The Value of Creativity

The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief

John Hope Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754607601
• eBook ISBN: 9781351880664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the middle of the 19th century a new value began to appear in Western Europe - the belief that (in the words of Matthew Arnold) 'the exercise of a creative activity is the true function of man'. This book gives an account of the stages by which, and the reasons why, this development occurred at that time. In so doing it reveals a historical puzzle, for the main factors which can be seen to have given rise to the new value - mainly scientific, technological, economic and political - were not reflected in the value itself, for that was applied almost exclusively to artistic and cultural activity. John Hope Mason sets out to explain this puzzle by showing how throughout European history there have been two radically different views of the creative attribute. An early example of one view was the character of Prometheus in Greek mythology; influential examples of the second were the figures of God the Creator in Judaeo-Christian theology and the neo-Platonic One in Hellenistic philosophy. The book shows how the contrast represented by those figures informed discussions of genius in the 18th century and indicates why the notion of creativity which came to prevail then assimilated it with purely aesthetic and moral concerns. Combining a broad perspective with a close analysis of key figures - from Adam Smith, Rousseau and Kant, to Arnold, Marx and Nietzsche - this book casts a new light on a central value of the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

Prologue: the divine wanderer

I

A vision filled his mind, radiant and compelling. Everything he saw, everything he cast his eyes on, seemed dull in comparison. The vision glowed; it was another sun, his sun, his own source of life. In its warmth he was intact, no longer needing the warmth of other people. In its light new forms took shape, rare, brilliant, rich in meaning. The vision pulsated; it wanted to live. And such was the strength it gave him that he knew that he could make it real. The vision could be made flesh, as radiant and compelling as he saw it now.

It was not to be. His name was Victor Frankenstein, and what he created was a monster, a creature of such repellent ugliness that everyone who saw it was disgusted. After disgust came fear. For the monster, meaning well but rejected by everyone, refused to accept his lonely fate. He took revenge, killing those dear to Frankenstein — members of his family, his closest friend, and finally, on his wedding-day, his wife. The vision of beauty led to a nightmare of terror; the thrill of creation ended in hideous destruction.

Frankenstein was first published in 1818 and was an immediate success. Within a few years stage versions had appeared in both London and Paris and the story was as popular throughout the nineteenth century on stage as it has been over the last century on film. One early version of the story was called Presumption, another, a burlesque, was called Frank in Steam. These titles reflect obvious aspects of the book: the ancient theme that human beings should recognize their limits and not trespass on areas traditionally reserved for the gods (or God), and the modern theme of the dangers of science. Given the immensity of these latter dangers today it is not surprising that Frankenstein is generally taken to be a story about a reckless scientist.

To see it as such, however, is to miss the central significance of Mary Shelley’s work. For Frankenstein is not simply a scientist, he is a man of vision, and as such he could be a poet, or an entrepreneur, or a statesman. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was in his way such a man, and her husband the poet was pre-eminently that. The idea for the story came to Mary Shelley in the summer of 1816, when she and her husband spent time on Lake Geneva with Byron. The poems of that summer — Manfred, Prometheus, Mont Blanc — and Mary’s experience of both her father and husband can be seen to have contributed to, or to echo, material in the novel. Its scope is wider than the problem of science, and its implications are correspondingly more far-reaching.

Not only does Frankenstein have a vision, he also realizes his vision. He is, to the utmost extent, creative. And the unwelcome truth which the novel presents is that creativity may be both irresistible and undesirable. Frankenstein is not evil or malevolent; even at the end of his life he is described as ‘noble and godlike’, ‘a celestial spirit’, a ‘divine wanderer’.¹ There are times when he attributes his work to the desire for power and ‘boundless grandeur’² but his principal impulse is to achieve something novel and significant, the desire to ‘pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation’.³ It is the belief in this possibility which becomes an obsession and takes an ‘irresistible hold’⁴ on his imagination. Ambition played an important part but he was not moved by ambition alone. The vision had its own radiant attraction.

Where then did it all go wrong? Could Frankenstein have succeeded in his aim? After all, the monster was not malevolent. He had a tender heart — ‘my soul glowed with love and humanity’⁵ — and it was only when he was rejected by everyone that he became destructive ‘my vices are the children of the forced solitude which I abhor’, ‘misery made me a fiend’.⁶ Is it not possible that he could have been accepted, at the very least by Frankenstein himself who knew the situation? In the answer to this question lies the bitter truth of the book. For there is an intrinsic connection between Frankenstein’s creation of the monster and his rejection of it, between the initial glorious vision and the eventual catastrophic destruction.

The crux of the matter is Frankenstein’s isolation. To do his work he has to shut himself away from the living world, from the beauties of high summer, from friends and family. All his ‘feelings of affection’ to others, or to the charms of nature, were put in abeyance.⁷ It is not painful for him to do this, because the vision had such compelling power. He feels no loss or emptiness or absence. He immerses himself in his great task and becomes wholly self-absorbed. To be able to be this is essential to achieving his goal, but being this he is then incapable of accepting reality. The real world is different, it is not self but other. To create another being is precisely to create something different from oneself, and the ugliness of the monster displays this difference with melodramatic effectiveness. Frankenstein never admits, let alone accepts, the reality of this otherness. He cannot even bring himself to give the minimal recognition that is conferred by a name; all his emotions have become concentrated in himself. That is why his rejection of the monster is not fortuitous but inevitable.

On only one occasion does he show pity. The creature pleads with him to end his loneliness by creating a female companion. Frankenstein is moved by this plea — ‘I compassionated him’⁸ — and agrees to the request. He sets about repeating his work, travelling to the remotest Orkneys to find the solitude which he needs. But his efforts are fruitless; he is unable to summon up the same ‘enthusiastic frenzy’ of his first creation.⁹ He starts to think of all kinds of possible consequences and this leads him to abandon the attempt. This failure confirms what had been shown earlier. As obsessive ambition and self-absorption can enable a vision to be realized, so, by the same token, compassion is unproductive.

Mary Shelley emphasises this theme further by duplicating it. The account of Frankenstein and the monster is set within another story, that of the young explorer Robert Walton who is on a voyage of discovery to the unknown regions of the North Pole. Walton is convinced that he will find there ‘a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered’, not a ‘seat of frost and desolation’ but ‘the region of beauty and delight’.¹⁰ He has learnt to endure the cold and hardship so as to be able to pursue this dream, spurred on by ‘a love for the marvellous, a belief it the marvellous’, to go beyond ‘the common pathways of men’.¹¹

It is as Walton’s ship is sailing among the ice-floes of the Arctic that he comes across Frankenstein, then in the last stages of his pursuit of the monster. He immediately recognizes the latter as a kindred spirit and confides in him his dream.

[I told him] how gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise. One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought; for the dominion I should acquire over the elemental foes of our race. As I spoke, a dark gloom spread over my listener’s countenance … I paused; at length he spoke, in broken accents: ‘Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me — let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!¹²

In this context, as a cautionary tale to someone ‘pursuing the same course, exposing [him]self to the same dangers’,¹³ that Frankenstein tells his story. When it is finished, Walton again takes up the narrative. His crew do not want to proceed further north and come to him asking that the voyage be abandoned. Hearing this Frankenstein intervenes: ‘Be men, or be more than men. Be steady in your purposes and firm as a rock … Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes’.¹⁴ But the crew are not moved; and Walton is not self-absorbed like Frankenstein. He has always been conscious of lacking a true friend and he recognizes now his crew’s feelings. He rejects heroism and agrees to turn back.

When Frankenstein is told this he wants to be left on the ice for his final encounter with the monster, but he is now too weak to move. As death approaches he bids Walton farewell. ‘Seek happiness and tranquillity’, he advises him, ‘and avoid ambition’.¹⁵ It is wrong, he had said earlier, to pursue any course which ‘has a tendency to weaken your affections’.¹⁶ The moral could not be clearer.¹⁷ Yet even at this final moment Frankenstein does not regard himself as in any way to blame for what has occurred, and his final words reassert the validity of what he attempted. ‘I have myself been blasted in these hopes’, he exclaims, ‘yet another may succeed’.¹⁸ The vision remains irresistible.

The sight of Walton’s ship sailing north into the ever colder, ever bleaker Arctic emptiness, driven on by the belief that there they would find a rich beauty, is a powerful image of futile ambition. But when Mary Shelley wrote, the North Pole had not yet been discovered and the idea that it would be a region of abundance had a long history. Frankenstein’s search was similar in that it had been in graveyards and charnel-houses, among death, that he had found the source of life.¹⁹ But his labours were not in vain. Unlike Walton he ignored the claims of everyone else and did not turn back. As a result he succeeded. The vision was made flesh. It was not his creative impulse or faculty which was frustrated. On the contrary, his creativity operated at full stretch. The problem was that it could do so only at the expense of other equally (or more) essential feelings.²⁰

II

This book is about the way in which ‘creativity’ became a value. When Frankenstein was published no such value existed; that is to say, there was no general belief that to be ‘creative’ was, in the words of Matthew Arnold writing half a century later, ‘the true function of man’. To be sure, there were many individuals who had achieved fame for abilities which we would now call ‘creative’, and as Mary Shelley was writing that word was coming to be used in an increasingly wide variety of ways. But only in the middle years of the 19th century do we begin to read statements that ‘man is made to create’ (Disraeli),²¹ or that real human fulfilment lies in ‘positive, creative activity’ (Marx),²² or that ‘the exercise of a free, creative power…a free, creative activity, is the true function of man’ (Arnold).²³ In other words, only then did creativity start to hold a place which gradually became as central to our society as heroism, honour, piety, or virtue (in different forms) had been in earlier societies.

The aim of this study is to provide an answer to two questions about this development: first, why did this new value emerge then, at that time? and second, why did this value arise? why did it take that particular form, being applied almost exclusively to artistic and cultural activity?

The answer to the first question relates this development to the general transformation which occurred in Western Europe between the early 17th and the late 19th centuries, as a rural, agricultural, tradition-bound society gave way to one which was urban, industrial and increasingly open. Although we may assume that one of the distinguishing features of human beings has been their freedom to act in new and self-chosen ways, throughout most history that freedom was contained within an overall dependence, and the sense of dependence (expressed in religious beliefs and rituals) was pervasive. ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof , wrote the Psalmist; ‘it is He who hath made us, and not we ourselves’.²⁴ In general, people saw themselves as relying on external, nonhuman forces which (or, in the case of a Creator, who) provided the essentials both of material well-being and of intellectual and metaphysical coherence. Only in the 17th and 18th centuries did it gradually begin to become apparent that they were moving out of a condition of dependence into a world which, in the most important respects, they were making themselves. This change took time to register. Locke wrote in 1690 that ‘if we will rightly estimate things…and [assess] what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour,…ninety-nine out of one hundred are wholly to be put on the account of labour’;²⁵ but it was only two hundred years later that May Day, the annual festival of the earth’s fertility, became a celebration of human productivity.

There were three aspects of this change which seem to be particularly relevant to the emergence of creativity as a value. The first was the way in which scientific and technological advances began to make a sense of human independence possible (Chapter 4). The second was the fact that with the introduction of free-market economics there was not only gradually accelerating economic growth, but constant innovation became inescapably necessary (Chapter 5). Then, in the last quarter of the 18th century, the impact of these two (and other) developments reached as it were a critical mass and led to a new perception of history, namely, the modern idea of progress (Chapter 8). This notion of continuing improvement (so that not only will tomorrow be better than today, but the day after tomorrow will be better than tomorrow, and so on) had the effect of making the new not only possible and necessary but also desirable.

However, if this account is broadly correct, we are then faced with a puzzle, one which seems to have gone unnoticed and which this study sets out to explain. If it was the case that it was mainly these factors which enabled human beings to regard themselves as not being dependent on a Creator, but as being themselves ‘creative’, why did the value which subsequently appeared have nothing to do with technology or economics? Why was it applied instead to the non-material realm of aesthetic activity, with the paradigm of the ‘creative’ individual being not an inventor or an entrepreneur but a poet or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prologue: the divine wanderer
• 2 Creation myths and virgin birth
• 3 The lion, the fox, and celestial harmony
• 4 New worlds
• 5 Action and imagination
• 6 Genius
• 7 Intuition and judgement
• 8 Progress
• 9 ‘The true function of man’
• 10 Radiant twilight
• 11 Epilogue: the fire and the fennel-stalk
• Notes
• Index