Beyond Mere Conjectures : Young’s Method of Original Composition

Edward Young’s historical contribution to the development of the concept of ‘artistic creativity’ is clearly attested by the many references to his work in articles and essays recently published on the topic. The consensus generally expressed through these various mentions of the 18th century English writer is that his Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Charles Grandison¹ signals the beginning of the Modern movement away from the Neoclassic paradigms of ‘imitation’ and ‘verisimilitude’ towards the more Romantic ones of ‘genius’ and ‘originality’. ²

Young’s accomplishment, it is generally argued, was founded on a radically anti-traditionalist and naïve view of creativity which, while historically significant, ought now to be rejected as untenable in light of contemporary contextualist and institutional theories of art. In the following pages, I mean to argue against this reductive reading of the Conjectures by bringing into relief what I will characterize as his ‘method of original composition’.

My main focus will be on the normative frameworks that the method makes relevant to creative artistic accomplishments. Of course, I do not mean to say that Young explicitly thought or wrote of ‘normative frameworks’. I will show, however, that such can be brought to the fore by attending to the manner in which his method relies, on the one hand, on the normativity pertaining to Neo-Platonist metaphysics and, on the other hand, on a Modern understanding of critical autonomy that in some ways borrows from the experimental philosophy of Francis Bacon. More specifically, I will argue that Young meant for the artist’s intentionality to be determined primarily by the true principles of nature, as inductively discovered by her original capacity for autonomous critical thinking. In so doing, it will become clear why that never entailed an obligation to reject traditional models and norms. As we will come to see, Young rather held the artist’s tradition and predecessors as precious, if not necessary allies towards the achievement of proper artistic creativity.

1. The Artist’s Spontaneity

Young’s purported anti-traditionalist view of artistic creativity is almost always explained relative to the manner in which the artist’s spontaneity appears in the Conjectures as a necessary condition to the composition of truly original works. The following passage is recurrently used to support this line of interpretation:

An Imitator shares his crown, if he has one, with the chosen Object of his Imitation; an Original enjoys an undivided applause. An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows , it is not made : Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Arts, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own. ³

Noël Carroll, who cites this passage at length and supplements it with similar, shorter quotes, reads Young as saying that ‘by emulating the canon, artists alienate themselves from their own sources of genius, and originality’. ⁴ If properly nuanced, I will show that this is coherent with Young’s views. But Carroll instead moves to make a more substantial claim. From Young’s words that originals must ‘rise spontaneously and naturally’, he concludes that the contingency of traditional values and historical practices always and necessarily hinder the natural manifestation of the individual’s genius: ‘if artistic creativity, properly so called, is the spontaneous outpouring of the authentic self uncontaminated by anything else, then tradition is its nemesis’. ⁵ This later leads him to suggest that the Romantic era then radicalized Young’s thesis and thus paved the way for the apparition of explicitly anti-traditionalist movements in early 20th century culture—movements such as the Futurists or the Nunism of Pierre Albert-Birot.

This interpretation, however, stems from a misreading of what ‘spontaneity’ describes in this passage. Peter Kivy offers an alternative interpretation in The Possessor and the Possessed that I want to argue is more faithful to Young’s argument. ⁶ Kivy remarks, for starters, that the ‘vital roots of genius’ and the ‘vegetable nature’ of the accomplished original work are meant to indicate that ‘genius’ is a natural phenomenon which, when manifested properly, will naturally lead to the production of valuable, original, artworks: ‘Clearly, then, it is “natural genius” that Young is talking about.’ ⁷

Meanwhile, Kivy steers clear of an interpretation of the ‘natural manifestation’ of genius as the spontaneous outpourings of a creative individuality. He remarks that ‘the original may, indeed, be a “vegetable”, a wild, uncultivated one at that. But even a wild flower must first be found, and then picked.’ ⁸ Kivy’s metaphors here repeat the rhetorical trope of ‘organicity’ favoured by Young in the Conjectures and rather common in 18th century literature about the production of artworks. ⁹ What is thereby indicated is that the spontaneity of genius’ accomplishments describes how she organically brings about works of value. But whereas plants can be said to passively realize that spontaneous organic process, Kivy aptly points out that the roots of original composition, its conditions of possibility, are not readily accessible to the endeavouring artist. There is an intentional dimension to the organic production of the original author, and she must set out to find her own genius—‘find and pick the wild flower’—so that she may properly and originally determine her creative activities: ‘it is imitation that is passive ; genius, in its originality, in its creativity, active. For it is mental acts that are here at issue, and imitation is a passive “act”, origination an act properly so called.’ ¹⁰

The opposition Kivy installs between ‘passive imitation’ and ‘active origination’ is particular to his overall argument in his essay and likely not congenial to the proper understanding of Young’s propositions—after all, Young tells us that originals are imitations as well. ¹¹ He does however rightly understand Young’s concept of spontaneity as describing an effect of the artist’s decision to rely upon her own genius.

2. Breaking the Rules

Let us therefore look further into the ‘mental act’ Kivy describes as the activation of genius. While I argue that he rightly understands it as an intentional decision on the part of the artist, I think he however errs when he then ties the manifestation of genius to the necessity of ‘breaking the rules’.

Kivy’s discussion of Young’s text and of the quote produced above appears in the ultimate moments of a chapter entitled Breaking the Rule , which seems to suggest that the Conjectures articulates one of the clearest expression of genius as producing her works against the demands of traditional norms and values. ¹² We also find explicit reason to the same effect when he writes that Young’s concept of ‘genius’ unequivocally repeats two ‘familiar Longinian themes’: ‘freedom from the rules, freedom to break the rules’. ¹³ In fact, not only had Young repeated these themes, Kivy adds, he in fact had radicalized them: ‘breaking the rules is not merely a necessary evil in genius, to some greater good, but, at least some times, a positive virtue in its own right ’. ¹⁴

To support this interpretation, Kivy mobilizes the following passage from the Conjectures in order to characterize the ‘mental act’ demanded of genius:

First, Know thyself . ... Therefore dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee, excite and cherish every spark of intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull, dark mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a body, let thy genius rise (if a Genius thou hast) as the Sun from Chaos; and if I should then say, like an Indian, worship it , (though too bold) yet should I say little more than my second rule enjoins, viz. Reverence thyself . ¹⁵

It seems likely that these two rules, ‘ know thyself ’ and ‘ reverence thyself ’, indicate the means towards the intentional activation of one’s own genius. Disappointingly, however, Kivy is rather laconic in his interpretation, offering but this suggestion that the whole passage should be read as a metaphor for the god-like power of original creation: ‘The genius is being analogized, as Longinus had already done, to God.’ ¹⁶ Genius, he tells us, is a god-like capacity of creating without the help of rules or knowledge, and it is no ‘small wonder, then, that Young admonishes the genius: Reverence thyself! For do we not owe reverence to “God”?’ ¹⁷ As a consequence, Kivy invites us to think that the original artist has absolute normative authority over her productions, an authority that, much like God’s, awaits for no external rule (‘ freedom from rules ’), no historical criterion, or no specific knowledge in order to validate its doings.

But can the original artist truly be this god-like figure whose creations answer to no given norms or criteria? Admittedly, there are passages in the Conjectures that seem to support this reading, such as the following: ‘For unprescribed beauties, and unexampled excellence, which are the characteristics of genius , lie without the pale of learning’s authorities and laws.’ ¹⁸ However, if genius does manifest itself free from all normative constraints, then a problem seems to surface that would indeed render Young’s conception of artistic creativity untenable. For, deprived of any measure to judge of genius’ accomplishments, it looks as though one would then simply be incapable to account for the possibility of bad original artworks. Consequently, this would lead us back to the equally untenable naïve conception of artistic creativity as sheer idiosyncratic spontaneity.

However, Young himself explicitly recognizes the existence of bad original productions, Jonathan Swift standing as his prime example of ‘genius gone wrong’. ¹⁹ In other words, activating one’s genius is not a sufficient condition to the production of valuable works: genius is valueless if it does not conform to some normative framework. Far from there being a ‘necessity of genius to break the rules’, then, I want to say that all that Young has established here is that the contingent rules and models carried by the artist’s tradition cannot fully determine her original accomplishment nor be the defining, ultimate criteria in its proper evaluation.

True: the determination of an original accomplishment ‘characteristically’ answers to conditions beyond the scope (‘ without the pale ’) of historically available models and criteria. One could say that this is a condition to works of genius being properly described as ‘original creations’, that is, as entirely novel productions, the meaning and properties of which may not be completely determined by relying only on traditional norms and ways of understanding. But that is not to say that the accomplishments of genius must then necessarily be set against those. In fact, and quite interestingly, Young explicitly states that genius is bound to manifest itself improperly should it act with a complete disregard for the contents of her tradition: ‘He who disregards Learning, shows that he wants its aid.’ ²⁰

There is, then, a subtlety in Young’s account of original composition that the interpretation favoured by Carroll, Kivy, and those reading Young’s argument as an anti-traditionalist account of genius seems to have missed. Undoubtedly, Young’s method requires the artist to trust in her natural talents and capacities. But he is also clear that such trust should never turn to a faith blinding genius to the recommendations of learning. This is only confusing, I want to argue, if we think that the artist’s reliance on her ‘natural talents’ amounts to genius freeing herself from all normative constraints.

What I am suggesting, then, and what I mean to work out in the following section, is that Young means for genius’ accomplishments to remain tied to a specific normative framework, that constituted by the laws of nature, which one expects will prove at least partly coherent with the norms made available to her via her tradition. This, I argue, will give us a definitive reason to think that the artist’s accomplishment need not be set against the rules and values of her tradition, and will also explain how Young can adequately account for our evaluation of original works and the possibility of bad originals.

3. Neo-Platonist Modernism: A Method of Original Composition

‘Nothing is more easy than to write originally wrong; Originals are not here recommended but under the strong guard of my first rule – Know thyself .’ ²¹

I have argued that we should interpret Young’s rules as to provide the artist with a method under which her accomplishment will prove original and possibly valuable. This method of original composition thus makes normative demands on the artist’s intentions that Kivy’s explanations did not fully capture.

So that we may now form a clearer impression of the normative demands placed upon the agency of the endeavouring artist, let us turn to the ethical context he uses to frame the meaning of his two rules—a context anti-traditionalist interpretations of Young generally do not discuss:

Since it is plain to see that men may be strangers to their own abilities, and by thinking meanly of them without just cause, may possibly lose a name, perhaps, a name immortal; I would find some means to prevent these evils. Whatever promotes virtue, promotes something more, and carries its good influence beyond the moral man: to prevent these evils, I borrow two golden rules from Ethics, which are no less golden in composition, than in life. ... First, Know thyself . Secondly, reverence thyself . Of ourselves it may be said, as Martial says of a bad neighbour, Nil tam prope, proculque nobis . Therefore dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee … ²²

In this passage, Young identifies two ‘evils’ he means to prevent: the mean opinion men have of their own capacities—to which I will return in the next section—and the ensuing ‘evil’ that the world may thus be deprived of new geniuses. The moral overtone of the passage is as explicit as it is obvious. Its proper interpretation, however, requires that we situate Young’s mobilization of these golden rules within the context of his participation to the English iteration of the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ that was raging at the time.

Resolutely on the side of the Moderns, Young thought that the scientific revolution ushered in by the works of Francis Bacon in the previous century had proven that contemporary minds were no less capable than that of their illustrious predecessors. ²³ But while science and ‘mechanic arts’ had since known perpetual progress, something stood in the way of similar advances in the realm of ‘liberal and politer arts’: whereas experimental science almost naturally brought men to ‘ever endeavour to go beyond their predecessors’, modern artists had given in to a ‘ spirit of imitation ’. ²⁴ Rather than trusting in their own powers to render the beauty and truth of nature, artists who yearned for fame and glory safely imitated the trusted models of the Ancients. In so doing, they robbed the world of novel discoveries that their single and natural talents were meant to unearth:

By a spirit of Imitation we counteract Nature, and thwart her design. ... That meddling Ape Imitation , as soon as we come to years of Indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the Pen, and blots out nature’s mark of Separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental Individuality. ²⁵

‘ Know thyself ’, then, was meant as an ethical commandment addressed to the artist so that she would duly and properly accomplish her singular role in nature’s march towards the perfect achievement of its design and thereby see to the progress of the Republic of Letters.

What is of particular interest, here, is how the notion of ‘mental individuality’ comes to the fore in a manner incoherent with its depiction as a god-like capacity for creation. For the passage clearly shows that this ‘mental individuality’ is under an obligation to manifest itself in accord with the norms imposed by nature’s ‘kind intentions’. But surely god-like beings do not answer to such external normative constraints. We must therefore seek another explanation for the ‘mental individuality’ that is here threatened by the ‘spirit of imitation’.

That individuals first find themselves ‘strangers to their own abilities’ implies that the true or natural self is not readily available to one’s consciousness. Hence Young’s first rule, which now appears to be akin to a demand for an introspective effort (‘ therefore dive deep into thy bosom, learn… ’) whereby one is to gain such knowledge.

But how does one’s true self become estranged to one’s consciousness? ‘Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?’ ²⁶ The answer, Young tells his reader, is that one loses sight of one’s original self because of a social process of alienation. In the course of our lives, we inevitably become ‘copies’ through various processes of cultural formation: infants, we imitate our siblings and parents; growing up, we discover traditional models and seek to emulate them; finally, once adult, in a quest to be secure in the thought that people value us, we adopt ways of being that have the favour of our community. In other words, it is the imitation of traditional models in a quest to belong to, and obtain recognition in, our community that makes us copies and alienates us from our particular, original natural self.

Obviously, such processes of cultural formation are necessary to the social beings that we are and do not constitute, in and of themselves, an affront to nature and morality. In the Republic of Letters, however, the choice to simply imitate one’s predecessors generally signals the intention to vainly adorn one’s accomplishments with the appearances of previous artistic successes. It is but immoral ambition, argues Young, a decision that ultimately ‘makes us Poor, and Proud’. ²⁷ Proud, for the imitator’s successful accomplishment lets him borrow, for a time, the laurels of the original artist; and poor, for such imitation adds no new value to the world, uncovers no novel idea, truth or beauty. ²⁸

And this is a key point in Young’s argument, one that installs the normative framework to which genius must answer for her original works to be valuable: a novel artwork, a truly beautiful and original composition, mirrors a truth of nature never before seen and thus adds a new province to the Republic of Letters. ²⁹ The task of the artist, which the method is to make possible, is to produce original works that imitate truths her talents had been originally, naturally, and specifically designed to unearth in ‘the book of Nature, and that of Man’. ³⁰ Hence the necessity for her to make the decision to rely on her natural capacities and faculties in trying to understand the reality that her work is to represent. And that, even if the result should fly in the face of traditional ways of seeing and understanding that reality—though, and this is what readers so often miss, it need not be a necessary consequence of her original work. ³¹

The Neo-Platonist themes and metaphysics that inform Young’s argument provide further indication that this is the proper way to understand how Young’s rules are to inform the artist’s intentional reliance on her genius. For sake of brevity, I will rely here on D.W. Odell’s analysis of Young’s argument in the Conjectures .

In his paper, Odell aptly points out that the ‘vegetable’ metaphor mentioned in the first of the two oft quoted passages from the Conjectures is, far from articulating the naïve conception of genius’ spontaneity favoured by some, first and foremost ‘a further application of Ralph Cudworth’s doctrine to litterature’. ³² He writes, referring to passages in the Night Thoughts that parallel the argument of the Conjectures :

Young describes literary creation in terms of the innatist theory of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth: it is the good man’s reason participating in the divine Ideas that enable man to create and in art, ‘manners (sad exception!) set aside’, to strike out ‘with master-hand, a copy fair/Of His idea, whose indulgent thought ... planne’d human bliss!’ ³³

Thus the need to acquire knowledge of one’s natural self: it stands as a necessary condition for the proper cognition of nature, one that answers only to the demands of ‘natural reason’ and abandons the contingent interpretations carried by tradition, ‘the dull, dark mass of common thoughts’. To ‘ Know thyself ’, then, can be read as what Odell calls the ‘recognition of the higher and truer self described in the Christian Neo-Platonist definition of love and of the mind’s creativity’. ³⁴

The activation of one’s genius, then, is tantamount to the decision to know and trust in one’s natural self. Hence Young’s characterization of genius as ‘innate knowledge’ of ‘celestial origin’: both notions express, in Neo-Platonist terms, the individual’s natural and original participation to the consciousness of the true principles of nature, or cosmos. ³⁵ It is by relying on her innate and unique capacities to cognize reality and thus discover its true principles that the artist may gain adequate and original insights on nature and thereby accomplish the just representation of its phenomena—to ‘ strike out with master-hand, a copy fair/Of His idea ’.

Going back to Young’s claim that only original composition can see to the progress of nature towards its perfection—an understanding of the historical becoming of reality that is also resolutely Neo-Platonist—the argument now seems to be that the value and interest of a new artwork ought to be evaluated relative to the new insight it provides its public on the true properties of the natural phenomenon it represents. True nature (or the eternal principles of cosmos) thus names the normative framework against which one is to evaluate the progress marked by an original production in the Republic of Letters.

Young’s method therefore does not sanction any and all spontaneous idiosyncratic accomplishments. Neither does it demand that the artist work against her tradition with the intention of breaking its rules. In fact, the very neoclassical rule of verisimilitude is maintained by Young: originals are to be imitations of natural truths. That rule is, however, reinterpreted so that the adequateness of original representations is no longer to be determined by an appeal to the decrees of the Academy or the productions of yesterday’s geniuses, but by proper contemplation and experimentation of nature.

4. In Bacon’s Name: Composing Original Works of Value

Bacon , under the shadow of whose great name I would shelter my own attempts in favour of Originals , says ‘Men seem no to know their own stock, and abilities; but fancy their possessions to be greater, and their abilities less, than they really are.’ Which is, in effect, saying, ‘That we ought to exert more than we do; and that, on exertion, our probability of success is greater than we conceive.’ Nor have I Bacon’s opinion only, but his assistance too, on my side. ³⁶

Young is here quoting from memory and referring to this passage from the preface to Bacon’s Great Instauration :

It seems to me that men do not rightly understand either their store or their strength, but overrate the one and underrate the other. Hence it follows that either from an extravagant estimate of the value of the arts which they possess they seek no further, or else from too mean an estimate of their own powers they spend their strength in small matters and never put it fairly to the trial in those which go to the main. ³⁷

Insofar as it repeats the intuition that led to the method’s two rules, Young’s reliance on Bacon’s ‘opinion and assistance’ functions as a means to further his claim that original artists are to apply their natural faculties in order to bring about progress in the Republic of Letters. Picking up on this same thread, Richard F. Jones argued that ‘[Young] is really trying to do for poetry what Bacon did for science, … put it on the right road to improvement.’ ³⁸

While I will show in a moment that this claim exaggerates the importance of Bacon’s influence on the method of original composition, Jones textual analyses nonetheless aptly reveal how his experimental philosophy played a part in Young’s characterization of the modern man’s intellectual faculties, as well as in his evaluation of its capacities for novel discoveries. He convincingly identifies numerous passages where Young, in an effort to establish the modern man’s capacity and moral obligation to be properly original, is either quoting from memory, paraphrasing, or borrowing heavily from Bacon’s rhetoric, particularly that of the Great Instauration . ³⁹ So much so that the following lines, written by Lord Verulam, read as though they could have been Young’s when he was blaming the spirit of imitation for the lack of original production that the sciences, on the other hand, were not suffering:

All the traditions and successions of schools is still a succession of masters and scholars, not of inventors and those who bring to further perfection the things invented. In the mechanical arts we do not find it so; they, on the contrary, as having in them some breath of life, are continually growing and becoming more perfect. ⁴⁰

Having said that, it is true that Young never explicitly defers to Bacon in his characterization of man’s natural faculties; on that front, the Neo-Platonist influences I have discussed above seem to have been much more determinant. This is at least one reason why it would exaggerate Bacon’s impact on the Conjectures to claim that Young meant to rigorously apply to artistic composition the principles of experimental philosophy that Jones summarizes thus:

First was the demand for a sceptical mind, freed from all preconceptions and maintaining a critical attitude toward all ideas presented to it. Second, observation and experimentation were insisted upon as the only trustworthy means of securing sufficient data. And third, the inductive method of reasoning was to be employed on these data. ⁴¹

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Young at least thought his views on original composition to be coherent with these demands made by the advancement of modern science. We have seen, for example, that the original artist must seek to understand and appreciate the true value of her representation’s contents and forms independently of the norms and conventions traditionally mobilized in such experiences; that is, ‘freed from all preconceptions’. But further yet: Young explicitly tells his reader that the discoveries of scientific minds such as Bacon were to be at the root of the organic and natural accomplishments of genius:

Yet, consider, my Friend! knowledge physical, mathematical, moral, and divine, increases; all arts and sciences are making considerable advance; with them , all the accommodations, ornaments, delights, and glories of human life; and these are new food to the Genius of a polite writer; these are as the root, and composition, as the flower. ⁴²

As a result, I want to suggest that it would not be misguided to think of the ‘intentional mental act’ demanded from genius as something akin to, or reliant on, the autonomous and critical use of inductive reason towards an understanding of nature’s true principles. In the following section, I will illustrate by means of an example how Young’s method accommodates this line of interpretation.

Before I do so, however, I want to raise one final objection to the anti-traditionalist reading of Young’s argument. For it strikes me that in pointing out where Young’s ambitions also differed from those of Bacon’s experimental philosophy, we may finally put the matter to rest.

In line with the interpretative consensus discussed earlier in this paper, Richard F. Jones writes that thinkers such as Young, ‘in order to have the opportunity to advance the cause of modern science, found it necessary to insist upon freedom to investigate and to advance their findings against established ideas’. ⁴³ It has been my claim, however, that Young did not set the modern writer against the established models and norms carried by her artistic tradition, but rather called upon her autonomous capacities in order to free her intentional activity of its contingent normative force. Only the true principles of nature, I have argued, offer the normative framework appropriate to artistic creativity qua original composition. What has been missed, however, is that insofar as traditional norms prove coherent with nature’s normative framework, there is no need for the artist to reject them. Quite the opposite in fact:

He who takes the same method, which Homer took, for arriving at a capacity of accomplishing a work so great. Tread in his steps to the sole Fountain of Immortality; drink where he drank, at the true Helicon , that is, at the breast of Nature: Imitate; but imitate not the Composition , but the Man . ⁴⁴

It seems rather clear that Young held traditional models, here in the person of Homer, as examples indicating to the modern writer the proper ways towards original composition. It is therefore highly unlikely that he would have ever fallen so far under Bacon’s influence as to repeat these words from the Great Instauration :

And for its value and utility it must be plainly avowed that that wisdom which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate, for it is fruitful of controversies but barren of works. So that the state of learning as it now is appears to be represented to the life in the old fable of Scylla, who had the head and face of a virgin, but her womb was hung round with barking monsters, from which she could not be delivered. ⁴⁵

Young wanted the modern writer to see ancient authors as powerful allies, not as ‘barking monsters’. ⁴⁶ Whereas the principles inherited from the Ancients and upon which science attempted to build its understanding of nature had undoubtedly been flawed, and therefore had stood as an obstacle to progress, traditional artistic models and conventions did not of themselves ruin in advance the extension of the Republic of Letters. It was, as we have seen, the immoral spirit of imitation that was to blame, that is, individuals who unethically proceeded intentionally with ‘pre-existent materials not their own ’. ⁴⁷

Hence Young’s argument was not that the modern artist ought to reject traditional models, but that she had to autonomously measure their truth and value in light of experiential data critically collected and parsed. Where such models proved to be adequate representations of nature’s truths, their example could healthily feed the mind of the endeavouring artist. And thus the terms of the alliance that Young thought the Modern artist ought to strike with the Ancients: ‘Let our Understandings feed on theirs; they afford the noblest nourishment; But let them nourish, not annihilate, our own.’ ⁴⁸

5. Applying the Method: Two Cases

By structuring creative artistic accomplishments with a method centred on critical autonomy that is at least coherent with the kind of inductive reasoning promoted by experimental science, Young placed the original artist’s work under the same normative framework as that discovered by modern science in its observation of nature. As we have seen, the result was that the accomplishments of all natural sciences stood to serve and promote creativity in the Republic of Letters.

On this front, Young’s own work, in his Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job , offers an example of both the persisting value of traditional norms and of a properly scientific outlook on what constitutes a true and original artistic representation of nature. In a commentary on Young’s Paraphrase , W. Powell Jones noted that:

Edward Young added a special interest in natural history to the six pages of notes appended to his twenty-six pages scientific poem, A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job (1719). Among other things he added material on mountains, comets, and the solar system, and wrote copiously of such creatures as the lion and peacock. He defended in learned fashion his choice of the crocodile for Leviathan and the hippopotamus for Behemoth over the usual whale and elephant, arguing that since the descriptions in Job are close to what the naturalists say about Egypt it is probable that Moses wrote the Book of Job. ⁴⁹

As I have said before, Young thought it fit to maintain the force of the neoclassic and traditional norm of verisimilitude, only the semblance of truth necessary to a work of value was no longer to be determined by an appeal to traditional models—here the whale and the elephant—but by the true nature of the imitated phenomenon. As a result, while his Paraphrase referred to and repeated that of an age old story—which we must think attested to Young’s critical assessment of its value as well—, it was nonetheless contemporary science that provided the understanding of nature constitutive of the normative framework relevant to the appropriate choice of metaphor. Hence, though Young is working under traditional models, he nonetheless proves properly creative by freely evaluating their worth and by favouring, instead, figures that science, under the guidance of an autonomous, critical, inductive reasoning, had suggested were truly proper.

As we have seen, it is essential that such a normative framework be preserved if we are to account for the possibility of failed attempts at originality, of bad artworks. And here, it is Young’s treatment of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that may help us understand just how the normativity inherent to his method allows us to do so.

Swift’s genius was, Young tells us, unquestionable; which is to say that he held him to have composed his works in accord with his method of original composition and that Gulliver was a truly original work. But in the same breath, Young tells his reader that Swift’s genius was not so naturally strong as to provide him with a solid perspective on human nature. Swift’s bouts of dementia and inclination for scatophilia were well known to his contemporaries, and may very well have been on Young’s mind when he wrote:

How have thy Houyhnhunms thrown thy judgment from its seat, and laid thy imagination in the mire? In what ordure hast thou dipt thy pencil? What a monster hast thou made of the ‘ Human face Divine ’? ⁵⁰

Young’s judgement is clear: Swift has failed to autonomously and adequately represent human reality in its proper and adequate moral determinations. Left to his own devices, his original talents were not sufficient to spontaneously force his composition in an accord with human nature’s true principles. Thus he was, Young tells us, a prime example of an infantine genius , that is, a writer whose original self needs to ‘be nursed, and educated, or it will come to nought: Learning is its Nurse, and Tutor’. ⁵¹

This, of course, attests once more to the positive role tradition may yet play in original composition. Had Swift followed more closely in Milton’s footsteps, the quote invites us to think, the realization of his genius would have naturally led to an accomplishment much closer to the truthful representation of human nature.

6. Conclusion

I have argued, against the widespread interpretation that reads Young’s characterization of genius and original composition as simply and naïvely anti-traditionalist, that the Conjectures in fact offers a rich method of original composition where traditional norms and models may yet play a positive role. Deeply embedded in a concern for the artist’s moral duty to participate to the advancement of human knowledge, Young’s method provides the conditions of possibility to new valuable artistic phenomena that are set in continuity with, while marking a progress in, the historical and institutional realm of literary art—what he calls the Republic of Letters , and what today would be characterized as an artworld . Central to that argument were the normative framework set by a Neo-Platonist understanding of nature, and the autonomous and critical use of inductive reason heralded by the experimental philosophy of Francis Bacon.

Admittedly, speaking of the Republic of Letters as an ‘artworld’ implies a form of institutionalism entirely foreign to Young’s understanding of artistic practices. But I want to suggest that this interpretation of his method is at least coherent with the institutional or contextualist claim that the project of an artistic accomplishment is made possible and significant qua ‘novel artistic accomplishment’ in virtue of the normative properties that pertain to the institution of an artworld such as the Republic of Letters . The Republic of Letters, after all, names a tradition of ‘art making’ consisting of shared norms and values—the Republic’s laws, so to speak—and recognized models—genial productions of yore. Together, it can be argued, these provide the artist with the technical and formal means to the production of novel artworks. For, as I have shown, the artist is never asked to reject the shared norms that make the Republic of Letters but, rather, to critically assess the manner in which her work is to relate to tradition. Young’s Paraphrase on the Book of Job was a clear example of a critically informed mobilization of traditional models and norms.

Insofar as this is correct, Young’s argument in the Conjectures ultimately and interestingly points to the necessity and insufficiency of the normative context set by tradition in grounding the possibility of artistic creativity as such. Hence, when David Davies writes in his Art as Performance that ‘the artist must consciously operate by reference to certain presumed shared understandings in order for her manipulations of a vehicular medium to count as the articulation of an artistic statement ’, he is only telling part of the story. ⁵² For if that were all artists do in specifying their pieces, they would merely be repeating possibilities already opened by their tradition, what Young would see as mere imitations that proceed ‘ out of pre-existent materials not their own ’. Such accomplishments, in other words, would remain short of seeing to the specification of a novel and original work.

Here, then, the Conjectures on Original Composition serve as a reminder, telling us that, while such shared understandings are constitutive of one’s artworld and thus necessary to the project of situating one’s accomplishment therein, their mobilization is not sufficient to the description of a novel artistic accomplishment as artistically creative or original. And while we may want to resist Young’s attending claim that valuable and original artistic accomplishments must draw from, and be measured against, the normative framework set by nature’s true principles, there are still quantities of other normative frameworks we can think relevant to the contemporary artist’s work and that she meaningfully shares with the other citizens of her artworld.

In other words, the interpretation of the Conjectures I have articulated in this article calls our attention to the fact that an account of artistic creativity must necessarily attend to the plurality of normative frameworks that come to bear on the determination of what will appropriately and meaningfully be understood as a properly original accomplishment in the artworld. In fact, art history seems replete with such accomplishments that specify their meaning in relation to other normative realms. Think only of Duchamp’s philosophically informed accomplishments of Ready-Mades; of the advent of Dadaism, made meaningful by its ties to Freud’s innovative thinking in psychology; etc. It seems in fact quite obvious, if not a truism, that artists do not merely draw from the shared understandings of their artworld when successfully, that is, meaningfully, specifying the properties of their piece.

This repeats, I believe, the gist of Cometti’s criticism of Danto’s and Levinson’s historicisms, which he thinks wrongly reduce artwork-status to a ‘conformity’ with normative standards one can read into past artistic accomplishments. ⁵³ Nevertheless, I think we must resist Cometti’s conclusion that this points to the misery that awaits any and all institutional or contextualist ontology of art. In showing that an artist’s creative endeavours must in fact rely on more normative frameworks than that of their artworld, on more than one institution, it is my conviction that the interpretation of Young’s method of original composition I have defended here indicates how institutional and contextualist theories of art may start to answer such criticism.