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

The instinct of imitation is more quickly aroused at the sight of things evil
than at the sight of things good. Atmosphere has a greater power of suggestion
than ideas. The subject of a sermon will more surely corrupt the listener than
the moral will tend to redeem. That is the reason risque plays and books will
always sell no matter whether, as in “ YAssommoir,” the hideous death of a
drunkard is depicted, or, as in “Madame Bovary,” the end of the woman
libertine is indicated. The suggestion to get drunk assails the reader of
‘T Assommoir” in just that degree that the orgies of the Coupeau household
are depicted; and the number of women who have found consolation in the
escapades of Madame Bovary, women who have settled down for a “better
time” after reading it, is perhaps incalculable. Macbeth has fathered
murder. “Ten Nights in a Bar-room” has confirmed thousands of drunkards
in their courses.
Decadence in art, that excessive passion for detail and finesse, is like
the sudden exaltation of the senses just prior to death, when the minute is
seen with startling reality.
Shakespeare’s plays never made a “bad” man a “good” one. That is
Shakespeare’s greatest glory, that he has no moral to inculcate. He has
shown us the wonders of sin, the tremendous possibilities in evil and the petty
degradations of conscience. He has shown us the way to greatness, the path
to the stars, and the hell that surges at the feet of a man who falters in his strong
earth-lusts. Be true to your dream of power and sweep to your revenges, he
tells us. Weakness is the only sin in sinning. We pity Othello, but stand in
awe of I ago—and awe is kin to worship.
Music infinitizes the soul of the strong man, while woman enfeebles and
finitizes it. Music mirrors the ideal rapture one seeks and which forever
flies, and in flying draws the soul with it, transforming it to its own majestic,
immeasurable proportions, teasing it, swelling it, with a desire never to be
satisfied. Sexual love is the rapture one may satisfy, and a rapture satisfied is
a rapture dead. We live by things we do not possess and are slain by the
things we do possess. That which we catch catches us, and the thing I have
has me.
If cosmic creation began by the disturbance of an equilibrium, so does
creation in man begin by the disturbance of an equilibrium, an unbalancing;
hence the greatest art is never quite a sane art. We conceive in passion—true
in the mental as well as in the physical world. This is even true of the critical
faculty; it is the passion for destruction at white heat, a cold art to the
observer’s eye only. A calm is a passion in suspense, a temporary equili-
brium gathering momentum for another tidal wave of destruction—or creation.
Benjamin DeCasseres.

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