Against Experience: The Craftsman approach to art.

The goals of this essay are as follows;

1 = the support of writing as equivalent and not unique against the broader arts in the question of ability accumulation.

2 = the opposition of the cult of the natural genius, which is a perversion of the spiritual genius accessible to all men, and a privation of skill to a nebulous abstract mundane aggregation called life experience.

3 = to exorcise the conjured shade of the starving artist as the archetypical ruler of the great-art maker, on account that literary quality achieved in poverty is in spite of poverty, not owed to it.

To justify our first premise, to draw a swift litany of gentlemen who all echo my opinion would serve for an opening.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the father of the rhetoricians and his work “on imitation” is a whole book arguing for the imitation of other authors in the view of their works as models, as the only way to further the art on account that all of the basic elements of composition (that is to say, word order choices, rhythms and basic practical ornamentation ) have already been found, agreeing with these sentiments we find no less than Cicero the great, whose works are consciously in imitation of Demosthenes, isocrates and Aristotelian dialogue, further enhancing the Roman cloud we have Quintilian whose influence extends all the ways into Neo-Latin, being the germ from which Erasmian Latin takes root, likewise if we look at the Greek stylists themselves they all held to various schools and masters to imitate, for which they call Homer the father of their styles and greatest source to imitate, turnt to the poets themselves we need only ask Virgil his debt to Homer and the neoteric poets + Theocritus, or Homer his debt to the collections of idioms and expressions of which scholars say he had sown together to create the Greek epic literary texture, or among the English we may ask Shakespeare his debt to Ovid and Marlowe, or Milton his debts to Virgil and Marco Girolamo Vida (and numerous others, 10 lines nearly never pass without Milton flipping or reworking or translating or inverting another poet’s lines.) likewise ask Dante his debt to Virgil and Statius and Bernard of clairvaux, ask Edmund Spenser concerning Petrarch and the Pléiadean poets, Dryden and d’avenant concerning Roscommon and Shakespeare, herrick of Ben Jonson, and onwards we can trace out these multitudes of clear pastiche and sons through the high experimentations of browning all the way too the completion of the modernist engine of mechanism and gears of styles in the current scion of poetry (James Fenton.) and study is not harmed by turning to the east, the fabulous antiquity of the book of odes itself just being a crystallization of the finest folk song build up of variable layers, of which, abstracted, became the basis of the sophisticated analysis of the Chinese poets, but beyond this, even the august gǔwén yùndòng movements prose masters, by no means would the illustrious Han-Yu be considered an innovator and not a refiner, even the esoterica of Li-He (so influential to the ghost genre even to the late yuan writers like Yang Weizhen) is nothing but the refinement of qu yuan’s Chuci style, whether it’s the early glories of the tang, or the late manchu-led propagandist-revivalist styles of the Qing, for all three of the jiangdong masters were simply revivalists, or even the modern state communist casual verse, pastiche and imitation is the common element. I need not repeat myself with but a switching of names concerning the extreme influence of kalidasa or the Vedas over Bharat as a whole.

Beyond this litany let me clarify further, that, a gentleman seeking to become a better painter studies both books on painting, and his favorite paintings, yes he studied the real life vision for examples of modes and pretty particulars of arrangements, but his primary substance is the painting, drawing and architecture and theories of other men, for “nani gigantum humeris insidentes” we dwarfs must stand upon the shoulders of giants, even the seemingly most idiosyncratic talents in painting, carving, architecture and music are soon to give you a similar litany of great influencers and geniuses by which their work would be impossible in its current state if not for the ingestion of their elements, thus this is the common state of the arts, da Vinci without the workshop of Andrea del Verrochio IS NOT da Vinci, and to demonstrate a real example of practical rhetorician gaining ability, not by some inborn genius but by the grueling endeavor of practice, let us look to the recommendations of Benjamin Franklin quoted at length.

“I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand.”

“Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them”

“I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.”

“I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.”

“By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer.”

And what is this?! But the wildling away at wood, but the slow process of looking over the works of another’s hands and trying your best with numerous failures to replicate their craft in finer and finer procession, what is this but the study of a manual and the replication of the parts into the order devised by the erudite, if we turn to Nietzsche he gives glory and honor and praise to Emerson (as does Whitman) if we turn to Melville he thanks the French and the Elizabethans alike, if we turn to starbuck Mayo or Keats or Blake or Poe, we find similar pastiches in their letters and prose and verse glorying in their predecessors for being their continual teachers. Where then is genius?

Swinburne in his essays divides the great writers into two categories, the Olympian vision and the Titaniac strength, those Olympian poets are those who have mastered the manners of their predecessors and by the natural ebbs of time have unified their voices with the idiosyncrasies of their own modern character, thus John Lucas Tupper’s genius preemptively attains the modernist-strain over 150 years prior to its creation, this is not simply because he was born with the ability, he was a magnificent scholar and performed the calculative dialectic internally by comparing the various stylistic modes already available. Genius is not simply given to you, intellect is given to you by God perhaps, capacity as a whole, but unlike Aesop given the boon of isis, or Pindar’s tongue stung by the bee, we cannot count on being blessed with any ability save an ever regenerating endurance which, if traded, may build an edifice of capacity equal to any idolic glory of any writer fabled to receive their boon.

By this same logic, let us turn the dagger of reason against the fable of the starving artist and the value of suffering to art, the first conceit is that the starving artist dedicates the bulk of his time to his art, in reality actual poverty not sustained by the wealth and help of patrons results in a deficit of time dedicated to the basic necessities of living, that is, not the higher life, but the worry over the most mundane (not even lowest) elements of life. Such was not the situation that bred Virgil or Horace, such was not the situation of king David and Solomon, such was not the situation of king siddharta, how many great writers prose stylists poets and rhetoricians have had the title statesman? Success in art despite poverty is a modern conceit abstracted over the sad failures of a few gentlemen, who, themselves, despised their circumstance. Poe and Melville and Clark Ashton smith, while perhaps never trading their castles of dreams for wealth, would surely all prefer the castle dunsany over their own dilapidated hobbles, one need only look to these three’s works to show no sympathies for poverty as a glory, by no means I do not intend to say that the base elements of an artists construction have no influence over the quality of his works, a man who makes a statuette out of gold begins with a glorious substance, a man who makes a statuette out of dung begins with a lamentable substance, to these two statements we must consider two proverbs, “all that glitters isn’t gold” and “you cannot polish a turd” all that seems to be of fine poetic rigor as a substance does not always yield to always being so, the intrinsic deficits will always yield themselves, the lack in the prose style of Dostoevsky is recognized by Russian critics, and the latter Tolstoy repents his early works mundane tedium, a man of skill like Maxwell Bodenheim never shakes the oppression of his choice of materials, whereas the child fantasies of ER Eddison need no refinement in their substance, it is the child’s undiluted and unrefined palette which secures it against the delusion that the taste of dung is fashionable and the taste of meats and sugars are not, where the child’s taste lacks is depth and nuance, it is imperative we do not confuse a depth of thought with simplistic mundane sufferings, or a nuanced conception or mode of speak or experience, with simplistic pathological depression and hatred of the self and others. How then do we uncover these depths, these nuances of style, peculiarities in voices of character? Why the answer is simple, if it was simply life experience, each old man would be an utterly idiosyncratic stylistic master, no rather, turn the focus to the actual masters of many styles, Robert bridges whose published numerous studies ranging from his friend Hopkins, to the most complete analysis of Milton, to the most diverse treatment of Virgil translations, to endless attempts at pastiche of multitudes of modes, for example his improvement of Blake’s style demonstrated by his pastiche in this stanza.

“Now, while the west-wind slumbereth on the lake,

Silently dost thou with delicate shimmer

O'erbloom the frowning front of awful

Night to a glance of unearthly silver.“

It is by the combination of modes, voices and multitudes of past treatments with each other that we experience escalations in the Vision and Voice, this is the chief value of parody and decadence, the allowance of the voices to grow a self-exaggeration until they gain new euphonies and new cacophonies, consider for example the oddity of witter bynner’s combinations of Chinese verse with western modernist modes in the manner of Jeffers and Whitman, likewise consider the artificial folk songs of the isle of white, clearly constructed with Walter Scott and even Milton in mind, or even just the exaggerated Poeism of MP-shiel, a man who may as well be the son of Eureka, yes certain gentlemen have advanced their style by a conscious integration of their inherent neuroticism, chief among these Robert Murray Gilchrist, Guy de Maupassant and to some degree, Kafka, but a cursory study of any of these gentlemen will demonstrate a laborious Flaubertian perfectionism to this integration that is not simply born of them having it, but of them desiring to magnify voices which already have them, this is most evident in the cryptic statements of Kafka’s proverbs, this again is no simple benefit of constitution, but the conscious move of calculated creation, in the same way no one will attribute the painter Francis bacon’s style to simply having asthma or being a homosexual, by no means can we attribute their styles to these elements of their character, no more so than we can contribute the high learned style of Dali to him simply being a quirky man, instead of his conscious imitations of Velasquez, Miro, Picasso, Salvador Rosa and numerous medieval fabulists and contemporary surrealists.

Now that these delusions have been dispelled, let us speak briefly on the proper mannerism, among the stylists we will find numerous terms “maintain the strain” “higher voice” “the poetic vein” “the poetic daimon” “the blessing of the muses” “the flow “ all of these terms speak to the proper craftsman perspective of poetry, where, having hit the “vein” of what the greater artistic modes sounds like, you demonstrate you can repeatedly maintain the voice, you can as a river, continue the outpouring, just as you’d expect any common city in England or Germany to have a gentleman whose wood working talent could craft a fine and lovely statue by sure fire methods, so also, should you expect to be able to go to an irrelevant place, like say, Eyam England and find at least a few gentlemen such as Richard Furness at any time, who, being studied, may match (and due to the benefit of the inertia of time and the gift of gradual refinement) overwhelm the quality of someone like Milton, just as you’d expect your local woodworker to be able to match his predecessors but with the benefits of modern materials, Dryden says this in his praise of Congreve

“The present age of wit obscures the past:

Strong were our sires; and as they fought they writ,

Conqu'ring with force of arms, and dint of wit;

Theirs was the giant race, before the Flood;

And thus, when Charles return'd, our empire stood.

Like Janus he the stubborn soil manur'd,

With rules of husbandry the rankness cur'd:

Tam'd us to manners, when the stage was rude;

And boisterous English wit, with art endu'd.

Our age was cultivated thus at length;

But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.”

That, despite the lacking of originality of strength, the lacking in modifications in the spirit of the time, the lack of new-vision, their pure ability regardless now excels their ancestors; fletcher, Jonson and laurel-crowned Shakespeare, and, on account of there being in Congreve the same strength as Shakespeare, he has of course, matched the sheer strength of him but matched it with finer skill.

How then do we differentiate the skill and the strength? Simple, strength is the Olympian vision, skill the sheer elemental ability to craft finer words, for which the restoration critics and Victorians, the best minds from John lambe to Swinburne, begrudgingly admit Middleton has the same if not superior elemental strength than Shakespeare;

“As Eden in choice flowers: thine honours such

As all the world may strive to imitate.

Be master of thy wishes: only this,

When the sad nurse, to still the wrangling babe,

Shall sing the careful story of my death,

Give me a sigh from thy heart's purest breath

And so farewell”

And this is born of simplistic mastery of voicing and manner, not even an Olympian vision of personas and moments, likewise William jaggard successful fooled the Elizabethan public by muddling the works of the great Thomas heywood (called by lambe the prosaic-Shakespeare ) with Shakespeare’s verse, therefore, if even the greatest respect stylist in English is able to be matched by the craftsman workers(of which he is but one) , with the only discernible difference be in the accidents of character and temporal construction, surely, the whole range of writing is nothing more than a question of conscious ability to write well and the conscious mastery of the techniques OF writing well.

It is up to us, craftsmen, in our demiurgy of the logos to differentiate between Tintinnabulation and the ringing of the bells, when either is appropriate, for in this subtle but fully rational art is the entirety of the breathing life and beauty into our fabricated clay golems of art, it is not the writing of the truth upon the golem’s head, it is the characters in Hebrew that must be placed upon it for it to live and die, likewise the specific conscious characteristic of our works determine their life and death. This arcana is not to be learned idly, for this is the highest degree of conscious solidification, as Wagner says, “man is nature made conscious of itself, and art is man conscious of himself” likewise, Dante calls art the grandson of god, for it is the child of man, thus it must be born of will and treated with the creative mastery befitting it.

For further reading, see Poe’s philosophy of composition, where he dispels the notion that any of his work is not pre-planned, by taking us step by step through the process whereby he created (the world famous) “the Raven” through pure calculation of his ideals and selection of sensual materia for such.