The Creative and the Critical, or Taste and Genius

Genius can, of course, dispense with taste. Of this Beethoven is an example. Mozart, on the other hand, his equal in genius, has, in addition, the most delicate taste. – Claude Debussy

In his overview of Kurt Cobain’s life, Steve Sailer makes the following remark:

Evolutionary psychologists such as Geoffrey Miller of the U. of New Mexico often argue that geniuses don't generally have better thoughts than you or me; they just have far more thoughts, and then choose the best of them.

Miller puts it this way:

Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers – they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. (Page 409, The Mating Mind)

Miller is certainly right that one of the hallmarks of almost all great artists is their obsessive need to pump out product, a need which often manifests itself well before they have any idea what they are doing. All but a very few artists have large heap of embarrassing juvenilia stored up somewhere, whether published or unpublished. (Unthinking poetry editors, unfortunately, have a habit of piling this stuff up at the start of a Collected Poems and therefore scaring the living daylights out of the casual reader.) Even after an artist matures, they all too often tend to produce an endless string of good but minor work, before finally hitting upon the material for their best work. For example, in reality, Mark Twain is essentially the author of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James is essentially the author of The Portrait of a Lady, but would they have written those two works without the impetus that led each to produce that shelf full of books they have mouldering away in university libraries everywhere. I am astonished that, time after time, the urge to produce leads writers and artists to keep pumping out work after work, long after it has become obvious that they no longer have anything left to say. Examples of this are too numerous to cite, but I am particularly haunted by the image of the dying Bernard Malamud having dinner with Philip Roth and his crushing disappointment at Roth’s judgment that he should not publish his last novel. Not that I would discourage any artist from continuing to work; sometimes lightening strikes again, like it did for John Huston, who, long in the creative wilderness (he hadn’t made a good film since the early 50s), returned marvelously to form with the late masterpiece The Man Who Would Be King.

But, partly true as Miller’s theory is, it cannot be the whole explanation for artistic genius. To be a genius you can’t just produce a huge number of ideas and then just magically pick the best ones. You need to be able to pick the best ones. You need to know, more or less, which the best ones are. Furthermore, not only do you have to pick the best ideas, you need to be able to follow them up, develop their implications, and put them into some sort of coherent order. As Mihaly Csikzentmihaly puts it, “Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one – and this selectivity involves convergent thinking. Manfred Eigen is one of several scientists who claim that the only difference between them and their less creative colleagues is that they can tell whether a problem is soluable or not and this saves enormous amounts of time and many false starts.” With some modifications, this holds true in the artistic world as well. A novelist needs to know almost instantly whether a story is worth telling. A composer needs to see right away whether a folk tune has the potential to be turned into a symphony. Sure a few false starts are allowed (almost all artists have produced inferior work), but you only get so many free passes.

Let us concede then that these two abilities, the one, to generate lots of ideas, the other, to recognize good ideas, are both necessary for an artist to achieve greatness. But they are not present in equal amounts in all artists. Some are more prolific, others have better taste. This is perhaps best illustrated by Paul Valery’s comparison of Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

Thus Baudelaire regarded Victor Hugo, and it is not impossible to conjecture what he thought of him. Hugo reigned; he had aquired over Lamartine the advantage of infinitely more powerful and precise working materials. The vast range of his diction, the diversity of his rhythms, the superabundance of his images, crushed all rival poetry. But his work sometimes made concessions to the vulgar, lost itself in prophetic eloquence and infinite apostrophes. He flirted with the crowd, he indulged in dialogues with God. The simplicity of his philosophy, the disproportion and incoherance of the developments, the frequent contrasts between the marvels of detail and the fragility of the subject, the inconsisitency of the whole - everything, in a word, which could shock and thus instruct and orientate a pitiless young observer toward his future personal art - all these things Baudelaire was to note in himself and separate from the admiration forced upon him by the magic gifts of Hugo, the impurities, the imprudences, the vulnerable points in his work - that is to say, the possibilities of life and the opportunities for fame which so great an artist left to be gleaned. . . .

Hugo never ceased to learn by practice; Baudelaire, the span of whose life scarcely exceeded the half of Hugo's, developed in quite another manner. One would say he had to compensate for the probably brevity and foreshadowed insufficiency of the short space of time he had to live, by the employment of that critical intelligence of which I spoke above. A score of years were vouchsafed him to attain the peak of his own perfection, to discover his personal field and to define a specific form and attitude which would carry and preserve his name. Time was lacking to realize his literary ambitions by numerous experiments and an extensive output of works. He had to choose the shortest road, to limit himself in his gropings, to be sparing of repetitions and divergences. He had therefore to seek by means of analysis what he was, what he could do, and what he wished to do; and to unite, in himself, with the spontaneous virtues of a poet, the sagacity, the skepticism, the attention and reasoning faculty of a critic.

As Valery sees, Hugo is an example of an almost purely creative artist, while Baudelaire is an example of a more “critical” artist. Like many creative artists, Hugo was enormously productive. As Harold Bloom has said, “Has anyone read all of him?” He managed to produce 7 novels, 12 plays, 155, 000 lines of verse, scores of essays. Baudelaire, in contrast, gave us only one slim volume of verse in Les Fleurs Du Mal (which tops out at 176 pages in Richard Howard’s English translation), and an even slimmer book of prose poems in Paris Spleen. Furthermore, as with many “creative” artists, the quality of Hugo’s work is extremely variable. Among his vast sums of poetry and prose are many pieces that are apallingly amateurish in quality: when Hugo is bad, he is very bad. Furthermore, he lacked the ability to unify longer works. Despite his epic pretensions, he never could write a coherent long poem, and, marvelous as his novels are they give off the impression of great big bags stuffed to bursting with all sorts of colourful rags. I don’t necessarily fault him for his inconsistency: it was what he needed to do to produce great work, and, besides, it is always our privilege as readers to pick out the good work and ignore the bad.

However, one has to be careful here. While a creative artist is, almost by definition, enormously prolific, a prolific artist is not therefore necessarily a creative artist. Almost all the work of the very productive Henry James, except for the wonderful The Portrait of a Lady, bores me nearly to tears. But it is all exquisitely written; the Jamesian prose style never flags. When reading his late work, I can never think of a good reason to stop, though I may be desperately hoping to find one. While his work may be boring, it is never in bad taste, and therefore I cannot quite put him in the same category as Hugo. James seems to me more of a primarily critical artist who suddenly caught the creative fire, only to have it abandon him for the rest of his career.

If Hugo and Baudelaire are perhaps the best examples of the creative and the critical poet, perhaps Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are the best examples of the creative and the critical novelist. Dickens, much like Hugo, was enormously productive. By the age of 42, the same age as Austen died, Dickens had already written ten large novels, several novellas and short stories, two travel books, a history of England, and a mound of varied journalism. His novels are notoriously messy in construction, and even some of the best contain appalling lapses into sugary sentimentality and overcooked melodrama. Austen, by contrast, had only her six relatively short novels and a few pieces of juvenilia. Her books are perfectly plotted, highly economical, and are always put together with the most perfect taste. They have no fat on them. If they never quite rise up to Dickens’ heights, neither do they falls down to his lows. I am not sure I would go so far as Paul Johnson, who says that Austen was a great artist without being a genius. Certainly her characters are not rammed with life in the same way as Dickens’, but Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett are still lively enough by any standard. Even so, Johnson’s point is well taken: Austen does not share in the creative faculty to the same degree as a Dickens, a Shakespeare, or a Chaucer. She is not as rich in invention. I would note, however, that even Dickens was not as pure a creative artist as Hugo. When meeting Dickens, people sensed being in the presence of a critical intelligence, sometimes, they thought, rather coldly sizing them up for placement in one of his novels. Furthermore, his books, unlike Hugo’s, always rest on a bedrock of good sense and human decency. Dickens just plain wasn’t as crazy as poor Hugo. Even outside his writing, Dickens personal life was far less disordered, his political judgments were far more sagacious, and his work on behalf of the poor and oppressed consisted far less of rhetoric and posturing and far more of pragmatic help. All we know of him, from his treatment of others to his artistic procedure, suggests him to have been a much more intelligent man, and a much more critical artist, than Hugo.

However, it is important to note that even so nearly pure a creative artist as Hugo could not do entirely without critical skills. In order to create great art, you have to be able to recognize, at least vaguely, what great art is. You have to have some degree of taste and perception, and you have to understand at least the basics of craft and construction. A 1200 page novel like Les Miserables may inevitably be something of a loose baggy monster, but even Hugo’s immense headlong invention and ability to entertain still needed to be put into some kind of coherent order. You cannot just throw everything but the kitchen sink into a book and call it a novel. Even Les Miserables, vast and digressive as it is, achieves a kind of unity, and that, to my mind, indicates at least some kind of critical intelligence.

It should be noted that Victor Hugo’s artistic inconsistency illustrates an important point: to be a primarily creative artist you don’t necessarily have to be that smart. Paul Johnson, in his recent book Creators, called his chapter on Hugo “The Genius Without A Brain” and quotes the great French critic and storywriter Chateaubriand, who called Hugo a “sublime infant.” Now, I don’t think Hugo could have had that low of intelligence. Most scientists working in this area don’t think you can do truly great work in the arts with an IQ of below 120. While I agree with that, I would go further: almost all truly major artists have had an IQ well above that minimum threshold. However, if asked to nominate any author of worldwide importance as a candidate for having an IQ of under 130, Hugo would be it. As Black Sea, commenting on one of my earlier posts, said “I wouldn't be surprised to discover that talented critics generally score higher than talented artists. IQ tests focus on abstract reasoning, and while art has its element of craft and construction, reasoning alone is hardly sufficient to bring a piece of work to life.” If you haven’t been blessed with the Dickensian or Hugoian plentitude of invention, then like Austen or Baudelaire, you are going to need every tool of analysis you can get your hands on, if you hope to challenge them in the artistic realm. This is not to say that Austen and Baudelaire had no creative faculty. No artist can do entirely without it, but the less you have of it, the more you are going to need your intelligence to help you compensate.

II.

What exactly do the creative and the critical faculties consist of. The creative faculty seems to consist of two things, the ability to generate ideas and a strong work ethic, while the critical faculty seems to consist of high intelligence and high sensitivity. Now, you might ask, why group can’t these four attributes be regarded separately? Why group them together into two faculties? Why not consider each of them separately? Well, because the characteristics they tend to correlate with each other.

Let us consider intelligence and sensitivity. One main reason that they tend to go together is that both one’s raw brain power and one’s emotional sensitivity are both at their height when young. Both start deteriorating in ones 30s. This is one of the main reasons that lyric poets tend to peak so early. Poetry is both the most abstract form of literature and the one requiring the most sensitivity, and therefore it. But because a poet has only so long before his intelligence and sensitivity start to fade, he not only has to meet the high demands for abstract thinking inherent in his art, but he has to learn how to master it quickly. Therefore this jacks up the IQ requirements even more. Furthermore, he needs every bit of sensitivity he can muster to learn as quickly as possible from his precursors, jacking up the requirements for his art there. The same thing applies to critical artists in other genres, to a lesser degree. Still, even in something like that novel, very few critical artists continue to make real contributions into old age. Among critical artists, those who have the most intelligence tend to last longer than those whose art is based almost solely on sensitivity. A high IQ critical artist like James Joyce can keep learning and therefore can sometimes keep coming up with new high concept ideas to keep their art going. But for an almost purely intuitive artist like Walt Whitman, once sensitivity is gone, it is gone, leaving a burnt out poet to gaze back at his past achievement and wonder where it all went.

On the other hand, it is not hard to see why the ability to generate ideas and a work ethic go together. If you are not blessed with a lot of intelligence to quickly evaluate what does and does not work, you are going to need a lot of trial and error to finally get it right. You learn by experience and because coming up with new ideas is something natural you will have lots of material to try out new things with. So what if you put out a lot of junk. Its all grist for the mill. Furthermore, if you have a hard time distinguishing good work from bad, you may need to pump out a lot of product before the stars aligns in your favour and the right combination appears, often as if by magic.

Certain genres lend themselves to a certain type of artist. Critical artists tend to work best in lyric poetry, shorter stories and the essay, creative types in the drama, epic and the novel. It is rare for a novelist to achieve success early in life. He needs to gather and synthesize vast amounts of social data before he can start his work. A few young critical artists can sometimes produce a good version of what I would call the lyric novel, such Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But books like those do not exploit the full potential of the genre and are hardly candidates for the novel at its best. In spite of their extremely fine prose, neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway is on the level of Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, James, or Faulkner, let alone that of Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy, or Proust. Lyric poets however quite often appear at an early age, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud, and only a few, Hugo, Browning, Frost, Hardy, Yeats, and Warren, continue to produce great work into old age. Lyric does tend to be a genre for the young and for primarily critical artists, but this is not a hard and fast rule. Primarily creative artists too have throve in the genre and continued their poetic careers well past middle age.

If I had to choose which faculty is more important to the artist I would have to say the creative. Without it the artist is sterile. Sensitivity and intelligence are great for appreciation, but they are not in themselves enough to create something new. Intelligence can help shape a work of art into a coherent whole, but the materials of art come from intuition. Without creative ideas there is nothing for the intelligence to shape Furthermore, the critical faculty can actually inhibit creation. I remember talking to an aquaintance who works as a fine artist and she told me that she often has to actively suppress the urge to be critical and just let things flow. Primarily critical artists, however good, tend to produce very little.

The creative and critical types I have sketched here tend to parallel the experimental and conceptual types outlined by David W. Galenson. However, Galenson’s typology only emphasizes intelligence in the conceptual type and work ethic in the experimental type. This has serious problems. It compels him to minimize distinctions between which types of genres better suit which kinds of artists. For example, it is possible for a critical (conceptual) writer to write a good lyric novel when young, but the genre tends to favour creative artists. Even fiction writers, like Joyce and Melville, who tend a bit more to the critical end of things, have a lot more creative characteristics than their counterparts in lyric poetry. In turn, while several lyric poets like Hugo, Browning, Frost, Hardy, and Warren (please note that Hugo, Hardy, and Warren were also great fiction writers) continued to be productive well into old age, there is no point denying that lyric poetry on the whole does tend to favour younger artists like Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Colridge, Byron, Rimbaud. Furthermore, Galenson’s taxonomy leads him to misclassify artists. Henry James, for example, was a critical artist masquerading as a creative artist. He produced an extrodinarily fine prose, wrote a good many good critical essays, and had only the one indisputable achievement, The Portrait of a Lady, which he wrote at a relatively young age for a novelist. But James wanted to be an old master like his idol Balzac, and he set himself to the talk with immense deliberation. He continued to learn and produce new work right up to the end of his life. He was indeed a master of his art. But Galenson’s focus on James’ undoubted work ethic leads him to ignore the fact that, while extrodinarily well crafted, James’ later work is rather thin in content. What mislead Galenson was that the novel as a genre tends to favour the creative type, so that, when working in the novel, even a primarily critical artist like James will show creative tendencies. James vast intelligence and sensitivity mark him out a primarily critical artist, but his work ethic adds a tinge of the creative to his achievement.

III.

How does the critical aspect of being a great artist relate to, well, being an actual critic. Well, the pattern holds. Very few critics have been very productive as poets or fiction writers. The ability to recognize great art, apparently, does not always come with the ability to create it, and vice versa. While many major literary critics, from Johnson and Hazlitt to Coleridge and Ruskin, have managed to put out a large body of critical writing, not many have produced a comparably large amount of poetry, and none at all have given us a major work of fiction. Samuel Johnson produced only two major poems, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Coleridge, during his poetic phase, produced only six poems of real value. Valery’s prose vastly overshadows his poetry. T.S. Eliot, like his model Baudelaire, produced only enough verse to fill a slim volume. William Empson too had only the one volume. Chesterton was prolific at everything, but his prose output dwarfs his poetry, most of which is pretty minor stuff anyway. Auden sure wrote enough poetry, but most of it is just going through the motions. Only his relatively early Letter to Lord Byron and a very few lyrics are really worth reading. The only real exception I can think of is John Dryden, but then he, unlike Johnson or Coleridge or most of the others, was a much better poet than a critic. Many major critics, from Hazlitt, Ruskin and Pater in the 19th Century to Frye, G. Wilson Knight, Kenneth Burke, and Harold Bloom in the 20th, have given us nothing of worth except their criticism.

However, if most critics have been unproductive as poets, their achievement as fiction writers has been almost non-existant. Poetry is the most abstract of literary genres and the one that requires the greatest sensitivity, therefore poets tend to be primarily critical artists. As intelligence and sensitivity are the prime critical virtues, this also means that they tend to be much better critics than novelists. Some of the most staggeringly creative artists in that genre have been strangely unable to produce good criticism. Victor Hugo, the epitome of the creative artist, had extraordinarily bad taste, and Dickens, despite his vast acres of journalism, never engaged in any criticism of any authors whatsoever, preferring to support anyone and everyone who came across his path. Of novelists noted for writing criticism, only Henry James and Virginia Woolf come to mind, and as critics they are pretty small potatoes compared to Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Valery, Eliot, Empson, Auden. One might round up Chesterton and C.S. Lewis into the fiction camp, but they wrote rather short archetypal fantasies, a poetic genre somewhat removed from the social novels of James and Woolf. Pater gave us Marius the Epicurean, but that unusual work was mostly criticism disguised as fiction. Poets, who tend to be primarily critical artists, also tend to burn out early. But they are also still intelligent guys who read a lot and can still write a bit. However, while the intelligence and sensitivity that characterize the critical artist are also the prime virtues of the actual critic, criticism also requires a broad experience of the art one is criticizing. Therefore, it tends to be the providence of poets who, having passed beyond their best days as poets, still have much to say on the subject of poetry. Criticism seems the perfect literary vehicle for such men, and, in fact, this is exactly the pattern one sees in the carreers of Johnson, Coleridge, Valery, Eliot, Empson, etc.

The work of the critic is in many ways similar to the scientist, in that he is highly reliant on convergent thinking. The chief difference between the work of the scientist and the work of the critic is that art is above all else about your subjective experience. There may be an objective reality behind that experience, but unless you experience it yourself, it is lost to you. Though a critic may reason, compare, and systematize much like a scientist, he cannot rely on anyone else’s data from which to do his work. Therefore, unlike a scientist, a critic doesn’t just need to be intelligent, in the sense of being able to reason well, he needs to be perceptive too. His own experience is the data from which he must reason. He may pay some attention to authority, but ultimately he can only rely on what he himself knows. If he is imperceptive, as many very high IQ people, especially in the sciences, are, he will not make good critical judgments. Interpreting art well requires more than just raw intellectual horsepower.