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A ghostly quartet.

Article Excerpt
Western European literature begins with these words, commonly attributed to Homer:

Sing, Muse, the wrath of Achilles ...

You might be inclined to remind me that Western European literature is like a river with two headwaters, and assert that the first words are:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light ...

Over both these great points of origin there are questions of authorship; and about the authorship of either great work there hovers a numinous question, the question of divine inspiration.

The pagan idea of the inspiration of poets and storytellers by a galaxy of Muses was obviously very hospitable to the idea of literary works as the word of God, since both ideas involve exogenous authorship. The general picture permits a claim for the status of the work of art greatly in excess of the status of the poet. One might think that in claiming to be only a conduit for the utterance of a god the poet was belittling himself, downsizing his glory. But it doesn't work like that. Although a piano is not a source of music, but only a means, we cannot help feeling reverence when we discover that the piano in the room we are standing in was played on by Mozart. In just such a way the claim to be inspired is not a claim to be only a humble hollow flute, breathed through by a god; it is a claim to have had an experience out of the common run. To have been touched by powers which others have no knowledge of. Rightly or wrongly, some of the glory rubs off on the conduit through which the sacred message flowed.

But the idea of authors as divine instruments is not the only idea of them available. "The life so short, the craft so long to learn"--which is Geoffrey Chaucer's rendering of Hippocrates's Ars longa, vita brevis encapsulates a very different picture. Why would a long apprenticeship be required to be the hollow flute through which the music played? The long apprenticeship suggests a need for mastery; and the mastery is that of a person--the person of the author. The association of the word author with the word authority gives its own message. In this very different vision of the creative process the art is not an inspiration, indeed not necessarily original at all, but simply "what oft...

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