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

of the painter, is the harmony of color. So, for a time, he experimented
with Symphonies, Nocturnes, Harmonies. But it was only an experiment,
and by the nature of the case incapable of more than temporary and partial
success. For this effort to escape from form was like that of the anchorite
to escape from the wickedness of the world. That it may not be a trammel
to his spirit, he buries himself in a cave, communing with himself of spiritual
matters; as if the world did not exist both outside and inside himself. The
Japanese artist, on the contrary, admits the necessity of form, but strives to
subdue its materialism to an expression of the Spirit.
This conflict of tendency — the Western preoccupation with what is
conceived to be the realities of form and the Oriental subordination of form
to spiritual expression—is a phase of the wider difference of motives which
separates the West and East. A very illuminating statement concerning
this difference occurs in Mr. Okakura’s" Ideals of the East.” He has been
saying that the Himalayas divide only to accentuate two mighty civilizations —
the Indian and the Chinese. “But, not even the snowy barriers," he con-
tinues, “can interrupt for a moment that broad expanse of love for the
Ultimate and the Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of
every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the
world, and distinguishing them from those maritime people of the Mediter-
ranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out
the Means, not the End, of life.” And nowhere better than in Japan can the
Oriental ideal be studied, since the successive thought-waves of Asia—Con-
fucianism, Taoism, Buddhism — have washed up on her shores, until she has
become “ the real repository of the truest Asiatic thought and culture, and
the history of her art has been the history of Asiatic ideals.”
To repeat the antithesis — theirs the love of the Universal and the
Ultimate; ours the love of the Particular and the Means. Postponing for
a moment the consideration of the Oriental, can we have any doubt as to
the substantial truth of this estimate of our own ideals?
Our love of the Particular: Did not the abstract perfection of the art
of Pheidias become speedily supplanted by the perfection of particular
types? Have not all the developing influences of our civilization — Italian
Renaissance, Revival of Learning, Reformation, English Civil War, and
Revolutions, American and French, trended toward the assertion of that
form of the Particular—the Individual ? And what is realism, as it has
fastened itself down upon literature and painting, but the minute and detailed
study of the Individual, the Particular; not mankind's relation to the Universe,
but a man’sadaptability to his own little backyard.
And our love of the Means: The art for art'ssake theory of practice
may have dissolved in dry rot, but the dust of it still lies over our art. Only
a few days ago, a pupil of Mr. Chase, a very promising one I had thought
him until he opened up to me his own emptiness, asserted with every appear-
ance of sincerity and conviction that the sole thing necessary for a painter
was to be able to paint. And really, if one searches the annual exhibitions
with their array of more or less skilfully handled canvases, barren all but