On Great Writing
And the many superfluous works.
THE great works of any Age are by necessity its exceptions. They are the anomalies which are the least representative of its spirit, and which have been elevated as exceptional for that very reason.
Cultural Historians, when they undertake to study a given period, do not confine themselves by any means to its masterpieces — to do so would be to misrepresent said period and deceive their reader. Instead, they have the unenviable task of combing through the reams of tedious political pamphlets, newspaper articles and minor poetical works, spun out by a thousands hacks. Works which are normally hidden away in academic libraries in order that we might, by its fewer good works, think the past greater than it was, and the present lacking.
The truth, as depressing as it is liberating, is that bad works have almost always outnumbered the great. But while great works are scarce, it is only the existence of lesser works which make their greatness visible: The spectacle of the tightrope walker achieving his feat would afford us no pleasure if experience did not make us conscious of the near-impossibility of his act, of the implicit danger, and of the great mountain of corpses below him (with their snapped necks and cracked ribs) that serve as a buttress to his greatness.
It is hardly conceivable how good works were distinguished from bad before the turn of the 18th Century, bringing as it did a middle class hunger for print and, consequently, a freer type of expression which was dismissive enough of good form to be able to reliably satisfy it.1 Here were born the pamphleteer, the minor poet, the third-rate satirist, and The Spectator columnist — all great buttresses of literature who “by the light of their own Genius … attempt[ed] upon new Models” and without whom genuinely good works would be indistinguishable.
Experience tells us that base works multiply at a greater rate than good ones, so that we can be assured that the quantity of hack writing is greater now than it ever was. Who has not, after leafing through a political magazine, or reading the blog of some late Catholic convert or other2, thought to himself: “You know, I could probably write something like this myself.”?
We owe to this very human tendency (and to platforms like the one you are reading) the exponential growth of bad works and, consequently, the greater appreciation of our truly great contemporary works, when and should they come along. Superfluous writing, then, serves an important function. It is on this basis that I have decided to take up the pen after such a long hiatus, this simple truth affording me (as, too, it should the writers of The Critic Magazine) no minor comfort in my endeavours.
Aided, in large part, by the disappearance of a conservative 17th century education, with its focus on rhetoric and form (what were called the Talkative Arts) in favour of a more practical-minded kind of education. This tendency in education, aided by (but not originating with) the Romantics, continues today, and without the prejudice of form we are inclined to judge a work nowadays, not by how skillfully it elicits what it aims to elicit, but (more hazardously) by the writer’s “performance”.
Or, indeed, The Pedestrian.