Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, Defining ‘Fine Art’)

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” —British art and social critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Two Paths, Lecture II: The Unity of Art, section 54 (1859)

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Being Yourself)

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,
Who finds himself, loses his misery!"—English critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Self-Dependence,” in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (1897)

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, on the Distinction Between Science and Art)

“Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul. Her work is to portray the appearances of things, and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce upon living creatures. The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions. Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with truth of aspect, the other with truth of essence. Art does not represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind. Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man: and it requires of everything which is submitted to it imperatively this, and only this,—what that thing is to the human eyes and human heart, what it has to say to men, and what it can become to them: a field of question just as much vaster than that of science, as the soul is larger than the material creation.”—English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Stones of Venice (1853)

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, on the Artist as ‘A Seeing and Feeling Creature’)

"The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record."— English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Stones of Venice (1853)

Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, As the Cheshire Cat Opines on Directions and Sanity)

[Alice] “was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

“The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had VERY long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

“'Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. 'Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

“'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

“'I don't much care where--' said Alice.

“'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

“'--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.

“'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.'

“Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. 'What sort of people live about here?'

“'In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 'lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, 'lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'

“'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

“'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

“'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

“'You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'”— English author, illustrator, mathematician, photographer, and teacher Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

This past week, a writer’s group submission by a prolific and accomplished playwright, Jim, alluded to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in its own delightful satire. After guffawing all the way through, I hunted down my copy of Lewis Carroll’s classic.

Midway through the Victorian Era, Alice amused readers through its whimsical depiction of eccentric characters (including the anthropomorphic Cheshire Cat). These days, it can strike people like me as a future glimpse at an age—such as ours—when absurdity edges closer to reality.

The image accompanying this post is one of the drawings from the original edition of the book by the English illustrator, graphic humorist and political cartoonist Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914).

Flashback, November 1850: Dickens’ ‘Favourite Child,’ ‘David Copperfield,’ Published

With the last of its breathlessly awaited 20 monthly serial installments issued, David Copperfield was released in book form in November 1850, capping the publication journey of the most autobiographical novel by Charles Dickens. 

Just a few years before his death, the astonishingly prolific writer pronounced this his “favourite child” among his novels, and whenever writers use the adjective “Dickensian,” they, more likely than not, have in mind the miserable childhood remembered and subtly reworked here.

In some ways, the novelist didn’t realize just how autobiographical his fiction in this case was: He later wrote friend and future biographer John Forster that he hadn’t noticed that David’s initials were his own in reverse.

Even the title character’s first name has underdog overtones that Dickens would have identified with: Just as the biblical David had to overcome a direct threat to his life, so did Copperfield and Dickens, in the form of grinding poverty.

The story of a youth at bay, struggling with a broken home, adult cruelty, youthful infatuation and the meaning of true friendship surely shows up, in one form or another, in many reading lists for children and youth adults. But I wonder how much the great prototype of the coming-of-age tale—Dickens’ novel—is read today, either by youngsters at their leisure or by students?

When I eye its bulk (882 pages, minus the scholarly appendices, in the paperback I’m holding now), a quote from a considerably slimmer, more recent novel, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, inevitably springs to mind:  “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” 

And there goes, I suspect, any inclination to urge Dickens on younger readers.

Victorian readers had no such compunctions about the novel’s length or its sentimental, sometimes lachrymose, subject matter. David Copperfield did not initially sell as well as its predecessor, Dombey and Son, but it became Dickens’ best-known book, particularly admired by Leo Tolstoy and Somerset Maugham.

Part of the book’s appeal comes from its almost cinematic qualities. Dickens’ affection for the stage has been well-chronicled, but it is equally extraordinary how he anticipated the elements of the motion picture: realistic depiction of setting and atmosphere, memorable dialogue, and most of all, montage, or parallel action that drives narrative simultaneously among different characters (a technique, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein noted in a famous essay, first employed by D.W. Griffith).

The 2020 film, starring Dev Patel in the title role, is only the latest adaptation of the novel for the big screen and television. The many extraordinary characters that Dickens created (Micawber, Mr. Murdstone, Uriah Heep, Steerforth, Betsey Trottwood) has attracted, over the past 85 years (since the classic MGM version), some of the brightest acting talents, including Basil Rathbone, Maggie Smith, Ralph Richardson, Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Cyril Cusack, Wendy Hiller, Edith Evans, Michael and Corin Redgrave, Ron Moody, Bob Hoskins, Lionel Barrymore, Edna May Oliver, Hugh Laurie—and, in the most unconventional bit of casting, W.C. Fields as Micawber.

(As I contemplate all these actors--and all the other actors, directors, and adaptations of Dickens--it occurred to me that I could create an entire blog on everyone associated with these versions for film, TV and stage, and never come close remotely close to running out of material.)

But as much as anything else, what contemporary readers responded to in the novel was not just its masterly characterization or its vivid description—both characteristic of Dickens’ fiction from the start—but a more naked honesty than Dickens had previously attempted, or, as G.K. Chesterton termed it, “a new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life.”

To some extent, that derived from its form: not merely a story seen through the consciousness of a child (something Dickens had created 12 years before in Oliver Twist), but an entire coming-of-age novel told through a first-person narrator.

Forster seems to have suggested this device after reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. But Dickens’ technique and voice differed from Bronte’s: less inclined at the start of the novel to take the reader immediately into the action, but more oriented towards a bifurcated vision of the past. Copperfield is not merely re-telling his history, but interpreting, even re-interpreting it as an adult, while foreshadowing later elements in his tale (e.g., the seaside setting and the roles of debt and dispersion, suggested in the sale of his birth caul).

In particular, Dickens--37 years old as he began his narrative, recalling a life of tumult and triumph--mined and tweaked his experiences and the people who played major roles in his life. 

For instance, Maria Beadnell, a pretty woman who infatuated him before she rejected his courtship attempts, was turned into David’s doll-like, childish first wife, Dora. Traits of the novelist’s father, John Dickens, were assigned to David’s stepfather, Mr. Murdstone (callousness), and Wilkins Micawber (an inveterate and unwise optimism in the face of financial catastrophe that has spawned the “Micawber Principle” of money management).

In a sense, the novel functioned as a form of displacement for Dickens’ long-repressed humiliation and anger at his parents, whose impracticality and improvidence led him to working in a blacking factory rather than being placed in school. Except for a reduction in age by two years (thus accentuating the peril faced by fictional David), the facts and feelings in this passage exactly mirror those of Charles:

“It is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”

To be sure, the novel has its weaknesses: Chesterton complained that, in sending Emily, Peggotty and Micawber off to Australia in the conclusion, Dickens had conceived of the far-off colony as “a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal it of its grievous wound,” and I find Dora infuriatingly infantile at maddening length.

But altogether, Dickens’ recent biographer Claire Tomalin is correct in calling David Copperfield “a masterpiece built on Dickens's ability to dig into his own experience, transform it and give it the power of myth.” Midway through his career, it opened up a vein in his memory, leading to the mature period in which he would write Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations.

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on What We Live For)

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”—English novelist novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871)

This Day in Literary History (John Ruskin, Influential But Troubled Art and Social Critic, Born)

Feb. 8, 1819—John Ruskin, a critic who trained his powers of observation on art and architecture before turning his attention to workplaces and natural landscapes endangered by industrialists, was born in the Brunswick Square section of his native London, England.

In college, I was exposed to Ruskin’s work in a course on Victorian literature. I confess that the critic did not make much of an impression on me then. 

Some of this may have had to do with Ruskin’s sometimes grandiloquent style (like many Victorians, he often preferred three adjectives when one would have done the trick just as well). But much of this may have involved my inability to appreciate a polymath who could do so much and affect so many people and across so many disciplines.

Initially, Ruskin gained fame as an advocate for landscape artist J.M.W. Turner. But in the second half of his career, he turned, with increasing dismay, toward the social and environmental havoc created by the Industrial Age, and promoted ideas later associated with the arts and crafts movement, the welfare state and the environmental movement.

A copious collection of watercolors owned by his father, a prosperous wine merchant, whetted Ruskin’s early interest in painting. While he did not pursue the visual arts as a career himself, what he learned along the way continued to inform both his writing routine and his prose for the rest of his life.

Like John Updike, Ruskin fashioned a style heavily dependent on what he saw. His work on Turner, for instance, recreates the painter’s textures and atmosphere almost as vividly as if one were in a gallery or museum. But, while Updike only made art criticism a small tributary in his copious work, Ruskin made it the current from which everything else he did flowed.

Henry James (another novelist fascinated by art) famously wrote that a fiction writer was someone on whom nothing should be lost. Ruskin was already pursuing this admonition on his own, in areas that became even more pronounced over time.

Modern Painters (1843), the first Ruskin title to attract the attention of the public, impressed the likes of novelists Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell. In it, he championed the work of Samuel Prout and Turner, and when the latter died in 1851 Ruskin performed a salutary service by cataloguing the 12,000 sketches the artists left the nation. 

The great transition in his career took place with the three-volume The Stones of Venice (1853). What began as a technical history of Venetian architecture soon broadened into a cultural and even social critique. The Italian city-state’s architecture, he felt, had declined as a result of aesthetic corruption. In parallel fashion, the anonymous guild craftsmen of the medieval period, animated by a pure faith, had given way to the materialism of the Renaissance artist. 

In laboring on this massive project, Ruskin couldn’t help feeling that what he saw applied just as strongly to the crass industrialism that had overtaken Britain:

“And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,-that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

Given such conclusions, in a recent “Masterpiece” column for The Wall Street Journal, Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, labeled The Stones of Venice “a defining text of ethical socialism.” Designer William Morris was influenced enough by Ruskin’s preference for handmade over machine-made products to produce his own highly acclaimed books, wallpapers, textiles, ceramics, furniture, metalwork, and glass, and Ruskin further promoted this fledgling arts-and-crafts movement by founding the  Guild of St George in 1871.

Ruskin developed his critique of contemporary society more explicitly in Unto This Last (1860), which castigated the pillars of Victorian economy: free trade, competition and market economics. In contrast to the works of individual artisans, he decried the products of the Industrial Age as soulless and advocated for the dignity of labor: “In order that people may be happy at work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it.”

The environmental movement, too, received an early boost from Ruskin. A 2015 Atlantic article by Uri Friedman identified a February 1884 lecture by Ruskin on the “plague-wind” afflicting London as an early harbinger of climate change.  This environmental jeremiad remains powerful today:

“For the sky is covered with gray cloud;--not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind. Dismal enough, had it been the first morning of its kind that summer had sent. But during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, through meager March, through changelessly sullen April, through despondent May, and darkened June, morning after morning has come gray-shrouded thus.”

For all his brilliance, it was Ruskin’s misfortune that, though he had been trained to focus on things, he didn’t have a similar education when it came to the female form. His mother hovered around him constantly while he was at Oxford, limiting his opportunities to interact with women. 

He was utterly unprepared, then, when, nearing 30 years old, he wed Effie Gray. Six years later, the aristocrat Gray, childless, had the marriage annulled on the grounds that it had not been consummated. As she explained in a bewildered and angry letter to a friend: 

“Finally this last year he told me his true reason (and this to me is as villainous as all the rest), that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife is that he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”

Smirking among the intelligentsia increased when Effie married again to painter John Everett Millais and proceeded to produce eight children. Early speculation was that Ruskin was put off by her body odor or menstruation on the wedding night. But the most common speculation about the disastrous relationship was that, with his understanding of the female form confined to paintings and classical statues, the critic was too astonished by her genitalia.

The last decade of Ruskin’s life was marked by growing mental instability. He died in 1900. His life has undergone greater popular scrutiny in films like Effie Gray (2014), but it appears that scholars, too, are trying to come to grips with this complex and multi-sided Renaissance man.

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a First Encounter With Edward Hyde)

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it Is on that of your new friend.’”— Scottish fiction writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)

The creation of Edward Hyde, the embodiment of pure evil in the physical ugliness so vividly portrayed above, is what has led so many to view this “Strange Tale” as a horror story.

But there is another horror that, to Dr. Henry Jekyll, might be just as dismaying: Hyde’s creator and opposite is not a saint, but the same old Jekyll: a proper, basically decent Victorian gentleman who cannot banish his primal urges—“that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.”

According to a fascinating Huffington Post piece by Melanie Kendry, “When Does a Man Become a Monster?”, the original draft by Robert Louis Stevenson indicated that the crime of the “ordinary secret sinner” Jekyll was not murder (or even the consorting with prostitutes shown in so many cinematic versions) but homosexuality. 

It was an anticipation of a later, wittier, but equally horrifying story of a double man in Victorian society, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Such were the taboos of the time in England, however, that even in the latter, more daring case, Gray’s secret sexuality could only be implied.

(The image accompanying this post shows John Barrymore, in the classic 1920 silent film version of Stevenson’s novella. Remarkably, Barrymore depicted the violent and disturbing physical transformation into Hyde without benefit of special effects. As fine as the 1933 Fredric March performance was—worthy enough of an Oscar---I still prefer Barrymore’s. I may be the only person I know who still recalls Kirk Douglas’ performance in a 1973 TV musical adaptation of the tale by composer Lionel Bart. That production was a horror story all its own!)