{"id":123627,"date":"2018-04-03T11:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-04-03T15:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=123627"},"modified":"2018-04-03T11:17:44","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T15:17:44","slug":"between-me-and-my-real-self-on-vernon-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/03\/between-me-and-my-real-self-on-vernon-lee\/","title":{"rendered":"Between Me and My Real Self: On Vernon Lee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is in one\u2019s own jottings something curiously unique; and after a lifetime spent in working on my own notes, I still sometimes catch myself feeling as if such manipulation of them came between me and my real self.<\/em> \u2014Vernon Lee<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vernon Lee was the nom de plume of Violet Paget (1856\u20131935), a writer of astonishing range and audacity whose published works include historical studies of art and music, dense treatises on aesthetic psychology, acclaimed travel essays, meditations on gardens, pacifist and feminist pamphlets, and supernatural tales. Her versatility is difficult for us to comprehend, which is one reason why she is not as widely read now as she deserves. Already in her later years, she presented the avatar of a bygone intellectual moment. In a 1920 review of her political-philosophical allegory\u00a0Satan, the Waster<\/em>, Bernard Shaw (in fact also born in 1856) saluted her as a figure of \u201cthe old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan intellectualism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s cosmopolitanism was not restricted to her intellect. Born to English parents in France, she had a nomadic childhood, living all over France, Germany, and Switzerland before finally settling in a villa in Florence, which would remain her home for the rest of her life. She drew intellectual collaborators and adversaries from across Europe, and though she commanded widespread respect, this did not always imply fondness. Henry James warned his brother William that Lee was \u201cas dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent, which is saying a great deal.\u201d Perhaps even to her contemporaries, Lee remained too various to grasp.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s thoughts on art and beauty seep through her literary criticism, her ghost stories<\/a>, her historical meditations. She baptized herself as a \u201cstudent of aesthetics\u201d in her 1881 volume Belcaro<\/em>,\u00a0by which she meant that she was turning her attention from art in its historical context to art\u2019s effects on individual experience. It was also in 1881 that she first met Walter Pater, who had laid out a program for such study in the opening pages of his 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance<\/em>: \u201cto define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.\u201d Lee openly acknowledged Pater\u2019s influence on her efforts to approach the beautiful through the following decades.<\/p>\n

Her 1884 volume Euphorion <\/em>was dedicated to him, and her 1896 Renaissance Studies and Fancies <\/em>concluded with a \u201cvaledictory\u201d eulogizing the recently deceased master. There, Lee defended Pater against the imputations of decadence associated with the slogan \u201cart for art\u2019s sake.\u201d His aestheticism was not irresponsible hedonism, she insisted, but a recognition of the power of art to harmonize the self with itself and with the world. Reflecting on this conviction years later, Lee conceded that it was vulnerable to the charge of mysticism or even childishness: \u201cBut is anything worth attaining ever attained, whether knowledge or love, without some such brief and hushed moments of expectant childishness?\u201d<\/p>\n

As Lee\u2019s farewell to Pater, the 1896 valedictory also marked the conclusion of one phase in her study of aesthetics, for she was already hard at work on the investigations of aesthetic psychology that generated \u201cPsychology of an Art Writer\u201d and \u201cGallery Diaries.\u201d From her earlier work and her readings of Pater she retained the conviction that the study of aesthetics had to begin with individual experience. But her sense of what constituted aesthetic experience had begun to expand, and in particular, she began to focus on the effects of art on the body of the beholder. In this new inquiry, she was no longer follow\u00ading Pater but was a student of her lover, the artist and writer Clementina \u201cKit\u201d Anstruther-Thomson.<\/p>\n

Lee and Kit were practically inseparable companions from 1887 to 1898; Lee\u2019s biographer, Vineta Colby, has called their relationship a marriage \u201cin all but a literal sense.\u201d In 1924, Lee wrote that watching Kit approach art, innocent of erudition but finely attuned to her own bodily and affective responses, convinced her that \u201cfor ten or more years I had written about art without having really seen it.\u201d Lee was impressed by Kit\u2019s description of the subtle effects of a work of art on her body: quick breaths, sensations of movement, muscular tensions. These effects had nothing to do with the subjects depicted by the artwork but were entirely matters of form: lines, curves, rhythm, movement. Lee and Kit began to wonder if the interaction of form and the body was not in fact the primary moment of aesthetic experience, anterior to any mental impression of beauty. The experience of pleasure would be the effect, not the cause, of such bodily sensations. They found a parallel idea in the new theory of emotion developed independently by William James and Carl Lange, who proposed that what we commonly refer to as the physiological expressions of emotions are in fact identical with emotions. Fear does not cause goose bumps and quicken the heart; it simply is <\/em>those symptoms. Following the same logic, beauty would not be the cause of bodily responses; rather, the physiological response would constitute beauty.<\/p>\n

Here, Lee always conceded, she was following the testimony of Kit, whose body seemed so much more sensitive to artworks than her own and who was so much more adept at registering her physiological responses. Kit was \u201cskilled from childhood in every kind of bodily activity and possessing every kind of dexterity of hand\u201d; in contrast, Lee found in herself \u201cneither facility nor training in bodily activities \u2026 Conscious life concentrated, so to speak, on the eye and the literary faculties.\u201d Lee would later recall how Kit\u2019s physical energy totally surpassed her own, how Kit had nursed her when she was ill and had challenged her to stretch the limits of her body as she grew exhausted by continual gallery wandering. In turn, Lee pushed Kit\u2019s mind, encouraging her to work toward a publication of the aesthetic theory they were developing together. In the end, it was Kit who could not bear the intensity of their collaboration. Just before their joint essay \u201cBeauty and Ugliness\u201d appeared in 1897, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon afterward, Kit and Lee separated, although they remained dear to one another, and Lee became Kit\u2019s literary executor upon her death in 1921.<\/p>\n

Lee always gave \u201cBeauty and Ugliness\u201d pride of place in her aesthetic theory, even as she came to correct and refine it over the years. When she published a volume of collected writings on aesthetics in 1912 under the title Beauty and Ugliness<\/em>, she reprinted the essay in its entirety at the center of the book. She added a few footnotes but did not change the body of the essay, except by bracketing certain passages where she and Kit now diverged. Lee had come to believe that the bodily responses she had found so compelling in Kit were probably secondary expressions of an essentially mental phenomenon: \u201cempathy,\u201d or, as it was named in German aesthetic theory, Einf\u00fchlung<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When Lee and Kit composed \u201cBeauty and Ugliness,\u201d they were unaware of the psychological aesthetics being developed in Germany by Theodor Lipps and Karl Groos, but their work showed striking parallels. Lipps\u2019s theory of Einf\u00fchlung <\/em>(literally \u201cfeeling-into\u201d) proposed that in the act of perception, we project ourselves mentally into what we perceive. This would explain, for example, why we might say that a line has \u201crhythm\u201d: because our eyes follow it with a certain movement and this movement activates memories of former movements, we attribute motion to the line. One point of contention in the debate over Einf\u00fchlung <\/em>was just how much it was a physical process. Lipps maintained that it was purely mental and saw in \u201cBeauty and Ugliness\u201d too much emphasis on the body, evidence of a general \u201ccult of bodily sensations\u201d in psychology. Karl Groos, on the other hand, believed that empathetic projection was always accompanied by minute physical imitation of the form perceived. Later on, Lee came to vaguely associate Kit\u2019s views with Groos and her own with Lipps. But she went further than either of the psychologists wished in making empathy the foundation of our judgments of beauty and ugliness and refusing to suspend the question of why we like some artworks and not others.<\/p>\n

After \u201cBeauty and Ugliness,\u201d Lee came to see herself as a fellow traveler of these aesthetic psychologists but always maintained distance. From her villa in Florence, she kept up with their journals and occasionally published in them. She submitted a questionnaire on \u201cthe motor element in visual aesthetic perception\u201d to the Fourth International Congress of Psychology in Paris in 1900. The texts presented in our volume originally appeared in the Revue philosophique<\/em>, a leading journal of psychology. Oswald K\u00fclpe, the W\u00fcrzburg experimental psychologist, respectfully noted in a 1907 literature review that \u201cGallery Diaries,\u201d though methodologically suspect, showed some promise. K\u00fclpe and his students were trying to address the rudiments of aesthetic response in highly controlled settings. A famous K\u00fclpe experiment involved flashing projections of ancient Greek artifacts for a few seconds before a spectator to see if they sensed anything like Lipps\u2019s Einf\u00fchlung<\/em>. (The results, such as they were, were negative.) Nothing could be further from Lee\u2019s long walks, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, through the great museums and cathedrals of Italy, already packed with guided tours.<\/p>\n

Lee had in fact visited K\u00fclpe\u2019s laboratory in 1911and was greatly impressed: \u201cI have come away with the conviction not only that theirs is the future way of studying aesthetics, but also that is the way in which, alas! I can never hope to study them. My aesthetics will always be those of the gallery and the studio, not of the laboratory.\u201d She and Kit, she wrote, were the rear guard of psychological aesthetics, like the dabbling eighteenth-century antiquarians superseded by modern archaeology. What she framed as her untimeliness may be precisely what keeps her interesting. \u201cGallery Diaries,\u201d relatively free of the technical vocabulary of the psychological aesthetics of her time, provides one of its most compelling documents today. Lee was fascinated by the foundations of aesthetic experience, but she refused to reduce it to those foundations. Artworks work on our bodies. Lee saw that any aesthetic theory had to give an account of the interface between the body and the world but that such an account could not exhaust the experience of art.<\/p>\n

It certainly could not fully explain why we might be moved by one artwork and not another or, even stranger, why we might be moved one day and untouched the next. Because Lee never bracketed these questions, her aesthetic theory approaches a theory of the self. Who has not had days of dullness? Who has not tried to force themselves to be moved, to be interested wandering through a museum? For Lee, the experience of boredom, of just not feeling it was as much a problem for aesthetic theory as the experience of rapturous engagement. Blockages like weather, crowds, and heartache were not extraneous variables but essential elements of aesthetic experience. Lee never cast out evidence in advance for the mysterious workings of art. The object of her investigations was the self. The stage of these investigations was the world, where tourists intrude, friends die, days are sunny, you have a tune in your head. All of this is possible evidence for what art does to us.<\/p>\n

Lee never intended for her own self-analysis to be the sole foundation for aesthetic theory. She was relentlessly introspective but also committed to collaboration. \u201cPsychology of an Art Writer\u201d and \u201cGallery Diaries\u201d modeled a method for fellow \u201cpsychological workers\u201d as a kind of manual of attention. Lee\u2019s wager in these texts is that aesthetic experience is emphatically individual but not atomized beyond communication, and it is only through such communication that we might refine our understanding of art and its effects. By sketching a capacious picture of the experience of art, they stand as a challenge to the more anemic versions of laboratory aesthetics. The optimism of Lee\u2019s position is that aesthetic theory can be synced up with aesthetic experience. Such a theory, she says, must be social as well as rooted in the body. It must account for boredom as well as rapture. It must take up day-to-day changes as well as long-term fixations. A rich vision of art is a rich vision of the self. There remains much in Lee\u2019s vision of art to guide today\u2019s psychological workers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dylan Kenny is a writer and Ph.D. student in classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He coedited the exhibition catalogue <\/em>Jason Rhoades: PeaRoeFoam (David Zwirner Books, 2015).<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>the introduction to<\/em>\u00a0The Psychology of an Art Writer<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>by Vernon Lee, published by David Zwirner Books, 2018. Courtesy of David Zwirner Books, New York\/London\/Hong Kong.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  There is in one\u2019s own jottings something curiously unique; and after a lifetime spent in working on my own notes, I still sometimes catch myself feeling as if such manipulation of them came between me and my real self. \u2014Vernon Lee Vernon Lee was the nom de plume of Violet Paget (1856\u20131935), a writer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1450,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33548,33549,4383,153,33550,16192,33547,19057],"class_list":["post-123627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-bernard-shaw","tag-clementina-kit-anstruther-thomson","tag-ghost-stories","tag-henry-james","tag-studied-in-the-history-of-the-renaissance","tag-vernon-lee","tag-violet-page","tag-walter-pater"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBetween Me and My Real Self: On Vernon Lee<\/title>\n<meta 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