Reading Breath in Literature by Arthur Rose & Stefanie Heine & Naya Tsentourou & Corinne Saunders & Peter Garratt

Author:Arthur Rose & Stefanie Heine & Naya Tsentourou & Corinne Saunders & Peter Garratt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319999487
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Art Unthought

In “Ruskinism” (1881), her forthright early work of intellectual self-positioning, Vernon Lee magnificently dismantles Ruskin’s preachy excesses on the morality of art. Everywhere, she complains, Ruskin equates the good with the beautiful—a fundamental, erroneous conflation, ripe for renunciation—because of a residual puritanism in Ruskin that cannot admit aesthetic pleasure on its own terms and must instead annex it to some higher purpose. Ruskin’s whole ethics of criticism comes down to this point: the sensuous wellsprings of beauty remain troublingly diverting, and in need of moral and spiritual rescue, such that sinful gratification must be converted into noblest virtue. “Ruskin has loved art instinctively, fervently, for its own sake,” Lee points out, admiringly, “but he has constantly feared lest this love should be sinful or at least base.” 10 In consequence, he “must tranquillize his conscience about art; he must persuade himself that he is justified in employing his thoughts about it; and lest it be a snare of the demon, he must make it a service of God.” 11 At root, as revealed in his most characteristic moments, Ruskin “made the enjoyment of mere beauty a base pleasure, requiring a moral object to purify it, and in so doing he has destroyed its own purifying power.” 12 As “Ruskinism” ends, with Lee now eased into the aesthete’s role, the essay yields an affirmation of startling dexterity, in its own way a kind of inverted Ruskinism, which celebrates pleasure’s intrinsic virtue: “For, though art has no moral meaning, it has a moral value; art is happiness, and to bestow happiness is to create good.” 13 This is hedonist aesthetics housed in the stately precincts of Victorian high seriousness.

What emerges from Lee’s effort to displace Ruskin—and what matters from the perspective of breath—is an accompanying return to less conceptual and more instinctual modes of relational awareness anchored in the body. When Lee announces in her introduction to Belcaro (1881), the book in which “Ruskinism” appeared, that her purpose in discussing art will be to re-engage a mood of childish enjoyment, she describes turning her back decisively on once cherished texts of high aesthetic theory—her well-thumbed and carefully annotated Plato and Hegel, her Ruskin and Taine—in order to establish the possibility of a direct encounter with works of art. Such a gesture of uncluttering (“getting rid of those foreign, extra-artistic, irrelevant interests which aestheticians have since the beginning of time interposed between art and those who are intended to enjoy it”) clears a path for what will become her distinctive approach to understanding objects displayed in galleries, music and poetry, even when less overtly sympathetic to the ideas of the Aesthetic Movement. 14 In Belcaro, she recalls discovering the poverty of theory as a primal recognition:Much as I read, copied, annotated, analysed, imitated [these authorities], I could not really take in any of the things which I read …. As soon as I got back in the presence of art itself, all my carefully acquired artistic philosophy, mystic, romantic, or transcendental, was

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