It seemed a good day to embark on some Victorian reading (inspired by my rereading of Possession which evokes the Victorian period so wonderfully) and I chose to go with some John Ruskin: The Pleasures of England, a series of lectures he gave at Oxford in 1884.


Filled with strident, oft heavy-handed opinions that sweep with intended majesty and authority over the topics of art, religion, and race, the lectures are, nonetheless, interesting in terms of his inclusion of story, his use of metaphor and his sentence construction.  If nothing else. I'm afraid I wasn't swayed by his intended majesty and authority.  Oh, I suppose I'm being a little hard on Ruskin.  But he is so terribly self-assured that it troubles one.


I do appreciate the construction of the lectures.  I miss lectures.  University lecturing is seemingly, and sadly, becoming a rare thing these days and I think it is to our detriment. After all, it is one of the ways we learn.  Not the only way, but one way.  And to lose one way, even one, is still to lose.  And there is something efficacious in the act of listening that is missing in the act of participating (not to mention ignoring).


But back to Ruskin.  He certainly can, and does, impart ideas worthy of note:


"When a boy falls in love with a girl, you say he has taken a fancy for her; but if he love her rightly, that is to say for her noble qualities, you ought to say he has taken an imagination for her; for then he is endued with the new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in her, —and this neither falsely nor vainly. His love does not bestow, it discovers,what is indeed most precious in his mistress, and most needful for his own life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her better, he discerns her more truly; and it is only the truth of his love that does so. Falsehood to her, would at once disenchant and blind him."


And this rather important point about the study of things that have gone before us:


"If the reader believes in no spiritual agency, still his understanding of the first letters in the Alphabet of History depends on his comprehending rightly the tempers of the people who did."


And, once again, while reading Ruskin and noting his many allusions to things he assumed his listeners were familiar with, I marvel at the encyclopaedic nature of the Victorian attention, the voracious curiosity.  Even with (or perhaps because of) our ability to access information instantly, we are a desperately lazy generation by comparison, seems to me.