Ruskin--Part XIII

This book was written at the same time as the Irish potato famine. Given our modern proclivity to be aware of and in some cases wring our hands over catastrophes quite a long way from home, I thought it worth noting that the crisis does not seem to have borne much on Ruskin's thoughts, though his own country and class was the ruling power in Ireland. Many modern people have wondered why England, nominally the wealthiest country in the world at the time, appears not to have attempted anything meaningful to relieve the mass starvation at the very least. While I do not doubt that the leadership of Britain was largely indifferent to the suffering, especially by our standards of decency, I wonder how logistically possible it would have been to pull off a humanitarian intervention on anything like the scale that we would expect now. I expect not very. The English nation at the time had not come to grips with feeding its own masses that, severed from the rural life or the cultivation of their own food, and without adequate employment, were unable to feed themselves. A lot of people seem to think we are going back to this level of civilization within the next few years, if not months, but I will comment on that in another post.

Fig. 1--Crusaders' Chain Mail. One of the many inexplicable, minor unrealized dreams of my life was to pick up a girl at a Renaissance fair. The reputation for beauty of the girls who attends these fairs is not high, but there are some acceptable lookers among the crowd, who would have more of the kind of education and other strange qualities that I would find appealing. This was to be a temporary, artistic-infused affair. Aren't the girls who dress up like this supposed to be notoriously easy if you can convince them you are one of them? Of course I never had any intention to dress up like the clown in this picture; I would have been willing to put on a tunic and a gauntlet if I had had to get in, but that is it.

I was greatly surprised in my researches to discover the extravagant cost of these fairs. They are $40 or $50 a person just to get in. Since they are so strongly associated with losers and the hopelessly uncool, I had assumed they must be free, or nearly so, to get any girls other than completely desperate ones inside the gates at all, but evidently that is not how this dynamic works (though judging by the reports on the internet, there are still a handful of studs who monopolize all the women, and the majority of male attendees go home bitter and alone, just like everywhere else in life; my miscalculation was always in thinking I would be one of the dominant ones among this crowd because to my eyes even the "cool" ones appear so weak. Yet their ladies love them as they are). "It is for each man to find his own measure in this matter (i.e., the activity of one's life); in great part, also, for others to find it for him, while he is yet a youth. And the desperate evil of the whole Renaissance system is, that knowledge is thought the one and only good, and it is never inquired whether men are vivified by it or paralyzed." By knowledge here, I am pretty sure he means mainly modern scientific knowledge.

Like most people--and I do mean most people, though not most very, very smart people who understand somewhat better what human existence is about--my instinct when reading a condemnation of contemporary life, whatever previous epoch of history it happens to be being compared with, is usually to nod in affirmation, though when pressed (and contrary to what it may sometimes appear), I do not believe that past ages were on the whole any better than our own. Obviously I find in certain individuals or pockets of people in former times admirable or delightful qualities that seem not to have been passed down to many people in our own age and that I should like to see a little more of. All of the problems with life elucidated here I have both at one time or another felt myself, and felt that my own society was particularly lacking in the wisdom or perception to meaningfully address. Perhaps these really are psychological conditions unique to the organization of society in modernity, and men in the high middle ages were the happiest and most fully realized people of all time--it is remarkable to me how many authors and scholars have come to this conclusion--but even if it were true, it is quite as impossible to return mentally to this manner of life as it would be for me to try to relate to the world as I did when I was a child--in which period, I might add, I was not especially happy, or brilliant either, at the time, but only seem so in retrospect when contrasted with the irreparable ruin I have since become.

"...one effect of knowledge is to deaden the force of the imagination and the original energy of the whole man: under the weight of his knowledge he cannot move so lightly as in the days of his simplicity." Again, one feels something like this to be the case in himself, though on the other hand it is impossible not to observe that many people who do not appear to know or think about very much at all also display little evidence of imagination or vigor. The problem I think may lie in the half or less than half-understood form that most knowledge consists of. The more mastery a man has over his knowledge, the more he is one with it and it with him, the greater his ability to manipulate it, the more vigorous and imaginative he will be.

Fig.2--Ruskin bearded. I have never had a beard of any kind. On the few occasions where I did not get around to shaving for a couple of days the growth did not look too terrible but I found it to be unbearably itchy. My children want me to grow a beard for Christmas and then shave it afterwards. I have always felt that one's face had to contain a high degree of solidity and purpose to carry off a beard with dignity. At the same time it seems like something one ought at some point in his life be removed far enough from pleasant civilization for some time to be forced to try on.
"...the Renaissance knowledge is like the Renaissance armour of plate, binding and cramping the human form; while all good knowledge is like the crusader's chain mail, which throws itself into folds with the body, yet it is rarely so forged as that the clasps and rivets do not gall us." I thought this figure and analogy especially well-down. That was my years as an earnest aspiring man of letters rearing itself out of the sludge, as such things will have the occasional tendency to do.

"They (men) look back to the days of childhood as of greatest happiness, because those were the days of greatest wonder, greatest simplicity, and most vigorous imagination." I don't have terribly fond memories of my childhood. In truth I very rarely think much about it up to about age 16 except in little fragments of memory that something has jolted. I was never one of those children who was infected with a high degree of "wonder", nor do I recall anything ever appearing especially simple to me other than lists of facts, dates, numbers, etc. My imagination was functional, but even at seven or eight I knew that it was not as vigorous--though I would have lacked the language to express this--as it might be. I guess I was just a bad seed through and through from the very start.

Fig. 3 This is supposed to be Croesus, I think.

The whole chapter "The Spite of the Proud" is very good reading. Though I don't know if he was thinking of Pope when he chose the title--somehow I doubt it--the phrase appears in the "Essay on Man", the closing couplet of Epistle I:

"And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."

"...of the paltry knowledge they possessed they could only be proud (as opposed to loving)...the one main purpose of the Renaissance artists, in all their work, was to show how much they knew." This is the same criticism Johnson made of the metaphysical poets, who were I suppose Renaissance figures, though late ones. Our time of course is so infused with this attitude that even I would not swear that anybody ever really did anything out of pure affection for their task more than egomania.

Fig. 4--I don't remember what this building is, or why I have a picture of it up here. I am pretty sure it is one of the colleges at Cambridge, but I cannot guess what it is supposed to refer to.

"Raphael, Leonardo, and Michael Angelo were all trained in the old school; they all had masters who knew the true ends of art, and had reached them; masters nearly as great as they were themselves, but imbued with the old religious and earnest spirit, which their disciples receiving from them, and drinking at the same time deeply from all the fountains of knowledge opened in their day, became the world's wonders." I thought it was an attractive theory. I don't know that I believe it, or that I can make it mean much to my outlook on life--so deadened to impressions and ideas my imagination has become, though it is still interested in coming upon them--but it carries with a whole vision of the organization of the world that I would find most desirable to believe in if I could.

"For instance, when perspective was first invented, the world thought it a mighty discovery, and the greatest men then alive were as proud of knowing that retiring lines converge, as if all the wisdom of Solomon had been compressed into a vanishing point." I thought this was humorous.

Fig 5--Dance Club on the Tech Company Trip to Miami. Now why the hell do I have this picture in here? These people look totally lame. The girl with the tattoo has nice hair and might not be a terrible person at heart or have a terrible mind but one suspects both of these have been somewhat constricted by society. I was thinking that any man of reasonable parts should be able to dominate this crowd with little problem, inspire lust in the women and awe in the men and so on, and yet so far am I from dominating them, that I couldn't even get invited to tag along with them or to work in a respectable position at their company. The distance between my perception of who I am vis-a-vis the rest of the world and who I really am is quite stunning even to me. Criticism of the excessively aristocratic bent to Renaissance architecture: "For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the multitude." Thankfully he did not leave to see Modernism. At first I wasn't sure about this quote either but there might be something in it; the architecture styles of certain ages definitely warm me more than others do. I don't know, however, either whether the Renaissance is really as off-putting to the common mind as he says it is, or whether it is really alone among pre-1900, or, given that Ruskin seems to hated the 19th century, pre-1800s epochs in being so.

James Macpherson--The Ossianiac Poems (1762-3) Part 1

This is one of those 18th century books that, while still fairly famous, and frequently referenced in literary and cultural histories, is, to judge by the paucity of easily available reading copies, not much read even by the learned, who when they do offer an opinion of its merits tend to be dismissive of them. The University of Edinburgh having recently published a complete edition of this work with notes and other scholarship, I was able to procure a copy of it over the internet . The saga of the Ossian poems is well-known, so I will only recap the major points for any curious readers who happen to be unfamiliar with them. In the early 1760s a young Scotsman printed several volumes of terse and primitive prose-poems that he claimed to be translations from the 3rd-century Gaelic bard Ossian. The critics were sceptical of this claim, though it seems now to be generally agreed that MacPherson's publications were based on ancient sources of some kind and tweaked or embellished by his art. The books were great hits in their day and even long afterwards, appealing both on account of their romantic qualities as well as their supposed illumination of the remote and little known and theretofore uncelebrated Scottish antiquity. Napoleon was captivated by the raw martial spirit, which he apparently considered to be extinct in his own time, bloody though it was, and commissioned a series of tapestries based on the
poems. As late as 1854 the future famous author Oscar Fingal Wilde, though in his own character not particularly evocative of the laconic, cave-dwelling, warlike race of men celebrated in the poems, was named by his fanatical Irish nationalist mother after two of the primary heroes in these nominally Celtic epics. The modern consensus, however, seems to hold that the magic which these works once held for men of intellect and sensibility has died, and is unlikely to ever be rekindled again. As for Macpherson, after these early successes in his 20s he did not pursue much more literary work, and according to the website from which I took the above picture of him, he moved to London and devoted himself to fornication on a scale that was notable enough to attach to his reputation forever. I am going to seek other sources to confirm this last bit of information, which to read about in literary types is always unsettling to me; for this is going into doors of a type that I know for certain I will never be entering myself, and I cannot help feeling that here I am definitely being left out of the fun, or at least the gritty reality, of life that is one of the main aims of studying literature at all.



This book is an example, to me, of the value of having some kind of list to follow and be working on as the main course of one's reading/study, for I would never have gravitated to or sought out or finished it left to my own inclinations. Though repetitive and difficult to follow at times due to the similarity of a lot of the characters, and battles, and names and so on, it has some not inconsiderable beauties and provokes the mind to a train of thought that is serious without being unpleasant or completely demoralizing, which is perhaps the primary advantage that literature dating from a time before men of a type too generally similar and identifiable with one's self existed has over more contemporary work.

Moving on to my general observations and amusements in the course of reading this book:

(This picture by the way is The Vision of Ossian by Ingres. He did a series of them, though whether this is the same work that was commissioned by Napoleon I am not certain at the moment)

I have never cared much for stories, common in ancient literature, where people accidentally slay their friends/lovers, who are usually in some type of disguise and have entered the fray out of some misguided notion of helping or protecting the hero whom they love. This is such an important motif that clearly early writers saw it as expressing something essential about the human condition, but in the Ossian poems it comes across as a tired and unwelcome convention.
The Edinburgh edition is very luxuriant in its use of paper (which I like). There are lots of blank and nearly blank sheets devoted exclusively to titles, brief Arguments, and the like.
I do try to keep in mind, especially after having read so many 18th century books, how to an English-language reader in 1762 this would have been a real departure from the usual fare, as well as exciting in its suggestions of a wild and heroic, as well as mythical past in the British Isles themselves, which learned people did not think of them as having before that time, similar I think to the sense that Americans who care about such things have now about the prehistory of their country, which is not generally looked to for inspiration or as anything with which the modern inhabitants of the nation have much affinity or relation.
The sociological impression made by the work is not one of great vitality but one in which the vast majority of the best men--and the most beautiful women, their broken-hearted lovers--are killed practically in the first bloom of adulthood, before they are able to do anything. Obviously this has happened to generations of peoples in recent times as well, but the impression is made perhaps even more strongly here, for besides there never being peace and cultural renewal of sorts there is never even expressed a desire for peace. War and early death are seen as the constant, natural and even desirable conditions of life.
The appeal of the romantic past in its ability to give us something we want that we are convinced we cannot otherwise get is really a remarkable phenomenom. Although I have never been to one, out of fear of being ruthlessly ridiculed by the semi-cool and cool friends I did have, as well as my shrewd and perceptive wife, I have always had an attraction to the ridiculous Renaissance Fairs that go on all over the western world. These fairs have a reputation for being about unattractive, socially inept, intelligent but usually haphazardly educated people having found a milieu in which they can play at being, witty, sexy, manly, etc without the interference of too many competent interlopers who will expose the mirage (though some of the women at them at least are quite good-looking and any guy who gets to dance with them, let alone rip their bodices off, even if he is wearing chain mail and talking in faux-Middle English, is going to have to have some muscles and an ability to function reasonably well in the greater society). Still, the illusion of sanctity is offered. One can imagine and perhaps even experience a world in which he has standing, and a personality, where he carries weapons and uses them successfully in contest with other men, in which he is invited to dances and is even permitted to dance with a girl showing a considerable amount of cleavage (we are ignoring that she may be a little chunky or pimpled for mainstream tastes for the nonce). People will do anything they can to experience these feelings for themselves, if they are in any way available for them to have.

All this said, the life of endless warfare must have been very taxing for non-alpha males unfortunate enough to live in these ages.
MacPherson, from the Preface to Fingal:
`Poetry, like virtue, receives its reward after death. The fame which men pursued in vain, when living, is often bestowed upon them when they are not sensible of it. This neglect of living authors is not altogether to be attributed to that reluctance which men shew in praising and rewarding genius. It often happens, that the man who writes differs greatly from the same man in common life. His foibles, however, are obliterated by death, and his better part, his writings, remain: his character is formed from them, and he that was no extraordinary man in his own time, becomes the wonder of succeeding ages.--From this source proceeds our veneration for the dead. Their virtues remain, but the vices, which were once blended with their virtues, have died with themselves.`
This is perhaps true only so far as writing of good quality goes, I presume.
I will close this post. I think Ossian might merit a 3 or perhaps 4 part recap. We will see.