Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 2))

OF ART IN RELATION TO LIFE.

ART MAY, perhaps, be explained as the self-realization of
personalities whose experiences are of such surpassing nature
that they can not be expressed adequately by the ordinary ways
of social intercourse and utilitarian production. A subtler
medium is required to transmit the thoughts and feelings of the
artist-soul in their intense individuality, and with exactly that poise between
definiteness and vagueness in which they were conceived. Has the painter
felt the dim, soft benison of hope—it stands confessed in the “Hope” of a
Watts. Did Shelley experience an agony of yearning for an elusive vision
of ideal perfection—in “Alastor,” in “ Epipsychidion” he has expressed it.
THIS satisfaction of the soul's need of self-realization—the most
fundamental want of all—while being thus the rationale of creative art, is
also its intrinsic justification. Further—but this is a merely extrinsic and
accidental result (important to us, however, if not to the artist)—the
personality of the poet, painter, sculptor, musician is immortalized in his
work, so that he becomes an influence, often a friend and master, to those
kindred spirits of removed localities and times who can understand
sympathetically his self-revealing art. Thus life becomes richer and fuller.
It is something to feel that Millet and Browning, before us, perceived
divinity in the unlikeliest human creatures. It is something to know how,
long ago, Shelley’s“ Cor Cordium” throbbed with a passion of love and a
rapture of hope for human kind. Companioned by such heroic souls, can
we find life a barren, loveless solitude ?
AND since we have emerged from the state of self-sufficient savagery and
have become highly evolved social beings, this widening of our horizon
of love is by no means an insignificant augmentation of the joy of living.
The personality of the artist is, however, more than an object of love and
reverence; it is moonlight for us on lone, darkening twilight ways. “Thy
word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” And the “word”
of art is Life: Life that is neither dust nor death—but love and beauty,
struggle and peace, moral truth and esthetic truth. The artist’s whole being
has quivered response to the mad beauty of the world—aye, of the world
in a single glistening dew-drop! Moreover, he has loved and suffered and
striven; and his awakened sense of the good has perceived live germs
of moral perfection, where to the dull susceptibilities of others there
appeared only darkness and sin. This, then, is the burden of art: “Lo-
the Beautiful and the Good ! ”
IF our ears are attuned to the rhythm of this undersong of all works of art,
it will be well for us. For we will know the underlying meaning of life-
the burden that accompanied the song of the morning stars of old, and that
still accompanies the song, the tears, the work, the love of man always and
everywhere. Still the undersong of life (like that of art) murmurs : “Lo —
the Beautiful and the Good! ”

(Miss) Lilian Steichen.