Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 7))

our predecessors. To such an extent have the stress of modern life and
mercenary reasons turned us all into specialists that we hardly realize how
ridiculous it is that one artist should devote his entire life to sheep-painting,
another to the depiction of pirates, a third to portraits, etc., just as if each
branch were a profession in itself. If a painter were to limit his emotions in
a similar way he would arrive at a point where he might be satisfied with
continually representing the same mood of nature. A certain number of our
painters have already fallen victims to this monotonous practice and even
Tryon has actually limited himself to two phases of nature—to dawns and
twilights. How the old masters would laugh at such proceedings, they,
whose brushes subdued the entire objective universe!
But one thing may be argued in favor of the modern artist—that,
limitation having turned him into an expert, he has become superior to
the old masters in the depiction of atmospheric effects and subtler emotions.
To know an age aright, we should seek to understand its ideal. The ideal
of modern art lies in its musical tendency. Walter Pater asserts that “all
art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." This is true in a
certain sense. But how could an age in which music was still in its infancy
make musical ideals the leading elements of its art? The school of Giorgione
had a physical suavity and charm, quite apart from the subjects it rep-
resented; but this quality, so far removed from mere topography, materia
and actual circumstances, was, after all, merely an accessory and the inspira-
tion which created it more religious than psychological. But what has
music to do with mystery? some reader may ask. Merely this: that mys-
tery is one of the few means (another being color, pure and simple,
as manipulated by Monet and Chavannes) by which musical ideals can be
expressed in painting. The vagueness of represented forms runs parallel
to certain sound-impressions—and that is the reason why modern painters
so often make vagueness the vehicle of their emotions. They are aware
that mystery dredges deeper than any other emotional suggestion; that
it represents to our mind an everlasting enigma which no human thought
can solve. The music of mystery, to speak with Browning, drags up
“abysmal bottom-growths ” from our soul-sea. It is the endeavor to per-
petuate particular moments of human happiness, vague currents of the
“unsounded sea” which at rare intervals lash our feeling into exquisite
activity. And to realize this is indisputably one of the most deserving
and ambitious tasks a modern artist can set himself.
Sidney Allan.

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