Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

works themselves of great artists, must evolve a new art form, or symbol, for
its expression. In short, when we come to think of criticism as the paradigm
and primum mobile of all the arts we shall better understand why so many
fail in that which it can only be given to the greatest artists of all to practice
and to understand.
Thus far, however, the argument has confined itself to the consideration
of those fallacies which are commonly contained in the practice and conduct
of art criticism. A rationale of the functions and limitations of art criticism
would have to take note also of the functions and limitations of art itself.
Art itself is of the type of an arch-paradox; it is always contradicting itself.
It is the whole armory of dogmatism and of persuasion and speaks, of course,
always in the language of exaggeration. Its humility is no less astounding
than its egoism; its breath and amplitude are no more significant than its
sheer intensity.
A recent biologist, one whose aim was to show that there was what
he named “a need or Drang for life” in the universe; or in other words, that
the desire for life was the end of all things, happily stumbled on this noble
induction: “ Life, not Beauty, is the mark of Art; but beauty is the signal that
the mark has been hit.” It seems doubtful if the meaning of that can ever be
bettered. It is true in an analytical sense that a centre of gravity, or centripetal
force, round which art forms are first produced and are then forever afterwards
enjoyed or dishonored, is the innate feeling in every human individual (and
perhaps in every atom of organic, as well as of inorganic life) for personal
affinity; for attraction and repulsion, selection and rejection. Also we have
seen that, short of an ideal (and that is as it seems an impossible) republic of
human opinion, a final standard of art can never be set up. Yet it is true that
among the ancient Greeks such an ideal was aimed at, and it may even be true
that among ourselves such a goal is tacitly agreed upon. What that is becomes
the business of esthetic criticism to discover.
Paul Verlaine once fashioned what would seem to be a very com-
monplace remark when he said or wrote: “L’art, mes amis, c’est d’ etre
absolument soi-meme.” The phrase has all the charm of ambiguity and of
explaining nothing—for what “soi-meme” is, what Paul Verlaine himself
may be, is one thing to me, quite another to Tolstoi assuredly, and as many
different things again no doubt as the different people who think about him
or about themselves. But whether his definition be true or not may depend
on the view which we take of art and of the artist in relation to society.
If we think of society as of an organization for ‘The greatest good of the
greatest number, ” then the claims of the individual within that sphere assuredly
cannot be considered as unlimited. Yet the sphere of art is, on the contrary,
so unlimited as to embrace in one shape or another men of every creed, of
every quality, training, disposition and even race. The beginnings of art, in-
deed, go deeper than, and perhaps alone constitute, the earliest records of
human society. Of art in its inception and its growth we may say even
more truly than the historian Freeman said of the structure of human
society as a whole, that there is no part of it, howsoever ancient, “that was not

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