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Neglected Genius
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 Geniuses, as we all know,
are often unrecognized in their own time. That’s why we need
the National Endowment for the Arts. Were it not for the support of the
federal government, the philistine American public might have failed to
appreciate the young woman who smears chocolate all over her nude body in
front of live audiences.  She might have had to do it alone in the privacy of her
home, languishing in obscurity. Unless she did it on videotape, even posterity
might not be able to appreciate her.
The
myth of the neglected genius isn’t entirely false. On the other hand,
artistic charlatans are often appreciated far too much in their own time.
Does anyone remember Salvador Dali? Does “Dada” ring a bell?
Or
how about the great Pablo Picasso? Picasso was to painting what Lenin was
to politics: a man who was far too successful in his day. Is there any
particular work of Picasso on which the eye lingers with delight and
permanent interest? Would anyone pay for his paintings if they
weren’t famous — or rather, if Picasso himself hadn’t
become a celebrity?
I
mean, if nobody had ever heard of Picasso, would you, looking at one of his
mature efforts, say to yourself, “I’ve just got to have
that!”? Don’t be silly. What would be the point of owning a
Picasso if you couldn’t tell people you owned a Picasso?
Picasso’s early work shows that he had considerable skill as a
painter. But his career helped banish the idea of skill, or craftsmanship, from
discussions of art. It wasn’t long before our colleges were full of art
majors, which led to the existence of what is now called “the artistic
community”: a critical mass of art majors who can’t support
themselves and demand that the taxpayer support them.
Along
with the bogus genius, there is another category we often overlook: the local
or temporary genius. Some artists are successful in their own time and
place, but opaque to foreigners and underrated by posterity. Their work
doesn’t travel well. J.S. Bach suffered a long eclipse when his music
went out of fashion; his sons achieved more celebrity than he did.
![[Breaker quote for
Neglected Genius: Local, bogus, and the real thing]](2006breakers/060907.gif) Often an artist finds his
best audience in his own contemporaries. A poet writing under the name
“William Shakespeare” made a smash in 1593 and 1594 with a
pair of narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece. Later he published plays that remain fairly popular,
but in his own time he was known chiefly as the author of these two poems,
which even Shakespeare scholars rarely read nowadays. Hamlet
and King Lear have traveled well. Venus and
Lucrece, which outsold the plays for
decades, haven’t.
Too
bad, because Lucrece is a masterpiece of its kind. It lacks the
drama of the Shakespeare plays, but it demands, and rewards, a different
kind of attention. It must have cost its author far more effort than his
dramas. Its difficult rhyme scheme and solemn, compact wordplay make it
the poetic equivalent of a Bach fugue. (Richard Burton’s superb
recording of it is still available.)
Modern readers, eager to get on with the story, find
Lucrece tedious, but it invites a sort of appreciation we rarely
give: It solicits our admiration for its own amazing workmanship. It’s
deliberately artificial because it assumes that artifice itself deserves
attention. The story of betrayal and rape would no doubt have raced faster
in the hands of James M. Cain, but it says something for Elizabethan readers
that they savored the artistry of Shakespeare’s slow-motion
treatment.
But
the Elizabethans’ favorite poem was much longer and slower-moving
than even Lucrece: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie
Queene. It still has its partisans, but they are dwindling. Spenser was
so popular and respected in his own day that when he died, he received a
huge funeral and most of London’s great poets threw their pens into
his grave in homage.
So
it’s smug to assume that we moderns have a keener appreciation of
great art than our ancestors did. Our current opinions aren’t the final
standings. And the government can hardly administer criminal justice; only a
fool would ask it to discharge poetic justice.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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