John Ruskin: Illth

John Ruskin - art critic, social scourge, artist, author, reformer, sage and prophet - turns 190 today. A hundred years ago, none would have questioned that he was a giant, a towering figure of worldwide importance. He was read by and influenced everyone, from schoolchildren to world leaders and great writers (notably Proust and Tolstoy). Today, I suspect, he is scarcely read at all outside Academe. This is partly a result of the decline in literacy and public education (very few schoolchildren today - and few world leaders, come to that - would even be able to understand his complex, richly allusive prose). But also we have generally turned against the kind of high earnestness that Ruskin embodied, and to distrust the Great Man and the prophetic voice, especially, perhaps, one as overtly biblical as his. I remember, in the 60s and 70s, often coming across sets of Ruskin's dauntingly copious collected works mouldering away in secondhand bookshops and junk shops, where they were simply unsaleable. In more recent times, positive biographies and critiques of Ruskin have done something to rescue his name from total oblivion. However, he survives in the public imagination only as a specimen of morbid psychology, known for his supposed aversion to his wife's pubic hair (a probably untrue story) and his supposedly unhealthy fondness for little girls. The poor man would indeed be revolving in his grave, if he knew how thoroughly mean and trivial our world has become.
For myself, I've read a good deal of Ruskin in my time - a rollercoaster reading experience, if ever there was one, as Ruskin lurches from piercing insight into impenetrable obscurantism, from clear rightness of judgement to the most boneheaded wrongness, from forcefully expressive prose into hypertrophied prosing and apopletic ranting. Exciting in a way, yes, but I doubt I could take it now in any but small doses. There is, though, an essence in Ruskin of something of true and lasting value - and, as the bankers bring us to our knees, might not the sonorous trumpet blast of his prophetic voice have something to tell us? For a start, we could revive his useful word illth. What were those bankers doing if it was not creating, on a world-destroying scale, illth? Perhaps it's time to have another look at Unto This Last...

Animated Relevance

So there I was, in a dream last night , talking to a friend who had been left by not one but two wives, but had now moved on to number three - who, happily, seemed very nice and no bolter. He was telling me how he had got his life back on track after someone had put him on to a new way of thinking. What was that? I inquired. 'Animated relevance,' he replied. 'Ah,' I nodded sagely, not having a clue what he was talking about. 'Animated relevance...'
I've no idea where that could have come from, but it's a fine sonorous phrase, and surely has self-help potential. 'Animated Relevance: A New Way to Unlock the Power of You'...

Fulsome Misprision Blues

And yet another thing... I've noticed that the BBC line - on paper and when vocalised by the ghastly Jay Hunt creature - is that Carol T had to go because she failed to deliver a 'fulsome' apology. This is what 'fulsome' means, and I don't think even the likes of Jay Hunt would consider such an apology tremendously useful. What the catachrestic BBC meant was 'full', but that blunt monosyllable didn't seem strong enough to convey just how full, so they reached for the beefier-sounding 'fulsome'. It's an increasingly common misusage - I've even seen it applied to bodily features ('fulsome lips' etc) - and I suspect the word 'fulsome' might well be migrating towards meaning nothing more than very full, fuller than full, super-full - just like the apology that, to the scandal of the BBC and the relief of the rest of us, never came.

Golly!

And another thing... Maybe it's just me - it very probably is (as a child, I found the world endlessly puzzling and generally misunderstood everything - yes, nothing much has changed) - but when I was a boy I never made the connection between golliwogs and black people. I just thought of gollies as some indeterminate anthropoid form - like Rupert the Bear, Winnie the Pooh and most toys designed to be held. If I'd thought about it at all, I'd have guessed the golly was based on some kind of animal I didn't know. It was only when the 'racist' interpretation gained ground - by which time I was some kind of adult - that the penny dropped. As I say, it probably was just me...
Meanwhile, here's a remark that is clearly offensive to one-eyed Scottish idiots everywhere.

'Fine variations of the commonplace'

I make no apologies for returning to the Gollygate saga - after all, the BBC, with its usual deft PR footwork, is keeping this hugely damaging story alive and kicking day after day. It seems to me that the root of this story - the 'offence' taken - is a textbook example of priggishness in action. And who wrote the textbook? Marilynne Robinson of course, in her brilliant, burningly pertinent essay, Puritans and Prigs.
Priggishness, she says, is 'up-to-date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and those that taste its lash'.
But priggishness is not morality... Distinguishing between the two, Robinson concedes that ' perhaps what I have called priggishness is useful in the absence of true morality, which requires years of development, perhaps thousands of years, and cannot simply be summoned as needed. Its inwardness and quietism makes its presence difficult to sense, let alone quantify, and they make its expression often idiosyncratic and hard to control. But priggishness makes its presence felt. And is highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring. The prig's formidable leverage comes from the fact that his or her ideas, notions or habits are always fine variations on the commonplace. A prig with original ideas is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus who can usually appeal to one's better nature, if only to embarrass dissent. A prig in good form can make one ashamed to hold a conviction so lightly, and, at the same time, ashamed to hold it at all. '
And there's more: 'People who are blind to the consequences of their own behaviour no doubt feel for that reason particularly suited to the work of reforming other people. To them morality seems almost as easy as breathing.'
Further comment would be superfluous.

The Fool Hath Said...

The Agnostic Bus rolls on, and now, belatedly, it's drawn a Christian response, of a kind. I think the Russian Orthodox approach is preferable - you can't go far wrong quoting a Psalm. The Christian Party sounds a deal too sure of itself (and quasi-political). The smartest response would have been a Christian counter-bus with the simple slogan 'There probably is a God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.' This exposes the non sequitur of the Agnostic Bus slogan, and goes about as far in assertion as a conscientious believer could in the circumstances. In the end, as Eames says in Gilead, 'Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defence'.

William Nicholson: Great Boots

Just days after James Joyce's, we have another birthday to celebrate (a 137th, rather than a 127th) - that of William Nicholson, an artist best remembered for revolutionising the art of the woodcut in his 'Beggarstaff Brothers' collaboration with James Pryde. Those great prints, with their bold, expressive design, deservedly remain hugely popular. Many of them - the famous Queen Victoria and Rudyard Kiplng among them - also demonstrate the gift for portraiture which was to provide Nicholson with his bread and butter. As a painter, though, I reckon he is hugely underrated. The exhibition at the Royal Academy a few years ago was one of the most enjoyably eye-opening I have ever seen, and included some unmistakably great paintings. One that lingers in the memory is a huge group portrait of the Canadian Headquarters Staff in World War I, an awkward assembly of men in uniform, standing at various angles, no one's eyes meetng anyone else's - in front of, and entirely dominated by, a gigantic aerial photograph of some bomb-flattened French town. It is a breathtaking work (rarely seen in public, and no image traceable on the internet unfortunately), and one of its remarkable features is that the officers' shiny boots seem more alive than them... And then there are Miss Jekyll's boots, which Nicholson painted in addition to his portrait of the great gardener (Gertrude) herself, and which seem almost as alive. With Van Gogh's these are, I'd contend, the great boots of modern art.
Nicholson was also an accomplished landscapist - his strong sense of design and preference for minimal means again to the fore - and, in particular, a marvellous still-life painter, with an almost uncanny gift for rendering metallic shine and lustre. Considering his careful cultivation of the 'dandy' pose, his work is always suprisingly restrained, with little of the dash or swagger so characteristic of Edwardian painting. Nothing is over-finished, and his virtuoso brushwork doesn't call attention to itself - nothing about his paintings does - but anyone with an eye can see that this was a real painter. His present eclipse is partly due to the swing in fashion that favoured modernist Ben over bygone Bill, and partly due to his work being so widely scattered in private collections (a lovely little landscape turned up on Antiques Roadshow recently). It would be nice to think that future generations might yet put him up there where he belongs, as one of the great British painters of the 20th century.