Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

then brought to the notice of the English world of thought and of letters by
the writings of Mr. William Archer and of Mr. G. R. S. Mead, to whom these
worlds owe a considerable debt of gratitude for the service. It was then
issued in a new and signed edition by the London firm of A. C. Fifield and it
is soon to be reprinted in America by the house of Mitchell Kennerley.
In form it is an open letter to the Swedish Academy at Stockholm. In
effect it is a new dialectic.
Its determining inspiration and professed object is the definition of the
word “ idealist ” as used by Alfred Nobel in the fourth clause of the residuary
bequest of his famous will, which reads:—“One share to the person who shall
have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an
idealist tendency/’ Its ultimate endeavor and, in a sense, its achieved result
is to have “forged upon the anvil of sense a definition of hope that will ring
true in the ear of the Materialist as well as of the Idealist.”
Its author is a master of style, but never the slave of it: a verbal swords-
man of exquisite skill, but without vanity. He is a wit, but never coins a
witticism. He is a philologist to whom words are living cells, not the fossil
remains of dead organisms. He is a philosopher, but does not aspire to solve
the riddle of creation or to codify the conscience of the Creator. He is an
interpreter of dreams, but not a dreamer. He is a lover of his kind, but a
student of them. He is a scientist, but also a poet.
But he is more than this, for this is but a summary of his equipment,—
and there remains his performance. But how, when the most succinctly
pregnant writer of the age expands a single word into a book, shall one sum
up his book in a word ? Let us content ourselves with saying that “The
New Word,” while it contains the latest, the most penetrating and the most
intelligible epitome of the destructive criticism of the nineteenth century, also
offers us the first dynamic formulation of the constructive criticism of the
twentieth. Once more the Phenix is born among the embers.
J. B. Kerfoot.

AHECALL*
“ . . . Though the soul is the still water in which each of us may dimly
discern this ‘sea-change’; Art, which is the symbolic language of the soul, is
alone, now, the common mirror into which all may look. And Art, we must
remember, is the continual recovery of a bewildered tradition, the tradition of
Beauty and of Joy and of Youth, that, like the Aztec word ahecall—which
signifies the wind and the breath and the soul—are but the three mortal
names of one immortal word.”
Fiona Macleod.

*From the hitherto unpublished MSS. of Wm. Sharp contributed by Mrs.
Sharp.
5°