Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 11))

against the black background of night. When we died our souls did not
go to heaven as they do nowadays, but they remained on earth around us;
they made their abode in the trunks of big trees, in the wind and storm,
in pool and brooks. Our shadows that followed us where we went had
more importance then than they do now; they were additional souls, and
our reflections in water were second selves.
It was in that period of our existence that we learned to love and wor-
ship some objects, and to fear and hate others; it was in those prehistoric
days that the germs of our poetical and art-senses were sown—that is to say,
that certain of our brain-cells assumed particular molecular forms, and
although these same cells have been added to and built upon by later
generations, the original germ still remains there. And when I say that it
was in those countless ages before civilization, even before the barbarous
period, that our poetical and art-senses began to exist, I mean that it was then
that there were first made those fundamental cells, which if to-day appealed
to by any outside stimulus, produce in us what we call the artistic and
poetical feelings. For example, when we look upon a big tree in the forest
there responds within our brain some special structure, but this structure
contains within itself as its basis that earlier organism which in our savage
ancestors answered either to the sight or conception of a tree. But to them
a tree meant more than it does to us; it meant something human, something
to revere as sheltering the souls of their fathers. It does not necessarily
follow that the sight of a tree will be sufficient stimulus to act upon the older
as well as the more lately acquired parts of this structure; possibly only those
parts that have been added since tree-worship has ceased to exist will be
brought into play; but when the whole cell is affected, then will we feel, with-
out knowing the cause, that same reverence our ancestors did, and we will
say that we are artistically or poetically affected, or that we are carried into
another land. The power of a tree-trunk to arouse within our mind a vague
remembrance of the past will be stronger in proportion as the surrounding
conditions are more like what they were in the past, the absence of the hand-
work of man, silence, and deep shadows are additional stimuli. In the latter
case the shadows themselves induce past memories, and the original sense
of fear they aroused will be felt as a sad yearning, or, possibly in certain
persons, still as fear, but thefe will always be the feeling that the cause
of sadness or danger is far away in some distant time, which indeed it is.
A pool added to the scene will enhance, even if that pool be a dirty,
shallow frog-pond, as long as the bottom is not seen and it appears deep.
A large, dark brook flowing silently and swiftly under the trees produces
a strong sensation, but a babbling brook is jolly because only good and
cheerful spirits lived there.
The association of joy with flowers has always existed, and the interesting
contrast of a field of flowers on the edge of the dark woods, or the ivy cling-
ing to the old oak-tree, is a psychological one and of the same order as those
we have just studied. A little one-story thatched hut meant home to our
forefathers, so to-day a house of that shape and structure, or as near like it