The Whole Five Feet

Volume 21

I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni

A few years after the first appearance of the Five Foot Shelf, Charles Eliot edited a second set of books, The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, in which he included all of the prose fiction -- Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Fielding, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Twain -- that was conspicuously left out of the first shelf. In his introduction to that set, Eliot notes:

In the original selection of The Harvard Classics, fiction was admitted only to a small extent, and none was admitted that was later than 1835. Indeed, Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, a historical novel published in 1826, was the only book included that would now be called a novel.  Don Quixote and Pilgrim�s Progress, two other pieces of prose fiction which found place in the collection, both belonging to the seventeenth century, have a character quite distinct from that of the nineteenth-century novel, romance, or story.

The first thing that struck me when I read this was that I can't think of anyone today who would claim that Don Quixote is not a novel. It is one of the lasting effects of the era of Modernist literary experimentation -- an era in whose midst Eliot was, in fact, writing -- that the novel has come to seem an almost uniquely elastic literary form. It is simply a work of prose fiction of a certain length. Except when it isn't prose (Pale Fire), or isn't fiction (In Cold Blood).  And this business about length is rather flexible, too, including The Great Gatsby at one end of the spectrum and In Search of Lost Time at the other. What is it, then, about Manzoni's book that made it, in Eliot's day at least, more recognizably a novel than was Don Quixote?  Well, what does I Promessi Sposi look like? The Betrothed (the good folks at Harvard must have run out of translation money before they got to the title) begins, after an extended scene-setting opening common to many nineteenth-century novels, with a local Milanese curate named Don Abbondio walking alone down a country road. He is accosted by a pair of bandits who threaten him and warn him not to perform the wedding, scheduled for that day, of two young peasants, Renzo and Lucia, because a local tyrant, Don Roderigo, has evil designs on Lucia. It's quickly clear that the curate Don Abbondio is a coward who will easily give in to this plea, and so Renzo and Lucia can not be married. More or less the entire book is there, in embryo, in that first chapter. Everything that is to come follows from this.

Of course, the same might be said about Don Quixote: in the first chapter, a man comes to believe that he is a knight errant, and everything follows from this. But there is a distinction here, for the situation in Don Quixote allows for a series of episodes, but doesn't necessarily call for resolution (when volume one ends, Don Quixote is in the same delusion state in which he begins). The situation in The Betrothed demands progression and, finally, resolution. From the moment we hear this set up, we know that the book will end with the lovers either married or dead. We turn the pages to find out which, and how. Under no circumstances will the book end with the two lovers still hoping to marry and Don Roderigo still frustrating these hopes. (Though of course we could picture a contemporary novel's ending ironically on just such a note.)

Another way of saying this is that where Don Quixote has a story, The Betrothed has a plot. The former is episodic and the latter is energeic, i.e., it begins with a situation that has within it potential narrative energy, and it ends when all of this energy is expended. This is the most obvious difference between the two books. And indeed, the majority of the novels that would later be collected for the separate fiction shelf seem to have in common a sense of causality, each scene emerging from what came before, until eventually a resolution is reached. In some cases -- say, Anna Karenin -- there are multiple plot lines, but each works on these principles. The scenes in Don Quixote, on the other hand, are interchangeable: the tilting of the windmills might easily be his last adventure instead of one of his first. When Don Quixote finally gives up his dreams of knight errantry, it's because he's old and tired. He has not progressed to this decision by way of his adventures in the field.

Some nineteenth century novels, of course, are every bit as episodic as Don Quixote. But this notion of progression points to a deeper distinction, because it requires that characters be changed by events. Virtually every major character in The Betrothed undergoes a major change at some point in the novel. Each time a good and pious character appears, we are given a brief backstory of the evil behaviour he repented before becoming good. When we meet a stern, selfish nun, we are told of the sad circumstances that made her so. The mutability of human character is a particular theme here, but the larger point is that the novel in its major nineteenth-century incarnation attempts psychological realism in ways that didn't much interest Cervantes. There is, too, physical realism. Don Quixote often seems like a cartoon character in his ability to survive scrape after scrape. Most of the way through The Betrothed, the plague sweeps through Milan, and the detailed descriptions of its effects, which last for several chapters, are absolutely wrenching.

Ultimately, these questions of genre are tough to answer, and perhaps not worth answering anyway. But Eliot's remarks raise another question. If indeed this was, by Eliot's own reckoning, the only novel that was included in the Classics, why should that be so? Here I must admit that The Betrothed was the only book in the Classics I'd never even heard of before coming to the set. As such, reading it was something of a revelation. For long stretches, Manzoni sustains the kind of ironic voice one expects from Jane Austen, all the while unfolding a historical adventure plot straight out of Stendhal. For its first five hundred pages, it is great fun, among the most purely entertaining books contained in the Classics so far. And then the plague arrives, and it becomes something much deeper and more wonderful than that. There are scenes here that would not be out of place in Children of Men or The Road. In the wake of mass death, the frustrated hopes of a betrothed couple become less urgent perhaps, but we see more clearly that the important point is not the plot, not the progression of events, but the way that people bear under them, the way they rise and fall in their efforts to meet them. Showing us what humans look like when they make such efforts seems to me the thing that the novel, for this brief time, did better than anything before or since has ever done.

--CRB, June 28, 2007

Volume 22

The Odyssey of Homer

Anyone who read Homer at some point in school will probably remember the oft-repeated "wine-dark sea" and "rosey-fingered dawn." Less famous is the epitaph so often attached to Odysseus throughout the poem -- man of many devices, as it is given in this translation; man of many turns, as it is elsewhere rendered. While some heroes are famous for strength or for bravery, Odysseus is known for his resourcefulness. Throughout his trials, he never hesitates to make use of what would generously be called guile or cunning.  That is to say, he's a bullshit artist.  This first become clear when he introduces himself to Polyphemus as Noman, so that, once he goes after him, Polyphemus will cry out, Noman is attacking me, and all the other Cyclops will leave him to be blinded.

Of course, we can forgive -- or even commend -- a little b.s. when it's necessary to escape the Cyclops or drive dozens of armed suitors from one's home. But the most striking example of Odysseus's guile comes in the poem's last book, once he has successfully made his way home, revealed himself, and defeated Penelope's suitors. At this point, he goes to find his father, Laertes, who is living out what remains of his life in mourning for his lost son. Odysseus finds his father alone, dirty and stooped with sorrow. Homer writes:

Then he communed with his heart and soul, whether he should fall on his father's neck and kiss him, and tell him all, how he had returned and come to his own country, or whether he should first question him and prove him in every word. And as he thought within himself, this seemed to him the better way, namely, first to prove his father and speak to him sharply.

Why does he feel the need to test the father he hasn't seen in twenty years? Stranger still is the method he chooses for his test. He approaches Laertes in the guise of a stranger and, after a brief conversation, says:

Tell me moreover truly, that I may surely know, if it be indeed to Ithaca that I am now come ... Once did I kindly entreat a man in mine own dear country, who came to our home, and never yet has any mortal been dearer of all the strangers that have drawn to my house from afar. He declared him to be by lineage from out of Ithaca, and said that his own father was Laertes son of Arceisius. So I led him to our halls and gave him good entertainment, with all loving-kindness, out of the plenty that was within.

At this point, Laertes begins to weep, and says,

Stranger ... plainly tell me all: how many years are passed since thou didst entertain him, thy guest ill-fated and my child, -- if ever such an one there was, -- hapless man, whom far from his friends and his country's soil, the fishes, it may be, have devoured in the deep sea, or on the shore he has fallen the prey of birds and beasts. His mother wept not over him nor clad him for burial, nor his father, we that begat him.

This would seem like as good a time as any to reveal himself, but Odysseus of many counsels continues: But for Odysseus, this is now the fifth year since he went thence and departed out of my country. Ill-fated was he.  It's only after Laertes begins to pour ash and dirt over his head that Odysseus relents and admits, Behold, I here, even I, my father, am the man of whom thou asked.

All in all, these seems less like a test of loyalty and more like an ancient episode of Punk'd. Leaving aside the cruelty of it, what is most striking is how purely gratuitous it is. Nabokov once remarked that literature began not on the day when the boy came running down the hill crying, Wolf, and the wolf came chasing after, but on the when he came running down the hill crying, Wolf, and there was no wolf behind him. I thought of this line when I read this exchange between Odysseus and Laertes. Odysseus is like a CIA-trained assassin in a bad movie, who can't stop killing once the war is over. He lies not to save himself, but for the sheer pleasure of the lie. At that moment, he becomes a story teller.

This seemed fitting to me, because the other thing that struck me as I read this week was how many of the other books in the Classics owe some sort of literary debt to Odysseus. To begin with there is The Aeneid. Then there are all the Greek tragedies that dramatize stories -- like Agamemnon's murder -- that originate with Homer. And without The Aeneid, there couldn't be the Divine Comedy. Without Aeschylus there couldn't be Shakespeare. And so on. And all this began not when Odysseus, trapped in the land of the Cyclops, gave his name as Noman.  It began once Odysseus was safely home, and he couldn't stop turning.

---CRB, July 11, 2007

Volume 23

Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Throughout the past six months, I have struggled to discover some logic behind the order of the Classics. For the most part, I've come to the opinion that there is none. They aren't grouped chronologically, or thematically, or by genre. But occasionally there is some tantalizing pairing that suggests a hidden pattern that might eventually make itself clear. The appearance of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast alongside The Odyssey is that kind of pairing.

The Odyssey may be the oldest work in the Classics.  Two Years before the Mast is among the most recent. Dana was a student at Harvard -- just a generation before Charles Eliot -- when weakened eyesight, brought on by a case of measles, forced him to leave school. In 1834, he signed up as a sailor on a merchant ship. (The term before the mast refers to common sailors, who bunk in the ship's forecastle, as opposed to the captain and his officers.) The odyssey that followed is the subject of Dana's book.

It's true that Dana's trip lasted only two years, as opposed to Odysseus's twenty. But it did suffer from unexpected delays. Throughout the journey, there were storms and lulls and icebergs. And then there were the hides. After sailing from Boston down and around Cape Horn, Dana's ship, the Pilgrim arrived at pre-Gold Rush California, then a sparsely populated Mexican territory. The ship came to California to trade for hides, which had to be tanned before making the passage back to Boston, so Dana finds himself six months on shore at this work. The descriptions of California are among the great pleasures of the book. To ensure a worthwhile profit, the ship continued up and down the west coast until it had collected 40,000 hides. Gradually, Dana comes to understand that this may take longer than expected -- that his eighteen months away from Boston may easily stretch to two years, to three, maybe more. By the time the Pilgrim returns to Boston, it will be too late for him to return to Harvard and make a professional life for himself; he will be a sailor. And this is when a brief trip threatens to turn into a lifetime on the sea.

In the event, Dana was able to get on to another ship that is returning in a more timely fashion. He returned to Harvard and eventually became a prominent maritime lawyer and advocate for sailors' rights. Twenty-four years later, he returned to California -- recently annexed to the U.S. He recounted this trip in a chapter appended to later editions of his book. Here is where Two Years before the Mast's juxtaposition with The Odyssey was most striking. For it seemed to me that the mechanics of sea travel had changed nearly as much in those twenty-four years as they had in the thousands of years prior. To be sure, by the time of the Pilgrim, the world had been more or less mapped; Dana's captain had navigational tools unknown to Homer. But in the end, Dana was among a crew of sailors in a wooden boat, dependent on the winds, working round-the-clock shifts to bring in and let out the sails. When he traveled again in 1859, he did so on the superb steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms.

The California to which Dana arrived on this lighted steamship was unrecognizable to him:

How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars, and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States.

Dana is stirred by a feeling that has become perhaps more common in the hundred and fifty years since he wrote, as the rate of change has accelerated dramatically. It is a feeling I have had myself as I these two seafaring books in the space of a few days. The past was real, Dana writes.  The present, all about me, was unreal.

--CRB, July 18, 2007

Volume 24

On Taste & On the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is the kind of writer I had in mind when I decided to read the Harvard Classics. That is, he's a writer I've never read before, a writer I've wanted to read, a writer I feel I ought to have read, and I writer I almost certainly would never have read without a project like this to spur me on. Having finished this volume, I can say that he's also the kind of writer who makes me glad I'm reading these all these books.

Burke is best known as a poltical thinker, but this collection of his work begins with an early treatise on aesthetics. I've always found aesthetics to be among the easiest branches of philosophy to mock. At its worst, it has the same tendency to obscurant pedantry as metaphysics or ontology, but it deals in something less fitting of such treatment. Interpreting the meaning of a work of art is one thing, but trying to explain beauty itself is like trying to explain what makes a joke funny. There is something bathetic about 1000 words on why we like to look at sunsets when compared with, say, a sunset.

Although a few of Burke's chapter titles -- Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables, Why Smoothness is Beautiful -- gave me a chuckle, his work -- especially the introductory On Taste -- is actually quite grounded, even useful. He operates on an aesthetic foundation consistent with his conservative political beliefs: It is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures. For if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary correspondence of life.  The key word here, I think, is standard. Burke doesn't pretend that all people have the same taste, only that there is a standard by which differing tastes can be judged. Sensibility and judgment, Burke writes, which are the qualities that compose what we commonly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people. From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong or a bad one.  He elaborates:

 

The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding, (in whatever the strength of that faculty may consist,) or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of proper and well-directed exercise, which alone can make it strong and ready. Besides that ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province ... Though a degree of sensibility is requisite to form a good judgment, yet a good judgment does not necessarily arise from a quick sensibility of pleasure; it frequently happens that a very poor judge, merely by force of a greater complexional sensibility, is more affected by a very poor piece, than the best judge by the most perfect; for as everything new, extraordinary, grand, or passionate, is well calculated to affect such a person, and that the faults do not affect him, his pleasure is more pure and unmixed; and as it is merely a pleasure of the imagination, it is much higher than any which is derived from a rectitude of the judgment .. In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things? I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.

Our own culture isn't all that comfortable with these sorts of standards. We are hesitant to speak of tastelessness or bad taste, let alone wrong taste. In judging art, affect is all. It's considered churlish at best, and probably elitist, to suggest that a passionate response to a movie or to the final installment of a children's novel lacks judgement. I don't think it would help matters much to add that such judgement might be gained through proper and well-directed exercise.

Reflections on the French Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord 

Of course, Burke is remembered not for his aesthetics but for his politics. He is sometimes remembered now -- and was thought of by some in his own time -- as anti-democratic reactionary. But this isn't the picture that emerges here. Burke was a member of parliament during the American Revolution, and he advocated strongly on the colonies' behalf. He was a reformer, but he also had great respect for order and tradition (In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction).  Reform, to Burke, meant something different than innovation or change. It meant applying local solutions to local problems within a system, rather than overthrowing the system itself. This belief motivated the harsh response to the French Revolution through which Burke more or less invented modern poltical conservatism. To read Reflections on the French Revolution now is in part to see just how little those who are currently running the show resemble Burke:

If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, by sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable. But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an undoubting confidence, are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator.

Burke wrote these words years before the Terror made the worst tendencies of the French Revolution painfully apparent. Once the dust had settled, Burke might not have fooled himself into thinking we had cured ourselves of the habit of violently overthrowing the status quo in the name of freedom and democracy, but he might have been surprised to find those most eager to continue the habit calling themselves conservatives.

--CRB, July 21, 2007

Volume 25

Autobiography & On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

The education of John Stuart Mill, as outlined in his Autobiography, would make a great Frank Capra -- or perhaps Ron Howard -- movie. Mill's father, John Mill, was a leading Utilitarian thinker in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mill pere seems to have had all of the moral authority and emotional coldness still associated with that school.  (Benthamites, they were still called then.) He treated the education of his son like an experiment. No summary of the process could quite do it justice, so I'll quote at length a typical passage from the early pages of the Autobiography:

I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed Vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through Aesop's Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read, under my father�s tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theaetetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it. But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.

This method continued until Mill was, perhaps literally, the best read thirteen-year-old in Britain, without having gone to any school but his father's study. Eventually, he took a job in his father's office at the East India Company. He also fell, like his father, under Bentham's influence. He even founded a group called the Utilitarian Club, which gave the movement its lasting name, and dedicated himself to liberal reform. All of this would be interesting enough in its own right, but the real drama comes with the inevitable crisis.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826 [i.e., when Mill was 20 years old]. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ... In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

In his desperation, he returns to the favorite books that his father has pressed on him, and finds nothing there. As for human companionship: If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was.  And the man who had been his closest companion in his life to that point?

My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies.

Here's where Capra and Howard come in, because the solution that Mill find is so simple and heartwarming as almost to defy belief. He discovers that there is more to life than diligent study. There is such a thing as feeling.  He reads Wordsworth.  He read Coleridge.  He listens to music.  He decides that a man's internal culture matters as much as his action in the world. Perhaps most strikingly, he continues on a path much like the one his father laid out for him, but does so with a sense of well being that his father could never teach him.

Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott by Thomas Carlyle

At the depth of his depression, Mill read Thomas Carlyle, and the experience played a major part in his return to good health. Carlyle, who wrote under the sway of German Romanticism, was the tempermental opposite of the elder Mill. Like him, Carlyle abandoned Christianity, but unlike Mill, he missed it, and he lamented living in an age of disbelief.  (In the Autobiography's funniest moment, Carlyle writes to tell J.S. Mill that he sees in him another mystic, forcing Mill to admit that he was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic.)

But Carlyle appealed to Mill because he diagnosed Mill's disease -- frigid over-intellectualizing -- as the disease of the age:

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician�s Aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong. ... We might pursue this question into innumerable other ramifications; and everywhere, under new shapes, find the same truth, which we here so imperfectly enunciate, disclosed; that throughout the whole world of man, in all manifestations and performances of his nature, outward and inward, personal and social, the Perfect, the Great is a mystery to itself, knows not itself; whatsoever does know itself is already little, and more or less imperfect. Or otherwise, we may say, Unconsciousness belongs to pure unmixed life; Consciousness to a diseased mixture and conflict of life and death.

Carlyle ranks among the high points for me of the Classics so far. Reading him reminded me, once again, how much of what we consider quintessentially post-modern (in this case, a crippling self-consciousness that overwhelms authentic vitality) was not only present but written about long before our time.

--CRB, July 25, 2007

Volume 27

English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay

There are many predictable delights to a year of navigating the great landmarks of literary history. But one unexpected pleasure has been the sense that so much of what we consider unprecedented about our own literary culture has actually been seen many times before. This feeling struck me in several different ways while reading this volume of English essays.

The short, personal essay, though it has roots in Seneca and Montaigne, came into its own as a literary form in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as practiced by the writers collected here. The form hits its stride in the early 1700s, in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who wrote gossipy pieces about the London of their day. Addison and Steele collaborated on the Tatler, which Steele founded, and later on the Spectator.  They created a collection of personae, which they called the Spectator Club, and many of their writings are openly fictionalised.  Here's the beginning of Steele's The Vision of Mirza:

When I was at Grand Cairo, I picked up several oriental manuscripts, which I have still by me. Among others I met with one entitled The Visions of Mirza, which I have read over with great pleasure. I intend to give it to the public when I have no other entertainment for them, and shall begin with the first vision, which I have translated word for word.

There follows a three page pastiche of an Arabian night, all of it ostensibly translated from this manuscript. When I read this work -- it's not an essay in the sense that we use the term now, but nor is it a story, exactly -- I thought immediately of a 20th century Orientalist Anglophile, one who specialized in this strange straddling of two forms. Borges' ficciones would not be at all out of place in the Spectator, a fact of which he was no doubt well aware. And yet Borges' odd mingling of fiction and non-fiction, story and essay, narrative and exposition is generally considered a sui generis post-modernist act. In light of these pages, Borges seems rather to be returning the essay to its original form. He's like a real-life version of his greatest creation, Pierre Menard, re-writing hundred-year-old works to which the passage of time has given new meaning.

But there's another way that these essays made me think of more recent writing. Addison and Steele aren't the only writers in this volume who started their own journals. There was Daniel Defoe's Review, Samuel Johnson's Rambler, Sydney Smith's Edinburgh Review (the radical outlet much discussed in Mill's Autobiography), and Leigh Hunt's Examiner. Which is to say that more than a third of the essayists included here published in journals that they had some hand in founding. These journals were often short-lived, and their content was often produced by just one or two contributers. You can probably see where I'm going here. Even names like the Rambler and the Tatler sound like blog names.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the reduction of book coverage in mainstream media. Many wrtiers have rejected out of hand the notion that literary blogs might fill the cultural vacuum that shrinking mainstream media space threatens to create. Blogs make poor substitutes for print reviews, the argument goes, mostly because they aren't edited, and because they lack the rigor and accountability provided by the imprimatur of the professional masthead. At present, this complaint happens to be generally true in practice -- there are a lot of sloppy blogs out there (including this one) and even the very best struggle to balance immediacy with quality control.

 

But there's no reason that any of this must remain true over time. If the decline of the print review sends more literate readers to the blogosphere; if these readers bring with them the expectations inculcated by the best print review sections; if these standards influence which blogs these readers regularly visit and what feedback they provide; if, in short, the stakes are raised within the literary blogosphere, there is no reason to think that some blogs won't respond to this challenge by becoming more professional.

Self-edited doesn't have to mean un-edited, and it certainly doesn't have to mean poorly written. Many of the writers in this volume wrote essays that were unapologetically trifling, written to make a quick buck. But the best of them are still read today. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, Samuel Johnson writes in his Life of Addison (included in this volume), familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.  These exemplary works -- like most blogs -- were written, edited and printed by the same hand.

--CRB, August 12, 2007

Volume 28

Essays: English and American

I first read Thoreau's essay Walking, which is included in the Classics' second volume of essays, as a freshman in a course on the American Renaissance. More recently, I've taught the essay several semesters in an undergraduate writing class. In between, I've probably read it close to fifty times. In my writing class, I talk a lot about the way that Thoreau's meandering style matches his subject matter, and more generally about the way that form and content align in a good piece of writing.  But the real reason I teach Walking, and the reason I read it over and over again, is because I love it as much as anything I've ever read.

When my friend Josh got married in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts last year, I spent the morning before the ceremony at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, whose Author's Ridge holds Emerson and Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. The first grave I looked for was Thoreau's, and I spent a long time in front of it, thinking mostly about what this essay has meant to me at various times in my life. Even skimming over it now to write this post, I find my heart rate elevating a little. So what did it mean to read these twenty familiar pages as part of 20,000 in the Shelf?

I wish to speak a word for Nature, the essay begins:

for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, --to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization.

Thoreau emerged from roughly the same New England society that a few generations later produced Charles Eliot. Like Eliot he was Harvard educated. He lived in a world that placed great stock in culture -- and the limits it placed on human behavior -- as opposed to instinct and wildness. Thoreau shared with Emerson the worry that a particular American genius risked being smothered in the cradle by a too-great reverence for European antiquity. In Walking, he links this general philosophical belief with the more immediate conviction that culture teaches men to give over too much of their lives to indoor occupations when they might be out in the natural world. All of which suggests, in part, that Thoreau would think rather little of a young man in the prime of life who chose to spend a year sitting inside reading classic works of literature.

There is an honest answer to this charge, one I've carried with me since February, when I read some of the same points expressed somewhat differently by Emerson. Plainly, we no longer live in an age too much in thrall to the past. Our culture is more than willing to honor instinct and to throw off the limits and demands of cultivation. In particular America is more than willing to celebrate a wild American genius at the expense of European civilization.

All of it true. Thoreau wrote in a different time. But I have come over the years to believe that there's something lasting about this essay, something that speaks to me in a particular way, and so I couldn't simply dismiss it as irrelevant when it seemed to challenge what I was doing with my time. It troubled me as I read Walking for the fifty-first time last week.  Then I came to what has always been my favorite passage in the essay:

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers--for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, --Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop.

Go to grass. I shiver every time I read these words. But this time they especially moved me. I'm more than halfway through the Shelf now, and it feels at times like I've been reading it my whole life. I suspect that some part of me will continue to read it my whole life. But part of me hopes that along with whatever knowledge the Shelf have given me, it is adding to my store of useful ignorance. And when I've finished the green crop will come, and I will be ready to go to grass.

--CRB, August 31, 2007

Volume 29

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

It's often said that Thomas Jefferson took scissors to his copy of the Gospels, excising all elements of the supernatural and leaving behind only Jesus' ethical philosophy. This, for him, was the real Jesus, one who ended just where everyone else's Jesus began. Several times this week, I thought of doing a similar cut-up job on Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. My version of the book would leave out all extended observations about plant life, about animals, about geological features -- everything that suggests that the book was written by the most important scientist since Newton. If this seems short-sighted to you, I would be more than happy to send you my scraps, which will be filled with passages like this:

The carnivorous beetles, or Carabidae, appear in extremely few numbers within the tropics: this is the more remarkable when compared to the case of the carnivorous quadrupeds, which are so abundant in hot countries. I was struck with this observation both on entering Brazil, and when I saw the many elegant and active forms of the Harpalidae re-appearing on the temperate plains of La Plata. Do the very numerous spiders and rapacious Hymenoptera supply the place of the carnivorous beetles? The carrion-feeders and Brachelytra are very uncommon; on the other hand, the Rhyncophora and Chrysomelidae, all of which depend on the vegetable world for subsistence, are present in astonishing numbers.

This business goes on unbroken for some time, which means the cutting job would be fairly straightforward. Once all the important science is removed, I would be left with my Voyage of the Beagle, a travel narrative worthy of Conrad. In it, an English naturalist, a skeptic and a rationalist, spends several years travelling through the wilds of South America and the Pacific Islands. He rides through the Argentine planes with Gauchos, who teach him to throw a laso. He stays for some time as the guest of a despotic Spanish general. On the shore of Tahiti he is met by the tattooed faces of the natives. His trip is occasionally slowed by the overthrow of local governments. Some locals think he possesses magic powers because of his compass and similar modern gadgets; others seem as worldly as a London gentleman. Our hero sees some areas untouched by the West and others where colonialism and slavery have done their worst. The same powers of observation he applies to fossil remains, he also applies to these diverse human societies. He finds most of them welcoming and hospitable and yet a little unnerving nonetheless. Only a page or two before the above passage about the Carabidae and the Harpalidae would have been, will be the following passage, typical of the book my cut-up job would leave behind:

An old Portuguese priest ... took me out to hunt with him. The sport consisted in turning into the cover a few dogs, and then patiently waiting to fire at any animal which might appear. We were accompanied by the son of a neighbouring farmer -- a good specimen of a wild Brazilian youth. He was dressed in a tattered old shirt and trousers, and had his head uncovered: he carried an old-fashioned gun and a large knife. The habit of carrying the knife is universal; and in traversing a thick wood it is almost necessary, on account of the creeping plants. The frequent occurrence of murder may be partly attributed to this habit.

In my Voyage, as in a Conrad novel, the well meaning Western narrator can't wholly be trusted. A bit of unease creeps in for me as I read those words specimen and wild applied to this Brazilian boy. At first this naturalist's habit of classification seems charming, but two curious facts about our scientist-narrator slowly emerge. The first is that this student of the natural order greatly prefers the civilized to the wild. The second is that he is quick to make judgments -- about animals, about climate, and about people -- that seem strikingly subjective and unscientific. And so we get the following description of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego:

These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one�s self believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians!

The relationship between Darwin's theories and some of the last century's more chilling ideas about human progress remains a matter of great intellectual debate. I wouldn't attempt to wade into those waters, especially since I've already admitted to skimming all of the Origin of Species and large chunks of this book. Regardless, it should be said first of all that Darwin abhorred slavery and was shocked by the Spanish treatment of the South American natives. It should also be said that he was equally shocked by the natives treatment of their horses. Lastly, one can't avoid the fact that for Darwin British colonialism was a very different matter.

It is impossible not to look forward with high expectations to the future progress of nearly an entire hemisphere. The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea, probably stands by itself in the records of history... these changes have now been effected by the philanthropic spirit of the British nation... It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization.

There may be no meaningful connection between Darwin's ideas about evolution and his ideas about the march of (human) improvement. And either way it's not always fair to read historical documents through the lens of the present. But as I read this passage, I thought of the current state of some of the areas that have flown the British flag: Iraq, Pakistan, Zimbabwe. The curdling irony here is one of the most interesting features of my Voyage of the Beagle.

--CRB, September 5, 2007

Volume 31

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography was a revelation to me. It was long a staple of great books programs, but I was completely unfamiliar with it before I started reading. Unlike the other memoirs among the Classics -- Franklin's Autobiography, Augustine's Confessions -- which are at heart didactic works, Cellini's Autobiography doesn't seek to use its author's life as an example.

This is probably a good thing. Cellini was born in Florence in 1500. He began writing his life's story in 1558. In between, he became the most distinguished goldsmith in Renaissance Italy, as well as a leading sculptor. He flourished in an artistic circle that included Michelangelo. He fought in the Sack of Rome. He witnessed the arrival of the plague to Italy. He was patronised by multiple popes and one king of France. He was a rival to several cardinals. He was exiled from both Florence and Rome. He committed at least two murders -- one to avenge the murder of his younger brother -- and was generally quick to solve disputes with his dagger. He was brought up on charges of using one of his models after the Italian fashion (the original Italian is quite clear on the implication that he was a soddomitaccio, but the English translator demures). Another model bore him a daughter, whom he never saw after the first days of her life. Cellini recounts these facts unapologetically: he isn't offering a confession, but a justification.

All of the above has been confirmed by contemporary sources, but there is much in the book that defies credibility and much else that, though possible, has been proven untrue. Which may suggest that Cellini's memoirs -- like James Frey's and David Sedaris's and Augusten Burroughs' -- are really works of fiction. Certainly, the book reads like a novel -- a loose, baggy pre-modern monster of a novel. Its narrator -- who doesn't seem to be quite the same person as its author -- prefigures the scheming anti-heroes in Balzac and Stendhal. This might not be that remarkable, excpet that Cellini wrote only a few years after the appearance of Pantagruel and Gargantua and almost fifty years before the appearance of Don Quixote.

If the novel as an art form didn't really exist in Cellini's time, one consequence of this fact seems to be that considerable leeway was given to fictionalizing within nominally non-fiction works. Perhaps one might better say that, if there was no tradition of serious prose fiction, there was likewise no tradition of non-fiction. Many of the essays that I've read in the Classics would have been called short stories if they'd been written in another time. For that matter, most of the drama and the poetry in the Classics grapples with ostensibly historical facts. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey don't want to be told that there was no Trojan War, any more than readers of the Bible want to be told that there was no Garden of Eden. The earliest novels played on this fact, using epistolary, journalistic or other documentary forms to suggest a realistic basis for their fictions.

But narrative writing has always been drawn towards the imaginative, even in eras when its audience didn't hold the imagination in particularly high regard. We seem to be in such an era today. Memoirs dramatically outsell novels. The biopic has become the ubiquitous film genre. The quickest way to an Oscar is to play a historical character. Based on a true story is the highest accolade that can be attached to any book or movie. Readers clamor for the literal truth. And all the while writers continue to make everything up.

--CRB, September 17, 2007

Volume 32

Literary and Philosophical Essays

Leaving aside the novelists, dramatists and poets -- that is, taking only the non-fiction writers -- I've probably spent more time reading Immanuel Kant than I have any other author in the Shelf. For the past decade, I've returned to him every few months as a kind of guilty pleasure. Have I read most of his work? Well, no. Actually, I've mostly read about the first hundred pages of his Critique of Pure Reason. If this doesn't seem like a lot, I should explain that I've read those pages about two dozen times. Why do I keep reading the same pages over again? Because I still don't understand them.

Every time I read Kant, I have a familiar experience. For pages at a time I feel the unique rush that comes with encountering difficult and exciting ideas. Kant and I walk along together on fairly solid ground. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, that ground turns a little shaky beneath me; now I'm only grasping the gist of his ideas. This still offers a heady excitement. But with Kant, the gist is never enough. All at once, I take what seems like a safe enough step and find that I've walked off the cliff. I'm completely lost now. On page 10. So I turn back a few pages, to the last sentence I'm sure I understood, and I start the process over again. In this way, I struggle along until my stamina runs out. Then I put the book back on the shelf for a few months.

Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, which is included in this volume, didn't cause me quite so much trouble, but it caused me enough. Here is how the essay begins:

Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: Physics, Ethics, and Logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing, and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions.

All rational knowledge is either material or formal: the former considers some object, the latter is concerned only with the form of the understanding and of the reason itself, and with the universal laws of thought in general without distinction of its objects. Formal philosophy is called Logic. Material philosophy, however, which has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again two-fold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom. The science of the former is Physics, that of the latter, Ethics; they are also called natural philosophy and moral philosophy respectively.

This is all fairly straightforward.  A reader unfamiliar with Kant may puzzle a moment over this distinction between nature and freedom, but all the rest makes perfect sense, and it's reasonable to assume that he'll explain his use of these terms. In the mean time, we're grateful that he's started at the very beginning and given us a few definitions to work with. Now here he is towards the end of the essay:

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient, independently on foreign causes determining it; just as physical necessity is the property that the causality of all irrational beings has of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes.

It takes one -- at least, it takes me -- a little while to figure out what the hell we're talking about here. After a few readings, I understood that we were being given the distinction between freedom and nature that we'd been hoping for earlier. Roughly speaking, freedom is the ability to act according to one's rational will without the determining influence of irrational forces like instinct and the physical limits of nature. Notice how the terms break down at the hands of paraphrasis. Kant never speaks roughly, and his sentences can't be simplified without losing part of his meaning. But it's important to try to simplify them, because eventually you're going to wind up face to face with something like, Every rational being reckons himself qua intelligence as belonging to the world of understanding, and it is simply as an efficient cause belonging to that world that he calls his causality a will.  At which point, good luck.

I'm belaboring all of this because reading Kant last week brought me for the first time this year to the question of difficulty. Do I really mean to say that it was the first difficult reading I've encountered in the entire Shelf? Well, sort of. There have been a few works -- John Woolman's Journals come to mind -- that I found tedious. Others -- like much of the out-dated science writing -- felt irrelevant and therefore uninteresting. Lastly, some works that would easily interest a different reader -- say, Darwin talking about rocks -- simply didn't do a lot for me personally.

But with Kant I'm talking about something else. I don't find him irrelevant or boring. The questions with which he centrally concerned himself -- What is the proper basis for morality? What are the limits of human knowledge? -- are deeply important to me. And I find his treatment of these questions exhilarating, which is why I keep trying to read him. But his answers are difficult. And even if they could be simplified, Kant wouldn't be the one to do it.

All of which interests me because I've never been a fan of the Take your medicine school of the literary canon.  I don't like to think of any book as a monument to be scaled.  If you'd rather watch House than read Homer, then you should watch it and not worry about it. Even as I've given myself this year of assigned reading, it's been nice to occassionally remind myself which of these books I could just as easily throw across the room without being any worse off. But when I talk about Kant, I start to sound like a culture warrior. These ideas are important, I hear myself squealing, and they won't fit between the commercial breaks!

Recently, the stakes have been raised a bit in this old argument about the easy pleasures of mass media. It's no longer just that the classics are better for us. Television is the opiate of the people. Al Gore, for one, seems to think that it's Britney's fault that we're in Iraq. You might not like turning off American Idol, he says, but you owe it the world. It's an especially tempting argument to fall into when reading Kant, because he stressed that truly moral acts are committed not out of interest or preference but purely out of duty. Still, for my part, I know that I keep going back to Kant because I enjoy reading him, and that the difficulty is part of what I enjoy, and that -- in any other year -- this book would have gone back on the shelf the moment that enjoyment stopped.

--CRB, September 25, 2007