Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 37))

I cling to nothing, stay with nothing, am wed to nothing, hope for nothing.
I am a perpetual Minute. In the firmament of my interior life I am a Vulture
that hovers over the world of sensation, feeling and thought.
It is in the padlocked speech of Maeterlinck and Ibsen that persons utter
almost nothing and say everything. Suggestion, innuendo, expletive, the
overwhelming pause—it is so in life, in our own speech. In the dialogue of
these masters we have the speech of the decadence. The monosyllabic replies
swarm with life. The sudden silence is a maelstrom. Destinies are consummated
in a dash that terminates a five word phrase. Maeterlinck especially has
reached the ultimate of human speech. One almost hears the inflection of the
voice of his characters. It is telepathy from the ink-pot. Each sentence is a
palimpsest. There is only one chemical reagent that can bring to light the
meaning engraved on meaning in these parchments; the reagent of aesthetic
intuition. Gautier says that every thought has just one word that is its verbal
symbol; in Maeterlinck every word has a thousand thoughts behind it.
They inbreed and interbreed. They are incestuous. Maeterlinck and
Mallarme dissociated language until they brought it back to what it was
originally, hieroglyph and bare sound-symbol. The unity of speech has been
cut to shreds on the monstrous fly-wheel of the modern mind.
Unity, broken into an infinite number of shining particles, is to-day
being sieved through the brain of genius, and the flat surface of our ancient
heavens is crumbling over the world like a rotten ceiling.
Benjamin De Casseres.

ON ORIGINALITY
IT HAS become customary to judge and appraise every new phase of art
by doubting its originality and to trace back the medium of expression,
or the idea underlying it, to some immediate or historical prototypes.
The slightest resemblance to any precedent production proves sufficient to
discard a work of art with a disdainful shoulder shrug and to exclaim with
arrogant superiority, “Oh, it is not original!” It is characteristic of this
age of eclectic investigation in which all knowledge, except specialism, is
derived at second hand.
This rage for originality is largely a mental pose, hiding incompetence
of judgment and artistic jealousy, and at the same time an injustice not only
to struggling talents but also to many of those masters who have achieved
prominence and proved their case. If these meddlers were logical in their
fault-finding most authors and artists save a few of the greatest would be
deprived of any claim to originality. In a measure public opinion, although
not interested in technical contentions, endorses this estimate. For if asked
to name the most original artists, the majority will agree, for convenience’
sake, on the few great names. But even they are not exempt from destructive
criticism. Commentators, biographers, critics and historians are ever busy
to distort originality and to present the intuitive agencies of genius as shrewd

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