Disappointments

Today I report two disappointments: one minor and one major. I had been looking forward to both the books for a long time, so even the minor disappointment stings. But that’s just the way it goes; as an explorer, I’m not going to enjoy all my planned destinations. And as I noted in March, after a disappointment like Browning, there’s usually a pleasant surprise like William Cullen Bryant.

First the minor disappointment. I had read about Roger Bacon many times. I knew him to be the Doctor Mirabilis, a thirteenth-century philosopher practicing and advocating empirical experiment three hundred years before Galileo. In reading his Opus Majus, I thought I would encounter a hundred-and-one ideas, half of them not quite right, but all of them too odd for the rest of the European intelligentsia to appreciate before their time. Instead, what I found was a man working hard to convince the Pope that intellectual study was a good Christian pursuit and offering not a compendium of his scientific findings but a mere sampling offered to support his persuasive argument without overwhelming His Holiness with details and jargon.

Bacon’s physics, for instance, consisted mostly of examples of the application of one representative principle: that things striking at an angle impact with less force than things striking perpendicularly. His explanation that things coming at 90 degrees come faster isn’t quite right: a stone heaved by a catapult actually travels faster after reaching the apex of its arc than a similarly massive stone dropped from the same height since added to the vertical speed of falling, which is the same for the two stones, the lobbed one has lateral motion, as well. But Bacon’s on to something when he observes that the stone hitting obliquely does less damage, and, since he knows that the earth is a sphere, he gets close to being right when he says the same principle is the reason that the sun’s rays give less heat when they strike us at an angle (as either in the morning or near one of the earth’s poles) than they do when the sun is overhead.

Still, I enjoyed reading through his dissertation on the causes of human error, his argument that Adam and Noah knew mathematics and other branches of philosophy, his demonstration that musical knowledge is essential to understanding languages, and many other parts of his Great Work. By contrast, I did not enjoy reading William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End at all. I disliked it so much, in fact, that, for only the third time in three decades of planned reading, I gave up on a book.

I know that Lewis and Tolkien admired this book and found inspiration in it. But I don’t see it. To begin with, there is no moral center here, no purpose to Ralph’s questing higher than his own desires and passions. He falls in love instantly with various women because of their beauty and has free sex (although the land is ostensibly Christian!). He seeks the Well at the World’s End only because he hears about it from everyone he meets and because it gives eternal youth. But he’s unhappy, so why should he want to prolong his life unnaturally? On top of these problems, Ralph encounters, deals with, and talks about far too many women-whom-the-woman-in-the-woods-met and tall-men-who-remind-him-of-the-man-from-the-village. To riff on Churchill, every character is an enigma which, taken away, leaves a mystery which, unwrapped, reveals only one more dude wanting to fight or yet another girl wanting to have sex with Ralph. I cannot help but think of Mark Twain’s rule no. 10:

They [the rules of literary art in fiction] require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale [Twain’s target was Fennimore Cooper] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

If anyone knows of a good analysis of Morris’s fantasy that could change my mind, let me know. In the meantime, I’m on the lookout for the next William Cullen Bryant.