Category Archives: fine arts

Aert de Gelder, “Rest on the Flight to Egypt”

This painting, from about 1690, is one of my favorites in our new home town of Boston. (It’s in the Museum of Fine Arts.) The “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” is an old subject for paintings, going back to the middle ages. It illustrates Matthew 2:12-14:

    And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way. And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.

For some reason that I don’t know, artists have (for many centuries) chosen to depict the little family pausing on the way to Egypt. That makes an acceptable subject for a Protestant, because it’s a “history painting”–an illustration of something that really happened, according to the Bible. In contrast, a painting of the “Holy Family” or the “Virgin and Child with Saints” would be problematic from a Protestant perspective. Those extremely common subjects developed as Orthodox and Catholic devotional objects, as icons or stimuli to prayer and meditation. For Protestants, they verge on “graven images.”

De Gelder (a student of Rembrandt) was a Protestant, but he has found a way here to imitate a “Holy Family” or a “Madonna and Child with Saint.” Joseph resembles St. Jerome in a painting of a sacra conversazione. And (as my wife Laura notes) the Madonna’s halo has migrated onto Mary’s extraordinary circular, gold-rimmed hat.

I take no sides in the Protestant/Catholic debate about religious images. But I think the shift from a Madonna and Child to a history painting has produced wonderful effects in this particular work. Since the baby is not an object of veneration, he can act like a real infant–snuggling down into his mother’s lap instead of being displayed upright. Joseph reads a grown-up book, presumably for the edification of the adults in the family–but he pauses to gaze affectionately at his newborn (holding his place with his finger). It’s an affectionate representation of a human family, with subtle echoes of the grand Catholic tradition.

The Winter’s Tale

Reading The Winter’s Tale this week reinforced my sense that Shakespeare, in his last years as a playwright, was worried about the power of a dramatist to influence people’s passions and make them believe falsehoods. In both The Winter’s Tale (1610-11) and The Tempest (1611-12), this power is seen as political and as morally ambiguous. The issues that concern Shakespeare remain alive today, although now the medium that is most problematic is film rather than live theater.

The Winter’s Tale has a fantastical plot. It’s a fairy-tale, involving an abandoned and miraculously rediscovered princess, a talking statue, and even a bear that appears without warning and devours a significant character. Whereas Shakespeare took most of his plots from purported works of history, this one was obviously a fiction–both because it was unbelievable and because the original authors were recent Englishmen. Only The Tempest belongs as clearly to the category of fiction.

One problem with telling a fictional story in an engaging way is that you thereby make people believe what is not true. This power has often made moralists uncomfortable. According to Plutarch, when the very first tragedies were performed, Solon attended and asked Thespis, the first playwright, “if he was not ashamed to tell so many lies before such a number of people.”

In Shakespeare’s time, Sir Phillip Sidney defended fiction on the ground that it was not the author’s intention to deceive. “The poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false.” As author of Astrophel and Stella, Sidney was not a liar because he could count on his readers not to believe the plot. But in the midst of an effective theatrical performance, the audience will suspend disbelief. It is the playwright’s goal to make that happen.

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the politics of Wind in the Willows

I recently read Kenneth Grahame’s classic to my 9-year-old. As you may remember, Toad is the heir to the local manor and fortune and the one character in the neighborhood with an advanced education. He begins as an awful person–arrogant, selfish, pretentious, wasteful, lazy, and a menace on the road. He takes some hard knocks and finally learns to be a good squire. His transformation is shown by two major signs: his behavior at a banquet in his own Hall, and his friendships. Whereas in the bad old days Toad used to make risibly arrogant speeches at dinner parties, the new Toad, “by pressing delicacies on his guests, by topical small talk, and by earnest inquiries after members of their families not yet old enough to appear at social functions, managed to convey that this dinner was being run on strictly conventional lines.” Meanwhile, he shows genuine respect and admiration for his three main friends–the acknowledged best of whom, Mr Badger, speaks with a notably uneducated accent and dresses roughly.

(As for Toad’s friend Mole–he is a wonderful caricature of a provincial middle-class suburbanite. “On the walls [of his garden] hung wire baskets with ferns in them, alternating with brackets carrying plaster statuary–Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy.”)

This is a conservative vision. No one gains any rights vis-à-vis Mr. Toad. He is not compelled to act better, nor to renounce any of his wealth or prestige. He isn’t (for example) taxed to fund better education for the myriad little rabbits who live in the Wild Wood. Instead, he helps to restore the ancient social equilibrium by acting responsibly and generously and thereby winning the respect of the neighborhood.

It’s not my ideal. I’m glad the real Mr. Toads of England had to pay inheritance taxes, and the real Moles and Rats got subsidized access to higher education. But The Wind in the Willows has a moral core as well as charm. In our era of billionaire celebrity heiresses, we could do worse.

nationalism as the enlargement of human sympathy

I finished Bleak House last night. It’s such an enormous and complex novel that one could talk or write about it forever. But I have a job. So I’ll just offer one thought about Dickens’ moral imagination.

I read Bleak House as nationalistic. Of the many dozens of characters, I believe only one is foreign: the French maid Hortense. She is completely wicked and a Francophobe caricature with her ridiculous accent and irrational passions. A more important character, Mrs Jellyby, foolishly engages in charity work overseas while neglecting her own English household and community. In the end, she is “disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which [turns] out a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody–who survived the climate–for rum.” The model of British manhood, Allan Woodcourt, is forced by economic necessity to travel abroad, where he experiences a “terrible shipwreck over in those East Indian seas.” He plays the hero in this crisis and “saves many lives”–presumably British lives.

This drawing of boundaries and discounting of outsiders is unappealing. But Dickens may also be skeptical about the wisdom of trying to help people whom one doesn’t know. (This is Esther Summerson’s explicit view, and she is the moral center of the novel.) The nationalism of the novel is not by any means imperialistic. It is isolationist, and perhaps driven by modesty.

Besides, the drawing of boundaries can mean an enlargement rather than a restriction of one’s moral commitments. Bleak House dramatizes the interconnections among British people. One could cite literally hundreds of examples, but one stark one [warning: plot spoiler coming] is the death of Lady Dedlock. She has been the most fashionable and elegant aristocrat in the land, but she expires in a pauper’s graveyard dressed in the clothes of a peasant whose baby had died from preventable disease. Her body is literally mistaken for that of someone at the opposite end of the social spectrum.

The leading idea of the novel is that all British subjects are one family and they must take care of one another. This is nationalism as mutual responsibility. It’s not a state-centered nationalism that favors political leaders or big bureaucratic programs. In fact, Bleak House seems disturbingly cynical about Parliament and the government as possible sources of reform. Instead, the ideology (if there is a single ideology in this polyphonic book) is one of non-fundamentalist Christian solidarity. That’s not my favorite ideal for our times–but we’d be better off if we had it.

the moral evaluation of literary characters

I’m on p. 521 of Dickens’ Bleak House–hardly past half-way–but so far Mrs Jelleby is proving to be a bad person. Like many of my friends (like me, in fact) she spends most of her days reading and writing messages regarding what she calls a “public project”–in her case, the settlement of poor British families on the left bank of the River Niger at the ridiculously named location of Borrioboola-Gha. Meanwhile, her own small children are filthy, her clothes are disgraceful, her household is bankrupt, her neglected husband is (as we would say) clinically depressed, and she is casually cruel to her adolescent daughter Caddy. Caddy finds a man who pays some attention to her, but Mrs Jellyby is completely uninterested in the wedding and marriage:

    “Now if my public duties were not a favourite child to me, if I were not occupied with large measures on a vast scale, these petty details [sc. the wedding] might grieve me very much. … But can I permit the film of a silly proceeding on the part of Caddy (from whom I expect nothing else), to interpose between me and the great African continent? …”

    “I hope, Ma,” sobbed poor Caddy at last, “you are not angry?”

    “O, Caddy, you really are an absurd girl,” returned Mrs Jellyby, “to ask such questions, after what I have said of the preoccupation of my mind.”

    “And I hope, Ma, you give us your consent, and wish us well?” said Caddy.

    “You are a nonsensical child to have done anything of this kind,” said Mrs Jellyby, “and a degenerate child, when you might have devoted yourself to a great public measure. But the step is taken, and I have engaged a boy [to replace Caddy as her secretary], and there is no more to be said. No, pray, Caddy,” said Mrs Jellyby–for Caddy was kissing her–“don’t delay me in my work, but let me clear off this heavy batch of papers before the afternoon post comes in!”

Mrs Jellyby’s friends dominate the wedding breakfast and are “all devoted to public projects only.” They have no interest in Caddy or even in one another’s social schemes; each is entirely self-centered.

Within the imaginary world of Bleak House, Mrs Jellyby is bad, and her moral flaws should provoke some reflection in the rest of us–especially those of us who spend too much time sending emails about distant projects. The evident alternative is Esther Summerson, a model housekeeper who cares lovingly for her friends and relatives and refuses to interfere with distant strangers’ lives on the ground “that I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated …; that I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others …”

Fair enough, but we could also ask why Dickens decided to depict Mrs Jellyby instead of a different kind of person, for instance, a man who was so consumed with social reform that he neglected his spouse, a woman who successfully balanced public and private responsibilities, or a woman, like Dorothea Brooke, who yearned for a public role but instead devoted her life to the private service of men. Both the intention and the likely consequences of Dickens’ portrait are to suppress the public role of women.

The general point I’d like to propose is this: the moral assessment of literary characters (lately returned to respectability by theorists like Amanda Anderson) requires two stages of analysis. First one decides whether a character is good or bad–or partly both–within the world of a fiction. And then one asks whether the author was right to choose to create that character instead of others.