4 posts tagged “essays”
Mooxyjoo was right about Nature being the one to check out. Yes sir. Love that prose, even lacking his version of faith. The Essays are awesome when they are about things I find awesome, like Circles. I am not quite as enamored of Heroism, and so lack of faith occasionally becomes a problem.
Maybe it was juvenile to find myself siding with (possibly apocryphal) Euripides and (historical construction of) Brutus rather than with Emerson? But dear Ralph Waldo, you would not want me to smother the instinctive counsel of my outleaping heart?It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword, after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,--"O virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade."* I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness.
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*I didn't remember this line from Euripides offhand and couldn't find a version of it anywhere - maybe from one of the lost plays, if there's anything at all to the story? These are some other versions of what Brutus said:
"O Virtue, thou art but an empty name!" - Helvetius, De l'esprit
"O Virtue! I sought thee as a substance, but I find thee an empty name!" -Godwin, Caleb Williams
"After taking breath for a little time, he cast his eyes up to heaven, that was all spangled with stars; he repeated a line from Euripides, containing a wish to the Gods, 'that guilt should not pass in this life without punishment.' To this he added another from the same poet: 'O virtue! thou empty name, I have worshipped thee as a real good, but thou art only the slave of fortune.'" -Oliver Goldsmith, The Roman History
The original source for all this seems to be the Roman History of Dio Cassius, composed in Greek circa 200 AD, whose book 47, chapter 49 reads (in one English version):
According to our translator Herbert Baldwin Forster, these lines appear in no extant play. But only one Herakles play by Euripides survives; there might have been more.Brutus, who had reached in flight a steep and lofty spot,
undertook to break through in some way to the camp. In this he was
unsuccessful, and on learning that some of his soldiers had made terms
with the victors he had no further hope, but despairing of safety and
disdaining capture he himself also took refuge in death. He uttered aloud
this sentence of Heracles:
"Unhappy Virtue, thou wert but a name, while I,
Deeming thy godhead real, followed thee on,
Who wert but Fortune's slave."
Then he called one of the bystanders to kill him.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (1873).
Here's a familiar quote in context:
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation - that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape - should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.
I'd always taken Pater's tagline as referring to the non-representational nature of music, but you can see that isn't exactly what he's saying - rather he means the inseparability of content ("matter") from form. In a way that might work out to the same thing, but if so it's with a very different emphasis; where we tend to think of non-representational art as abstract - chilly Mondrian rectangles and so on - for Pater the distinctiveness of music is the indispensability of the sensory component. Likewise it is the matter of poetry, not the form, that is addressed to the "pure intelligence" - for matter is linguistic and conceptual, while form exercises its power through the senses. It's a startling inversion of Kant's and Schiller's aesthetics, and makes a nice fit with a book whose conclusion Pater had to suppress in the second edition, "as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall."
We had a tasty Catalan wine the other night, which reminded me that this had been sitting on the shelf - and I can't imagine Orwell would have minded the circumstance, because he's such a humane writer, just as interested in the wine and cold and lice as he is passionate about the politics. He wants more than anything to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not:
Being hit in the throat with a bullet is, he notes, a highly interesting experience; and it is indeed, as he describes it, most interesting. The saddest part of the book is his political speculation about what kind of government Spain might expect if Franco was beaten back; that still seemed possible as he was writing, and what he feared most was infighting among the Left.Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993 (1963).
Title from a slave song: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! Two essays, the first a brief and moving letter to Baldwin's nephew, the second a longer autobiographical piece that turns into a meditation on how the problem of American race relations is essentially white America's problem with itself. Highlights include a visit to Elijah Muhammad and this:
White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad and that, God help us, is exactly the way that most white Americans sing them - sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been "down the line," as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing "I Feel So Good," a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She's coming home. It is the singer's incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing "Lonesome in My Bedroom," or insisting, "Ain't we, ain't we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don't today, we will tomorrow night." White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironci tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word "sensual" is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either.
