Autumn IV. Poetry and landscape

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn III. Time regained again

The characteristic motive of English poetry is love of nature, especially of nature as seen in the English rural landscape. From the “Cuckoo Song” of our language in its beginnings to the perfect loveliness of Tennyson’s best verse, this note is ever sounding. It is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama. Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss were there! ...

This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an English school of painting. It came late; that it ever came at all is remarkable enough. A people apparently less apt for that kind of achievement never existed. So profound is the English joy in meadow and stream and hill, that, unsatisfied at last with vocal expression, it took up the brush, the pencil, the etching tool, and created a new form of art. The National Gallery represents only in a very imperfect way the richness and variety of our landscape work...

One obvious reason for the long neglect of [J.M.W.] Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner’s landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist not the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory -- but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet of colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England would not love him. If any man whom I knew to be a man of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster, I should smile -- but I should understand.

Alpha.

J.M.W. Turner is somewhat in the public mind these days. There is a new movie about him and a major exhibition [I would have edited out much of the beginning of this video] at Tate Britain. I suspect he was one of the painters Proust was thinking about when he wrote about artists having to educate an audience to see the world -- or at least their canvasses -- the way they did. Ryecroft isn’t completely unfair to Turner here as he admits his virtues when it comes to color and form. I rather imagine that Ryecroft would prefer landscape painting over photography only in it’s potential for perfecting or idealising the image (though with Photoshop I guess the photographer can also delete the unwanted wires and or add the properly rustic worker).

I’ve never been that big a fan of Turner myself. He seems to me too much a transitional figure: Not the realism Ryecroft likes or the full impressionism/ expressionism I prefer.

VisiCalc, cat videos, and symbolic horses.

Who remembers VisiCalc nowadays? I do because I was a Sinclair ZX81 owner in the early days of personal computers. VisiCalc was the first “killer app” -- a spreadsheet for the Apple II that gave “serious” people an excuse to invest in the new gadgets. The killer app for the Internet would seem to be cat videos.

I can’t make fun of either of these things -- though for me, the original PC killer app was the BASIC computer language. Today I can’t imagine life without spreadsheets. It’s a rare day when I don’t use at least a couple spreadsheets for one thing or another,and just the thought of doing those things without spreadsheets makes me tired. And Maru is my favorite cat in the world. (How wonderful that he also has his own Wikipedia page!) But I’ve moved on from cat videos, first to goat kid videos and most recently to foals.

I suspect that both goat kid and foal videos are most effective if you’ve had contact with these animals in the past. There is one foal video with a woman petting this adorable animal that gives me a hint how some women feel about babies. Oh, and while we’re on horses, lets consider for a moment the symbolic use of horses in literature. How smooth was that?

First there’s the hard to miss episode with Vronsky racing the mare Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina (source here):

What's important about the scene symbolically is that it foreshadows what's going to happen to Anna herself. Vronsky is absolutely taken with the horse, but his love of her doesn't prevent him from doing something that ruins her forever – he misjudges where he's put his weight as Frou-Frou is gearing up to jump, and she breaks her back. This is similar to his relationship with Anna. Vronsky loves Anna, but he convinces her to have an affair with him, which destroys her. Vronsky's great tragic flaw is that he's capable of deep love, but he's just not that careful, and his lack of care has terrible consequences for the women (or female horses) with whom he gets involved...

The use of horse symbolism in Parade’s End is rather more complicated. Besides being a special (and antique) sort of Tory, Christopher Tietjens is sold to us as being especially good with horses. His "way" with horses comes up several times but first and most importantly (in my opinion) in the first volume Some Do Not. The several scenes with the Wannop’s poor horse are excellent for establishing Christopher’s character, but less effective at symbolizing his relationship with his wife, Sylvia, as we have, at this time, not seen them together. Tom Stoppard --  given the amount of time he lavished on these scenes with the horse -- was all over this symbolism I think, while writing the screenplay for the recent TV mini-series of Parade’s End.

Sylvia is a thoroughbred. She may be difficult in any number of ways, but if you start thinking of her as a spirited horse, much in the novel that is obscure becomes clear. And Christopher, for all his way with actual horses, is not in need of a thoroughbred mate. To quote what he says in the mini-series script when he first sees the Wannop’s new horse,

...Gosh, don't you know you've got a 13 hands pony harness on a 16 and a half hands horse? Let the bit out three holes.

It's tearing the animal's tongue in half...

...This isn't the rig for you, Mrs Wannop.

A pony and basketwork chaise, that's the trap for ladies...

Christopher himself needs a pony and finds one in Valentine Wannop. But where he can immediately recognize the problem with the Wannop’s horse and suggest the obvious solution -- trade for a new animal -- in his personal case he dithers and is blocked by his Tory principles... or something. What he does to Sylvia is worse than what happens to the horse in the accident with the General's automobile, but his lines at the end of the first episode of the Mini-series (addressed to the horse) could just as well apply to Sylvia ,

...Damn near forty miles in one night.

You've lost a lot of blood.

I let you down, old girl, didn't I?...

And, just because I can, here are some of the videos I've referenced. First Maru, the cat that likes to walk around with a bag on his head:

Then the foal video:

And finally some baby goats. I Have no idea why I can't display it the usual way.

Next: Autumn V. Illness.