Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 4))

full beauty. The things one sees and realizes during many lingering walks
that were impossible of assimilation on a first or single visit is always a great
revelation to me.
And there are no more abiding memories of peace, deep joy, and satisfaction,
of a calm realization of an order of beauty that is so new to us as to be
a real revelation, than those given by a prolonged stay in a cathedral vicinity.
The sense of withdrawal, an apartness from the rush of life surging up to
the very doors of the wonderful building, is so refreshing and recreating to
the spirit as surely to be worth any effort in attaining. When one comes to
be past the fatigues of traveling, and has to rely on old memories, these old
visits to glorious cathedral-piles will be found, I think, to be among the
richest remembrances one has stored up.
FREDERICK H. EVANS.

ROAMING IN THOUGHT.
(AFTER READING MAETERLINCK’SLETTER.)
THE LETTER from Maeterlinck, published in the last issue of Camera
Work, may have appeared insignificant or even superficial to many
readers. At the first perusal, I also thought that almost anybody could
have written it. But after careful study I realized that really no one but
Maeterlinck could have written it.
|t is vague, obscure in places, but full of hidden meanings, written in
exquisite French, in the true Maeterlinckean style. It contains in a few
hundred words sufficient material for a long essay, for it touches upon the
old question whether artistic photography is an art or not. Maeterlinck's
answer is a little bit elusive; it is not a decided yes, but that is his way of
saying things, and as there is no doubt that his sympathy is entirely with
the artistic photographer, we should be satisfied. Coming from a man who
is modern to his finger-tips, from a poet, whose aims of injecting new life
into our dramatic art are strictly reformatory, even the little he has to say is
valuable. It is an expression of the tendency of our time.
To me the letter is particularly gratifying, as I have had from the very
start only one opinion on the subject. A few days ago, I ran across my
first article on artistic photography, written in ’95 I believe, a criticism of a
photographic exhibition that was held at the rooms of the Society of American
Artists. It was the first exhibition of this kind I had ever seen, and a fairly
representative one for those days. In the criticism I find the following para-
graph : “The painters will have to be on their guard. I fear that photography
will seriously rival a number of the expressions of art, illustration being
exposed to the most immediate danger. Artists are apt to argue that photo-
graphs are lifeless and can never express sentiment. I beg to differ. It
depends entirely on whether the photographer is poetically endowed or not.
“I even believe that a picture like Millet’s ‘Angelus' could be done by
photographic processes by training models, carefully selecting the appro-
priate scenery and patiently photographing again and again until one has