Weekly Reading Journal, October 13-19, 2024

Reading Journal is a day late this week because I was under the weather, but this gives me a chance to share the results of my Classics Club Spin.  Spin #39 was announced last Saturday, and I have been agog with anticipation awaiting the results.  As of this morning, the Wheel has spoken, and I will be reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer!  I have only read selected tales, so I am excited to read this work in its entirety.  My list is always compiled using a random number generator, but, weirdly, it generated several Gothic tales this time.  I was convinced that I'd get one of those, but I am not disappointed.

This week I started making my way through Tremendous Trifles, an essay collection by G.K. Chesterton.  There is no writer quite like Chesterton, in style or substance; he's always an interesting read.  I particularly loved a passage from the essay "A Piece of Chalk," which, on the surface, is about young Chesterton drawing with chalks upon brown paper out in the countryside:

They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

I love nature art of all sorts, from Romantic landscape to medieval manuscript borders to natural history illustration, so I was dubious about the start of this passage.  By the end, my breath was taken away.  I love where Chesterton went with this - artists and poets were always taking inspiration from nature on the plane of symbol and emotion, if not as direct copyists.

I finished three books this week, two of them on the same day!  On Wednesday I finally wrapped up Vanity Fair, which I have been reading for weeks, and also finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which was a short read.  On Friday I came to the end of The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton.  Reviews to follow.

I did read some spooky stories from The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by John Polidori and others, but nothing that has really thrilled me yet.

COMMONPLACE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past." - G.K. Chesterton, "A Piece of Chalk," from Tremendous Trifles

ART OF THE WEEK

Jane Morris: Study for "Mariana" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868

Chalk on brown paper, in honor of Chesterton's essay. :)  This is a study of Jane Morris which Rossetti later referred to for his painting of Mariana, completed in 1870.  "Mariana" is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, based on the character of Mariana in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.  Tennyson's poem very much inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, with Millais and John William Waterhouse also creating paintings based upon it.  The subject of a poem is a woman weary from waiting for her lover to return, forlorn, isolated, and despondent.  I actually prefer this chalk drawing to Rossetti's later painting - it better captures that expression of melancholy weariness on Jane's face, and her very posture seems listless and tired.  What makes you weary, Jane?  Is it your marriage to William Morris?  Is casting you as Mariana a sly comment by Rossetti that you should prefer him?