Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 8))

SEBASTIAN MELMOTH—EXTRACTS.
IT IS always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice
is fatal.
Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be
popular one must be a mediocrity.
Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be
added to you. This devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful
things is the test of all great civilizations; it is what makes the life of each
citizen a sacrament and not a speculation.
Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a
microscope.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier
than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.
It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.
“ If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise
authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he
can not receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to
dominate the spectator; the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master
is to play, and the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his
own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what art should be or should
not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in
question. This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theater-
going public of English men and women; but it is equally true of what are
called educated people, for an educated person’sideas of art are drawn
naturally from what art has been, and to measure it by the standards of the
past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection
depends. A temperament capable of receiving through an imaginative
medium and under imaginative conditions new and beautiful impressions is
the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.”

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