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

eloquent of commonwealths in foreign lands then undiscovered.” The prin-
ciple which underlies art is the same today as it was yesterday, or as it will be
forever. Its source is in a sense of individual eclecticism reaching out through
the whole body of correlatedly human, or universal, desire. Assuredly, then,
the artist in the highest and strictest sense of the term can have no business,
no immediate business at all events, with society, or with the offices and affairs
of an organization supposedly intended for the great (or little) good of a great
or little number. The artist’s concern must be primarily with himself, not in
the artifices of man, but innocency of Nature. In short, as Mathew Arnold
said of the functions of poetry in particular, so we may say of the artist in
general that his business is “the criticism of life,” and therein exactly lies the
supreme differentiation between society and the artist, that whereas society
is engaged in the interpretation of things in relationship to itself and that is in
the relation of parts to a whole (or at the best a diverse, temporary and mock
whole), the artist on the contrary is only concerned with their resolution in
terms of himself, that is, in the relationship of their apparent identity or inter-
changeability. Now if we believe in the latter as the symbol of a more en-
during type, then we may have to adopt as an imperative maxim, that the
business of the artist and its value for us lies rather in its differentiation
from, than in its conformity to, past or existing models or modes of society.
And hence the application of the argument to the functions and limitations
of art or of art criticism. If art has a supremely vital, even though a com-
monly unrecognized, relation to the thought of the age in which it lives; we
may have to add thereto, that its value as an interpretative gage lies rather in
its differing from, than adherence to, past or existing modes of thought. For if
the last were not true then it would be difficult to account for that gross stamp
of originality and independence with which great men have always sealed
their work, and the widening of our sympathies which has been its direct re-
sult; or if the first were not so, then the chronology of art, like the chronologic-
al facts of history itself, could have no meaning and no interest for us.
Yet we know that that is not so either: that the monuments of ancient
Greece and Rome, or the wall-paintings of old Assyria, or the churches and
palaces of a later age with their interior decoration; all these and their like
are as authentic documents in the survival of remembrance, as the testamen-
tary records themselves of the peoples and races to which they belonged.
And still it may very well be that what we have come to regard as common-
place, or at the best as merely decorative in the large procession of time,
may have had an interest as intense and vital in the order and contingency
of things to which they first belonged as events the most ephemeral or the
most perdurable which attract our attention today or at any passing hour.
And thus, if we are so minded, we at last probe into that profound relationship
which exists between what has been named the Time-Spirit in art (or its work-
aday, stained and mutable costume) and its fast anchorage in the immixity and
sempiternity of things.
The artist, then, in the high meaning and example of the term, is no
mere child loosed at large in a garden stocked with all playful colors, but rather

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