Sherry Chandler » Ruskin’s cat
Ruskin’s cat
Mathematics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature. When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its applicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point comes out more sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge Moore over the problem of Ruskin’s cat, the animal that was picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and cannot be logically proved. It is “proved” only by the practical and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet, qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real or Ruskinian.
— Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism
You will find a longer explanation of Ruskin’s cat and the correspondence between W. B. Yeats and Sturge Moore here at God of the Machine. I do not endorse the opinions of relative poetic worth, having never read Sturge Moore or the correspondence.
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1 Comment
1. poppysmatus replies at 26th May 2006, 1:09 pm :
The answer to Yeat’s statement that Ruskin could not have differentiated between his house cat and the phantom/demon cat is that his house cat would doubtless have taken a bit of Ruskin’s anatomy along with it out the window.
Possum seems to be guarding her presumptive daddy against the possibility of imposture or defenestration. Or perhaps refenestration.
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