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

well and good; he should have them. But if such optical and chemical
technicalities and such florid ornateness hinder his object—as they probably
will, if he has an esthetic intent and is not trying for a lens-or plate-maker’s
prize, he must throw such complications overboard. He will find his skill
more highly exercised and taxed when he tries, by every means in his power,
to accent the idea, the feeling that he wishes to express; and the more of
what is not absolutely essential that he can eliminate in the process the
better will the result be—as art. Let us pause to consider this “idea," the
theme, or “motif,” in art. It is not a thing of fact-communication as in
science, but a thing of feeling, in graphic art as in poetry or in music. Its
thought is in terms of sentiment, not of logic; its growth and sequence are
by emotional connection, so that its coherence must be one of feeling and
not of rhetorical reasoning—of the heart and not merely of the head. And
that explains why faking, insincerity, vanity, or even honest but prosaic
endeavor, can not accomplish anything that rings true.
Obviously it is ridiculous, for philosophic and esthetic reasons, to make
truth and perfection in “copying nature” the crucial test and gauge of art. It
is even absurd on physical grounds. There can be no “perfect copy” upon
a flat surface of three-dimensional objects; no, not even a perfect copy of the
way we see them. To talk of such a perfect copy is more than paradoxical;
it is a mere contradiction in terms. Old-time critics, it is true, said that the
artist’s ideal was to “hold the mirror up to nature.” Well and good; it
was—and is. But how? What did they mean? They were not materialists
nor scientists. By nature they meant not merely physical matter, but all
things, quick as well as dead; and mainly the emotions. And the mirror?
Did they mean a Claude Lorraine glass, and then a rectangle of canvas?
No, they meant a man’s heart. Our esthetic aims and intents to-day do not
differ from those of the ancients or of the Renaissance in these essentials so
much as in other ways. We have gone forward (or roundabouts!); we have
built on their buildings, and we have perforce continued to differentiate-
perhaps spiritualize?—certainly to evolve species from species and to
specialize the individual . The printing-press and other cheapening means of
reproduction, the closer association of nations, have made past, and foreign,
art achievements so generally known that we can not merely imitate or
repaint and rewrite, to present in the style and fashion of our own day and
land the beautiful truths that others have said in their own way before us,
though it is ever a great temptation to retell these in the new aspect of our
modern feeling. However, captious critics so inflate and wave on high the
bogey of plagiarism, even while they cry aloud that there can be nothing
more, really new, born under the sun, that we moderns must apparently
tremble even when we dare to use the universal ideas in which we live and
move and have our being. As a matter of fact, no true artist would or
could actually and merely plagiarize. However, print is so cheap and there
is so continual a hullabaloo, that all are kept on edge by the watch-dogs that
smell poachers and thieves everywhere. Discipleship seems at a discount-
only temporarily, let us hope; and one might think derivative work to be