That the restless inclination towards creative activity is transferable across media has been shown both empirically and theoretically. All too often we see individuals whose main creative focus is accompanied by additional muscle fibres of consciousness that can latch on to complementary pursuits as well. Einstein swore by his violin, William Blake defined Romanticism with both pen and brush, Goethe was the last universal genius (Serge Gainsbourg tried his hand at a lot of things too) and the Russian avant-garde pushed its vision in every possible way. We cannot help noticing that creativity spreads above all into similar vessels: a visual artist will try sculpture, painting, architecture, design; a musician will be versed in many instruments; and a man of letters may write poetry for an educated, elite audience or scripts for mass consumption on Saturday nights. It is thus no accident that there is a theoretical treatise on poetry whose thesis we can apply without qualms to creative activity in general.
Whoever Eliot wrote Tradition and the Individual Talent for, to me this text reads like a manual. A guide for budding artists, not yet burnt out by age, who under the weight of their hot blood and behind the veil of a bohemian pose still ignore an important fact: education is essential, you fool! And I do not mean the definition of education that refers to the years spent on the stuffy school benches of our schooldays. I see education as knowledge, experience, learning. Eliot says: “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” Eliot appears here as an apologist for tradition. But what does tradition have in common with creative work and thinking? Are tradition and innovation not, by any chance, in binary opposition? Is Eliot perhaps a die-hard fan of the dusty tweed jacket?
Plato, through Socrates, proclaims that poets at their peak moments do not produce work on the basis of technical skill or extensive knowledge; Plato claims that they are inspired by a divine force — the Muses have literally breathed into them these extraordinary abilities, which resemble a state of madness. Aristotle, for his part, says that the poet’s work is the result of rational, purposeful making (poiesis). Kant partly agrees with Plato when he says that genius is a capacity that does not consist in following particular procedures and is a mystery even to the creators themselves. Nietzsche, paradoxically, comes closest to current research when he says that creativity is a combination of Dionysian intoxication with vitality and passion and of Apollonian deliberate thinking, which channels chaos into orderly boxes and forms. But what image does creativity have in society?
I dare to claim that ordinary people still believe in the romantic picture of the lonely genius who creates on the margins of society and whose work is the product of a single mind. We have to set this notion in a wider context. Roughly 400 to 200 years ago, art was in the service of a higher power, that is, in the service of the church. Art was dedicated to God, and anonymously at that. It was not customary for a painter to sign his paintings. These “craftsmen” worked for others; they were hired house painters who decorated the walls of great lords or the stone chambers of the highest Lord of all. Only in the period of Romanticism did the idea of individual talent appear, of the genius creating on his own, inspired by walks among magical crags shrouded in a thick white haze of mist. The artist became a creator whose ability to create “ex nihilo” was synonymous with the abilities of God. From there it was only a small step to celebrating the mysterious act of creative making exactly like Genesis. The artist became a god. Although the popular mind still thinks so to this day, on 24 December 1859 there appeared a seemingly uncreative work by a seemingly uncreative individual — a scientist — which brought creativity back from the heavens to where it belongs: to earth.
The fact that a dogma more than 2,000 years old can be humbled by a single work is a splendid result for science and for evolutionary theory itself. However towering Darwin’s genius was, his On the origin of species was, of course, also the result of an evolutionary process. Lamarck, Malthus and Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus were an inspiration to Darwin, and an attentive reader will surely discover particular passages that Darwin had also read, remembered, and found useful when he was writing his Magnum Opus. But back to T. S. Eliot.
With his “manual” from an older, more experienced colleague, Eliot recommends precisely that all who are serious about art leave their insatiable ego in the wardrobe and realise that they are not gods but mortals. Not only poets but every creative person thinks and creates within a certain context: he is influenced by historical events, or by socio-political and cultural relations. But he in turn also influences this context. Just as biological life needs an environment (a context) in which the expression of genes can be realised, so the creative person necessarily needs an environment into which he can set the expression of his thoughts. This environment forms not only the material to which the creative person responds, but also the natural limits that determine the range of possible methods of expression the creative person can reach for. Besides the natural limits there are also artificial ones, which the creative person more or less chooses himself. These limits are formed by the active relevant knowledge available to the creative person while creating, by the material and by the field of activity. While a poet may, on the basis of his field, have his limits defined by the classical form of iambic pentameter, a painter has limits in the form of the size of the canvas or, more generally, of the medium in which he will work.
Although it may seem counter-intuitive that limits should be part of creative work, let us not be misled, and let us look at how Mother Nature deals with limits. What natural limits are more natural than the laws of physics? That galaxies, stars, planets and human beings exist, we owe precisely to limits. Nature has a repertoire for its whims that is admittedly vast but clearly not unlimited. Without limits, nature would have infinitely many possibilities from which to choose the shape of planets and the form of people. It follows logically that among all those possibilities there would have to be constellations in which the universe existed exactly as it appears to us now, but there would also be many, many failed attempts in which, instead of the beauties of nature, there would be some colourless, amorphous sauce of bad choices. Limits and certain rules are therefore necessary. But many rules exist only to be broken, and it is in overstepping them that creative work lies, for if some limits and rules remained unchanged, stagnation, decline and mediocrity would follow, and finally vulgarity. But how are rules to be overstepped?
Here I repeat Eliot’s words once more: “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” While a certain pinch of talent that influences the work of a creative person is indeed inherited, the large remaining part is a part that requires constant and purposeful activity: sweat and blood. Yes, this is that idiosyncratic definition of Eliot’s tradition: the traditional creator is the one who, at the moment of creating, has available in his head the whole genealogy of the works of his predecessors:
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
Eliot sees tradition as a monumental network of all works and creators, whose individual meaning is given by how they differ and what they have in common with one another. In order to understand and evaluate a work, we must have it before our eyes in the context of earlier works. The less a work has in common with the rest of that mighty network of predecessors, the longer, inevitably, it will take for criticism and then the public to evaluate and appreciate it. That, after all, is the fate of many greats!
(This network of meanings, by the way, closely resembles the structuralist view of natural language. Saussure, in his lectures on general linguistics, famously writes that the meaning of a linguistic sign is given by its relation to other signs)
If a person wants to achieve greatness, if he wants to break down limits, overcome rules and raise the bar, he must know exactly in what position and at what stage the limits and the bar are. That is why Eliot urges creative people to base their work on a careful, perhaps even pedantic, study of the history of their field, but also on a scrupulous observation of where the main current winds its way:
“The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes.”
But Eliot knows that such study requires a great deal of work: “The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon.”
And he is right. Just look at the creators of colossal achievements. Those who became greats knew very well about the history and current state of their field, but also beyond it. Richard Wagner was a devoted reader of Schopenhauer; the aforementioned Darwin was deeply immersed in the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley. The physicist Niels Bohr did not scorn Goethe. And Marx, however much his views were later distorted, was a passionate reader of everything: from Dante to Cervantes.
Fortune, it seems, really does favour the prepared.