Ruskin, Lectures on Art, Lectures 2-4 - 11/11

[Aloha]

I had that same problem, Proustitute. If you copy the GR coding, then put the link within it, it should work. It won't take the typed coding anymore.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

I don't know if these are the links you intended, I got them from Wiki, or elsewhere.

Dürer’s

Giotto’s Justice

Raphael

The Light of the World

[Aloha]

Oh, good. I was in the middle of posting Elizabeth's link but saw you had taken care of it when I refreshed.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Beyond the links and to your post in guiding my thoughts of Ruskin: It really helps to have your perspective. I just copied my highlights and I seem to have ignored all the thought process above. I went to such things as:

The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life.

and

... the highest thing that art can do is to set before you the true image of the presence of a noble human being. It has never done more than this, and it ought not to do less.

[Andrew]

Elizabeth, I marked the same passage (section 103) when I read the lectures. It seemed to sum up what Proust was trying to do throughout "Remembrance." His characters are not 100% moral, but the best of them, if "Swann's Way" (the only part I have read thus far) is any indication, have a great nobility in their motivations and consciousness. After all, that is what sets humans apart, at least in our own eyes...we have the ability to perceive ourself, others, and the relation thereof, and recognize the richness of our interior lives. "Remembrance," in attempting to depict a consciousness in all of its power, is Proust using words to try to achieve the Ruskin ideal.
The entire Lecture IV is fascinating because Ruskin extrapolates this idea into wanting to give a clear, detailed picture of anything and everything an artist chooses to depict. What interests me, in light of the comments by our Humble Host, is that Ruskin here, as opposed to in Lecture II, seems to be stressing a very OBJECTIVE attitude, a need to record for posterity and accuracy to fully understand, while Proust is SUBJECTIVE in his writings, which might qualify his art under Ruskin's terms as "not useful" but potentially...and ironically in light of my own opening statement...MORAL, as a description of the best and worst of humanity which we could learn from...and thus ultimately becomes useful.
Since Ruskin stresses a link between morality and usefulness, this is no surprise, but how deep is that link in the end? And how can we think of art which doesn't seem to be moral or useful but is still beautiful? How do we defend such art to Ruskins?

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Ruskin, himself, seems to evolve. The Gutenberg edition is a revised edition of the original lectures.

At the end of Para. 53, he says:

Our duty is to believe in the existence of Divine, or any other, persons, only upon rational proofs of their existence; and not because we have seen pictures of them.

which is then footnoted:

I have expunged a sentence insisting farther on this point, having come to reverence more, as I grew older, every simple means of stimulating all religious belief and affection, It is the lower and realistic world which is fullest of false beliefs and vain loves.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

I liked that you started with just Lecture II - I have more that I underlined in III and IV.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Lecture III

Para. 68 All the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral; it becomes accurate if the speaker desires to be true; clear, if he speaks with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has sense of rhythm and order.

I finished this week's Ruskin before starting on Carter's shorter Proust in Love, which, if I leave the computer soon, I might finish tonight. Having already highlighted the above, Carter leads me to believe that Proust took this quote and rode it throughout. I am still the Proust neophyte, but hope I am correct and that Proust may be even more special than I'd hoped.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Proustitute wrote: "Elizabeth, do you mean Carter brings this quote from Ruskin to bear on Proust? If time allows, I'd love to read the quote in full from Proust in Love which I've not read."

No, he does not. But what he represents is that so much of Proust's life (and knowledge of others) is reflected in In Search of Lost Time. It is my interpretation, then, that what Proust desires is to be true. And while I haven't cracked the cover of ISOLT, certainly the earnestness and a sense of rhythm can be anticipated. There are numerous quotes from ISOLT in Proust in Love, so I do have some basis for thinking this.

[Nick]

Whether a conscious decision or not, I think Proust ended up following the principles in Elizabeth's quote.

And to follow on from your thought about the truth of his project, Elizabeth: there is to my mind definitely a dedication to a truthful depiction of human nature in all it's guises and forms, good or bad, personal or social.

Nothing evades Proust's gaze, not even his self or his own actions. (So for me, The Captive remains one of the most dazzlingly insightful portrayals of human consciousness, its vacillations and justifications and fictions and mutability. Page on page of deep insight. Granted, it may be the thoughts of a skewed personality we are shown, but there is astonishing , sometimes exhausting richness in there. Proust really mines deep.)

For what purpose all this investigation, beyond the aesthetic pleasure we get from reading it? In Sesame and Lilies (The first book 'Sesame') Ruskin tells us our best education lies in our best books. Proust knew he was to write a book to be so judged.

Conrad liked to say that above all, his work tried to make you see. I think this is true of Proust too. He wants us to see, so that we might benefit from his wisdom. For me, that is a key to Proust. There is definitely nobility of spirit in the book, the Narrator's and, going one layer up, in Proust too.

(Sorry I digressed a little from Ruskin's lecture here!)

[Eugene]

I was stopped too by “degrees of darkness”. I like that it wasn't elaborated upon, coming at the end of a dissertation on modesty and before what Ruskin has to says on the two faiths; for me it permitted my imagination an entrance to Ruskin's thought, an opening, an invitation to an equality between writer and reader, rare in what little I've read of Ruskin's work.

"Melancholy," well yes, lovely...but what another reader might take from it too (the sentence being unelaborated upon is open in meaning) based upon his or her experience.

Accordingly, Ruskin's mother was evangelical (as were my grandparents); even though he'd disavowed 'the what' of Evangelicalism he seems to maintain 'the how' of it in his later style, in his wide ranging 'condemnations', but curiously or not, what we're reading is his thought and "all our thoughts are but degrees of darkness."

@Proustitute

What I found to be a very interesting quote isn’t really elaborated on, but I think it is meant to suggest that there is a certain kind of melancholy (or perhaps a melancholic perspective or aesthetic) that those who appreciate art share, some “degrees of darkness”:

But above all things, see that you be modest in your thoughts, for of this one thing we may be absolutely sure, that all our thoughts are but degrees of darkness.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Eugene wrote: "I was stopped too by “degrees of darkness”. I like that it wasn't elaborated upon, coming at the end of a dissertation on modesty and before what Ruskin has to says on the two faiths; for me it pe..."

I have started the next lectures and Ruskin seems to carry this theme forward with a discussion of light and shadow, the early Greeks and later. I hope we can discuss this theme more next week.

[Nick]

The Captive is by Mr. Proust, yes. Book 5. I know some people find it a bit dull but like I said for me it was breathtaking.

Stay safe and well, Proustitute.

[Nick]

I was exactly the same with Guermantes Way. Basically three(?) very long dinner parties with a smattering of incidental passages.


(view spoiler)[SPOILER:

The final passages with the Duchess' red shoes and revelation of Swann's illness were very memorable, and are rightly celebrated by critics, and that together with the beginning ("the twittering of the birds...") and passages about his Grandmother's really quite harrowing suffering are all I remember from this distance of that volume. Maybe some bits about Balbec too but only cause I leafed through it this summer reading snippets. ISOLT lends itself perfectly to this casual leafing through. Incidents that are trivial in the beginning turn out to be foundational later on. What a perfect construction it is!


(hide spoiler)]



I always seem to turn to those opening sentences of that volume to test if I like the translation. Traherne's seems nice and breezy, which is probably close to the original.

Glad to find you feel the same way about Captive/Fugitive, Proustitute! I was afraid I was in a minority of one with that :)

[Eugene]

Listening while driving to Effie...Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais by Suzanne Fagence Cooper. The year 1854 interested me when Effie sought an annulment from John Ruskin after 6 years of an unconsummated marriage; this is told in excerpts of letters & statements... I'd expected Ruskin to come off worse than he did...what a trying situation, then & now, for all parties.

[Kalliope]

Eugene wrote: "Listening while driving to Effie...Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais by Suzanne Fagence Cooper. The year 1854 interested me when Effie sought an annulment from John Ruskin after 6 y..."

I did not know about this book. I have read Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives Of The Pre Raphaelites, which is very entertaining... It deals with that episode amongst other things, and also with his infatuation with Rose la Touche.

In the 1887 Preface he mentions a dear friend's death in 1875. I think he is referring to the death of Rose.

[Eugene]

Proust too read Lectures on Art; from his preface to The Bible of Amiens,

"…there is a sort of idolatry which no one has defined better than Ruskin himself, in a passage from the Lectures on Art (II):

‘Such I conceive generally, though indeed with good arising out of it, for every great evil brings some good in its backward eddies–such I conceive to have been the deadly function of art in its ministry to what, whether in heathen or Christian lands, and whether in the pageantry of words, or colours, or fair forms, is truly, and in the deep sense, to be called idolatry–the serving with the best of our hearts and minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made for ourselves, while we disobey the present call of the Master, who is not dead, and who is not now fainting under His cross, but requiring us to take up ours.’"

Courtesy of http://proustreader.wordpress.com/201...

Reading elsewhere, I liked these sentences.

Thus I have tried to provide the reader with, so to speak, an improvised memory in which I have arranged recollections of other works of Ruskin—a kind of sounding board against which the words of The Bible of Amiens will be able to ring more deeply by awakening fraternal echoes. But these echoes will undoubtedly not correspond to the words of The Bible of Amiens, as they penetrate a memory which is itself composed of horizons generally hidden from our sight and whose various distances our life itself has measured day by day.

On Reading Ruskin, Marcel Proust, p. 6 of the Preface to The Bible of Amiens; tr. Autret et al

They remind me of what Searls said in his lecture, Kalliope.

[Marcelita]

Nick wrote: "The Captive is by Mr. Proust, yes. Book 5. I know some people find it a bit dull but like I said for me it was breathtaking.

Stay safe and well, Proustitute."

The Captive is my favorite...Fortuny, the syringa/lilacs, the music meditations, the Verdurins' drama, Venice, Lea, Morel, and all the spoilers....the deaths.
The Fugitive is too close...grief meditations...to be enjoyable right now.
Time Regained has "the red book" as the involuntary memory trigger, but I always sense the unedited-ness.
WBG is my second favorite, with the meditations on nature...light.

[Marcelita]

Eugene wrote: "Proust too read Lectures on Art; from his preface to The Bible of Amiens,

"…there is a sort of idolatry which no one has defined better than Ruskin himself, in a passage from the Lectures on Art (..."

Damion Searls at The Center for Fiction, discussing his new translation, "On Reading."
http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/...