Once artists have received our canonisation, we cannot get enough of their masterpieces. Everything becomes touched with their genius; the feeblest of works written out of financial rather than creative necessity; trifles and jokes produced purely for their own amusement or for friends, and never designed for publication or even survival; rambling works of their dotage, sad codas to magnificent lives. But there is one category of new-found masterpieces that do genuinely have their virtues: the early works.
The first tottering steps of an artist towards final greatness stand in a special relationship to the rest of the oeuvre. For art is perceived as a constant progression, a widening and deepening river that attains its most magnificent aspect at the end as it enters the sea. This is the Great Late school of thinking: it looks to an artist to work towards the profundities of the last Shakespeare comedies, of the definitive Rembrandt self-portraits, of the final Beethoven string quartets.
This view of the artist's life stands in complete contrast to the trajectory of the greatest scientists, who however much they contribute during the rest of their lives nonetheless are nearly always most fecund at their careers' beginning. The brain - or the left-hand side of it - seems to be at its most agile up to the twenties; thereafter we must compensate for failing raw computational ability with slow-won experience.
In the first works of the creative artist, then, we see the evolution of the final style, the familiar genius. We can watch, as if in some cultural laboratory, the various elements that went to make up the unique personality of the writer or composer, the influences on the painter, the technical weakness of the sculptor and how they were gradually overcome. Like fond parents and relatives, we can play the game of spotting family resemblances to this or that predecessor in the artist's infant style.
Most artists' early productions have, therefore, at the very least a curiosity value to us. Some, though, offer us far more. These are the masterpieces of the prodigies, the Mozarts, the Raphaels, the Keatses, who dying so young produced only early works, and whose extraordinary first efforts seem therefore to spring forth ready-formed, almost without preparation. They combine that greatness we awaited from them many years in the future with other qualities that all first essays tend to share.
They have a freshness and spontaneity that will never be recaptured, no matter how great the artist. Words or music or images will flow from the creator with an ease that never returns. This facility encourages work on the largest scale; nothing seems impossible. As a result, young artists are often crazily ambitious: they have no fear of challenging the older masters or the oldest certainties. Later, when they have reputations to lose or families to feed, they may learn circumspection; now, though, they will attempt anything. If most of them - those who are not Mozarts - fail, at least they will have left behind glorious failures, failures such as only youth in all its huge and wonderful hubris can achieve. Failures which to the old artists, however great, have a unique sweetness and bold beauty unmatched by all their subsequent, more famous creations.
(4.1.90)
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