Art & Creativity Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies skewers a very particular kind of piety: the critic’s need to turn every novel into a moral-aesthetic crusade. The line is funny because it’s phrased like a diagnosis. “Frequently suffer” casts critical taste as an ailment, not an authority. And “curious belief” is his polite way of calling it delusional. He’s not attacking ambition in art; he’s attacking the sanctimony that treats ambition as a mandatory credential, the way certain gatekeepers confuse their own ideal of Literature with every writer’s actual motives.

The subtext is a defense of the working novelist’s mixed, sometimes unglamorous intentions. Writers might want to entertain, to make money, to tell a good story, to revisit familiar forms, to please themselves, to please an editor, to meet a deadline. Davies punctures the romantic myth that the “real” author is always pushing frontiers and spelunking the “human spirit.” That phrase is a deliberate exaggeration: it mimics the grand, breathy language of criticism and cultural institutions, where the stakes are always transcendence.

Contextually, Davies is writing from inside a mid-century literary ecosystem where modernist innovation had become a kind of moral norm, and where critics often acted as priesthood, rewarding rupture and scorning craft that looked “mere” or popular. His final twist - “and if he doesn’t, he should be ashamed” - exposes the coercion beneath the praise. It’s not advice; it’s social control. Davies’ point lands because it reminds us that art isn’t improved by compulsory heroism, and that criticism, at its worst, mistakes the critic’s aspirations for the artist’s duties.