"Artistic Integrity" and "Over Influence"

“Artistic Integrity” and “Over Influence” 

“ Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence”  (Emerson, The American Scholar p. 58).

“ In the shadow of the reputation of his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau had to contend with the substance of Emerson’s teaching, which was not kind to derivative success”  (Jonathan Levin, Introduction, Henry David Thoreau  “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience”, Barnes and Noble Classics p. xviii).

“ Emerson was the apostle of self-reliance, and took a dim view of disciples”  (Levin p. xviii).

“ I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system” (Emerson p. 57).

“ Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he/she announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his/her word, or his/her second, be he/her who he/her may, I can accept nothing”  (Emerson, from the Divinity School “Address” p. 79).

“ I read …some verses written by an eminent painter (Washington Allston 1779-1843) which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines; let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men; that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes thee outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of thee Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within”…” Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another “.

“ The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”  A sculpture of a face, a character, or a fact in your memory makes an impression on you alone. The placement of the eye is testimony to that memory.  But in reality, “ we but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.  A man is relieved when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance, which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. “

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, “ Self-Reliance”  (1841) A Treasury of American Literature, edited by Davis, Frederick, & Mott. Grolier Inc. NY. 1948. Scribner’s Sons. p. 738).