Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

enon. Paganism is the instinct for liberty. It is a tendency, not a bundle of
opinions. A “ pagan movement” is always a “new movement.” It is always
a rebellion against dogmas, codes, conventions, dry-rot morality and the
professional instinct. Every artist who sees in a new way is a pagan. Monet
and Manet and Boecklin and Rodin and Matisse and Walt Whitman and
Wagner and Richard Strauss were pagans. It is the deep, procreant spirit
that wages war against all forms of death. The pagan spirit is the red blood
of our dreaming, and its products spring from the loins of our aesthetic rapture.
There is always a renaissance somewhere in the world. The human
spirit will not long be set in limits. It will invite pain, but it never invites
immobility. The pagan spirit calls the dead from their tombs and blasts the
sight with its supernal vistas. It may be sudden epiphany of a Nietzsche in
philosophy, a Whitman in poetry, a Wagner in music, or a Rodin in sculp-
ture, but it is always a murderous and creating Force—murderous in that it
batters at the rotting ramparts of the orthodox gods; creative in that it
brings to the human race a new gospel.
This spirit takes for its loom the whole visible and invisible universe, and
weaves with the golden thread of its dreams the mighty tapestries of Art. It
conjugates the things seen with the eye and the things touched with the body
in all their moods. It transfigures and rejuvenates a staled world. Only one
thing it is not—it is not “moral.”
And thus forever and forever will this divine spirit recur. Always some-
where in the world there is being birthed a human revenant of the Great God
Pan, who comes to finger his immortal pipe, to jettison his fulness of joy over
an outworn world, to spill into the golden matrices of art his hyperborean
chant.
If the divine erotic Sappho was a pagan, so was the austere Epicurus.
In our day Rodin and Anatole France, Goethe and Keats, Swinburne and
D’Annunzio stem from Olympus. Rabelais and Montaigne left records that
smug gentility has not yet found the means of annulling. And now we hear
the parochical piffle about Rodin and Matisse, and the little dry cough of
prudery is heard in the land. And Philistia passes in obese seriousness
before the products of the masters of the age. And the lazarus-rattle of the
leper, Hypocrisy, is heard at the door. And those midwives of mediocrity,
the art critics and art editors, croon and mumble their nothings.
But over all reigns Aphrodite; and look at that kissprint on the breast of
Rodin—it is where the divine goddess kissed him!
Benjamin de Casseres.

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