Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 12))

OF VERITIES AND ILLUSIONS.

THERE IS a Buddhist text: “He alone is wise, who can see things with-
out their individuality." Japanese art and life, at least until lately, have
been based on it. We, however, of the Western world live by a different
rule; individuality is the keynote of our civilization; the pushing of it to
furthest possible extreme the measure of personal success, and success,
appraised at a money valuation, almost our sole criterion of worthiness.
An echo of the Buddhist text appears in Winckelmann'sdictum:
“The highest beauty is that which is proper neither to this nor to that person.”
He derived it from a study of the sculptures of Pheidias and his immediate
followers, whose impersonal types of human form represented a supreme
union of physical perfection and mental elevation—the harmonious balance
of matter and spirit. A little later the balance was disturbed. Praxiteles
and Scopas began to glorify physical perfection at the expense of mental
grandeur, and the further trend of Greek art was toward the loss of the
spiritual in the material. And all the subsequent story of Western art may
be summarized,so far as its motives are concerned, as a perpetual readjustment
of the claims of the material and the spiritual; as most often an acquiescence
in the superiority of the material, at intervals a restoration of the spiritual to
a share in the artist's ideal. Its conspicuous feature has been a reliance upon
form, the actual visible appearance of it, such as will scarcely be found in
Japanese art. It is with us an inheritance from the great Greek days, a sur-
vival, as it were, of the letter of the law of beauty, even while its spirit has
been obscured. To Western artists form has presented itself as a reality;
those exclusively interested in its appearances we call “realists ”; Courbet,
who dubbed himself a realist, proclaimed that the appearance of form was
la vérité vraie.
To the Japanese, however, by reason of Buddhist teaching, the reality
is Spirit or Soul; matter an illusion; form, not of itself to be admired, not
to be studied for its own sake, but only as the temporary embodiment or
habitation of some portion of the universal Spirit, yet necessarily to be
studied by artists, indeed not able to be escaped by them, since through form
primarily must they make appeal to the imagination. It is in the attitude
toward form that the Western and the Oriental artists rudimentally differ.
Before considering the Oriental habit of mind, so alien to our own, in order
to bridge over, as it were, the great gap between, let us recall the attempt of
Whistler to get away from the obsession of form.
Moved by the example of the Japanese, which fitted in with his own
rarely sensitive feeling for beauty, he tried for a time to eliminate form from
his pictures, and to depend as nearly as possible only upon color. He real-
ized that form, the concrete thing, expressible in words and suggesting
them, draws off the mind of the spectator from the more abstract qualities of
beauty; moreover, that music, because of its appeal being uninterrupted by
the concrete, is capable of deeper and farther reaching expression than paint-
ing, and that the nearest analogy to the harmony of sound within the scope

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