The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive PiecesKilmer, Joyce
History
The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces
Kilmer, Joyce
American essays; Literature -- History and criticism
Among the simplest and least literary people, events that greatly
disturb the routine of life--wars, famines, pestilences,
earthquakes--seem to develop writers automatically. The great thing has
happened and must have a record safer than man's fickle memory. So
inevitably come the chronicler and his chronicle. The demand creates the
supply. But the desire to ensure remembrance of events is not in itself
sufficient to ensure the existence of literature. There is also what I
have termed the urge to attract. The savage warrior may carve on stone
or paint upon a strip of pale bark a record of his own brave victory or
ingenious escape. This he does to attract the attention and admiration
of his public, such as it is, to his courage and intelligence. And also
the mere making of the record is in itself an achievement certain to
bring to its maker the wonder and esteem of those lacking this strange
power. And this sort of admiration, he finds, comes to him even when the
things about which he writes are not his own doings. So subjective art
comes into existence. Man writes because of the urge to worship to-day,
as he has always done. He utters prayers that have been provided for his
needs by divinely constituted authorities, and to the unspoken
ejaculation of his heart he silently gives the best literary form
possible to him--the directness and passionate simplicity proper to
great literature. He repeats, when he prays in accordance with the forms
prescribed by the Church, great literature which came into existence
originally in response to the urge to worship. And in all languages the
writings of most enduring loveliness, even apart from those divinely
inspired, are those which relate most closely to worship--those writings
made immortal by the love of God. So writers may fulfill the purpose for
which they are made by writing--may know God better by writing about
Him, increase their love of Him by expressing it in beautiful words,
serve Him in this world by means of their best talent, and because of
this service and His mercy be happy with Him forever in Heaven.
There is also the motive which perhaps gives rise to the common and
fallacious idea of the writer's inspiration--the motive which I have
designated as the urge to create. Of course the only true creator is
God, and for a creature to seem to create may be a perilous thing,
savoring of blasphemy. Certainly the evil egotism of some writers, using
their talent for the destruction of their souls and those of others, is
a blasphemous thing. This is a matter better suited for discussion by a
moral theologian than by a critic, but surely it is possible for the
writer to assay his task of creating a work of art the more humbly and
the more joyfully because it is done in reverent imitation of the Maker
or Poet of the universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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