The business of an artist is the practice of his art
In my last column, I remarked in passing that while great music is always original, originality alone doesn’t account for its greatness. The same is true of all art, of course, not just music
As for why this so, something C.S. Lewis had to say on the subject, which I came upon just the other day, is especially insightful:
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
Bach would have understood this. So would a painter like Fra Angelico. Or the builders of the cathedrals. These were artists whose originality did not derive from challenging tradition, but rather from mastering it so completely that they had no place else to go but forward.
The fact is each of us is altogether original. As the song would have it, there will never be another you — just as there never has been. Bear in mind that anyone can learn the Palmer Method of penmanship, but everybody’s handwriting still remains unique.
One sometimes hears it said that two people looking at a tree do not see the same tree. But that isn’t quite correct. Both see the same tree, but each has a different experience of it. Looking at the tree is only one factor in that experience.
We are not passive receptors and processors of sense data. When we look at something — really look at it, not merely glance at it — we encounter it. We bring to it the whole of our being, which includes — is practically equivalent to — that continuously changing process known as experience. By becoming a part of that experience, that tree becomes a part of ourselves. As Aquinas would have it, knower and known become one.
That is why, if one describes what one has experienced as accurately and as precisely as one can, the reader will know what your feelings are about what you have experienced without your having to go on about them. Inexperienced reviewers often make the mistake of paying too much attention to how they feel about what they are reviewing, and not enough to what they are reviewing.
It isn’t that reviewers ought not to communicate how they feel about what they are writing about. That is, after all, one of the purposes of a review. But they will better get across how they feel if they concentrate on the details of the work under consideration, not the details of their reaction to it. The attempt to accurately and precisely describe the details of the work will necessarily guide them in the choice and placement of their words. Their feelings, in other words, will come through without their having to belabor them.
Something else will come through as well: Their originality. That focus on accurate and precise description will also compel them to fully engage once more with the work under review and the uniqueness of that encounter is bound to be evident.
The business of an artist is the practice of his art, not the display of his personality or originality. Those can take care of themselves. The more of himself that the artist puts into his work, the more of himself will be manifest in that work. What Eliot says of poetry is true of all art:
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Or, as the painter Georges Seurat put it: “Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.”
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It’s true that as a reader of reviews I’n not uninterested in how the reviewer feels about the book, but more interested in how I will feel when I read the book.