Ars et Natura

Left: Amphora depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes (450–440 BC, MFA Houston) Middle:  Oedipe explique l'énigme du sphinx (1808, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Louvre) Right:  Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864, Gustave Moreau, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) An abridgement of G. H. Mair's sweeping yet concise survey of modern English literature (1911, Oxford University Press, The Home University Library Series), recast as an essay on the meanings of classic, romantic, decadent. The Decline of Elizabethan Drama                          [The] voluminous plays of  Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama.  Decadence is a term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is decadent when the sound is allo

Left: King James I (c. 1605) after John de Critz; Right: The Authorized King James Bible (1611)                          In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude, the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social, political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to examine the causes that have produced such great results.                           The Authorized Version is not, of course, a purely seventeenth century work. Though the scholars who wrote and compiled it had before them all the previous vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they found them or devised new ones in accordance with the original, the basis is undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less, the qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly have been done earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done half so well.                   

Left:  John Donne  (17th-century copy of a 1616 original) after Isaac Oliver; Right:  Robert Browning  (1858) by Michele Gordigiani                           Very different from his [Ben Jonson's] direct and dignified manner is the closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining together.                           In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays,  obscurity arises not because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers; he is for analy

                         Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the “University Wits” [1] who fused the academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of literature and leaning to mould it to finer issues, gave us Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here... Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. Historical relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of his time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power and life inspires all his pages.                           The teaching of Machiavelli, misunderstood for their own purposes by would-be imitators, furnished the reign of Elizabeth with the only political idea

Left:  Sir Philip Sidney  (18th century copy of a c. 1578 original) after Antonis Mor; Right: Henry Peacham's  The Compleat Gentleman  (Francis Constable, London, 1634)                          In the course of the history of English letters certain authors disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position: they are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There are not many of them and they could be easily numbered: Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably Tennyson. But the greatest of them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his symbolical relation to the time in which he lived was realized by his contemporaries, and it has been a commonplace of history and criticism ever since. Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at the age of twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of the Renaissance, William the S

Selwyn Image (1849-1930) graphic art: Left: The Tragic Mary (1890); Center: The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884); Right: Representative Painters of the Nineteenth Century (1899); The sphere of art is in the region of the imagination, and the office of the imagination is to render us sensitive to the most exquisite pleasures of which our nature is capable.  ~ Selwyn Image (1884) Notes:                     The Century Guild was established by the architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851 – 1942), and his assistant, Herbert Percy Horne (1864 – 1916), in close collaboration with designer Selwyn Image (1849 – 1930). They aspired to elevate crafts to the status of art, integrate both art and crafts in domestic interiors, and democratize good design. Hobby Horse was their publication. ( William Morris Gallery )

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875), Morris & Co. (1875–1940) Left: Golden Lily  (1899, J.H. Dearles) on wallpaper in indigo Right: Sunflower (1879, William Morris) on velvet in saffron/vellum                     You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the æsthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some æsthetic young men.  Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all.  It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy.  And so with you: let there be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that do

Nocturne: Black and Gold — The Falling Rocket (James McNeill Whistler, 1875) Nocturne: Black and Gold — The Fire Wheel (James McNeill Whistler, 1875)                     Scarcely so much can be said for any other pictures of the modern schools: their eccentricities are almost always in some degree forced; and their imperfections gratuitously, if not impertinently, indulged. For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay [founder of Grosvenor Gallery] ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face. John Ruskin “Letter LXXIX, June, 1877” from  Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain on the exhibit at Grosvenor Gallery (London, 1877)  ☙❧

Albert Moore (1841-1893); Left: Azaleas (1868);  Right (top to bottom): Dreamers (1882), Apples (1875), A Musician (1867)  On the paintings of Albert Moore:                     His painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to poets; the faultless and secure expression of an exclusive worship of things formally beautiful. That contents them; they leave to others the labours and the joys of thought or passion. The outlines of their work are pure, decisive, distinct; its colour is of the full sunlight. This picture of  “ Azaleas ”  is as good a type as need be of their manner of work. A woman delicately draped, but showing well the gentle mould of her fine limbs through the thin soft raiment; pale small leaves and bright white blossoms about her and above, a few rose-red petals fallen on the pale marble and faint—coloured woven mat before her feet; a strange and splendid vessel, inlaid with designs of Eastern colour; another—clasped by one long slender hand and filled

Roman Empire at its greatest extent (under Trajan) The Empire, as it was finally shaped by Augustus, included Spain, Gaul, Italy, and the Balkans, the north coast of Africa, Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor. The Mediterranean was a Roman lake. Every people who had contributed to the sum of Western civilization was now subjected to Rome. H.A.L. Fisher A History of Europe  (p. 85) Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1935

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's Dreamland (1902, Francis Simpson Coburn) Edgar Allan Poe Pompas del mármol, negra anatomía que ultrajan los gusanos sepulcrales, del triunfo de la muerte los glaciales símbolos congregó. No los temía. Temía la otra sombra, la amorosa, las comunes venturas de la gente; no lo cegó el metal resplandeciente ni el mármol sepulcral sino la rosa. Como del otro lado del espejo se entregó solitario a su complejo destino de inventor de pesadillas. Quizá, del otro lado de la muerte, siga erigiendo solitario y fuerte espléndidas y atroces maravillas. — Jorge Luis Borges ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧ Translation: Splendor of marble, black anatomy  horrified by graveyard maggots— the triumph of death he congealed with glacial symbols—he feared not, but feared of other shades, of love,  of other people's common lot. He was not deceived by gilded metal,  nor the tomb’s marble, but the rose. As if from the other side of a mirror,  he gave himself, alone, to h

Left: Petrarch (1304-74) Right: Vitruvian Man (1490, Leonardo da Vinci)                          In discussing the transition from classical antiquity to the Middles Ages, we were able to point to a great crisis — the rise of Islam — marking the separation be tween the two eras. No comparable event sets off the Middle Ages from the Renaissance. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to be sure, witnessed far-reaching developments: the fall of Constantinople and the Turkish conquest of southeastern Europe; the journeys of exploration that led to the founding of overseas empires in the New World, in Africa and Asia, with the subsequent rivalry of Spain and England as the foremost colonial powers; the deep spiritual crisis of Reformation and Counter Reformation. But none of these events, however vast their effects, can be said to have produced the new era... Perhaps the only essential point on which most experts agree is that the Renaissance had begun when people realized they were no lo

Kingston, Canada                          Christmas 2005: Montreal, Québec City, Mont Tremblant, Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto… Sightseeing has become a wearisome parade of old churches, historic monuments, and kitschy souvenir shops. Even Niagara Falls seemed lackluster, as much from the grey winter light as from the hotel/casino perched right on its banks. It is Nature drained of the Kantian sublime, completely incorporated within the city, and turned into an urban spectacle like some Las Vegas attraction. Niagara Falls                         We live  in an immigrant ghetto of Montreal, a hub where Filipinos come to roost after caring for the young and elderly of posh French and Jewish neighborhoods. It’s quite disorienting to pick up Tagalog and Bisaya, or even more obscure Philippine dialects, dislocated from their sun-drenched origins. Their diction, like florid birds-of-paradise, does not quite belong among the stolid architecture of the Second Empire…                         But no

Hôtel Biron (undated, after 1908), now Musée Rodin                         T he old Beaux Arts train station, now Musée d’Orsay; the broad gardens of the Tuilleries and the bridges of the Seine; and, of course, the Eiffel Tower viewed from Trocadéro, where dusk reduces it to pure geometric lines before it’s lit up. The shock of Paris seen for the first time. The L’Orangerie near the Tuilleries now shelters the Nymphèas of Monet — overwhelming in their hugeness, you could almost tilt and dip into the water.                          Around the Hôtel Biron, the well-kept gardens are littered with Rodin’s seemingly pulsating bronzes. This is where Rilke discovered his new voice. In response to Rodin’s aesthetic of “living surfaces,” he began to write what became his “thing-poems,” and, like one who gazes at the archaic torso of Apollo , reflected on the transforming power of art: “ Du muss t dein leben ändern ” (Your life must change). (Paris, late 1990s - Gainesville, FL, 2007)

Left: Coronation of Roger II, robed in Byzantine splendor Right: Monreale Cathedral                          So under the full glow of papal benediction these freebooters of the North laid the foundations of a civilized state in Mediterranean waters. With Norman flexibility the descendants of Tancred organized government under new and difficult conditions and on original lines. In the kingdom of Roger II, who united the Norman territories on either side of the Straits of Messina, Europe witnessed a polity half Oriental, half Western, providing a shelter for Greek, Latin, Moor, and Jew, and better organized, seeing that it preserved the tradition of its Greek and Saracen past, than any other European government of that age. Among the orange groves of Palermo, Roger, the descendant of the Vikings, sat upon his throne, robed in the dalmatic of the apostolic legate and the imperial costume of Byzantium, his ministers part Greek, part English, his army composed as to half of Moors, his flee

The Course of Empire: Desolation (1833-36, Thomas Cole) Wealth, vice, corruption––barbarism at last. ~ Lord Byron Fall of the Western Roman Empire, A. D. 476                           From this moment, the germanization of the West steadily proceeded. Ostrogoths poured into the Balkan peninsula, creating by their restless and turbulent activities a problem similar to that which had taxed the resources of the Eastern Empire a century before. In Italy a succession of phantom and ephemeral emperors reached its close with a pathetic figure, named by the supreme irony of providence, Romulus Augustus, who was deposed by Odovacar, the East German master of the troops (476). Military revolutions were no novelty in the annals of the Roman Empire, and the act of Odovacar had many precedents… It is true that he deposed Romulus, but the lad was a usurper, unrecognized in Constantinople, and the deed condoned by the bestowal upon its author of the high imperial title of patrician. What was original