"It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection"
About this Quote
Maugham’s line lands with the cool authority of someone who made a living pleasing crowds while watching “serious” taste-makers sharpen their knives. “It seems” is doing stealth work: a modest hedge that reads like a verdict. He isn’t claiming a law of nature so much as staking out a social truth from the theater world he knew, where the people who build the thing and the people who judge the thing often treat each other as mutually suspect.
The friction he points to is psychological and professional. High-level creation requires a kind of willful credulity: the ability to fall in love with an idea long enough to give it form, to tolerate mess, repetition, and embarrassment. High-level criticism, at its best, demands the opposite posture: distance, skepticism, the habit of testing every choice for weakness or cliché. Push either faculty to “highest perfection,” and it starts crowding out the other. The creator’s inner critic becomes a censor; the critic’s creative impulse becomes a softener.
There’s also a tactical subtext. Maugham, frequently dismissed as too polished, too popular, too readable, is quietly reframing the hierarchy. If critics are masters of the critical faculty, that may come at the cost of imaginative risk. If artists sometimes sound defensive, it’s because their job depends on protecting the fragile, irrational spark that criticism can extinguish. The quote isn’t anti-criticism; it’s a warning about overdeveloped discernment turning into creative sterility, and about the theater’s perennial cold war between making and measuring.
The friction he points to is psychological and professional. High-level creation requires a kind of willful credulity: the ability to fall in love with an idea long enough to give it form, to tolerate mess, repetition, and embarrassment. High-level criticism, at its best, demands the opposite posture: distance, skepticism, the habit of testing every choice for weakness or cliché. Push either faculty to “highest perfection,” and it starts crowding out the other. The creator’s inner critic becomes a censor; the critic’s creative impulse becomes a softener.
There’s also a tactical subtext. Maugham, frequently dismissed as too polished, too popular, too readable, is quietly reframing the hierarchy. If critics are masters of the critical faculty, that may come at the cost of imaginative risk. If artists sometimes sound defensive, it’s because their job depends on protecting the fragile, irrational spark that criticism can extinguish. The quote isn’t anti-criticism; it’s a warning about overdeveloped discernment turning into creative sterility, and about the theater’s perennial cold war between making and measuring.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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