Friday, April 8, 2016

Introduction and Preface

110 years After Henry Ryecroft, more or less


Introduction

My edition of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, by George Gissing, is 293 pages long and printed in 1914 by Constable & Company LTD., London. The type is large and the line spacing is vast. It almost looks like the type was set by hand, the way we did it in printing shop back in junior high school in the ‘60s.


It isn’t a novel, but more like a modest sized collection of essays or reflections. Parts are quite enchanting. Parts are amazingly dated. Much is still of interest to someone with similar literary or historical interests, though, in all honesty, I can think of very few people I would recommend it to. And yet...


My plan here is to take excerpts from this antique, and never very popular book, that will in some cases be quite lengthy.  (I’m assuming it is in the public domain by now, and in any case I can’t imagine Gissing minding this affectionate use of his prose). I will also include a link to the complete work online Here. Or Here for the work divided into sections, as I've done. And see here for a particularly nice version.


On this foundation I will try to build something new. In part this will consist of explanations or comments on his ideas and subjects. But, in the spirit of Gissing’s original conception, I will embellish all this with my own subjects. Many will flow from the original, but some will be out of the blue.


I will also borrow from Gissing the idea of distancing myself a bit from the material. There is a great deal of Gissing in Ryecroft but there is also a good deal of invention. For one thing, Gissing spent his last days in the French countryside, not the English, and George Gissing was a more successful writer. I’m not, at the moment, familiar enough with the life of Gissing to know just how much of Ryecroft is invention. I suspect in my prose there will be more of me than there is of him in Ryecroft, but I know that I will follow Gissing in his pleasant fantasy.


This fantasy of long delayed financial independence and freedom is the heart of the appeal (as least to me) of the book. This is like contemplating winning the lotto, imagining what you would do if, late in life when you are too old to start any big new projects, you suddenly had the privilege of living however you pleased.


One other thing before I begin. While I am “publishing” this in blog form, I can’t imagine that there is really an audience for it. I aim to be supremely self indulgent as I assume I am my only audience. You, should anyone ever stumble upon this, are hereby warned.


A word on typeface and formatting. I will make Gissing’s prose look as much like the original as possible while “my” prose will look more modern. I will find some way to also distinguish material quoted from other sources... with either color or typeface or both. Because I find Gissing’s prose style strikingly odd, I will render in bold anything particularly puzzling, including phrases that baffle me or where he puts things in ways I can’t imagine anyone today copying. I will also include as many links, images, and the like as I can force Blogger to display.


Preface

The name of Henry Ryecroft never became familiar to what is called the reading public. A year ago obituary paragraphs in the literary papers gave such account of him as was thought needful: the date and place of his birth, the names of certain books he had written, an allusion to his work in periodicals, the manner of his death. At the time it sufficed... like other mortals, he had lived and laboured; like other mortals, he had entered into his rest. To me... fell the duty of examining Ryecroft's papers; and having, in the exercise of my discretion, decided to print this little volume, I feel that it requires a word or two of biographical complement, just so much personal detail as may point the significance of the self-revelation here made...


There follows a brief biography of a hard working but not very successful man of letters in the closing decades of the nineteenth-century.


At the age of fifty, just when his health had begun to fail and his energies to show abatement, Ryecroft had the rare good fortune to find himself suddenly released from toil, and to enter upon a period of such tranquility of mind and condition as he had never dared to hope...


The bequest, so popular with Victorian English writers as a sort of deus ex machina, suddenly ended Ryecroft's desperate striving (no Faustian connotation intended) and made him, for the first time, comfortable. (Perhaps I dismissed Faust a little too quickly. The best translation (by Margaret Fuller) I've found of the bargain in Goethe's Faust reads as follows:


 Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery

Make me one moment with myself at peace,

 Cheat me into tranquility? Come then

And welcome, life’s last day.

 Make me but to the moment say,

Oh, fly not yet, thou art so fair,

 Then let me perish, &c.


This book is the account of a previously striving writer (due to economic necessity, not because of Faust's existential reasons) finally savoring his moment of tranquility before he dies. You could see Ryecroft as a rebuke of Faustian striving. And I might as well add to this, already too long parenthetical, that both Faust and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann will come up more frequently in the posts to follow than you might expect.)


In a few weeks he quitted the London suburb where of late he had been living, and, turning to the part of England he loved best, he presently established himself in a cottage near Exeter, where with a rustic housekeeper to look after him, he was soon thoroughly at home.


He was a widower with a married daughter, but we will speak no more of that, as he never does.


It had always been his wish to die suddenly; he dreaded the thought of illness, chiefly because of the trouble it gives to others. On a summer evening, after a long walk in very hot weather, he lay down upon the sofa in his study, and there -- as his calm face declared -- passed from slumber into the great silence.


There are a few more pages of exposition, how the "author" found Ryecroft's manuscript diary, from which the book that follows is extracted for example. But let's shift now to the "actual" author, George Gissing.


There is an uncanny, though not perfect, resemblance between our late, lamented Henry Ryecroft and Mr. Gissing. One of the most significant differences, at least from a subjective point of view, would be that Gissing didn't live to his 50th year (Ryecroft lives at least to 54). Gissing died of emphysema the same year this book was published, at the age of 46. I found the following in a review of a book about Gissing, “...H.G. Wells, who, arriving at Gissing’s sickbed on Christmas Day 1903, commandeered the nursing arrangements, and by force-feeding the patient pints of champagne, beef tea and coffee, more or less killed him on the spot.” Link


Now back again to our preface,


I suspect that, in his happy leisure, there grew upon him a desire to write one more book, a book which should be written merely for his own satisfaction. Plainly, it would have been the best he had it in him to do. But he seems never to have attempted the arrangement of these fragmentary pieces, and probably because he could not decide upon the form they should take. I imagine him shrinking from the thought of a first-person volume; he would feel it too pretentious; he would bid himself wait for the day of riper wisdom. And so the pen fell from his hand.


So Gissing elected to distance himself, to avoid the first-person, by a literary subterfuge of the executor/editor. In turn, I am merely following his example, in a more self-actualizing century and medium. Also, I haven't yet chosen an executor for my estate.


NOTE: There are many links in the text that follows, mostly to Wikipedia, but because Blogger is Blogger, the link is not always obvious. If there's a name or title or term you think should be linked to more information, mouse over it to see if it is, even if there is no visual clue. I've tried a number of ways to work around this bug, but with very limited success.


Contents


Spring

I. Exposition + The Matrix and Lucy

II. Home

III. Botany + Dawkins

XXIV. Walking in the country + Hans Castorp

XXV. The end of spring + Prometheus


Summer


Autumn

XIV. Nietzsche - part 3 - Homer & Archilochus <This post gets a gold star



Winter



Historical Dates Continued, and in a convenient place


[Needs to be reformatted when complete. Blogger can be a little bitch at times]

14th century
Edward I of England - Plantagenet (1272-1307)-35 [years of reign]
Edward II of England - Plantagenet (1307-1327)-20
Black Death (1346–53)
Renaissance begins in Italy, to 17th century

Little Ice Age begins, to 19th century
Edward III of England - Plantagenet (1327-1377)-50
Richard II of England - Plantagenet (1377-1399)-22


15th century

Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) -75 [age at death]
Henry IV of England and Ireland - Lancaster (1399-1413)-14

Printing - Age of Discovery
Henry V of England - Lancaster (1413-1422)-9

Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) [War & Big History]

Constantinople falls to the Turks 1453
Henry VI of England - Lancaster (1422-1461)-39

Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) -70
Edward IV of England - York (1461-1483)-21
Richard III of England - York (1483-1485)-2


 16th century

Henry VII of England and Ireland - Tudor (1485-1509)-24
Protestant Reformation begins

Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516) -65 [Foucault mentions]
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) [artist]

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) -70
Dr. Johann Georg Faust (c.1480–1540) (Possible historical Faustus) 
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) -70

Martin Luther (1483-1546) -63
Henry VIII of England and Ireland - Tudor (1509-1547)-38
Edward VI of England and Ireland - Tudor (1547-1553)-6
Mary I of England and Ireland - Tudor (1553-1558)-5

John Calvin (1509-1564) -55
Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592) -59

Richard Hooker (1554-1600) -46 [Ryecroft mentions]


 17th century

Elizabeth I of England and Ireland - Tudor (1558-1603)-45
Shakespeare (1564-1616) -62 - His career brackets 1600 as Goethe’s does 1800.

Age of Enlightenment - continues into late 18th

Plymouth Colony established 1620
James I of England and Ireland (1603-1625)-22 James VI of Scotland - Stuart (1567-1625)

Francis Bacon (1562-1626) -64

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) -78

English Puritanism - theaters closed by mid-century.

Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648)

Thirty Years' War (1618–1648)

Peace of Westphalia 1648 - Worst of Wars of Religion over - 
new Catholic-Protestant status quo in Europe
Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland - Stuart (1625-1649)-24

English Civil War and Commonwealth (1642-60)

René Descartes (1596-1650) -54

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) -63

John Milton (1608–1674) -66

Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (1632-1675) -43

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) -45

Izaak Walton (1594-1683)
Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland - Stuart (1649-1685) actually (1660-1685)-25
James II of England and Ireland - Stuart (James VII of Scotland) (1685-1688)-13 
Glorious Revolution 1688 (Last British RC King deposed)

Nine Years' War (1688–97)

18th century

William III of England and Ireland - Orange-Nassau (William II of Scotland) (1689-1702)-13 
also Willem III Stadtholder of Dutch Republic (1672-1792)
John Locke (1632–1704) -72

Friedrich I of Prussia (1657–1713) -56
Anne of England, Scotland and Ireland - Stuart (1702-1714)-12

War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714)

Louis XIV of France (1638–1715) -77

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) -70

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) -72
George I of Great Britain and Ireland - Hanover (1714-1727)-13
also Duke and Prince-Elector of Hanover (1698-1727)

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) -85

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) -55
George II of Great Britain and Ireland - Hanover (1727-1760)-33

also Duke and Prince-Elector of Hanover (1727-1760)
Goethe starts work on UrFaust 1770s

David Hume (1711 - 1776) -65
American Revolution 1776

Romantic period (1770?-1850?)

Voltaire (1694–1778) -84

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) -75

French Revolution 1789

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) -35

Steam power commercialized

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) -38

19th century

Marie Francois Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) -31 
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) -80
Goethe completes Part One of Faust 1808

Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) -74
Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815)

The “Year without a summer” 1816

James Watt, FRS, FRSE (1736–1819) -83
George III of Great Britain and Ireland - Hanover (1760-1820)-60
also Duke and Prince-Elector of Hanover (1727-1814) King of Hanover (1814-1820)

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) -52

William Tuke (1732-1822) -90
David Ricardo (1772-1823) -51
Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) -65

Philippe Pinel (1746-1825) -79
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) -57
George IV of Great Britain, Ireland, and Hanover - Hanover (1820-1830)-10
Prince Regent (1811-1820)-9

July Revolution 1830

Goethe completes Part Two of Faust 1831

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) -83

George Cuvier (1769-1832) -63
William Godwin (1756-1836) -80
William IV of Great Britain, Ireland, and Hanover - Hanover (1830-1837)-7

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) -73
J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) -76

Mary Shelley (née Wollstonecraft Godwin; 1797-1851) -54

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) -83

Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 1855) -47
Crimean War (1853-1856

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) -59

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) -59

The Great Stink (1858)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) -72
Pre-Raphaelites (1848-?)
Electromagnetic radiation understood - unified theory of electricity, magnetism and light
American Civil War (1861-1865)
Franz Bopp (1791-1867) -76
Michael Faraday (1791–1867) -76
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871)
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) -48
Charles Darwin, FRS (1809-1882) -73
Karl Marx  (1818-1883) -65
Ramakrishna (1836 – 1886) -50
Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary (1858-1889) -31
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) -56
Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland - Hanover (1837-1901)-64
Empress of India (1876-1901)


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