Eucatastrophe Reader

"People are not given premonitions for nothing"

“He did not reply for some instants.  "When the sun shines on the
north front of Sherton Abbey--that's when my happiness will come
to me!" said he, staring as it were into the earth.”

In the Biblical books of Exodus and Joshua, we are introduced to the concept of the Covenant. Specific terms for human behavior in society are laid out, said to be terms demanded by God, and attached to punishments and rewards. In the subsequent histories of the nation of Israel, Biblical historians link the fates of the country to their observance of the covenant. As they abide by it in faith, the fates smile upon them. As they neglect it, the scourges of fate work against them in an iron law of retribution. And the harder they struggle against the pricks of divine displeasure, the more enmeshed they become. As the people of Israel become enamored with the various nature religions of the people’s around them, they loose sight of their covenant obligations and descend into a downward spiral of ignorance and inexplicable (to them) suffering. Only from time to time do heroes stand out with courage among the crowd to show the way to covenantal life.

In a way, Tomas Hardy uses his novels to rewrite this formula. Instead of linking fate to compliance with a religio-social contract (which is what Victorian Era Christianity entailed), Hardy’s fates are linked to the natural rhythms of nature, instinct, and intuition. As characters neglect this natural compass, no matter if they do so for religious purposes or economic or as a consequence of social pressures, they open themselves up to the workings of an antagonistic universe that will not flinch in wrecking its vengeance.

Thus, in the Woodlanders, when we are introduced to the heroine, Grace Maybury, we know that she will have a life of suffering to face.

“Her look expressed a tendency to wait for others' thoughts before uttering her own; possibly also to wait for others' deeds before her own doing.  In her small, delicate mouth, which had perhaps hardly settled down to its matured curves, there was a gentleness that might hinder sufficient self-assertion for her own good.”

 Grace Maybury, filial child. Grace Maybury, dutiful church-goer. Grace Maybury, devotee of Victorian social morality. We suspect from the outset that Hardy intends to crush her in the machinery of a universe intolerant of imposed sentimentality. 

We hope for a universe that will reward us for being “good” by society’s terms. Hardy will not indulge us. “Melbury, perhaps, was an unlucky man in having within him the sentiment which could indulge in this foolish fondness about the imprint of a daughter's footstep,” writes Hardy in his description of Grace’s father, “Nature does not carry on her government with a view to such feelings.”

For those who may not have read the novel The Woodlanders, the plot involves a hard-scrabble village merchant who sends his daughter off to school at great expense to educate her up to a higher social level so as to make a better wife to the yeoman tree planter, Giles Winterbourne. When she returns however, Mr. Maybury gets it into his head that his daughter will now be “wasted” on one such as Giles Winterbourne.

“But here was the fact, which could not be disguised: since seeing what an immense change her last twelve months of absence had produced in his daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he had been spending for several years upon her education, he was reluctant to let her marry Giles Winterborne, indefinitely occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant, apple-farmer, and what not, even were she willing to marry him herself.”

“Yes, I believe ye.  That's just it.  I KNOW Grace will gradually sink down to our level again,” he bemoans to his wife,

“. . . and catch our manners and way of speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife.  But I can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of maidenhood as ever lived--fit to ornament a palace wi'--that I've taken so much trouble to lift up.  Fancy her white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail and wamble!"

 Various pressures, social and parental begin to bear down on Grace Maybury, driving a wedge of prejudice between Giles, her childhood sweetheart, and her own heart. "That, then, is the secret of it all," she eventually concludes, "And Giles Winterborne is not for me, and the less I think of him the better."

 But these sentiments are but “implanted tastes” as Hardy would let us know. 

“He had a strong suspicion that somewhere in the bottom of her heart there pulsed an old simple indigenous feeling favorable to Giles, though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes.”

It is precisely that “simple indigenous feeling” that is Hardy’s concern. It is to him what the covenant was to the Hebrew prophets – the touchstone – the central determinant of whether the seemingly uncaring fates will bless or curse a life. Listen to that voice and you live. Repress it and you die. That is the formula.

“Matters lingered on thus.  And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this side and on that is made to travel in specific directions, the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl shaped the curves of her career.”

From the moment that Grace Maybury deferentially allows her father and all that he represents to influence her, the gears of her calamity begin to grind. Hardy records the terrible moment when the future of Grace and Giles hangs in the balance and both are weighed and found wanting.

“"My silence just now was not accident," she said, in an unequal voice.  "My father says it is best not to think too much of that-- engagement, or understanding between us, that you know of.  I, too, think that upon the whole he is right.  But we are friends, you know, Giles, and almost relations."”

“She added, with emotion in her tone, "For myself, I would have married you--some day--I think.  But I give way, for I see it would be unwise."”

“Grace heaved a divided sigh, with a tense pause between, and moved onward, her heart feeling uncomfortably big and heavy, and her eyes wet.  Had Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come down from the tree to her, would she have continued in that filial acquiescent frame of mind which she had announced to him as final?  If it be true, as women themselves have declared, that one of their sex is never so much inclined to throw in her lot with a man for good and all as five minutes after she has told him such a thing cannot be, the probabilities are that something might have been done by the appearance of Winterborne on the ground beside Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.”

Neither of them are willing to live courageously. Neither will fight the current of conventionality that has inserted itself between them. Both believe somehow that they are being noble in deferring. And from here on out, the plot begins to array all the forces at its disposal against them, surrendering them to what they apparently wanted more than what they might have had. The words of the Proverbs come to mind.

²² “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
   How long will mockers delight in mockery
   and fools hate knowledge?
²³ Repent at my rebuke!
   Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
   I will make known to you my teachings.
²⁴ But since you refuse to listen when I call
   and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand,
²⁵ since you disregard all my advice
   and do not accept my rebuke,
²⁶ I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you;
   I will mock when calamity overtakes you—
²⁷ when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
   when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
   when distress and trouble overwhelm you.

 ²⁸ “Then they will call to me but I will not answer;
   they will look for me but will not find me,
²⁹ since they hated knowledge
   and did not choose to fear the LORD.
³⁰ Since they would not accept my advice
   and spurned my rebuke,
³¹ they will eat the fruit of their ways
   and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
³² For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
   and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
³³ but whoever listens to me will live in safety
   and be at ease, without fear of harm.”

Replace the word “wisdom” with the word “naure” and the word “Lord” with the word “intuition” and you are well into Hardy’s mind. The great difference between the Hewbrew conception of wisdom and that of Thomas Hardy has to do with where wisdom will be found. Is it in nature? Inintuition? In “common sense” and self-awareness? Or is it to be found in a text? In a social code? In an ancient covenant and tradition? Hardy describes Grace Maybury as one “mentally trained and tilled into foreignness of view” – literally divorced from her own self-understanding. There is a brief moment where she senses vaguely the danger of what she is doing and seeks to retreat from the path that her father’s paternalistic classicism has maneuvered her into but the voice of the inner wisdom is too weak and “the frail bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly launched was stranded and lost.”

“Fate, it seemed, would have it this way, and there was nothing to do but to acquiesce.”

The local farmers, being in tune with those rhythms of the natural world better than the refinely educated Grace Maybury, can see who belongs with who but the protagonists themselves cannot. "If they two come up in Wood next Midsummer Night they'll come as one," says one of the local “characters” of Dr. Fitzpiers and Grace.  

"Instead of my skellington he'll carry home her living carcass before long. But though she's a lady in herself, and worthy of any such as he, it do seem to me that he ought to marry somebody more of the sort of Mrs. Charmond, and that Miss Grace should make the best of Winterborne."”

All Grace can do is sense that something is not right with the relationship that develops with Dr. Fitzpier, the man that her father considered “best: for her.

“She admitted the advantage; but it was plain that though Fitzpiers exercised a certain fascination over her when he was present, or even more, an almost psychic influence, and though his impulsive act in the wood had stirred her feelings indescribably, she had never regarded him in the light of a destined husband.  "I don't know what to answer," she said.  "I have learned that he is very clever.”

Should we marry someone we regard as “very clever” simply because of some parental agenda? Hardy thinks not.

“She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as he could state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had none.  That Fitzpiers acted upon her like a dram, exciting her, throwing her into a novel atmosphere which biased her doings until the influence was over, when she felt something of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced—“

Grace is unable to believe what she is unable to explain. But such is the case with most of us in a post Enlightenment society. And in many ways, the father who pressures her is himself a victim:

“Melbury's respect for Fitzpiers was based less on his professional position, which was not much, than on the standing of his family in the county in by-gone days.  That implicit faith in members of long-established families, as such, irrespective of their personal condition or character, which is still found among old-fashioned people in the rural districts reached its full intensity in Melbury. His daughter's suitor was descended from a family he had heard of in his grandfather's time as being once great, a family which had conferred its name upon a neighboring village; how, then, could anything be amiss in this betrothal?

"I must keep her up to this," he said to his wife.  "She sees it is for her happiness; but still she's young, and may want a little prompting from an older tongue."

Having eviscerated his daughter of her self-confidence, Maybury has left her with no rudder. No compass. What he has done is made her vulnerable to whatever external force pressures her the most. And in this case, it is the philandering heart of Dr. Fitzpiers.

“The intoxication that Fitzpiers had, as usual, produced in Grace's brain during the visit passed off somewhat with his withdrawal. She felt like a woman who did not know what she had been doing for the previous hour, but supposed with trepidation that the afternoon's proceedings, though vague, had amounted to an engagement between herself and the handsome, coercive, irresistible Fitzpiers.”

“His material standing of itself, either present or future, had little in it to give her ambition, but the possibilities of a refined and cultivated inner life, of subtle psychological intercourse, had their charm.  It was this rather than any vulgar idea of marrying well which caused her to float with the current, and to yield to the immense influence which Fitzpiers exercised over her whenever she shared his society.

Any observer would shrewdly have prophesied that whether or not she loved him as yet in the ordinary sense, she was pretty sure to do so in time.”

Should someone marry because most folks think they are pretty sure that love will ensue? Hardy thinks not. This trading of what is as though it were a substitute for what should be is precisely what Hardy objects to. If you have read Hardy’s novels, you get to the pivitol dialog between Grace and Fitzpiers and you watch, as one outside the events, observing a train approach a missing bridge that the passengers believe is there.

“"But could it not be a quiet ceremony, even at church?" she pleaded.

"I don't see the necessity of going there!" he said, a trifle impatiently.  "Marriage is a civil contract, and the shorter and simpler it is made the better.  People don't go to church when they take a house, or even when they make a will."

"Oh, Edgar--I don't like to hear you speak like that."

"Well, well--I didn't mean to.  But I have mentioned as much to your father, who has made no objection; and why should you?"

She gave way, deeming the point one on which she ought to allow sentiment to give way to policy--if there were indeed policy in his plan.  But she was indefinably depressed as they walked homeward.

“He left her at the door of her father's house.  As he receded, and was clasped out of sight by the filmy shades, he impressed Grace as a man who hardly appertained to her existence at all.  Cleverer, greater than herself, one outside her mental orbit, as she considered him, he seemed to be her ruler rather than her equal, protector, and dear familiar friend.

. . . .The disappointment she had experienced at his wish, the shock given to her girlish sensibilities by his irreverent views of marriage, together with the sure and near approach of the day fixed for committing her future to his keeping, made her so restless that she could scarcely sleep at all that night.”

“But since you refuse to listen when I call . . .”

Once more, on the day before her wedding, she tries to struggle free from the grip of her filial mesmerism.

“I have been thinking very much about my position this morning--ever since it was light," she began, excitedly, and trembling so that she could hardly stand.  "And I feel it is a false one.  I wish not to marry Mr. Fitzpiers.  I wish not to marry anybody; but I'll marry Giles Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative.”

But she implores rather than insists and in so doing, declares her life to be the second life of another.

“The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could, in fancy, catch the noise of it, hear the murmur of the villagers as she came out of church, imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells.  The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding-dong of those three crazed bells more persistent.  She awoke:

the morning had come.

Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers.”

Hardy could not be more brilliant than when he describes the sheep-dog like forces that drive people into decisions that run counter to their inner wisdom.

“Then, when my emotions have exhausted themselves, I become full of fears, till I think I shall die for very fear.  The terrible insistencies of society--how severe they are, and cold and inexorable--ghastly towards those who are made of wax and not of stone.  Oh, I am afraid of them; a stab for this error, and a stab for that--correctives and regulations framed that society may tend to perfection--an end which I don't care for in the least.  Yet for this, all I do care for has to be stunted and starved."

It is only in hindsight, as Fitzpiers true character is revealed, that she begins to understand the mistake that she has made. He regards her as “another species” and begins to regret having “mated with someone below him.” He forms emotional and sexual liaisons with a local aristocrat and runs off to Italy with her. “I stooped to mate beneath me, and now I rue it." He says. Both of them consider themselves to have lost “their path.”

“But though possessed by none of that feline wildness which it was her moral duty to experience, she did not fail to know that she had made a frightful mistake in her marriage.  Acquiescence in her father's wishes had been degradation to herself.  People are not given premonitions for nothing; she should have obeyed her impulse on that early morning, and steadfastly refused her hand.”

But Hardy is not done with her. “Him she could forget; her circumstances she had always with her.” And Hardy’s machinery of fate is not done grinding her deference to social convention down either. He has had his way with the tradition of the father’s choosing their daughter’s marriage partners. Now he is going to go after the idea of marriage as an irrevocable bond that should be sacrosanct in the face of non-existent attachment. Through the ruminations of Grace’s father, we begin to hear the voice of Thomas Hardy asking why social conventions should hold such sway when people suffer thereby.

“Melbury's heretofore confidential candor towards his gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did injnry to his every action, thought, and mood.  He knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be so.”

“Was not the Sabbath made for man and not man for the Sabbath?” we can almost here Hardy asking his readers?

“Impelled by a remembrance [Grace] took down a prayer-book and turned to the marriage-service.  Reading it slowly through, she became quite appalled at her recent off-handedness, when she rediscovered what awfully solemn promises she had made him at those chancel steps not so very long ago.

She became lost in long ponderings on how far a person's conscience might be bound by vows made without at the time a full recognition of their force.  That particular sentence, beginning "Whom God hath joined together," was a staggerer for a gentlewoman of strong devotional sentiment.  She wondered whether God really did join them together.”

It is impossible not to think of Rousseau’s Emile as Grace and her father talk about the damage that had been done by so removing her from nature and bringing her up in school:

“You ought to care.  You have got into a very good position to start with.  You have been well educated, well tended, and you have become the wife of a professional man of unusually good family.  Surely you ought to make the best of your position."

"I don't see that I ought.  I wish I had never got into it.  I wish you had never, never thought of educating me.  I wish I worked in the woods like Marty South.  I hate genteel life, and I want to be no better than she."

"Why?" said her amazed father.

"Because cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles.  I say again, I wish you had never sent me to those fashionable schools you set your mind on.  It all arose out of that, father.  If I had stayed at home I should have married--" She closed up her mouth suddenly and was silent; and be saw that she was not far from crying.

Melbury was much grieved.  "What, and would you like to have grown up as we be here in Hintock--knowing no more, and with no more chance of seeing good life than we have here?"

"Yes.  I have never got any happiness outside Hintock that I know of, and I have suffered many a heartache at being sent away.  

Hardy gives his hero and heroine another chance at love but, like Jude and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, their second test would require greater fortitude against social convention than the first. And though they draw close to making the fateful decision, neither can do it when they find themselves at the brink of it. [Plot spoiler alert] In the end, they defer to social convention and Giles sleeps in the rain, contracting the illness that will kill him.

“A dreadful enlightenment spread through the mind of Grace.  "Oh," she cried, in her anguish, as she hastily prepared herself to go out, "how selfishly correct I am always--too, too correct! Cruel propriety is killing the dearest heart that ever woman clasped to her own."

 “Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now, though she knew him so well.  The purity of his nature, his freedom from the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had never been fully understood by Grace till this strange self-sacrifice in lonely juxtaposition to her own person was revealed. The perception of it added something that was little short of reverence to the deep affection for him of a woman who, herself, had more of Artemis than of Aphrodite in her constitution.”

It is hard to find a more fitting portrayal of Thomas Hardy’s prophetic message to his society. He would have Victorian England live lives with less Artemis (god of reason) and more Aphrodite (god of passion). For Hardy, the one person who does so in The Woodlanders is the unfortunate Marty South, lifelong friend and and co-worker of Giles Winterbourne. “Marty South alone, of all the women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's level of intelligent intercourse with nature,” says Hardy,

“In that respect she had formed the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.”

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze.  They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew.  They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off.  They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots.  The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and not from that of the spectator's.

"He ought to have married YOU, Marty, and nobody else in the world!" said Grace, with conviction, after thinking somewhat in the above strain.

Marty shook her head.  "In all our out-door days and years together, ma'am," she replied, "the one thing he never spoke of to me was love; nor I to him."

"Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew—not even my father, though he came nearest knowing--the tongue of the trees and fruits and flowers  themselves."

In the end, it is Marty South that stays faithful to Giles even after he dies. "Now, my own, own love," she whispers to his gravestone after Grace decides to move on with her life.

"You are mine, and on'y mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died. But I--whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee.  Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say none could do it like you.  If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and Heaven!--But no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a GOOD man, and did good things!"

In the film version of the woodlanders, Giles and Marty capture the essence of the novel in the following exchange:

Marty: Oh, Giles, if only you could tell your heart to be free.
Giles: You can't tell the heart. The heart hopes. Most of all where it's hopeless.

"Every tree said 'Holy! Holy!" - Beethoven

What Life Was Like in Europe’s Romantic Era

“The Romantics would promote individual creativity over Classical rules, exalt emotion over reason, love the wild beauty of nature and exotic, far off places, closely examine the human personality, and admire genius and heroism”

I’ll not say a great deal about this book though I enjoyed it much. Its principle contribution to my understanding of Romanticism lies in giving biographical detail to the names of the people I keep coming across. What Life Was Like in the Romantic Era lingers on the lives of people, well known and not so well known, like Tallyrand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Wolstoncraft, Germaine De Stael, Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, George Sand, Beethoven, Goethe, Fanny Arnstein, the Grimm brothers, Delecroix, John Henry Fuseli, William Turner, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley.

It is a reminder that the Romantic era, like any era of time, is merely a collection of individual life stories that sometimes connect and share commonalities but that are, in the long run, simply lives lived in different ways.

"For a genius, principles are even more harmful than examples.”

The Romantic Revolution by Tim Blanning

By the end of the first of the three sections of the book, The Romantic Revolution: A History I was excited. Blanning’s presentation of the historical development of the Romantic Movement and how it has been understood would be a perfect text for the class. In the section following, we begin to see the way that Romanticism acquired a “dark side (some would argue that it started out that way). By section three, the book seems to lose its way in the forest of detail. Facts, quotations, short biographies, all begin to merge together into a patternless onslaught of the author’s knowledge. Section one explains what is happening in a night sky full of stars. Section two reveals some constellations. Section three seems to be mostly stars and I lose the connection between them.

In the introduction to the book, Banning addresses the basic question of definitions. He lays out the various suggested beginnings of the Romantic Movement in the years between 1748 and 1770. (Banning seems to like the moment when Jean Jacques Rousseau was “converted” to the belief that the Enlightenment was ruining the planet). The next several pages trace the history of the term Romantic as a moniker for the system.

Banning sent me off on a search for the discourses of Joshua Reynolds delivered at the opening of the Royal Academy, January 2nd, 1769. It is a treasure trove of quotes that demonstrate what the Romantics were reacting against. Reynolds insisted that the primary task of the artist was to study and master ancient techniques.

. . . Thus I have ventured to give my opinion of what appears to me the true and only method by which an artist makes himself master of his profession, which I hold ought to be one continued course of imitation, that is not to cease but with our lives.

. . . Study, therefore, the great works of the great masters for ever. Study as nearly as you can, in the order, in the manner, on the principles, on which they studied. Study nature attentively, but always with those masters in your company; consider them as models which you are to imitate, and at the same time as rivals which you are to combat.

. . . A man who thinks he is guarding himself against Prejudices by resisting the authority of others, leaves open every avenue to singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy, and many other vices, all tending to warp the judgment and prevent the natural operation of his faculties.

This submission to others is a deference which we owe, and indeed are forced involuntarily to pay.

It is this idea above all others that Rousseau was reacting to when he wrote Julie: The New Helloise. Similarly Goethe rejects any notion that beauty could be found by “joining schools, adopting principles, or following rules.”

“The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from deep, independent, harmonious feeling, from feeling peculiar to itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant of everything foreign, then it is whole and living, whether it be born of crude savagery or cultured sentiment. . . . For a genius, principles are even more harmful than examples.”

From his discussion of the Romantic response to aesthetic rules dominated by ancient masters, Banning goes into a delightful discussion of how the Romantics were reacting to the evisceration of mystery and religion from public and private life. “Now we have got the freedom of believing in public nothing but what can be rationally demonstrated,” complained Johann Heinrick Merk,

“They have deprived religion of all its sensuous elements, that is of all its relish. They have carved it up into its parts and reduced it to a skeleton without color and light … and now it is put in a jar and nobody wants to taste it.” .. .

“My Opinion is this” Coleridge insisted,

“—that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Letter to Thomas Poole (23 March 1801)

Banning makes a strong case that the public was not ready to have the mysteries of their life of faith eviscerated and the Romantics offered them the feelings of their religions while they lost them. Romanticism is, in some respects, like phantom limb syndrome. And even when they retained their religious connections, it was with a view to emotional rather than intellectual satisfaction, As Chateaubriand puts it in The Spirit of Christianity, or the Beauties of the Christian Religion (1802)

“One cannot enter a Gothic cathedral without feeling a kind of shiver of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity. The forests of the Gauls have passed their tuen into the temples of our ancestors, and the woods of our oaks have thus maintained their sacred origin. These vaults carved in foliage, these buttresses supporting the walls and terminating abruptly like broken tree trunks, the coolness of the vaults, the shadows of the sanctuary, the dark aisles, the secret passages, the low doorways; everything in the Gothic church retraces the labyrinths of the forest and excites feelings of religious horror, the mysteries and the Divinity.”

Similarly, as aristocracies began to lose their power to democratic influences, artists tended to transfer their allegiances from the few wealthy people who could afford to pay them to the many common people who would pay to see their work in galleries or on lithographs. With the coming of technologies that would allow pictures to be reproduced, the money was to be found in the mass markets. Not in the private homes of well bred aristocrats. What the common people wanted is what the aristocrats had always wanted – confirmation that they were special. Clearly, not everyone could obtain the sort of education that would entitle them to claim genius by study. Perhaps it was comforting to know that genius could simply be had by birth.

This leads us to the second portion of Banning’s book; the part where Romantic authors and poets began to focus on themselves and their own idiosyncrasies, and sometimes nightmares, as a means of declaring their individual worthiness. Ironically, we can see some of Joshua Reynolds’ worst fears about the future of art coming to fruition.

One almost senses that there are those who begin to make the following argument “since geniuses are often mad and I am mad, I must be a genius.” “The author has not followed the precedents of any other artist,” writes Francisco Goya,

“nor has he been able to copy Nature herself. It is very difficult to imitate Nature, and a successful imitation is worthy of admiration. He who departs entirely from Nature will surely merit high esteem, since he has to put before the eyes of the public forms and poses which have only existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind, or one which his beset by uncontrolled passion. .”

Maybe having no self-control could be regarded as a sign of genius?

Several times Banning mentions that history is a dialectical process. We never go back to old ideas. We simply take old ideas and rework them into the fabric of what has happened since. Somehow, it seems that an old idea that was surrendered might now work if only modified by a few things learned since.

I look forward to assigning and discussing the first two segments of The Romantic Recvolution: A History in years to come.

Question for Comment: Do you consciously pattern your own life after some model? In what ways do you attempt to be utterly and completely unique?

"Even perfect at times, but also so damn destructive.”

Swan Lake

One element that I have left out of my Romantic Mind course is that of dance. I confess. I did not grow up in a ballet loving sort of family. Indeed, I have never been to a ballet. So I thought I would take some time tonight to look into one that might play well in the context of the course on Romanticism that I am developing. I decided to go with Swan Lake by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. There were several reasons. One, it was the song that the trappist monks play at their last supper scene in Of Gods and Men. Two, it is at the basis of the recent hit movie The Black Swan and I thought that might give it some contemporary associations. Third, the music from Swan Lake is often familiar to people who do not even know it is from a Romantic Era ballet.

For the uninitiated, Swan Lake is based on an old German (or Russian) folk tale about an evil wizard who turns a princess into a swan and curses her to remain so until some dashing man with a true heart swears true love to her (Those were hard to come by in those days). This she finds in the prince Siegfried who has a whole court of prospective damsels dancing to catch his eye. Fortunately, Siegfried falls in love with her before he shoots her (moonlight does things to a guy). Smitten, Siegfried has no interest in the bevy of dancing candidates his mother has assembled but the evil wizard Von Rothbart makes his daughter Odine look like the beautiful Odette and she seduces Siegried with her Odette doppelganger looks, her “come-hither” demeanor and dark art of seduction (besides, she can spin around in circles better than anyone).

Poor Siegfried. He’s fallen in love with Odette and lo and behold, he thinks he is proposing to her when he proposes to Odine. It is an honest case of mistaken identity perhaps but one suspects that since the viewer can detect the difference between the real and the fake (both Odette and Odine are usually played by the same ballerina but present different character traits in the different roles) Siegfried should be able to tell that something is amiss as well. He loves Odette and easily transfers that affection to the wily Odine who has learned to mimic enough of Odette’s movements to pass herself off as the real deal. Siegried is the victim of a few parts transference and a few parts hot-bloodedness.

In the end, Odette and Siegfried throw themselves off a cliff in order to be together (it is the Romantic movement and it is important to have characters suffer on their way to bliss I suppose). The Romantic features of Swan Lake are numerous. The plot draws on an ancient mythological tale. The characters demonstrate both a passion for purity and exquisite love as well as cruelty, envy, and sinister intent. And the ending seems to suggest that true Romantics will only get to experience the great love that they almost attain only after they jump off a cliff and ascend to some other world beyond this one.

Needless to say, I am an amateur at this sort of thing and hope to be forgiven for trying to understand something before I had the proper education to do so.

Question for Comment: In the modern film, Black Swan, Natalie Portman’s character gets the role of the lead dancer in Swan Lake and has to play both the good girl Odette and the bad girl Odine. In the course of the movie, in order to succeed in the role, she has to let Odine out (thus the scenes where she kills some of her competitors for the role) while putting “Odine” in her place (stabbing her) after her part has been played and she must play the winsome Odette again.

“Everything Beth does comes from within, says the malevolent Thomas Leroy in Black Swan.

“From some dark impulse. I guess that's what makes her so thrilling to watch. So dangerous. Even perfect at times, but also so damn destructive.”

Do you ever have to transition back and forth from different selves to succeed at what you have set out to accomplish in life? 

"May we meet again, happy thieves in Paradise"

Writing a script for a two hour movie in which the main characters are all Cistercian monks could not have been easy. Cictercian monks (or Trappists) as these monks are known to be specifically. try to speak as little as possible to leave room for a prayerful and contemplative life. It makes for a very quiet movie.

The monks at the center of this movie (set in Algeria but filmed in Morocco) have come to provide a Christian presence in an ever radicalizing political situation that pits the Algerian army against Jama Islamiya, a sect of radical Islam. Most the film simply documents the monastic life – (Cistercian monks are famous from the founding of the order for their intention to support themselves by means of agricultural pursuits). Throughout the film, they are faced, as a group and as individuals with the precariousness of the position in which they hope to survive, hoping to bear witness to the love and faith of their calling to Christians, Muslims, fundamentalists and the villagers who are being terrorized by them. In the middle, they find themselves threatened by both sides though loved by the people.  

The movie’s power comes from several scenes, one in particular where the monks share a communion together. Finally resolved to the likelihood of death, but determined to remain in place where think themselves called, they listen to the Swan Lake Overture by Tchaikovsky (a great use of Romantic music). As we will soon see, this is their last supper and the director has, I think, in some ways tried to recreate on their faces the emotions of Jesus and his disciples as they wrestled with similar questions of life, death, loyalty, faith, and comradeship.

Based on a true story, the film leaves us with the words of Christian – the monastery’s spiritual leader:

“Should it ever befall me, and it could happen today, to be a victim of the terrorism swallowing up all foreigners here, I would like my community, my church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to his country. That the Unique Master of all life was no stranger to this brutal departure. And that my death is the same as so many other violent ones, consigned to the apathy of oblivion. I've lived enough to know, I am complicit in the evil that, alas, prevails over the world and the evil that will smite me blindly. I could never desire such a death. I could never feel gladdened that these people I love be accused randomly of my murder. I know the contempt felt for the people here, indiscriminately. And I know how Islam is distorted by a certain Islamism. This country, and Islam, for me are something different. They're a body and a soul. My death, of course, will quickly vindicate those who call me naïve or idealistic, but they must know that I will be freed of a burning curiosity and, God willing, will immerse my gaze in the Father's and contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them. This thank you which encompasses my entire life includes you, of course, friends of yesterday and today, and you too, friend of last minute, who knew not what you were doing. Yes, to you as well I address this thank you and this farewell which you envisaged. May we meet again, happy thieves in Paradise, if it pleases God the Father of us both. Amen. Insha'Allah.”

This “last will and testament” suggests that the faith of these men was inclusive, and elastic enough that it could envision a paradise where terrorists and their victims, being in many cases the offspring of colonizers, can finally see beyond the tinsel of faith and doctrine.

Father Christian calls those who he suspects are soon to kill him “friends of the last minute.” He refuses to hate them or fear them. We are left to ask the question. Were these men examples of the sort of naïveté’ that earned them their martyrdom? Or wiser than the rest of us?

It would be a mistake to think that the movie has easy answers. Viewers are given to understand that Islamic fundamentalism is not Islam and that even Islamic fundamentalists come in different forms. “This is my country. Beside being tired. I am tired of not seeing it grow up” says an Algerian official in the movie, despondent over the forces he sees overtaking his people. Ultimately, we are inclined to see these fundamentalists as a product more of ignorance than of their religion.

Question for Comment: Have you ever felt the pressure to leave a difficult commitment?

"To free the hollow heart from paining—"

 

The Portable Romantic Poets

The last few days, I have been reading (or trying to read) Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley). I confess, it is a subject that I will need some help to better understand and so I have ordered a course from the Teaching Company on it. But I did come across a poem by Coleridge that I found interesting and wanted to explore.

 It is about two friends who part and comes from the poem Critabel

Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.

And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother:
They parted— ne'er to meet again!

But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between.
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

Coleridge, Cristobel

Commentators suggest that this poem was first written to express Coleridge’s sense of grief over the loss of his friend (his heart’s best brother) William Wordsworth. Roland and Sir Leoline are two knights, once friends, who are now estranged from one another but not without a sense of retained connection.

The poem leaves the reader with a tension between separation and attachment. It asserts that there is permanence to both.

Naturally, poetry of the Romantic era gravitated towards anything that evoked strong emotions and I suppose there are few subjects as emotionally wrenching as a broken friendship or lost connection. Coleridge’s opium addiction may well have been the cause of what happened between he and Wordsworth.

One comes across this same dilemma of connection and separation co-existing in almost all of Thomas Hardy’s work I have noticed. He loves to put his characters in these emotional nutcrackers where they are attached and torn apart. In the last chapter of Hardy’s The Return of the Native that I finished just the other day, Clym Yeobright experiences Coleridge’s dilemma after the “dreary sea” separates him from the drowned Eustacia.

“Every pulse of loverlike feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia's lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for another fire of that sort, as may happen with more boyish loves. Even supposing him capable of loving again, that love would be a plant of slow and laboured growth, and in the end only small and sickly, like an autumn-hatched bird.

. . . His passion for Eustacia had been a sort of conserve of his whole life, and he had nothing more of that supreme quality left to bestow.

. . . Had only Yeobright's own future been involved he would have proposed to Thomasin with a ready heart. He had nothing to lose by carrying out a dead mother's hope. But he dreaded to contemplate Thomasin wedded to the mere corpse of a lover that he now felt himself to be. He had but three activities alive in him. One was his almost daily walk to the little graveyard wherein his mother lay, another, his just as frequent visits by night to the more distant enclosure which numbered his Eustacia among its dead; the third was self-preparation for a vocation which alone seemed likely to satisfy his cravings--that of an itinerant preacher of the eleventh commandment. It was difficult to believe that Thomasin would be cheered by a husband with such tendencies as these.”

Fortunately for both Yeobright and Thomasin, she has another suitor that suits her well and Clym Yeobright turns to his career as a teacher/preacher to free his “hollow heart from paining”.

“On the Sunday after this wedding an unusual sight was to be seen on Rainbarrow. From a distance there simply appeared to be a motionless figure standing on the top of the tumulus, just as Eustacia had stood on that lonely summit some two years and a half before. But now it was fine warm weather, with only a summer breeze blowing, and early afternoon instead of dull twilight. Those who ascended to the immediate neighbourhood of the Barrow perceived that the erect form in the centre, piercing the sky, was not really alone. Round him upon the slopes of the Barrow a number of heathmen and women were reclining or sitting at their ease. They listened to the words of the man in their midst, who was preaching, while they abstractedly pulled heather, stripped ferns, or tossed pebbles down the slope. This was the first of a series of moral lectures or Sermons on the Mount, which were to be delivered from the same place every Sunday afternoon as long as the fine weather lasted.

The commanding elevation of Rainbarrow had been chosen for two reasons: first, that it occupied a central position among the remote cottages around; secondly, that the preacher thereon could be seen from all adjacent points as soon as he arrived at his post, the view of him being thus a convenient signal to those stragglers who wished to draw near. The speaker was bareheaded, and the breeze at each waft gently lifted and lowered his hair, somewhat too thin for a man of his years, these still numbering less than thirty-three. He wore a shade over his eyes, and his face was pensive and lined; but, though these bodily features were marked with decay there was no defect in the tones of his voice, which were rich, musical, and stirring. He stated that his discourses to people were to be sometimes secular, and sometimes religious, but never dogmatic; and that his texts would be taken from all kinds of books. . . .

Yeobright had, in fact, found his vocation in the career of an itinerant open-air preacher and lecturer on morally unimpeachable subjects; and from this day he laboured incessantly in that office, speaking not only in simple language on Rainbarrow and in the hamlets round, but in a more cultivated strain elsewhere--from the steps and porticoes of town halls, from market-crosses, from conduits, on esplanades and on wharves, from the parapets of bridges, in barns and outhouses, and all other such places in the neighbouring Wessex towns and villages. He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men. Some believed him, and some believed not; some said that his words were commonplace, others complained of his want of theological doctrine; while others again remarked that it was well enough for a man to take to preaching who could not see to do anything else. But everywhere he was kindly received, for the story of his life had become generally known.”

In the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the later died earlier than his estranged friend, and Wordsworth seems to have moved on while Coleridge, like Clym Yeobright really never does.

Question for Comment: Why, in your opinion, do some people seem to be able to move on after loss and others get stuck?

 

 

"In other words, you get Romanticism."

Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Ferber

“Romanticism celebrated genius and unique individuality,” says Michael Ferber, “so it is bound to be various and quirky.”

“In a family of ten there can be five or six distinctive bodily or facial features that recur among them but it may happen that two or even three members have no such features in common.  They might each have two or three of the family traits, but not the same two or three. . The other members may each have four or five of them, so there are many overlaps. , and when you have had a look at say, five of the family members you may be likely to pick out the other five from a crowd. A definition based on this on this idea would lead to a list of distinctive traits , with some ranking as to importance and generality, but no one trait, maybe not even two or three would be definitive.”

The book is short but rather comprehensive in its references. It provides an imitable definition and outlind with ample references to Romanticism’s various expressions. “Romanticism was a European cultural movement, or set of kindred movements,” says Ferber in trying to lay out a definition:

“which found in a symbolic and internalized romance plot a vehicle for exploring one’s self and its relationship to others and to nature, which privileged the imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than reason, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural world, which ‘detranscendentalized’ religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul and replaced theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which honored poetry and all the arts as the highest human creations, and which rebelled against the established canons of neoclassical aesthetics and against both aristocratic and bourgeois social and political norms in favor of values more individual, inward, and emotional.”

The author notes that Romanticism can refer to a set of ideas and attitudes OR to a period of time. This book forcuses on the former. Chapter one focuses on the definition of Romanticism. Chapter Two presents an era Ferber calls “Sensibility” that serves as a buffer between neo-classicism and full blown Romanticism. Chapter Three addresses romantic poetry (Ferber believes that the poets are at the heart of Romantic Spirit). Chapter Four looks at the Romantic conceptions of religion, philosophy, and science. Chapter Five is about the “Social Vision of Romanticism” and chapter six highlights Romanticism in the Arts.

In speaking of the poets, the author emphasizes how Romanticism celebrates the genius, so ahead of his time that no one understands him. He suffers alienation and neglect precisely because he sees things others don’t; Feels things more powerfully than others; Values things as they ought to be valued. “Most romantics believed that imagination was the supreme human faculty,” writes Ferber,

“superior to reason or understanding and when it was fully exercised humans achieved a godlike vision and creative power.”

Interestingly, he points out that Romanticism may well have simply been the natural response of people who are having the mysticism of life destroyed by rationalism and skepticism. He refers to Romanticism as “spilt religion” – suggesting that when the classicists of the enlightenment attacked religion, the religious impulse and instinct had to come out another way and that Romanticism, with its awe in the face of nature, supplied that instinctual need. “You don’t believe in a god so you begin to believe that man is a God.” Writes T.E. Hulme in Speculations (1823)

“You don’t believe in heaven so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth.  In other words, you get Romanticism.”

“I am certain of nothing but the Holyness of the hearts affections” says Keats in a later from 1817, “and the truth of the imagination”

“It is still a commonplace about the Romantic poet or artist that he dies young, preferably of tuberculosis, or suicide, or a duel, or starvation in a garret, or in exile. . . . If neglected genius’ is a larger category than ‘poets dying young’, larger still, alas, is suffering poets, neglected or not, and in poem after poem, play after play Romantics summoned up their spirits to cheer themselves or their contemporaries.”

Thus many Romantic Minds would gather and associate in brotherhoods, regarding themselves as disciplines of a minority-purity in a world that did not understand them. The feeling of isolation and the need to form attachments with the persecuted few who understood them is well captured in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1867)

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Romantics responded to reason’s attack on superstition and religion in a number of ways. Some responded by offering a more emotional or sentimental version of rationalistic religions. Others offered the religion of nature or art – asserting that the “sublime” could be found in creation – both divine and human. Other romantics appealed to ancient paganisms, or to modern nationalisms as surrogates for religious devotion. Some even dabbled in pantheism – offering the possibility that nature might itself be God and might be perfectly worthy of worship. Some Romantics saw the ideal of a great love as all that the heart really needed and set off in search of it. In then end, Romantics sought multiple avenues for pursuing lives worth living. Either by seeing more in what was around them or by searching in the exotic beyond them.

Question for Comment: By any definition above, are you a Romantic?

"The impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still"

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

In Homer’s The Odyssey, we see a man far from home struggling to get back to it. The great question is “will the fates, gods, and nature let him?” In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native we find people who have those homes struggling to keep them and the great question is, “will the fates, gods, and nature let them?” Generally, the answer Hardy gives is, “No”. In describing the capriciousness of Eustacia Vye, Hardy tips his cards to us.

“Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.”

But Hardy is not a real believer in a universe devoid of sentience. I am closing in on Mr. Thomas Hardy. I have his number. Through many of these novels I have almost been seduced by his infernal pessimism but by the end of Return of the Native it has become clear to me that Hardy’s presentation of fate as a diabolical and thought-blank force is not as bleak and blind as it seems on the surface.

In the introduction to the novel presented by Alexander Theroux, we are given to understand that Hardy lost his faith in the 1860’s and “trusted in scientific materialism”. “He was one of the original acclaimers of the origin of species” he notes, and “in 1882, attended Darwin’s funeral.” Hardy’s “Nature is non-sentient,” insists Theroux

“and with the wild heath as a sort of objective correlative of nature itself, with all its lunar and mysterious evocation, Hardy is committed to the deep expression of its ironic chaos, and strange apathy, even hostility towards man.”

But I think I disagree. Hardy’s “catastrophic coincidences” happen too regularly and specifically to be regarded as evidence of a random universe, handing out tragedy and windfalls indiscriminately. Look below the surface and you will find a universe that punishes and rewards. That favors and disfavors; that has its Cains and Abels. Its Jacobs and Esaus.

Hardy has not rejected Christianity for nothing. His is a somewhat pagan doctrine of retribution that insists that nature itself will not be scorned. Deny nature or natural instincts in the interest of social or religious convention and just watch what horrendous things the fates will wreck your life with. Those willing to abandon human convention can be “saved” from disaster but those who are not will suffer. In Hardy’s Eden, the sword bearing angels ban you from the garden of bliss for not being pagan enough. In Return of the Native Clym Yeobright, Eustacia Vye, Thomasin Yeobright, and Damon Wildeve are driven from the garden for not being enough like the ancient Druids who used to live on the heath in which they live.

In Return of the Native, the only time a sense of brooding stormcloud disappears from the heath is when the ancient maypole is set up and the young people surrender themselves to its power.

“A whole village-full of sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none other than themselves.”

“The dance had come like an irresistible attack upon whatever sense of social order there was in their minds, to drive them back into old paths which were now doubly irregular.”

Eustacia highlights the insufficiency of “living by the book” when she describes the self-effacing nature of Clym’s inclination to live an “Amish life.” “He's an enthusiast about ideas, and careless about outward things,” she says of Clym, “He often reminds me of the Apostle Paul." "I am glad to hear that he's so grand in character as that" her grandfather responds, to which Eustacia demures,

"Yes; but the worst of it is that though Paul was excellent as a man in the Bible he would hardly have done in real life."

For Hardy, the “progress” of civilization and of Victorian morality is not progress at all. Every person who falls under the sway of an artifical social code based on anything but nature is a step away from Eden. “The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived,” he says,

“when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.”

Hardy notes that the wisdom of ancient paganism only exists in struggling enclaves of culture and place. “England lingered on here [in Egdon Heath] with exceptional vitality, he writes,

“and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still--in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”

If left alone, people living in such places would know enough to select their partners with the wisdom of their natural inclinations and intuitions. Every sufferer in Return of the Native can pretty much take it to the bank that their sufferings were hatched by their concern for some sort of social convention – by an inability to read their own natures in the face of external pressure, usually a pressure of a Puritanical nature. Eustacia is one of those characters who dares to let herself desire something beyond what her society offers at first but she cannot escape entirely.

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”

Her loneliness deepened her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices, and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

Fidelity in love for fidelity's sake had less attraction for her than for most women; fidelity because of love's grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience--she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces, and concluded that love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.

She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the unaffectedly devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, "O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness; send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die. . . .

Her high gods were William the Conqueror, Strafford, and Napoleon Buonaparte, as they had appeared in the Lady's History used at the establishment in which she was educated. Had she been a mother she would have christened her boys such names as Saul or Sisera in preference to Jacob or David, neither of whom she admired. At school she had used to side with the Philistines in several battles, and had wondered if Pontius Pilate were as handsome as he was frank and fair."

Hardy does not judge her harshly for this lack of reverence for established saintly forms. But only for paying too much heed to the foolish notion that such a love had to be found within her own class and social status. “In heaven,” Hardy asserts, people like Eustacia Vye “will probably sit between the Heloises and the Cleopatras” (both women would have been defined as sinners in Victorian society).

If we look further, we see that all of Thomasin’s suffering will be the consequence of her class-conscious deferential rejection of Diggory Venn. “Another reason is my aunt.” She explains to him in rejecting his proposal,

“She would not, I know, agree to it, even if I wished to have you. She likes you very well, but she will want me to look a little higher than a small dairy-farmer, and marry a professional man.”

Unable to see their own best interest in the face of convention, everyone picks wrong in this tale.

Note Eustacia’s rejection of Wildeve, by far the better match for her mercurial nature than the aesthetic Clym Yeobright.

“He [Wildeve] loved her best, she thought; and yet--dared she to murmur such treacherous criticism ever so softly?--what was the man worth whom a woman inferior to herself did not value? The sentiment which lurks more or less in all animate nature--that of not desiring the undesired of others--was lively as a passion in the supersubtle, epicurean heart of Eustacia. Her social superiority over him, which hitherto had scarcely ever impressed her, became unpleasantly insistent, and for the first time she felt that she had stooped in loving him.”

This is not a character that Hardy will have his hand of Providence treat kindly. She will blame blind fate for her woes in time but Hardy would have us know that what happens to her is her own doing. That is the irony of Hardy. Characters sense that there is no sentience behind their travails but it is there if they will only look beyond the story they play in.  

“Yet, instead of blaming herself for the issue she laid the fault upon the shoulders of some indistinct, colossal Prince of the World, who had framed her situation and ruled her lot.”

You will see Clym Yeobright doing his own analysis of the catastrophe of his life.

“He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to say that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without shame. But that he and his had been sarcastically and pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls he did not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the sternest of men. Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.”

Hardy’s characters conclude that there is no reasonable cause for their misfortunes but that is because they do not see how they offend. They diss nature and then expect nature to arrange things in such a way as to reward them for it. “Good luck with that,” says Hardy. “Get used to being disappointed.”

Question for Comment: “My Dear Eustacia,” Clym writes to his estranged wife, “--I must obey my heart without consulting my reason too closely. Will you come back to me? Do so, and the past shall never be mentioned.” Is this sentiment one which you think is likely to lead to good results?

“Sometimes things happen in life that turn you down a different path.”

“Sometimes things happen in life that turn you down a different path.”

Who changed your life? Who tried? Who’s lives have been changed because of you? Captain Abu Raed is a movie that answers these question in a Middle Eastern context. Shot in the cities of Amman Jordan and Salt, Jordan, it was a movie of particularly special connections for me.

Abu Raed is a janitor in the Amman airport who has lost both his only son and his wife. HE is a man who thinks perhaps that his life’s purpose may have been served and that his days of labor have no meaning. He picks up garbage, scrubs floors, and returns to his lonely flat in a poor section of the city. Until one day he finds a pilot’s hat in a trash can and wears it home. Local children begin to believe that he is a pilot and he begins to tell them stories of adventures and far away places. We begin to see in him a man who only has something illusory to offer at first, but in fits and starts, we also find him beginning to care about them and to intervene, haltingly at first, in improving their lives.

Captain Abu Raed is an honest movie in many respects because it portrays a world where one old man can do some things but not everything. Where some efforts at redemption fail and some succeed; where some attempts to help result in failure and even sacrifice and where some attempts to help only make an urchin’s life worse. Abu Raed’s deception is inspiring to the kids at first but he profoundly disillusions them when they discover his real identity. When Abu Raed attempts to buy one young boy’s crackers so that he can attend school, the boy is given even more to sell the next day. In time we discover that every attempt on his part to improve the lot of the child is simply making is lot in life harder.

In many ways, the music and lighting at the end of the film gives us the sense that Abu Raed is a saint … he ascends the stairs to his final confrontation with the abusive father of one of his young charges, knowing that it is likely to be his last act on earth. “Sometimes things happen in life that turn you down a different path.” I think the creators of this film would like this portrayal of Captain Abu Raed to be one of those things that happen.

Beautiful movie, highly recommended.

Question for Comment: What is a moment in your life that turned your life in a different direction?

Romanticism: "Genius immitates nobody"

European Romanticism: A Brief History With Documents by Warren Breckman provides me another opportunity to survey the difficulties of the road I have chosen to travel in creating and teaching a course on Romanticism. Again, I am reminded that it is the sort of subject that expands ever further the more it is explored. Breckman himself notes the “border crossing nature of Romantic thought” in his preface as he struggles to find a means to draw categories. I feel like Lewis and Clarke tracing one thin line of river into an expanse that is somewhat inexhaustible. Nevertheless, I feel closer to the goal for having read this book. Something like one in three of the articles I can imagine assigning in a course and a few of them I could not regard as essential.

The introduction of the book would be well worth an assignment as it approaches the subject with a certain amount of subtlety. Romantics, says Breckman, were not rejecting antiquity so much as neo-classicism. They were not denying the validity of the classical perspective. They were merely rejecting the notion that it could be used as a universal measure. The Romantic Era is often thought to have been a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, and it was, but it was more a matter of reweighting of values than a replacement of them. Romanticism never asked that reason be discarded. Only that it be put in its place. Genius should create its own rules and use them to pursue its own goals. “It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none,” Friedrich von Schlegel wrote, “It will simply have to decide to combine the two.’ The Romantics simply stressed the essentiality of the inward and introspective intuition before the objective observation of the external. “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him,” writes the German artist, Casper David Frederick,

“. . . but also what he sees in himself. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. . . . The pure, frank sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of art. A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling. All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it.”

One can see this celebration of human diversity as opposed to the constraints of rule-based systems in the writings of Chateaubriand (the Genius of Christianity - 1802) for example. “Everything ought to be in its propoer place,” he writes,

“The Greeks would not have been better pleased with an Egyptian temple at Athens than the Egyptians with a Greek temple at Memphis. These two monuments by changing places would have lost their principle beauty.”

“. . . The Gothic style, notwithstanding its barbarous proportions, possesses a beauty peculiar to itself. The forests were the first temples of the Divinity, and in  them men acquired the first idea of architecture. This art  must, therefore, have varied according to climates. The Greeks turned the elegant Corinthian column, with its capital of foliage,  after the model of the palm-tree. The enormous pillars of the  ancient Egyptian style represent the massive sycamore, the  oriental fig, the banana, and most of the gigantic trees of Africa and Asia.

The forests of Gaul were, in their turn, introduced into the temples of our ancestors, and those celebrated woods of oaks thus maintained their sacred character. Those ceilings sculptured into foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the secret passages, the low doorways, in a word, every thing in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood; every thing excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity.”

http://www.archive.org/stream/geniuschristiani00chatuoft/geniuschristiani00chatuoft_djvu.txt

“When we ground our judgment of modern painters merely on their resemblance to the ancients, we must necessarily be unjust towards them, “writes August Wilhem Schlegel in his “Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature” (1815).

“Those very ages, nations, and classes, that were least in want of a poetry of their own, were the most assiduous in their imitation of the ancients. Hence the dull scholastic exercises which could at most excite a cold admiration. But, in the fine arts, mere imitation is always fruitless ; what we borrow from others must be again as it were born in us, to produce a poetical effect. Of what avail is all foreign imitation? Art cannot exist without nature, and man can give nothing to his fellow men but himself.

The genuine followers of the ancients, those who attempted to rival them, who from a similarity of disposition and cultivation proceeded in their track, and acted in their spirit, were at all times as few as their mechanical spiritless imitators were numerous. The great body of critics, seduced by external appearance, have been always but too indulgent even to these imitators. They held them up as correct modern classics, while those animated poets, who had become the favourites of their respective nations, and to whose sublimity it was impossible to be altogether blind, were at most but tolerated by them as rude and wild natural geniuses. . . .  Genius is the almost unconscious choice of the highest degree of excellence, and consequently it is taste in its greatest perfection.”

It is not hard to see where Ralph Waldo Emerson may have gotten his ideas for the essay Self-Reliance (there is a certain irony to that).

One of my favorite pieces in the book is Standhal’s The Salon of 1824 in which he castigates art critics for fawning over neo-classical paintings that Stendhal regards as mere imitations and not art at all. “My aim is to make each spectator question his own heart, articulate his own manner of feeling,” he says,

“and thus form a personal judgment and a vision base don his own character, tastes, and dominating passions – providing, that is, he has emotions, because unfortunately they are essential for the appreciation of art.”

“Genius imitates nobody,” he writes, “least of all the academicians” insisting that a common prisoner could be taught to do what most of the neoclassicist painters were doing in their painting. He basically calls them trained monkeys and laments the absence of soul in any of their work. (Compare the Parthenon frieze for example with the Sabine Women by Jacques Louis David and you will see what he is driving at). Everything in the painting seems posed and passionless. People are posed for geometrical effect not passion.  Victor Hugo expresses the sentiment again in his Preface to Cromwell (1827)

“But still the same refrain is repeated, and will be, no doubt, for a long while to come: "Follow the rules! Copy the models! It was the rules that shaped the models. . . . And whom me are we to copy, I pray to know? The ancients? We have just shown that their stage has nothing in common with ours. . . . Whom shall we copy, then? The moderns? What! copy copies! God forbid! . . . Let us then speak boldly. The time for it has come, and it would be strange if, in this age, liberty, like the light, should penetrate everywhere except to the one place where freedom is most natural--the domain of thought. Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic systems. Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the façade of art. There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, there are no other rules than the general laws of nature, which soar above the whole field of art, and the special rules which result from the conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition. The former are of the essence, eternal, and do not change; the latter are variable, external, and are used but once. . . . The poet--let us insist on this point--should take counsel therefore only of nature, truth, and inspiration which is itself both truth and nature.

If genuine talent could abdicate its own nature in this matter, and thus lay aside its original personality, to transform itself into another, it would lose everything by playing this rôle of its own double. It is as if a god should turn valet. We must draw our inspiration from the original sources. It is the same sap, distributed through the soil, that produces all the trees of the forest, so different in bearing power, in fruit, in foliage. It is the same nature that fertilizes and nourishes the most diverse geniuses. The poet is a tree that may be blown about by all winds and watered by every fall of dew; and bears his works as his fruit, as the fablier of old bore his fables. Why attach one's self to a master, or graft one's self upon a model? It were better to be a bramble or a thistle, fed by the same earth as the cedar and the palm, than the fungus or the lichen of those noble trees. The bramble lives, the fungus vegetates. Moreover, however great the cedar and the palm may be, it is not with the sap one sucks from them that one can become great one's self. A giant's parasite will be at best a dwarf. The oak, colossus that it is, can produce and sustain nothing more than the mistletoe.

Let there be no misunderstanding: if some of our poets have succeeded in being great, even when copying, it is because, while forming themselves on the antique model, they have often listened to the voice of nature and to their own genius--it is because they have been themselves in some one respect. Their branches became entangled in those of the near-by tree, but their roots were buried deep in the soil of art. They were the ivy, not the mistletoe. Then came imitators of the second rank, who, having neither roots in the earth, nor genius in their souls, had to confine themselves to imitation. As Charles Nodier says: "After the school of Athens, the school of Alexandria." Then there was a deluge of mediocrity; then there came a swarm of those treatises on poetry, so annoying to true talent, so convenient for mediocrity. We were told that everything was done, and God was forbidden to create more Molières or Corneilles. Memory was put in place of imagination. Imagination itself was subjected to hard-and-fast rules, and aphorisms were made about it: "to imagine," says La Harpe, with his naïve assurance, "is in substance to remember, that is all."

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:CromwellHugo.djvu/43

 As I said in my introduction, some of these sources will be indispensible to my course on the Romantic Mind . . . if I can ever get to a place where I feel like I know enough to teach it. 

 Question for Comment: How do you follow the rules in your line of work? How do you create your own? What approach works best for you?