Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 32))

ART: LIFE'S PRISMATIC GLASS


LL great art conceals artfulness, but never conceals the artist.

the particular, to waylay the imperceptible.
In great art the part always contains the whole.
Where there are two persons in contact there is drama.
Men of action achieve the obvious; poets achieve the impossible.

The mission of genius is to transfix the universal as she peeps through

There is no art without a moral. It is Knowledge defining Will, that is,
a sudden flashlight poured suddenly on the dumb, brute thing we call Nature.

Art renders the world fabulous, and the fable is the realitv.
There are obtuse minds, but no obscure thoughts.
One should never paint or write with the thought of being understood,
but only for those who understand.

The world without genius would be like the skull of poor Yorick without
Hamlet's soliloquy.

The difference between the poet and the ordinary man is the difference
between a piano and a cash register. The poet contains all the melodies that
lie in infinite latency, and at a touch outwell the vibrant harmonies. The

average man, touch whatsoever key you may, responds baldly, absolutely, like
the latest total-adder, and with as much music.
All literature is a fishing for words; all thought a fishing for ideas; all
labor a fishing for food. Opposed to all this is the attitude of receptivity. I
will to be fished out of this dirty pool of a world. The ebbtide leads to the
depths. My attractions shall be the bait I shall dart for.
There is a beauty that is blasphemous—the wild, savage, sacrilegious
beauty of mountain ravines, of dark, desolate wastes.
Art is the everlasting protest of man's soul against this day’s work, this
lumpish experience on the earth. Man sides with Lucifer, but he does not
know it; he flies in the face of the primal edict, but he never knows the signifi-
cance of his protest. His religions are a kind of atheism. He repeats mechani-
cally, “ God's will be done,” but he will not stop to find that Will out. Art,
pleasure and other-world hankering are his consolations for the ruthless, piti-
less exactions of that Will which is always being “done.” :•
The soul's very gait and bent and attitude as it utters its thoughts to itself
—that is, what Maeterlinck has done in his dramas.
Maeterlinck in his dramas and essays has said the unsayable; he has put
those things into words which the brain never knows and the tongue never
utters. His characters are subconscious. He has seen the world as it is, the
home of shadows that whisper across chasms.

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