Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 5))

¶ There are, overmore, in every branch of art men and women who,
because they are utterly devoid of genius, avenge themselves by making a
practice of their mediocrity at the public expense. This clan of parasites
composed of the average critics, teachers, connoisseurs, of the vulgar
middlemen and boastful art-promoters, makes it its trade to submit from
generation to generation, theoretically or mechanically, certain fixed laws of
the beautiful, to convert nature into a theme of scholastic babble, and to
lay down accurate rules, as one might set rules for measuring pieces of
silk or mending shoes. In this way the chain of masters and disciples
extends back into the remotest centuries; and this interminable series of
people, repeating and imitating one another through ages, we term tradition.
It is infinitely respected, this tradition. It has its schools, its organs, its
regular administration, and the entire social organization does duty in its
service, watching sharply over its continuance, recompensing it, and guarding
it from any possible accident that might break the remarkable chain.
¶ It is the tyranny of conventional and prescribed estimates in artistic
matters which stands father to so many of the shams, confusing and injuring
honest and healthy appreciation. Honesty is the beginning of all pleasure
in art and literature as in life, and the only fruitful method of studying
masterpieces is to judge them by what they do for us. Art is no exact
science, and there is always room for a robust personal opinion. If it should
happen that some lover of art had no use for Whistler’snocturnes, Monet’s
fragments of nature, or Rodin’s melodies in marble or bronze, while it isn’t
at all necessary for him to cry the fact from the house-top, it is necessary for
his own salvation to remain firm and not to feign admiration for something
he does not appreciate. It implies no idiocy to take that attitude, but only
a different idiosyncrasy, education, environment, taste from that of the
lovers of the above-named masters. He should be broad-minded enough
to allow that they may be right, but not weak-minded enough to make an
effort to agree with them. As Stendhal said, all that the layman in the
enjoyment of art requires is to dare to feel for himself.
¶ The critics could do much to create what is called a public opinion. They
should possess “the leisure to be wise.” But as it is, the majority of critics
write from hurried glances and in the abundance of their ignorance, and
should not be honored with any consideration at all. Such criticism reveals
nothing so much as the incapacity of the writer and judges him more than
the subject of his criticism. Even great men often miss the mark. The
unfavorable comments of Voltaire and Goethe on the " Divine Comedy” of
Dante showed that neither the philosopher of Ferney nor the sage of
Weimar was able to bring his mind into sympathy with the grand epic of
smoke and flames and human suffering. Heine and Borne in turn were
incompetent to appreciate Goethe's " Faust.” Criticism nearly always
consists of blaming the artist because his idea is not clearly expressed. It
forgets that clearness is always relative and dependent on certain conditions.
When the subject is profound and demands close reasoning, subtlety of
sentiment, and delicacy of expression, it is impertinent for the critic to say