R.J. MacSween

From the Inside

Nothing can take the place ofexperience; without it, no knowledge is complete. Even the correct words ring hollow when not backed up by. the feel and smell and taste of things.

This is of course true in all matters that pertain to art of any kind. It is the practitioner who best criticizes and evaluates; it is the practitioner who best interprets for the understanding of others. There is nothing wrong with work done by the non-pracdtioner; it may be the best available at the time. But the non-practidoner starts with the dreadful handicap of knowing the matter from the outside. The non-pracddoner describes as best possible, but can never really know as the artist knows.

The best critics in English literature are the great writers. They learned their craft in the bitter labor of creation. In their criticism they are recalling what they learned by trial and error, by failure and renewal. They are Ben jonson, Dryden, Sam Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Arnold, Eliot, and Pound. These teach the truth of their art to all the spectators of art.

Pardon me if I speak of my own experience. I hardly knew what a poem was until I began to write poems. Before that time I had merely thought I knew. It was the same with short stories and novels: in the wrestle with words and arrangements, the mind and the ear sharpen and the forming intelligence is given exercise and pleasure. Nothing was the same as it had been before. I'm sure that in other disciplines there is a similar revelation in all work done from within, when someone ceases to be a spectator and plays the game as practitioner.

And so it is, I'm sure, in the case of drama in which writing, directing, acting, and producing must cooperate in a precarious balance with the human qualities at play. There the experience is even more vital to success. Our greatest writer was dramatist, producer, director and actor. He knew it all from the inside.

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The Antigonish Review is a quarterly literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. The Review features poetry, fiction, reviews and critical articles from all parts of Canada, the US and overseas, using original graphics to enliven the format.

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