranges in wheelbarrows round the corner; and Thames’ shore within three minutes’ race.

None of these things very glorious; the best, however, that England, it seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift…

Here Ruskin sees Turner’s attraction to ugliness, like “anything fishy or muddy… black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog.”  One might think that the words “beauty” and “ugliness” are being overstretched.  “No Venetian ever draws anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture;  old sides of boats, weedy roadside vegetation, dung-hills, straw yards, and all the soilings and stains of every common labor.”

That Turner also develops an unusual sympathy for the poor, and for seafaring stuff (sailors, masts – “better for the boy than wood of pine, or grove of myrtle”) is more conventional biography.  Turner becomes not vulgar but “very tolerant of vulgarity,” this because of “the original make and frame of [his] mind… as nearly as possible a combination of the minds of Keats and Dante.”

Yet after all of this Turner becomes Ruskin’s Turner only after a chance summer in the Yorkshire hills, where he discovers “Loveliness at last…  Beauty, and freedom, and peace…”; in other words, landscape.

So taught, and prepared for his life’s labor, sate the boy at last alone among his fair English hills; and began to paint, with cautious toil, the rocks, and fields, and trickling brooks, and soft, white clouds of heaven.

It is all a mystery, then, although partly visible in retrospect.  The artist of genius creates with whatever is at hand.  Sometimes the result is beautiful.  The critic of genius studies the artist and – what does he do?  He writes a great chapter in a great book, I am sure of that.

Every perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, they defile. - Ruskin asks, what is the use of beauty?

Modern Painters was seventeen years in the writing, and John Ruskin was only twenty-three years old when he began the book.  Of course he changed in the meantime.

Still, it is a surprise to read, almost at the end of the final volume, this reflection on the purpose of the book:

I have written it to show that Turner was the greatest landscape painter who ever lived; and this it has sufficiently accomplished.  What the final use may be to men, of landscape painting, or of any painting, or of natural beauty, I do not yet know.  (Vol. 5, Ch. 11, “The Hesperid Æglé”)

The sense, or possibility, of despair is perhaps more evident on the previous page:

Once I could speak joyfully about beautiful things, thinking to be understood;- now I cannot any more; for it seems to me that no one regards them.  Wherever I look or travel in England or abroad, I see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty.  They seem to have no other desire or hope but to have large houses and to be able to move fast.  Every perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, they defile.

One reason to spend time with Ruskin – not at all my reason – is his relevance.  Among the concluding passages of Modern Painters are a number of social reforms.  Some of the rhetorically brilliant and argumentatively exasperating essays that would make up Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (1862) were published in 1860, almost alongside Modern Painters V, and in the book of what is nominally art criticism the transition is evident.  From now on, Ruskin would be a social critic as much or more than an art critic.

I say, first, that due economy of labor will assign to each man the share which is right.  Let no technical labor be wasted on things useless or unpleasurable; and let all physical exertion, so far as possible, be utilized, and it will be found no man need ever work more than is good for him.  I believe an immense gain in the bodily health and happiness of the upper classes would follow on their steadily endeavoring, however clumsily, to make the physical exertion they now necessarily take in amusements, definitely serviceable.  It would be far better, for instance, that a gentleman should mow his own fields, than ride over other people’s.  (still in Vol. 5, Ch. 11)

This is just as an example, although I picked it first for its clarity, second for its distance from any argument about landscape painting, and third because it ends with Thomas Carlyle’s old hobbyhorse, scattered throughout The French Revolution and elsewhere, about the worthlessness of an upper class that devotes all its energy to hunting.  Any arguments with the vagueness of the terms is best taken up with the shorter, punchier Unto This Last.

Modern Painters is a defense not simply of Turner but of beauty.  By 1860, Ruskin had begun to fear that a defense of beauty through art was no defense at all.  In Volume 4, Ch. 8, Ruskin argues that rocks and more generally “the natural ordinances seem intended to teach us the great truths which are the basis of all political science,” but a few  years later he had concluded that the message of the rocks was not getting through.  Social and economic reform had to precede aesthetic reform.

I, by contrast, say aesthetic reform first.  One more post on Ruskin.  His defense of beauty is not so bad.

Modern Painters as Pale Fire - with a bonus: the rhapsody on moss

A reader unfamiliar with John Ruskin’s methods might think that a gigantic book titled Modern Painters would be about modern painters.  Today, thanks to Charles Baudelaire, the term evokes Manet and Monet; they are too late for this book, but neither Corot nor Courbet nor Delacroix are mentioned either.  Besides Turner, the primary subject of the book, almost no painter contemporary with Ruskin is ever mentioned, aside from occasional complimentary nods to the Pre-Raphaelites.

The final volume of the book includes an index (three, actually) so I can see who is mentioned the most, aside from Turner.  By eye, the leaders are Claude Lorrain, Titian, “Tintoret,” and Salvator Rosa, all painters of the 16th and 17th century.  The Venetians are taken as the greatest landscape painters before Turner, while the first and last are primarily used as punching bags.  Claude, for example:

absurdities of conception, iii, 401; deficiency in foreground, i. 284, ii. 182 [I will hereafter omit volume and page numbers and rearrange entries capriciously]; absence of imagination in; narrowness of, contrasted with vastness of nature

But I see that my memory fails, since Lorrain is often praised, as well:

sincerity of purpose of; tenderness of perception in; true painting of afternoon sunshine

Salvator Rosa gets some good ones: “perpetual seeking for horror and ugliness; vicious execution of; vulgarity of.”  That last entry is attached to Rembrandt, too.  Many artists (Durer, Raphael, Perugino, Fra Angelico) have a page reference for their “hatred of fog.”

The Topical Index* is at least as much fun.

Age, the present, mechanical impulse of; spirit of; our greatest men nearly all unbelievers; levity of.  See Modern.

Yes, sir.

Modern age, characteristics of; costumes, ugliness of; romance of the past; criticism; landscape; mind, pathetic fallacy characteristic of.

I begin to wonder if I should just read the index.  It begins to look like a precursor of Pale Fire.  “Grief, a noble emotion, ii. 372, 373, iii. 30”; “Keats, description of waves by; no real sympathy with, but a dreamy love of nature”; “Moss, beauty and endurance of.”  Volume 5, pp. 138-9 that last one a great passage, a rhapsody on lichens.

Meek creatures! the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin, - laying quiet finger on the trembling stones, to teach them rest.  No words, that I know of, will say what these mosses are.  None are delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough.

So Ruskin will just try out all of the words. 

How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,- the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock Spirits [!] could spin porphyry as we do glass,- the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness…

That goes on for a while.  The Rock Spirits aside, this sounds gassy but is actually quite precise.  It is in the service of a simpler point, that a good mountain painter ought to know if the patch of color he is seeing from a distance is rock or moss.

*  I do not know for a fact that Ruskin compiled the indices to Modern Painters.  I have only been able to trace them back as far as 1863 (see here), but come on, who else.

Ruskin's fantasia on a grain of sand - poor, helpless, mica flake!

Mountain beauty, cloud beauty, leaf beauty – what is all of this doing in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters?  Why all of the diagrams of striated cliffs and parts of trees (Chapter 4: “The Bud,” Ch. 5: “The Leaf,” Ch. 6: “The Branch”)?

To judge a painting of a peak or tree, the critics must understand peaks and trees.  He must see them as they are and understand what he is seeing, not see them as they are conventionally represented.  For most people, including Ruskin, this requires a scientific understanding of natural phenomena.  A few geniuses, like J. M. W. Turner or Titian, see everything intuitively, or through their own eye training.  Ruskin and I have to work harder.  Most landscape painters, including some of the supposed greats, do not understand what they are seeing.  That is Ruskin’s argument.

A piece of Modern Painters like Volume 4 (“Mountain Beauty”), Chapter 16 (“Resulting Forms: Thirdly, Precipices”) is really about what the title claims, precipices, those of the Swiss Alps, and how they are formed by erosion and the movement of tectonic plates.  Ruskin does not know of the existence of the plates, but he does a good job of identifying the gaps in his own knowledge, allowing me to fill some of them in a little.

Sometimes Ruskin’s writing – I will stay with the precipices – is cleanly precise, as with this glacier: “Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields and furrows, hard and dry, scarcely fissured at all.”  But then the glacier becomes something else as Ruskin invokes an empty street “of tombs in a buried city,”

the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so destitute of all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness of majestic death, that it looks like a world from which not only the human, but the spiritual, presences had perished, and the last of its archangels, building the great mountains for their monuments, had laid themselves down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his white shroud.

Ruskin has interwoven some kind of fantasy novel with his precipices.  Soon he is hiking up the Matterhorn, pausing to listen to the Alps, “these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at their feet, muttering and whispering to us garrulously, in broken and dreaming fits, as it were, about their childhood” before imagining them as their components, “little flakes of mica-sand…  almost too small for sight.”  If one of these flakes “could have a mind given to it” (yes, if!) as it passed through the ages, “laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all atoms” – Ruskin is, remember, following a sentient grain of sand:

what would it have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; that against I – poor, helpless, mica flake! – the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath it – low-fallen mica flake! – the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it – weak, wave-drifted mica flake! – the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?

The grain of sand ends up on the tip of the Matterhorn is what happened there, for those who lost the thread.  This is not exactly how geology is taught now (or then), but it is effective in its own way.

One of the great pleasures of reading Ruskin, is what this sort of thing is.  Unpaintable, the author declares in the next paragraph, “beyond [the landscape painter’s] power – even beyond Turner’s.”  I believe Ruskin is right about that.

But I find nobody ever reads things which it takes any trouble to understand, so that it is of no use to write them. - John Ruskin

On the one hand, preach it, Brother Ruskin!  So true, so true.  On the other, this sentiment is buried by John Ruskin in a footnote on page 93 of the fifth volume of Modern Painters (1860), meaning somewhere around the 1,850th page of the entire monumental work, about 2,300 pages in the 19th century edition I read.

The first volume of Modern Painters was supposed to be the only one.  The 24 year-old Oxford punk meant the book to be a defense of the reputation and artistry of J. M. W. Turner, 68 at the time, but he soon discovered that it was impossible to understand Turner’s paintings  - really, really understand them – without exploring taste, truth, beauty, perception, geology, botany, atmospheric science, and to a limited degree art history, among many other topics.  The subtitle of the third volume (1856) is “Of Many Things,” a title both accurate and useless, but perhaps more inviting than that of the fourth volume (also 1856), “Of Mountain Beauty,” 497 pages on just what it says.

So I detect irony, that is what I am trying to say.  “No use to write them.”  I will come back to this idea.

During the seventeen years it took to write Modern Painters, Ruskin also wrote the three volumes of The Stones of Venice (1851-3), masterful 1,500 page sequel or supplement or appendix to Modern Painters (or vice versa) and several other works that I have not read.  His final delay came from a request by the National Gallery to organize and catalogue the huge mass of Turner drawings the artist had bequeathed to the nation.

In seven tin boxes in the lower room of the National Gallery I found upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another.  Many on both sides; some with four, five, or six subjects on each side (the pencil point digging spiritedly through from the foregrounds of the front into the tender pieces of sky on the back); some in chalk, which the touch of the finger would sweep away; others in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid colored drawings among them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the edges, in capes and bays of fragile decay…   (Vol. 5, Preface)

How I would love to continue that quotation.  Ruskin should have been offered a baronetcy for his efforts.

Over the last six years, I read Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, and a couple of shorter Ruskin books, which would feel like an accomplishment if moving one’s eyes across a page of text and flipping pages were in and of itself so difficult.  I have written about Ruskin in fragments over that time, as needed, as useful, but never in a concentrated burst, which is what I will do this week, without argument or goal, but simply as a pleasant rummage through the book in front of me, the fourth and fifth volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters.

I’ll get this out of the way here:  reading all of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice is Much Too Much, certainly, but the abridgements I looked at were Not Nearly Enough.  Much great writing is omitted.  I do not have an answer.  The Stones of Venice is the more interesting of the two books.

What I have to say about field herbage - some notes on Ruskin's The Queen of the Air

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) is about air pollution, likely as vivid a screed against air pollution as exists (“And yet observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable cloud, for all the depth of it, can’t turn the sun red, as a good, business-like fog does with a hundred feet of itself”).  Part VII of Book V of Modern Painters (1860), “Of Cloud Beauty,” appears to be about clouds, how they form, how to draw them, what they mean.  You never know with John Ruskin.  Anything can lead anywhere.

The Queen of the Air (1869) is also about clouds.  It is about Athena, more specifically, and the interpretation of Greek myth and art, the dual roots of myth, in religion and in physical phenomena, like clouds and dew and birds:

We will take the bird first.  It is little more than a drift of the air in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh and glows with air in its flying, like blown flames; it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it, -- is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.  (para. 65)

Birds share the colors of clouds, “woven by Athena herself into films and threads of plume… infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the sea-sand” (66).  Each color and form picks up a symbolic religious meaning along the way.  Art is the human attempt to capture the Truth of the relationship, both the physical reality and the human meaning.  The more reality and the more meaning, the better the art.  The Muses preside over beauty, Athena over truth:

She does not make men learned, but prudent and subtle; she does not teach them to make their work beautiful, but to make it right.  (101)

I remind myself that Ruskin’s concept of truth and reality is flexible enough to distinguish true griffins from false.  Everything he writes is like the myths he interprets in The Queen of the Air, simultaneously literal and metaphorical.

Much of the above is meant to serve as a prod to my memory when, a week or two from now, I discover that I have forgotten the most basic aspects of the book.  Ruskin is complex, but also bizarre, and hilariously digressive to the point that sense is impeded:

I have no time now to trace for you the hundredth part of the different ways in which it bears both upon natural beauty, and on the best order and happiness of men's lives.  I hope to follow out some of these trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say about field herbage…  (38)

I love nonsense, but it can be awfully hard to retain.  At his best, Ruskin writes as well as anyone of his time – criticism, like biography, is literature.  Who cares about mid-19th century anthropological theories about Greek myths?  All of that stuff has been replaced by books that are more up to date, accurate, and heaven knows better organized, but none of them are written like Ruskin.

His biography is simply, “He did this, nor will ever another do its like again.” - on literary biography

Perhaps, writing about “The Aspern Papers,” I downplayed its attack against that malicious species known as the literary biographer.  If so, I had two good reasons: first, upon paying attention to the text of the story rather than my received idea of it, I quickly saw that James’s target was more complex and more interesting; second, James himself was a literary biographer.  He had written and published Hawthorne (1879) only nine years earlier.

Granted, James did not attempt to steal, or at least avoids the inference that he had stolen, any love letters from Hawthorne’s early paramours or illegitimate daughters, and in the book’s first sentence he claims “to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography” (Ch I), in part because Hawthorne’s life was unutterably tedious (“almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality”), but largely because James’s concerns are more with the art than the man, none of which prevents him from writing several chapters of what appears to be ordinary biography, mostly a summary and commentary on the more conventional 1876 Hawthorne biography written by George Parsons Lathrop, or from delivering aggravating judgments like “[t]his sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the most gracefully and humorously autobiographic,” even though the “Custom-house” section is a blatant fiction as a critic as sophisticated as the author of "The Art of Fiction" surely knows.

I’m abandoning James now, so I thought I would treat myself to a nice, twisty sentence.

On the one hand, I am not much of a reader of literary biography.  On the other hand, I love it and read it all the time, mostly in the form of magazine reviews of gigantic definitive biographies that I would never think of reading, the big bruisers that go into so much detail about what the writer has for breakfast.

Actually I do not remember any of the big biographies I have read (Nicolas Boyle on Goethe, Brian Boyd on Nabokov, Richard Holmes on Shelley) having a word to say about breakfast (Boswell’s Life of Johnson may well contain a morsel of breakfast).  When Jane Austen in Mansfield Park tells me “that the remaining cold pork bones and mustard in William's plate might but divide her feelings with the broken egg-shells in Mr. Crawford's” I take that as an example of exquisite artistry.  I wonder where the anti-breakfast cliché came from.  More biographical breakfast, I say!

By chance I came across John Ruskin expressing my true feelings, or what I would like them to be, in his peculiar book The Queen of the Air (1869).  Artistic biographies are in no obvious way the subject of the book, but that never stops Ruskin:

Of Turner’s life, and of its good and evil, both great, but the good immeasurably the greater, his work is in all things a perfect and transparent evidence.  His biography is simply, “He did this, nor will ever another do its like again.”  (III.113)

Give me a list of works and their chronology and I will understand the artist’s biography.  The rest – the breakfasts, the love letters – is just literature.  Meaning: a biography is well-written, or not; clever or dull; meaningful or trite; a good book or a dud.  Literature, or not.

Griffinism

After all my jabber about John Ruskin’s griffins, it occurs to me that I should show them:

The plate is in Chapter VIII, “Grotesque,” of the third volume of Modern Painters (1856).  The left-hand griffin, medieval griffin, the “true” griffin, resides on the cathedral of Verona, while the “false” classical griffin on the right is from the Roman temple of Antoninus and Faustina.

Neither creature is true in the sense that it exists or existed.  Ruskin is arguing the case for imaginative truth:

The Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life, meaning to declare to all ages that he had verily seen with his immortal eyes such a griffin as that; but the classical workman never saw a griffin at all, nor anything else; but put the whole thing together by line and rule.

“How do you know that?”

Very easily.  Look at the two, and think them over. (§12-13)

Taking “easily” ironically, and taking for granted that Ruskin’s arguments will be fanciful, the passage does turn out to be a masterpiece of the core of criticism – look and think.  Ruskin saves it (too easy), but I will start with the most bizarre flaw in the classical griffin, that the left foreleg is nearly twice as long as the right; Ruskin is amused by what the griffin is doing, gently touching a leaf or flower:

We may be pretty sure, if the carver had ever seen a griffin, he would have reported of him as doing something else than that with his feet. (§ 14)

The Gothic griffin is actually clutching a little dragon in its powerful claws, which is unfortunately a bit hard to see in the plate – that’s the dragon’s curled tail and wing running up the griffin’s throat.

I do not want to repeat Ruskin’s analysis.  The conclusion is that the classical griffin is a hodgepodge assembled from earlier models, with decorative elements added to hide the flaws, while the medieval beast is not a scrapbook but a wholly imagined original creation.  Just look at that beak full of lion teeth.

So that taking the truth first, the honest imagination gains everything; it has its griffinism, and grace, and usefulness, all at once; but the false composer, caring for nothing but himself and his rules, loses everything, -- griffinism, grace, and all. (§ 20)

I can hardly imagine arguing on Ruskin’s terms (“honest,” truth”), and he in fact begins the next chapter with “I am afraid the reader must be, by this time, almost tired of hearing about truth.”  But much of what I look for in art and literature, much of what I am trying to do at Wuthering Expectations, is in that passage.  I am looking for true imagination when I read, for a book’s griffinism.

I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph. I have been ordered to write it. (How interesting this is!) - the Wilkie Collins griffins

The Woman in White has spurred or focused my puzzlement over the role of enjoyment in criticism because it is one of the most sheerly enjoyable Victorian novels.  Stretches of prose are functionally  ordinary (“Half an hour later I was speeding back to London by the express train,” that sort of thing), and the plot is, stepping back a bit, nonsense, but perfectly paced nonsense, thrilling nonsense.  Collins attributes the success of the story not to its ingenuity but to the characters who drive it, to “their existence as recognizable realities” (Preface, longer quotation here).  This sounds suspiciously like a version of Ruskin’s question: Is it so?  Some – I do not think all, but some – of the characters in The Woman in White are “so,” wonderfully “so.”

Richard at La Caravana de Recuerdos has been reading an amazing book, a thousand-page diary of Adolfo Bioy Casares entirely about his friendship and conversations with Jorge Luis Borges.  The book sounds as bookishly juicy as The Life of Johnson.  In a passage Richard just posted (translation his), Borges and Bioy Casares assemble a list of “lifelike characters”:

Pinkerton from The Wrecker; the father from Douglas' The House with the Green Shutters…  Cousin Basilio's heroine… Shylock; perhaps King Lear (not Macbeth)… Martín Fierro; Grandet and Eugénie… Jesus; Count Fosco and the paralytic uncle from The Lady in White [sic, English in original]; according to my father, Félicité from Flaubert's Un coeur simple and the woman that's in The Crime of Father Amaro.

I have heavily trimmed the list to emphasize my own recent and upcoming reading.  If there was any doubt about why Borges is one of my guiding figures, I can see here how my entirely arbitrary and random matrix of tastes lines up so well with his.  Not my point, though, which is more that several people are reading The Crime of Father Amaro soon and it is not too late to join in and meet “the woman.”  No, that’s not my point either.

Count Fosco and Mr. Fairlie, the paralytic uncle, are just the characters I pick as the ones with the most vivid “existence,” the ones who Collins was able to infuse with “real” imaginative truth.  Fosco is a villain who is observed and described in the heroine’s diary, and whose written confession is the imaginative climax of the novel; Fairlie is a peripheral plot device who only plumps up during his own firsthand testimony, which mostly consists of this sort of thing:

That is to say, I had the photographs of my pictures, and prints, and coins, and so forth, all about me, which I intend, one of these days, to present (the photographs, I mean, if the clumsy English language will let me mean anything) to present to the institution at Carlisle (horrid place!), with a view to improving the tastes of the members (Goths and Vandals to a man).

I was very unreasonable – I expected three days of quiet.  Of course I didn’t get them.

I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph.  I have been ordered to write it.

He waved his horrid hand at me; he struck his infectious breast; he addressed me oratorically – as if I was laid up in the House of Commons.

That last “he” is Count Fosco, and much of Fairlie’s letter is his version of the encounter between the novel’s two best characters.  Readers of Samuel Beckett’s novels might detect something familiar here.  This is the Borgesian definition, and Ruskinian, and Amateur Readerian, of “lifelike.”  Not that the character resembles an actual living creature, but that his creator truly saw the imaginary beast.  Mr. Fairlie and Count Fosco are like Ruskin’s Lombardian griffin, imaginary but true.

I will leave Count Fosco’s extraordinary letter alone, except to give Collins more credit: the villain’s confession contains almost no information that a half-awake reader does not already know, so is functionally almost useless, except that it is the best thing in the book, all due to the character’s force of personality, to his language.  “(Pass me, here, one exclamation in parenthesis.  How interesting this is!)”

Most of the other characters are like Ruskin's Renaissance griffin.  I have seen reviewers of the novel single out the heroine, Marian Halcombe, as a great character, but I have had trouble seeing how she is not more than a high-quality adventure novel heroine, one of those Strong Female Characters we are trained to praise.  I ask her fans for a passage, or line, or action that pulled her out of the book, something that belongs just to her.  Something not relative to novels of her time (where I see no shortage of plucky heroines, honestly), but to the timeless.  Where does she feed the monkey, so to speak?

Their feelings pleasantly stirred and their fancy gayly occupied - Ruskin's suspicion of enjoyment - Is it so?

There is the certain test of goodness and badness, which I am always striving to get people to use.  As long as they are satisfied if they find their feelings pleasantly stirred and their fancy gayly occupied, so long there is for them no good, no bad.

I am still in Chapter X, “The Use of Pictures,” of the third volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856), an idea-packed masterpiece of rhetorical prose.  Many of the ideas are wrong, or, provocative.  For example, it is clear enough that for many consumers of art a pleasantly stirred fancy is the exact definition of good, the more pleasure the better.

Anything may please, or anything displease, them; and their entire manner of thought and talking about art is mockery, and all their judgments are laborious injustices.

I am just continuing the quotation here.  The end, Ruskin’s “certain test,” will not be satisfying, I promise.  “Injustice” seems awfully strong, no?  I enormously enjoy seeing Ruskin work himself up to this high pitch.  Pleasure-based judgment of art has its narrow use, the equivalent of matching my tastes against a blogger’s star ratings.  I discover with experience that I enjoy any 4 or 5 star book rated by my favorite book blogger, BookGullet, while I consistently enjoy only the 5 star books chosen by BookGrump, and I never get along with even the 5 star books of BookGoon.  I am comparing my arbitrary matrix of tastes against everyone else’s and using the results of the algorithm to read bloggers and their recommended books.

So, not an injustice, or even a mockery, but for the reader who arbitrarily values knowledge as much or more than experience (myself, John Ruskin), frustrating.  I learn a lot about the taste of readers when I wander around book blogs, but not so much about the literature they read.

But let them, in the teeth of their pleasure or displeasure, simply put the calm question, -- Is it so?  Is that the way a stone is shaped, the way a cloud is wreathed, the way a leaf is veined? and they are safe.  They will do no more injustice to themselves nor to other men; they will learn to whose guidance they may trust their imagination, and from whom they must forever withhold its reins.

“Simply” – oh please!  In Chapter VIII of the same book, Ruskin compares two carved griffins, and preposterously, convincingly demonstrates how one is so, and one is not so – “the Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life.”  So the “so,” the Truth of a work of art, even of a drawing of a leaf, is an imaginative truth.

The Woman in White is a mystery and a thriller, and Collins’ skill with pacing and tension must still be a model for suspense writers.  It is an easy book to enjoy, even if it is often a silly book.  Is it so?  Obviously not, except that, at its best, it is.  Collins really did see it, and wrote it from life.

There's a thread to follow tomorrow.

Enjoyment - romances, science fiction, reading

I must ask permission, as I have sometimes done before, to begin apparently a long way from the point. (John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. III, Ch. X)

The problem with invoking Ruskin like this is that he knew the point at which he would end.  I intuit my point.

I have said, here and in comments elsewhere, that I am not so interested in the enjoyment of books, not just your enjoyment, but even my own.  Typical Wuthering Expectations contrarianism, except that I mean it, as I always do.  Pleasure, our reasons for enjoying anything, are so arbitrary.  Anyway, I enjoy literature, reading as an activity.  I even enjoy the books I do not enjoy.  Your enjoyment of a book is likely a much more interesting subject than mine.

The Argumentative Old Git does not enjoy science fiction, as he discusses here – since I am not going to mention it otherwise, his catalogue of the praise of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is hilariously excellent.  Himadri has given the genre the old college try, and then some, and has concluded that whatever the merits of the best books, he is finished for now.  Some well-meaning commenters urge him to keep trying, but they fail to understand the statistics of the problem.  Himadri is engaging in sequential analysis, which was mathematically formalized during World War II as an efficient way to test explosive shells for duds.  Rather than fire off the entire lot of shells, the tester can stop once a statistically significant number of shells have misfired.  Himadri has read enough misfires, given his sample size, to call it quits.

Rohan Maitzen is engaging in the same exercise with romance novels.  So far, the results are more positive, although she understands that she has not yet fired enough shells to make a statistically sound judgment.  The criteria, again, is enjoyment – “amusing and entertaining.”  My own experience with romance novels is similar, although my pool is awfully narrow.

Or is it?  This fascinating post at Something More led me to the results of a methodologically sound romance readers’ poll, a list of the best or favorite or “top” 100 romance novels, as of 2007, as determined by a large and well-read group of voters.  I see that I have read and enjoyed three of them: Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Jane Eyre, the only 19th century novels on the list.  Three Georgette Heyer novels (1932-1965) follow, and then seven novels from the 1980s (Judith McNaught is the big name), meaning that 87 of the best 100 novels are from the last 20 years.  I wonder what other genres or audiences would give a similar result.  Romance seems to have an unstable canon.  New novels quickly replace old ones.  Would I enjoy any of those 87 as much as I enjoy Jane Eyre?

I have been thinking about writing up the case against the enjoyment of literature, but I have concluded that the point is too obvious.  To read well, we should cultivate patience, question our preferences, moderate our consumption of junk, and when writing about reading try to imagine ourselves in the place of others.  Consider sacrificing short-term for long-term enjoyment (study, cultivate tastes, read some quantity, however small, of dull but useful books), all within the inevitable constraints of time, energy, and concentration.  Everyone knows this, already, so enough of that.

I am still writing about The Woman in White, if I can figure out how to return to it.  Through Ruskin, somehow.

In literature there are no such things as beautiful subjects - Or, The expression of man’s delight in God’s work

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter, posited two “axiomatic” “truths”:

(1) that poetry is purely subjective, that in literature there are no such things as beautiful subjects, and that therefore Yvetot is the equal of Constantinople; and  (2) that consequently one can write about any one thing equally well as about any other.*

Yvetot is a small town in Normandy; in other words, nothing, or Hell, or both.  How unwise to follow Flaubert too far in any direction, and here he clearly goes too far.  How unfortunate that I agree with him.   What is beauty in literature?  What is beautiful writing?  In dark moments, I suspect that there is no such thing.  Flaubert may be claiming that he can write beautifully about ugly subjects, any subject.  I'm not even sure about that.

I never use the word,”beauty,” not about writing.  I don’t know what it means, so I don’t use it.  Startling, original, invigorating, sublime, good, but not beautiful.  I would like to reclaim the concept.  Oh, that would be so much work.  I have in front of me a Modern Library collection titled Philosophies of Art and Beauty.  The compilers have thoughtfully selected 63 pages of Kant, 63 pages of Hegel, and 47 (only?) pages of Schopenhauer for me.  Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin.

Actually, I use the word all the time, about scenery, and art, and music.  Direct sensory stimuli.  Sir Thomas Browne “cannot tell by what Logick we call a Toad, a Beare, or an Elephant, ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best expresse the actions of their inward formes” (Religio Medici, 1642, paragraph 16).  Browne goes too far the other way, doesn’t he?  If I call all of God’s creation beautiful, I’ve emptied out the word again.  But he’s right – if I want to say that the garden toad is ugly and the iridescent poisonous frog is beautiful, I should think about why.

John Ruskin tried to find that Logick.  One reason I read him is that his aesthetics underpin a lot of received ideas about beauty.  Like Browne, he needs God for his argument, or Nature.  Beauty in art, any art, is “the expression of man’s delight in God’s work” (The Stones of Venice, Vol. I, 1851, XX.iii).  Note that the human creator is necessarily present here.  In Plate VII, above, Ruskin looks for beautiful forms in nature and finds them everywhere – in mountains, branches, shells, and leaves.  The top curve is a view of a Swiss glacier.  My favorite, for some reason, is the bottom middle one, a direct tracing of half of a bay leaf.  Beautiful man-made form imitates beautiful natural form.  Readers of Alan Hollinghurst will observe that Ruskin is updating Hogarth’s Line of Beauty here.

Too bad Ruskin wrote so exclusively about visual art.  I want to argue by analogy, borrowing from the visual arts, but the fit is so poor.  Can any writer describe (beautifully!) the curve of that bay leaf?  Fundamentally: open a book with your favorite page of beautiful writing (calligrammes excepted) and set it next to your most reviled page of ugly writing.  Print out something from Wuthering Expectations, perhaps.  Step back several feet.  The additional mediation required by literature changes too much.  Ruskin provides just a clue.

I would hate to see “beautiful” go the way of “lyrical,” which now, as a description of prose, means little more than “uses adjectives.”  I don’t know how to use the word.  I should learn.

Advice and guidance much appreciated.  Anything:  aesthetic manifestos, critical dissections, single sentences as piercingly lovely as the last umber ray of the autumn sun reflected from a still turquoise pool into, um, the crystalline eyes of a, hmm, a tourmaline, let’s see, fritillary.

* Letter to Louise Colet, 1853, as found in Jonathan Raban’s recent New York Review of Books piece (p. 27) on Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary.  Raban does not otherwise specify the date of the letter, and I can’t find the passage in the Penguin Classics Selected Letters of Flaubert (1997).

In the pits of stinking dust and mortal slime - John Ruskin and the horrors of fiction

We used to regard novels as ephemeral; and a quarter of a century since were accustomed to consider those by Scott, with a few others which, from Robinson Crusoe downwards, had made permanent names to themselves, as exceptions to this rule.

Anthony Trollope is, in his 1879 essay “Novel-Reading,” celebrating the publication of collected editions of Dickens and Thackeray.  I don’t know how many dozens of novels Trollope had behind him at this point but I can somehow sense Trollope’s satisfaction that he, too, will someday be represented in a diligently-edited uniform edition, as will Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot and George Meredith and any number of other deserving writers.

Trollope never actually writes that.  I’m reading between the lines.  It’s a self-satisfied essay.  Individual novels may be bad, or even bad for the reader, but “the novel” is a good thing.  The old argument about the morality of the novel is over.

I think Trollope is broadly correct, which is why it is so much fun to turn the page of The Victorian Art of Fiction to John Ruskin’s “Fiction – Fair and Foul” (1880), in which he declares that novels are rotten.  Here’s how it begins:

On the first mild – or, at least, the first bright – day of March, in this year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the Hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded College of Dulwich.

In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green bye-road traversable for some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part, little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by blackberry hedges from the better cared-for meadows on each side of it; growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a primrose or two – white archangel – daisies plenty, and purple thistles in autumn. (297)

Then: a spring, duckweed, “sundry curious little skipping shrimps,” “sometimes a tittlebat.”  We seem to be nowhere near the topic of fiction, unless Ruskin is actually writing a novel.  What is Croxsted Lane like now?

No existing terms of language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin that varied themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane.  The fields on each side of it are now dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of three railroads. (297-8)

Now Ruskin really gets going:  “heaps of – Hades only knows what… mildew of every unclean thing… back-garden sewage” ending with the worst insult, “remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and mortal slime” (298).

All right, now I get it.  This is a metaphor!  Of what?  Ruskin’s marvelous childhood lane has been destroyed by his arch-enemy:  London, the home of misery, infection, and decay.  Cities destroys landscapes, people, and, it turns out, fiction.  Fiction, and its writers and readers, now worship “the Divinity of Decomposition” which is “concerned only with the regenerative vigour of manure” (300).

Who is Ruskin talking about?  Amazingly, after a glance at Balzac, Ruskin launches directly into Charles Dickens, into Bleak House!  Urban readers can now only be entertained by “varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dulness the horrors, of Death,” which Dickens happily provides, as Ruskin demonstrates in his hilarious list of the fatalities in Bleak House:  “One by assassination; One by starvation, with phthisis,” and so on, all of which is “properly representative of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London” (301).

At this point, the essay, becomes, a bit strangely, a defense of the “healthy mind” of Walter Scott, who of course did not write much about cities, and did not write at all about the morbid horrors of modern urban life.  Ruskin excepts a few other novels, based on no principle that I can see.  Oliver Twist is fine (“earnest and uncaricatured”) but Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris is “the effectual head of the whole cretinous school,” which is bad, I guess.

Which bothers Ruskin more, the loss of fortifying Scott-like fiction, or the loss of Croxsted Lane?  It’s all the same thing, really.  To Ruskin, cities destroy everything.  The novel is traditionally the product of modernity, but to Ruskin it is just another casualty of modern upheavals.  Halt “progress,” and then you’ll get your good fiction back.

John Ruskin is always – what do I want to say? – a provocative and useful challenge to me.

An ossifiant theory of progress - John Ruskin and a classroom failure

I introduced John Ruskin into my class in the role of a non-Marxist critic of capitalism.  We read about Utopian Socialists like Owen and Fourier, but I wanted to give the students a taste of another tradition, the British medievalism of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin and William Morris.  A key consideration: these men were good writers.  I have my doubts about those Utopian Socialists.

A brief look at Past and Present (1842), Carlyle's essential Condition-of-England fantasy, left me looking for alternatives.  It was all so Carlylean.  Too dense, too weird, too distracting.  An essential caveat here is that I don't know what I'm doing.  I needed something easier to swallow. 

So I assigned the first chapter or essay of Unto This Last (1860), one of Ruskin's assaults on the notion of economic man.  There's Ruskin, to the left, as painted by Millais.  My students found Ruskin frustrating, as they should have.  Unlike Marx, Ruskin had no system.  His insights come in sudden leaps.  He argues poetically, or by metaphor, or, most irritating to me, by etymology.  He knew how things ought to be.  For example, everything, including, especially, labor, should be priced at its moral value.  Ruskin is sure he knows what that means.  I am sure I do not.

I also do not know how Ruskin, or Marx, or other enthusiasts of the idea, was so sure that the medieval stone-carvers of Venice were not alienated from their labor.  I have no doubt that many led deeply fulfilled, creative lives.  Ruskin is sure that they all did, and that you would, too.  I'm afraid, though, that I think of restlessness, boredom, and dissatisfaction as human rather than capitalist problems, and have trouble pinning all of the blame on the division of labor.  Perhaps this is why I taught Ruskin so badly.

I did get a rise out of the students by briefly pushing on to William Morris and then linking the whole tradition to Tolkien and his hobbits.  That's what they'll take away - Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris are old English men who want us all to live in the Shire.  Well done, Herr Professor Doktor.

Ruskin is such a good writer.  The skeleton metaphor, for example in Essay I.  Ruskin imagines a "science of gymnastics" that assumes that humans do not have skeletons:

It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables;* and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability.  Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis.

He could have stopped there, but, no, he advances a step:

Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.

I love that sarcastic dig at the end, and the whole structre of mock-pompous Latinisms.  But if I ever teach the subject again, I'll going to switch toWilliam Morris, "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" (1886), which I have not read, so it will hardly solve the incompetence inexperience problem, but will at least allow me to fail in a new and productive way.

*  It would be advantageous to roll the students into pellets, sometimes.

The enjoyable Karl Marx - a classroom success

I do not believe I have ever written a post about my teaching.  In the classroom, the Amateur Reader becomes a Professional Reader.  Not a reader of anything that might show up on Wuthering Expectations - there's the difference.

This semester, though, I have been able to briefly force a merger, during a two week unit on Karl Marx.*  My real coup was forcing John Ruskin on the unsuspecting young'uns.  As with many coups, a counter-revolution drove the rebels from the palace.  They were lucky to escape with their lives.  What a disaster.

Marx, though, I cannot believe how well the students responded to Marx.  We used The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka, reading The Communist Manifesto and selections from The German Ideology, Grundrisse, and Capital.  Light stuff, as Marx goes.

I had a copy of the book from college, and read or reread the whole thing.  I read an unhealthy chunk in Morocco, or on the plane home.  When I was an undergraduate, twenty years ago, I read Karl Marx, substantial chunks of Karl Marx, in courses in:  History, Economcs, Political Science, and Sociology.  Plus, everyone graduating with a BA was assigned The Communist Manifesto in Western Civ.  So that's five subjects.  That's a lotta Marx.

Of my sixteen students, four had read the Manifesto.  One of these had read Capital as well.  What, the first volume, I asked?  No, all of it, all of it.  Two thousand pages, more.  I thought it would be discouraging to ask why, so, to answer your question, I don't know.  No, I know.  Why do I read (some) of what I read?  To do it, to see what's there.  Good for him.

I do not believe I had any actual Marxists in my class, although a student did wear a Marxite novelty t-shirt on the final day (Lenin in a pointy hat, Mao with a noise-maker, all at the Communist Party, ho ho), and another said he had meant to.  The positive response, then, was not to the ideas of Marx, as such - hostility was more openly expressed, at least - but to Marx as a sort of intellectual puzzle.  We take a definition of surplus value from this reading, combine it with offhand comments about what capitalists produce from that one (short answer: nothing but trouble),  mix in some colonialism here and some peppery rhetoric there.  Combine enough pieces and a picture begins to emerge.  The students seemed to enjoy it, and seemed to understand that agreeing with any or all of it was entirely beside the point, an activity for elsewhere.

If they actually remember a single Marxian idea, I hope it is the concept of the worker's alienation from his labor.  I'm training students to be well-paid bureaucrats.  I accept that.  Best to be aware of the truth.

*  I will allow readers to guess at the class.  Standard class in my field.

Monday literay links - true taste is laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished

It's time for a roundup of literary links. Most people seem to use posts like this to link to other websites. Consider them all linked, in spirit.

***

What a shock it was to come across this passage in Dombey and Son:

"[T]he Doctor, leaning back in his chair, with his hand in his breast as usual, held a book from him at arm's length, and read. There was something very awful in this manner of reading. It was such a determined, unimpassioned, inflexible, cold-blooded way of going to work. It left the Doctor's countenance exposed to view; and when the Doctor smiled suspiciously at his author, or knit his brows, or shook his head and made wry faces at him, as much as to say, 'Don't tell me, Sir; I know better,' it was terrific." (Ch. XI)

Honestly, it was like looking in a mirror, the kind of mirror that turns reflections into descriptive passages in the style of Dickens. That is exactly how I read. If I am reading your blog, that is exactly how I am reading it.

Note how the meaning of a word changes. When Dickens calls the Doctor's way of reading "terrific," he means it inspires terror. But when I read that way, it's also "terrific," meaning "really good." Don't tell me, Sir; I know better.

***

I was recently, for one reason or another, looking at this famous passage from The German Ideology, about the division of labor as is and under communism:

"He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."

Meine Frau pointed out to me that, assuming the hunter uses gunpowder, Marx and Engels have covered fire, water, earth, and air. The "critical critic" produces, mostly, air.

I've enjoyed this imaginative passage since I first read it, but only now does it strike me that "The After-Dinner Critic" would be a good name for a litblog. The phrase only gets two hits (until this post gets added in), both from Google books! A golden opportunity. "The Critical Critic," also not a bad name, gets 686.

***

If I were collecting quotations for an Appreciationist Manifesto, I would include this one by John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Part III, Section I, Chapter 3, "Of Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Impressions of Sense":

“The second, that, in order to the discovery of that which is best of two things, it is necessary that both should be equally submitted to the attention; and therefore that we should have so much faith in authority as shall make us repeatedly observe and attend to that which is said to be right, even though at present we may not feel it so. And in the right mingling of this faith with the openness of heart, which proves all things, lies the great difficulty of the cultivation of the taste, as far as the spirit of the scholar is concerned, though even when he has this spirit, he may be long retarded by having evil examples submitted to him by ignorant masters.” (pp. 246-7 of the 1851 edition).

Those ignorant masters! This does get at the heart of what I call appreciationism - that the people that came before me are not all fools or frauds, and should be given some attention. My worry is that I am too respectful, with too much faith and insufficient "openness of heart." Well, I'm not done yet:

“But true taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy, lamenting over itself and testing itself by the way that it finds things.” (248)

“I have seen a man of true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to look at the channellings that recent rain had traced in a heap of cinders.” (249)

I wonder if that man of true taste is J. M. W. Turner.

The phrase "Appreciationist Manifesto" gets one Google hit, to me, here, in another post about Modern Painters. Seem to be repeating myself.

1. On vacation in Senegal, 2. Read Adam Bede

I'm either on my way to, in, or returning from Senegal, depending on when you are reading this. I will return July 2.

One book coming with me is Adam Bede. Prof. Novel Reading is hosting a George Eliot summer book club at The Valve. Here's the leisurely reading schedule, and here is the first discussion. I don't understand about 50% of what is written over there, but Prof. Maitzen should be a trustworthy guide.

My travel makes my participation unlikely, but I am happy to read along and catch up. An advantage of being an Amateur Reader is that one can read this 600 pager over the summer just as well as that one. Take the opportunity, and read Adam Bede.

One comment, having only read a few chapters. Since I had recently been thinking about the influence of Walter Scott, I was amused to see that Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, begins in 1799, exactly 60 years before its year of publication. The long title of Scott's first novel is Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since. So whatever Eliot's many reasons might be for choosing that date, there's also a little nod to Scott.

Then, in Chapter 3, there's a long paragraph of landscape description that has a suspicious resemblance not only to the description of a landscape painting, but specifically to the sorts of description I have been reading in Modern Painters:

"And directly below them the eye rested on a more advanced line of hanging woods, divided by bright patches of pasture or furrowed crops, and not yet deepened into the uniform leafy curtains of high summer, but still showing the warm tints of the young oak and the tender green of the ash and lime." And so on. This is Eliot, not Ruskin.

Eliot uses more metaphorical language than Ruskin, but compare to his chapters on "On Truth of Vegetation" or "On Truth of Earth." Eliot's probably not the only great writer of her generation who learned about nature description from John Ruskin.

Always interesting to root through a writer's toolbox.

John Ruskin the Appreciationist - who would wish the lark not to sing?

"We shall probably find something in the working of all minds which has an end and a power peculiar to itself, and which is deserving of free and full admiration, without any reference whatsoever to what has, in other fields, been accomplished by other modes of thought, and directions of aim. We shall, indeed, find a wider range and grasp in one man than another; but yet it will be our own fault if we do not discover something in the most limited range of mind which is different from, and in its way better than, anything presented to us by the more grasping intellect. We all know that the nightingale sings more nobly than the lark; but who, therefore, would wish the lark not to sing, or would deny that it had a character of its own, which bore a part among the melodies of creation no less essential than that of the more richly gifted bird?"

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. I, II.VI.III, pp. 438-9 of the 1851 edition.

Do we all actually agree that the nightingale sings more nobly than the lark? Never mind, not the point.

Ruskin gives us here a little Appreciationist manifesto. He is not the most obvious example of the type, since he is also a vicious slasher - "The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole range of Art" - but that's part of the idea.

The good Appreciationist critic is not uncritical, but rather searching. What's good here, he asks, or true, or beautiful, or new. It won't be everything in a picture, or a book. Note the underlying humanism - there's something to learn from the encounter with almost anyone, or with almost any work of art, and if I don't find it, it's my own fault. This lets the artist off a little easy, doesn't it? But Ruskin is addressing the viewer here, not the artist.

There's still the question of how we spend our limited time. A diet of the World's Greatest Masterpieces would seem to give the highest return on our intellectual investment. Ruskin is suspicious of this idea, though. He is always looking carefully, at mediocrities as much as masterpieces (and at nature as well as art), and will praise a painting for a single well-painted rock or tree or wave.

I like to think that I read the same way. One great sentence, one new image, one real insight - maybe not much to show for the hours spent with a novel, but not nothing.