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

ODDS AND ENDS.
ARISTOCRACY.
¶ THE PRESENCE of an aristocracy, in the radical sense of the word,
when it is a natural creation and not a hereditarily acquired nonentity, is
a very comforting one: for, to each of us who strives earnestly to achieve
something definite, and to whom one of the most pregnant sayings of
modern wisdom is Carlyle's “Produce, in God’s name, man, produce!”
there is ever present the thought, the belief, that the real aristocrat is he
who produces something great, and the more final of its kind it may be,
the higher up in the ’ocracy is he.
¶ It is your genuine worker attaining genuine success who is, or should be
recognized as the real aristocrat; they who work but achieve nothing true,
or good, or new, but who always keep on the low level of the mediocre,
they are the bourgeois, the great middle class, the average, “the usual
thing.”
¶ How interesting it is to prove and work this out in the field of art, even
in our own, as yet juvenile department of photographic art! There will
always appear certain works, that, on sight even, are acclaimed as good;
they carry a sense of distinction; one realizes the presence of a compelling
genius behind; the thing is high-born, finely bred; one feels secure and
full of joy in its presence, and lingers to complete that joy by a patient
analysis that shall deepen and fix it. There is an absence of that dubiety,
hesitancy, reluctance of accepting, that a feebly felt and imperfectly worked-
out impression, however good in its inception, always conveys, and annoys,
and disappoints one with.
¶ This it is to have an aristocracy in art, and how terribly ambitious it
makes one, if, by our much striving, we may but some day come to be
reckoned as members of it! And yet, there are only too many to whom
it must not only be forever impossible to be acclaimed as one of that
favored band, but to whom even its ways and works and desires are also
doomed to be from the beginning a sealed vision, a land of unknown desire.
How grateful should not we be who instinctively feel that the good of this
land is ours, that we may and do enter in and enjoy, even if we may not
share in the highest order of creative ability; to appreciate and enjoy to
the full is almost as large a measure of bliss, perhaps more, as one is freer
from the obsession that mere making compels! How much wiser is
the good old text, “To him that hath shall be given,” than the proverb,
“Much would have more and so lost all,” which, of course, should
run, “ Much would have more and so got all,” for it is surely the meas-
ure of wanting to compass a thing that implies and makes possible its
achievement.
¶ I was lately enjoying some studies by Robert Demachy, and again, as
always with this master’s works, I had the delightful sense of their being
right; conscious that, after the first joyful glance, a further study and
analysis would but make it the more certain that they were, essentially and

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