"For Ancient Rules a Just Esteem" - The duty, the privilege, and the necessity of the cultivated amateur
Yesterday, I listened to a lecture by Dr. Michael Drout, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of the Medieval at Wheaton College.1 Near the end of the talk, Dr. Drout said, “Our job as the audience is to educate ourselves the best we can so then we can get all [the] nuances and references [in works of literature].” I cheered when I heard that. This is something that is very important to me. This is why I started writing here, and why I called this Substack, “The Cultivated Amateur.” As pretentious as I’m afraid the name might sound, I wanted to be able to continually point back to something Northrop Frye wrote in an essay which I believe is a needed validation for the non-artist as well as providing an important perspective on the role of the audience in relation to the artist.
In an essay titled, “The Instruments of Mental Production,” Frye writes:
“Because we have tended to think of leisure as occasional or preparatory, and leisure-time activities as merely filling up the cracks of a busy life, the creative arts, which are particularly the symbols of cultivation, have never reached their true educational proportions. I think that what is true of scholarship is also true of the creative arts: those who paint and write and compose are, again, producers. The process of liberal education seems to me to be concerned more with understanding and responding to the arts than with producing them, though, of course, this is a matter of emphasis, not of definition. As Castiglione showed for the Renaissance courtier, the artist needs to be complimented by the cultivated amateur, who represents the social vision of an educated public that has some idea what to do with the artist’s work. Hence education in the arts is primarily critical: it struggles to attain a conscious knowledge and understanding of a kind that is normally detached from the creative process itself, though it should be as useful to the creative artist as to anyone else. The chief deficiency in today’s literature, for example, is not the lack of good writers, but the lack of a reading public sufficiently large, informed, and articulate to establish the social importance of the good writer.” (emphasis mine)
I’ve harped on this in other essays, but I really don’t think it can be said too often. We are not all called to produce art. We are not all able to produce art. But we are all able, artist and amateur alike, to participate in our culture’s artistic and literary traditions. This tradition can go as far back as Homer or Seinfeld, or, as Dr. Drout pointed out in his talk, be as current as asking your teenager to explain the latest viral meme. The point is we can all actively participate. I will get to how we do that. First, I’d like to sketch out the problem and where we can correct faulty thinking.
Receiving Art is Active
A friend of mine is a professional Scottish fiddler, and a few years ago, our family went to see him perform. It was such a fun experience. The audience was small and not at all quiet or passive. There was loud whooping and clapping and stomping to the time of the music. Over the course of the show, I noticed that as the audience became more involved, he seemed to play the conventional Scottish pieces with more and more vigor. He was playing traditional tunes that he had prepared for that particular show, but as the audience responded to his playing, he began playing more for that specific audience in the moment. He was more physically involved, too. His movements became more responsive to his own music and he smiled through every song.
Afterwards, I shared what I noticed and that it seemed like he played at a different level of involvement. I asked him if the audience response was a help to him. “Oh, definitely,” he said. “When the audience is awake and alive and interactive like this one, it makes me play better. There’s a kind of energy exchange that is essential. I’ve played some venues where no one makes a sound and the applause is mild at best. It’s much harder to play for the audience in those situations. You don’t know how your work is being received, and that makes it harder to focus on playing. I need the audience to help me perform better. An audience like this makes me a better fiddler.”
The non-artist is not passive in his reception of a work of art. Not at all. He is active, or would be if he has been trained and educated correctly. Active reception does not mean the audience trades places with the artist, but that they know the tradition the artist is working in well enough to give it the reception it deserves. Most of the audience in the anecdote above knew the traditional tunes my friend was playing by name. He wasn’t bringing in anything that veered out of the Scottish fiddle convention. But as the audience heard his artistic renderings of these tunes, they responded with educated enthusiasm and approval. This improved the quality of his work in the moment of production. It was an incredible thing to witness, though I’m sure it happens frequently at shows like this, especially the smaller, more intimate venues. The exchange of energy improves the performance and the audience.
Unfortunately, the more modern emphasis on art as primarily a self-expression of the artist has done us all, artist and non-artist alike, a disservice.2 We think (because we have been taught) that the true artist is primarily revealing their inner life and feelings about their life experiences through their work, and perhaps most modern artists are. Plenty of artists seem to view art as a vehicle for a public trauma dump or an open diary entry. And because of this emphasis, we respond in kind, by focusing on our expressions. How does the art make us feel? This becomes the primary question in an audience’s response to a work of art.
It isn’t that expression and response have no place in the creation and reception of Art, it’s that it doesn’t have the primary place. Art as a subject is not subjective. Its meaning is not amorphous and different for everyone, depending on their personal response to it. Art is not unconventional and original in the sense of something made that is totally new and has never been done before. Art is always derivative, as in derived from something that came before, in both its symbols and its mediums. When it comes to Art, “there is nothing new under the sun.” At some point it has been done before, if not in exact details then in category. It is a tradition of craftsmanship and conventions, and it is in learning about those tools of the craft and the symbols of the conventions that we as the non-artist can flourish, both in our understanding of Art at large as well as our appreciation a particular work of art produced by a professional.
The idea that Art is whatever I create is new approach to Art and totally unhelpful. It slanders Art itself as having no inherent meaning and it elevates the amateur artist in his own mind so that he cannot accept that his free verse drivel is anything but that. Simply put, self-expression makes bad Art. It also makes for a confused public who feels that Art just isn’t for them, or, worse, a pretentious and unteachable public who look down on anyone honest enough to ask how, exactly, is a banana duct-taped to a wall Art?
How Do We Actively Participate in Art?
We participate in Art by continuing to educate ourselves. It truly is as simple as that. This education consists in learning and understanding the conventions and traditions behind a work of art.
E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture is a great example of the kind of information the amateur needs to become familiar with in order to properly receive an Elizabethan work of art. C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image is also a great resource for understanding the tradition behind Medieval and Renaissance literature and art. These are the kinds of things amateurs need to seek out in order to better understand the work. We can just pick up a work like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and read it, but because we live in a time that is removed both in time and culture, a lot of what we read will either go over our heads or make no sense to us.
In his lecture, Dr. Drout said this about reading Beowulf:
“When you teach it right, Beowulf is like The Godfather plus Game of Thrones plus Lord of the Rings – there’s so much going on. But you need to learn enough of the tradition to enjoy it. And that does require some study, but when you can study what you’re interested in, that’s not work anymore. I mean, it is work - you put the energy into - but it’s enjoyable and you get from that so much.”
Enjoyment is dependent on knowledge. But for a lot of these works, we are lacking the knowledge that is essential to enjoyment. And when we are engaging with a work of art, enjoyment is the desired result. (We can’t say that enjoyment is the desired result in tragedy - we can’t ‘enjoy’ King Lear in the same way that we can ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ - but there is a kind of response that is in the same family as enjoyment – maybe en-sorrow-ment, to Frankenstein a word? As literary enjoyment is a personal resonance with a story that provides a larger perspective on reality, so we feel a resonance of sorrow and the horror at the situation in a tragedy, and this give us perspective similar to the perspective produced by literary enjoyment. And it is why someone will choose to read Lear or Beowulf more than once, why it might be a favorite book. There is something compelling, something that resonates with the reader in a very personal way, but also in a way that connects them to a larger vision of Life and Reality.)
Dr. Drout pointed out that this literary self-education is required even for newer works of literature:
“I was born in ’68. When I read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, I can just barely get the pop culture references to products and songs on the radio – and really, just barely get it. Current students can’t get it at all. And that’s only 50 years old. Think about when we’re doing something hundreds and, in Homer’s case, thousands of years. It requires – that’s why need teachers. We need teachers and guides and editions and things to lead us through, to be a guide through these works.”
Speaking of the oral tradition and the oral lyric poets known as the guslari,3 Dr. Drout says, “They’re not just making [the epic poems] up from scratch; they’ve heard these poems many, many times. They’ve been participants in the tradition – people know what should be there. The artistry is how you do it.” (emphasis mine)
Notice that before they ever picked up a guslar and a bow, before they ever sang a note, they were participating in the tradition by listening and learning the form of the Art. Art comes from a working knowledge of conventions, which comes first from active participation in the tradition.
I think I have established that self-education is necessary and continuous self-education. We never stop learning about these things. There is always more to discover.
“I am of yesterday and know nothing.”
However, before we can begin self-educating, we have to admit that we don’t know enough to understand a work of Art on its own. Here we are brought back to humility and self-awareness which I wrote about in a previous Substack. In an older work of Art, we are brought face to face with a tradition which we don’t seem to grasp. The language is difficult or overly ornamental; the references fly over our heads; the work, for the most part, doesn’t seem worth our time or effort. This is because we lack what we need to understand what we are reading as it was meant to be understood. This is key - “as it was meant to be understood”. We are not the original audience. We are listening in, and just like jumping into a conversation that has been going on for a while before we arrived, we need the backstory and context and some definitions. We need to be brought up to speed before we can understand what the conversation is about, let alone participate in any meaningful way.
This is not a small thing. This is the fulcrum of self-education. We can lay down our pride and our desire to appear like we know something in order to actually learn something, or we can continue to plow ahead thinking we understand a work by looking at it through our modern lenses and never truly come in contact with the work itself, but only interact with a clichéd representation of it.
Unfortunately, we have plenty of teachers and scholars ready to read something like the plays of Shakespeare, for example, through modern lenses that simply did not exist in his day. When Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew, he was not addressing feminism or gender identity or the patriarchal power structure. These issues simply do not exist in the text. We can definitely read them into the text and make it say something it was never trying to say, but are we actually reading the play at that point? I would argue that we are not. We are using the play to play with our pet philosophies and social issue hobby-horses. What is the point in reading an older work – even if it is only 50 or 20 years old – if the only way the text is approached is demanding it respond to modern concerns that are completely beyond the scope of the work?
Even things like biographical information, historical context, social and political issues in the author’s lifetime – all of these might very well inform some aspect of our understanding of the text, but ultimately, they are less important than understanding the framework of imagination that forms the structure of the story itself. What stories did Chaucer know and reference or retell in his works? This will tell us more about the work we are reading than knowing about his employment or marriage or how many children he had, with the possible exception of his poem about the empty purse.
Bristly and aggressive
Frye knew all about the face-saving that goes on when a student is confronted with his own ignorance. In Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship, he writes,
“The first thing that university teachers want to know is: what is important in the pre-university study of literature? Most of us, when we complain about our freshmen, base our complaints on the theme of information or memorized knowledge: our students don’t know enough; they haven’t read enough; the chronology of literature is a vague haze in their minds; some of them could hardly distinguish Chaucer from Tennyson except by the spelling, and so on. But if students don’t have enough information, it is a simple enough matter to supply it or provide the sources of supply. The trouble is what they learn they learn within a mental structure of habits and assumptions, and university comes much too late in a student’s life to alter that structure. For example: many students come to university assuming that convention is the opposite of originality, and is a sign that a poet is superficial and insincere. If they are writing poetry themselves, they are apt to get bristly and aggressive about this assumption. They can’t be writing in a convention that all their friends are writing in: they must be conveying unique experiences, because their poems say they are. Here is a result of illiterate teaching that makes the most scrambled nonsense out of all literary values, yet nothing can really be done about it. We tell them at university that literary sincerity is quite different from personal sincerity, that it can only be developed by craftsmanship working within a convention, and that it is the function of convention to set free the power of expressing emotions, not to provide formulas for ready-made emotions, thought it may do this for dull writers. They listen; they understand; they may even believe; but the effect on their mental habits is very like the effect of schoolmarm English on the little boy: ‘Dar ain’t no “ain’t you”, is dey? It’s “aren’t you”, ain’t it?’”
The optimist in me revolted against Frye’s plain realism. No! I thought, No! We can overcome, surely. But Frye’s experience isn’t to be lightly brushed aside.
The first necessary thing to make an amateur (or an expert; they are often amateurs unaware) a cultivated amateur – a member of what Frye calls “an educated public” – is also the most difficult thing – the admission of ignorance. This is especially difficult if a person has spent extra time and effort (and money) to become learned in these areas. We don’t like to say, “I don’t know.” We like even less saying, “I was wrong.” If a student or scholar can’t admit ignorance or error, then what Frye says becomes fact: “nothing can really be done about it.” I don’t have any degree higher than a high school diploma, so admission of ignorance isn’t as difficult for me as it would be for someone who has spent years in academia, who as built their career and reputation on knowledge and knowing. I can understand how it would be a Herculean effort of honesty to look at one’s training, even at one’s scholarship, and say, “I am of yesterday, and know nothing.” Perhaps this is why there are so few cultivated amateurs out there.
But this is where we have to begin. You and me. Our work as an educated public is an essential part of the exchange of energy between the artist and the non-artist. It is an essential part of the literary tradition continuing, surviving our generation and being passed on, accepted, understood and loved by the next. The work of the cultivated amateur is ongoing, never ending, always necessary – and thank goodness for that.
You then whose judgment the right course would steer,
Know well each ANCIENT'S proper character;
His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page;
Religion, country, genius of his age:
Without all these at once before your eyes,
Cavil you may, but never criticise.
Be Homer's works your study and delight,
Read them by day, and meditate by night;
Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring,
And trace the Muses upward to their spring;
Still with itself compar'd, his text peruse;
And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse.
When first young Maro in his boundless mind
A work t' outlast immortal Rome design'd,
Perhaps he seem'd above the critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountains scorn'd to draw:
But when t' examine ev'ry part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.
Convinc'd, amaz'd, he checks the bold design,
And rules as strict his labour'd work confine,
As if the Stagirite o'erlook'd each line.
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy nature is to copy them.
…
Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands,
Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
See, from each clime the learn'd their incense bring!
Hear, in all tongues consenting pæans ring!
In praise so just let ev'ry voice be join'd,
And fill the gen'ral chorus of mankind!
Hail, bards triumphant! born in happier days;
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow!
Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound,
And worlds applaud that must not yet be found!
Oh may some spark of your celestial fire
The last, the meanest of your sons inspire,
(That on weak wings, from far, pursues your flights;
Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes)
To teach vain wits a science little known,
T' admire superior sense, and doubt their own!
Alexander Pope
It was the first lecture in the five-lecture online conference put on by The Literary Life podcast and House of Humane Letters. Available for purchase here https://houseofhumaneletters.com/product/2025-literary-life-conference/
According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, “the distinctively expressionist view of artistic creation is the product of the Romantic movement, according to which the expression of feelings constitutes the creation of art, just as philosophy and other disciplines are the expression of ideas. It is, at any rate, the theory of art as the expression of feelings (which here shall be taken to include emotions and attitudes) that has been historically significant and developed: art as specially connected with the life of feeling.” brittanica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art/Art-as-expression
The word in the “Bosniak-Croatian-Serbian language for an epic singer who performs long narrative tales while accompanying himself on a one- or two-stringed instrument, known as a gusle (gusla)” Encyclopedian Britannica britannica.com/art/guslar
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