The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [114]
The ability to do the labor is the second gift. The artist works, to echo Joseph Conrad once again, from that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition. To speak of our talents as gifts distinguishes them from those abilities that we acquire through the will. Two men may learn to speak a foreign language with equal accuracy, but the one who has a gift for languages does not have to struggle with his learning as does the man who has no gift. Men or women of talent must work to perfect their gifts, of course; no one is exempt from the long hours of practice. But to set out to acquire the gift itself through work is like trying to grow an extra hand, or wings. It can’t be done.
The artist’s gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon him; to put it another way, if the artist is gifted, the gift increases in its passage through the self. The artist makes something higher than what he has been given, and this, the finished work, is the third gift, the one offered to the world in general or directed back specifically to the “clan and homeland” of an earlier gift.
Whitman himself imagines the commerce of these gifts as both an inner and an outer activity. He has a strong sense of a reader to whom the poem is directed. That recipient is not always the conventional reader of the book, however; it is just as often an interior figure, Whitman’s own soul—or muse or genius or spirit—lover (the one he imagined would meet him in death, “the great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine”). In one of his prefaces Whitman speaks of his poems as having been spoken to him by his soul—but he is dissembling if he would have us believe that these poems are the same as those we find printed on the page. The soul that translates dumb objects into speech does not speak the finished poem, as Whitman’s fat revision books attest. Out of what the soul has offered him, the poet makes the work. And in this interior commerce the finished work is a return gift, carried back into the soul. In a famous letter Keats wrote that the world is not so much a “vale of tears” as a “vale of soul-making.” The artist makes a soul, makes it real, in the commerce of gifts. As when the Roman sacrifices to his genius on his birthday so that it may grow and become free spirit, or as with any number of the exchanges we have described, the point of the commerce is a spiritual increase and the eventual actualization of the soul.
Every artist secretly hopes his art will make him attractive. Sometimes he or she imagines it is a lover, a child, a mentor, who will be drawn to the work. But alone in the workshop it is the soul itself the artist labors to delight. The labor of gratitude is the initial food we offer the soul in return for its gifts, and if it accepts our sacrifice we may be, as Whitman was, drawn into a gifted state—out of time, coherent, “in place.” And in those moments when we are gifted, the work falls together graciously. (Not always, of course. For some the work may fall into place regularly, but most of us cut out a thousand pairs of shoes before the elves begin to sew.)
When Whitman speaks of his work in terms of an outer audience, he tells us, to take a key example, that he intended Leaves of Grass “to arouse” in the hearts of his readers “streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever.” It seems an odd direction at first: “from them to myself.” As we saw in Whitman’s life, we have before us an artist who is hungry for love. He knew it. He speaks of his desire as “this terrible, irrepressible yearning,” and he speaks of his poetry as the expression of a “never-satisfied appetite