Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

all, there exists in the Louvre a drawing by Raphael on which is written in
Raphael's handwriting a note to Durer, to whom he propounds the question,
if brilliant results might not be obtained by laying colors in stripes instead of
flat tones, etc.! Now, I do not for an instant believe that Raphael ever had
brains enough to conceive the principle he elucidated to Durer, but, probably
seeing the results Sodoma obtained, he realized his opportunity and decided
if possible to appropriate the conception and take the credit to himself. Be
this as it may, the principles of breaking color were known hundreds of years
ago, only to-day Monet’sadditions and improvements in the procedure have
given him all the credit, just as to-morrow, should some one do it a little
better, he would be called the “genius.”
“ But, if Claude Monet'swork is only the result of gradual evolution
and plagiarism, what then constitutes the difference between our and former
ages?” you may ask. The difference lies in this: That we are neither
honest with ourselves nor with others, while the old masters were both. The
old masters worked and thought and copied outright; we talk, and are
“inspired,” and copy underhandedly; in the olden times artists were quite
sane and saw clearly; to-day, “genius,” or what comes very close to it,
namely, “remarkable talent,” stalks the streets unfettered; we suffer from a
confused idea that, although we can not make progress in art unless we study
the compositions and methods of others, yet it is dangerous to do so, as
“the influence might show.”
There is, however, scientific and unscientific plagiarism; that existing at
the present day being mostly of the latter kind. The Italians recognized,
as we have seen, that it was a mathematical impossibility for one mind to
create more than a very little, just as Homer and Shakespeare and Wagner
realized it would be quite impossible to invent such plots and themes as they
desired for their purposes, themes and stories which it had taken the accumu-
lated art of many generations of repeating and adding to and subtracting
from to produce. So they frankly and honestly accepted all that the past
offered them, copied it en bloc, and built up upon it; and if we come back to
our original definition we will see that this is not plagiarism ; for to plagiarize,
as we understand it, is “ to appropriate from another and give out as one’s
own ” ; but on the face of it, if the part of a picture appropriated is well known
to be the creation of others, then there can be no possibility of “giving it
out as one'sown,” for nobody will believe us; and to the old masters it
never occurred that any one would regard their work as “ original.” But,
when the “genius” came on earth, he had of necessity, owing to his “ super-
natural ” make-up, to refrain from copying others, and had to confine him-
self to original work; and these “geniuses” spread their cult so wide over the
earth that to-day, when a painter or photographer does the only natural and
intelligent thing to do, namely, copy, he must, forsooth, copy in such a way
that it shall not be recognized, he must become a hypocrite and hide his act;
but unfortunately for the moral side of it, the better he hides, the more of a
plagiarist he is, for just so much the more does he succeed in giving out as his
own that which is not. This hypocrisy does more to damage progress than