Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 27))

Also is Pamela Colman Smith the evocatrice of Wonder. Her world
is a world of romance—a world seen with the divining and transforming
spiritual power of a child. It is a fugacious world, a world forever tottering
to its downfall, but saved from annihilation by its inherent power of recreating
itself. The spirit that rules life is neither a spirit of destruction nor a spirit
of creation. It is the Spirit of Evanescence, a lapsing of shadow into shadow,
a fusing and interchanging, with a perpetual tendency to extinction. Inspired
in many cases as Miss Smith has been by the pictures that music gives to her
mind—music the art fugacious—she has seized these morsels of the infinite
out of the hurrying stream of her dreams and translated them into colored
vibrations. To such minds what is practical is vulgar, what is utilitarian is
ugly. Grimm and Andersen tell finer truths than Euclid or Newton, and
they that built the Pyramids built things less substantial than the two young
gods who lie dead under the Aurelian wall.
For Art takes the infinite for its theme; life—practical life—has no theme;
it is all variation, without a welding unity. It is detail, detail, detail, spread
to stupefaction. The artistic spirit constructs ends; having attained them,
it rests a marbled, immortal contemplation. It dwells in an everlasting Now
and has power to hallow, smut and aureole the beast. Our visions! Who can
take them from us ? Our impassioned dreams that burst their brain-dikes
and overflow on canvas or that torture from the marble block its secret of line
and curve or that flash across the world as musical rhapsody—that is the real
moment over against which the “real” workaday world is a fiction, a blas-
phemy, a lie. Pamela Colman Smith has in this manner, I think, challenged
the world around her.
Let the scavengers scrape the gutters for coppers and duck in the cesspools
of practical life for the rolling dollar. They are the “Captains of Industry”—
the grimy, smutty captains of the marts, and their “industry” is a grimy,
smutty, lurid hell of lies. And their realm is the realm of the arched spine
and the furtive glance and the gluttonous lip. They and all their works
shall go in the winds; and the turrets and spires and bridges of our civiliza-
tion shall long be gangrened in the muds of Oblivion when the dreamers from
the slopes of Parnassus shall still with potent rod smite the souls of generations
yet unborn; and from them, as from us, shall burst the fountains of exalted
wonder.
Pamela Colman Smith has seen by closing the eyes.
Benjamin de Casseres.