The Artist and His Public: I Think I Had Too Much Caffein

 A couple of weeks back I got all kvetchy with some guy who seemed to be ordering me to pay attention to a work of art.

Maybe I overdid it.  Here's a more persuasive rendition of the original point.

[T]orpor, rather than fire, was what she had to dread. In those gloomy days that had befallen her, it was a great additional calamity that she felt conscious of the present dimness of an insight which she once possessed in more than ordinary measure. She had lost—and she trembled lest it should have departed forever—the faculty of appreciating those great works of art, which heretofore had made so large a portion of her happiness. It was no wonder. 

A picture, however admirable the painter’s art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter’s art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical, instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.

Italics mine.   So Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun.  Odd novel, that.  It's a slender story,  a kind of Gothic fairy tale all merchandised with a kind of  Victorian archness that can be almost unreadable.  Still, after you've  had enough of Henry James' characters disporting themselves among the ruins, it can be interesting to pick up Hawthorne and understand him as the great precursor, or at least  precursor.

Cowen on Gladwell on Rereading

Tyler Cowen is impressed by Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that "rereading is much underrated." I agree with every word of that except "underrated"--I'm not at all sure it is underrated, at least not in the circles where Cowen and Gladwell would hope to travel. Or maybe they are just too young. There comes a point when it sinks in on you that you can draw on your experience, your accumulated cultural apparatus. You realize you can plumb new depths of nuance in your old favorites. You also (I am not sure whether Cowen/Gladwell intended this or even know it) --you find the truth in the maxim that every reading is a rereading. You realize (in retrospect!) that your first exposure to (say) Pinocchio was cast against an implicit model, to which the exposure becomes an affirmation, a criticism or a challenge. When those guys finally grow up, they may come to see the truth of Whitehead's maxim that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato.

For an elaboration of the point, with the obligatory Nabokov reference, go here. Whether love is lovelier the second time around--is left as an exercise for the student.

upfdsate: Joel points out that Lady Kaga rereads Pride and Prejudice every year.

Hoffman on Zweig: Tell Us What You Really Think

Can't remember when I've seen such a slapdown of a famous writer by a famous critic as Michael Hoffman administers to (the ghost of) Stefan Zweig (link) in the current London Review of Books When's the last time anyone called you a "uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s"--?

Zweig may be second-rate but he's not that awful. I suspect that Hoffman is feeling the need to protect the reputation of his own beloved Joseph Roth (of whom Hoffman has translated umpty ump books). Fair enough: Roth is clearly the better writer, but it is an unfortunate truth that he looks enough like Zweig from the outside that the casual observer is likely to mix them up. What Hoffman may fail to understand, though, is how much Zweig probably does give voice to a certain defining characteristif of dessicated Late Empire sensibility and deserves attention for his very clothy sprogginess.