Hortus Vitae Essays on the Gardening of Life

by Vernon Lee

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109 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Violet Paget, known by her pen name Vernon Lee, is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel, poetry and contributed to The Yellow Book. An engaged feminist, she always dressed à la garçonne, and was a member of the Union of democratic control.

Her literary works explored the themes of haunting and possession. The English writer and translator, Montague Summers described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction."

She was responsible for introducing the concept of empathy (Einfühling) into the English language. Empathy was a key concept in Lee's psychological aesthetics which she developed on the basis of prior work by Theodor Lipps. Her response to aesthetics interpreted art as a mental and corporeal experience. This was a significant contribution to the philosophy of art which has been largely neglected.

"The Lie of the Land", in the voume "Limbo, and other Essays", has been one of the most influential essays on landscaping.

Additionally she wrote, along with her friend and colleague Henry James, critically about the relationship between the writer and his/her audience pioneering the concept of criticism and expanding the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's (or her personal) response. She was a strong, though vexed, proponent of the Aesthetic movement, and after a lengthy written correspondence met the movement's effective leader, Walter Pater, in England in 1881, just after encountering his famous disciple Oscar Wilde. Her interpretation of the movement called for social action, setting her apart from both Wilde and Pater.

Reviews

[Francisca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es bella y tosca la vida si así la queremos ver. No nos basta vivirla, tenemos que ahondar en ella, llevarla a la superficie desde las profundidades de nuestros pensamientos y deseos y darle, si precisa, de un valor intrínseco de acuerdo con nuestra alma. Vernon Lee es lo que ha hecho aquí con diversos temas traídos a colación que, de acuerdo con su época, nos esboza con aletargada ensoñación mental, pero de una extrema lucidez. El entusiasmo prominente de cada texto nos hace replantearnos esos temas de los que trata (ya sea asistir al teatro como leer, recibir cartas o un regalo o volver e irse) de una manera perspicaz y nada ausente de la vida. Es innegable ver la asiduidad que tiene Lee con la palabra escrita. Son palabras que asumen al intelecto de una dotación exhaustiva, detallada, sin abogar por ningún tipo de filosofía en sí misma. Vernon Lee no era filósofa, pero podría serlo perfectamente. Con una elocuencia extraña, sus textos definen a la perfección lo que la autora pensaba y percibía, especialmente percibía. Es así su pensar y su ser único en su especie, pues sus opiniones, lejos de ser conservadoras, eran profundamente radicales. Dignas de un esfuerzo puramente intelectual.

Es una autora perspicaz, que sabe lo que dice, sabe de lo que habla. Ahuyenta lo que no le gusta y lo que más le gusta lo atrapa con palabras. En este libro, Vernon Lee aboga por ejercer el derecho del silencio, el del silencio interior. Un trasfondo silente se alarga y se adecua despacio y con fuerza a lo largo de este libro. Ella le llamaba Los jardines colgantes, los jardines celestiales que acabarían en suelo terrestre. No voy a hablar de ello, mejor léanlo en este libro que se sumerge en la mente de una de las personas más brillantes de su tiempo.

Los temas de los que trata, exceptuando un par, bien podrían ser actuales y bastante adecuados a nuestra época, pues son temas perennes, que ahondan en la amistad, en la gracia de saberse elocuente respecto al resto de seres. Hay cierta independencia en estos textos, pues la opinión de Lee es puramente, como ya hemos dicho, de rebelión contra un sistema conservador y que poco tiene que hacer con estas ideas latentes. Estas ideas que se sumergen en la vida de una mujer que escribiría y escribiría y escribiría y de la cual su escritura tendría un profundo calado para épocas venideras, especialmente en el campo de la estética y la ficción.

La labor de la autora es encomiable y profundamente anti-intuitiva: nunca sabemos lo que está pensando. Pese a que escribir o hablar ya sea la consecuencia de esto. Esto no lo digo yo, lo dice ella en este libro. Y es que sus ensayos, breves como si fueran imágenes, como si fueran fotografías que detallan un respectivo campo, se inmiscuyen de una manera más objetiva que subjetiva sobre la vida. Pese a que la sensación de leer a Lee sea poderosamente deudora de unas opiniones fuertemente influenciadas por su época, por los temas que se trataban entonces, hay una linea temporal por encima de todo lo que se trata aquí. Vernon Lee era, ante todo, una buscadora de la verdad. Y eso no podemos negarlo, no podemos no verlo, porque su objetividad, pese a estar gravemente servida en bandeja, era puramente personal y única.

Son estos textos pequeños jardines. Que juntos, forman El jardin de la vida. Que juntos, se encomiendan a lo salvífico en las palabras.

[Majenta · Rating 4 out of 5]

The things you find when you don't know what you want!

[Tom Ewing · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.)

Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story writer, and aesthete active in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. She’s not quite forgotten now – there’s a Vernon Lee society with its own journal – but her essays come quite low down the list of things people remember about her. She’s better known for her supernatural fiction, her feminism and pacifism, and her theories of psychology and aesthetics – she was one of the first people in English to use the word “empathy”.

Said theories centered on the idea that appreciation of art was a matter of unconscious bodily response. They were considered eccentric. Her opus, Beauty And Ugliness, co-written with her work, travel and romantic partner Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson, was met with bafflement and mockery: the two women ended their relationship soon after. Undoubtedly an odd work – it consists mainly of Kit’s minute observations of her physiological and posture changes when she encounters beautiful objects, and Lee’s philosophical glosses on same - it feels more relevant in the era of neuroscience and embodied cognition than it probably did in 1897.

Set beside these grand theories, or the epic anti-war denunciations of her allegorical play Satan, The Waster, the essays in Hortus Vitae (the Garden of Life) are knowingly and endearingly slight. But the subject – how to enjoy life with minimal regret – seem just as important to me, particularly as I drift into my mid-40s as greedy for culture as ever and as lazy as ever about actually getting out and experiencing it.

Lee’s point of view has two elements I particularly sympathised with. The first is a sense of optimism – looking for the best in experiences, taking opportunities, and so on. She’s honest enough about the general difficulty of this that her efforts seem sincere. The second is a keen appreciation of context as a shaper of experience – the way the smell of a theatre changes the play; the way a bicycle changes the landscape. One of the best and most specific essays, “A Stage Jewel”, describes Lee’s disappointment when she realises some jewellery she’d bought was made for the stage – not because it’s fake, which she knew, but because the understanding of the specific fakery collapses any mystique the object had. Or at least I think that was the issue. By that essay I’d grown accustomed to Lee’s unhurried, slightly arch style, occasionally direct, more often ornate – appropriate in a book devoted to pleasing oneself, however clear-eyed it is about the problems involved.

[The Usual]

I loathe self-help books, despise inspirational quotes and positively detest being lectured to, so I really ought to hate this book of essays. Vernon Lee has, you see, a philosophy of life – what I think is now called mindfulness – and she’s written these to tell us all about it. It’s very sensible, no doubt, but nothing like as deep as she thinks.
I didn’t hate it; I rather enjoyed it. I think I rather like the woman.
The saving grace is that she approaches her subject in a diffuse, inoffensive fashion and writes with warmth and style. That counts for a lot. It feels like she’s talking to, rather than at, the reader and wanders off subject charmingly often.
A good one to dip into.

Purely for reference this is a volume of light essays in English consisting of:

I. DEDICATION
II. THE GARDEN OF LIFE—INTRODUCTORY
III. IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
IV. ON GOING TO THE PLAY.
V. READING BOOKS.
VI. HEARING MUSIC
VII. RECEIVING LETTERS
VIII. NEW FRIENDS AND OLD.
IX. OTHER FRIENDSHIPS.
X. A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM
XI. IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP
XII. KNOWING ONE'S MIND
XIII. AGAINST TALKING
XIV. IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
XV. THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
XVI. SERE AND YELLOW—INTERLUDE
XVII. A STAGE JEWEL
XVIII. MY BICYCLE AND I
XIX. PUZZLES OF THE PAST
XX. MAKING PRESENTS
XXI. GOING AWAY
XXII. COMING BACK
XXIII. LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
XXIV. THE HANGING GARDENS—VALEDICTORY

[Matt Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rambling, mysterious little book on recognizing the possibilities for the good life in the most mundane of things.