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

from his cabin are to be found the power of the torrent, of coal and of wind,
which offer to do twenty times in one hour the work which costs him a long
month of slavery, and to do it better.
It is already many years since the sun revealed to us its power to portray
objects and beings more quickly and more accurately than can pencil or
crayon. It seemed to work only its own way and at its own pleasure. At
first man was restricted to making permanent that which the impersonal
and unsympathetic light had registered. He had not yet been permitted
to imbue it with thought. But to-day it seems that thought has found a
fissure through which to penetrate the mystery of this anonymous force, invade
it, subjugate it, animate it, and compel it to say such things as have not yet
been said in all the realm of chiaroscuro, of grace, of beauty and of truth.
Maurice Maeterlinck.

“It was only, in those earlier days, when proprietary rights were not
associated with art, that the relation of the layman thereto approached the
socialistic ideal. Art was for all, for it belonged to no one. It stood above
individual greed, a highly communistic symbol in an age that in all else was
far indeed from the socialism of our day. Now it has become the expression
of our terrible class distinctions. It is only accessible to an aristocracy, whose
domination is the more sinister, in that it is not based solely on rank and
wealth, that is to say, on things by the division of which the ardent socialist
hopes to re-establish the social equilibrium. There is nothing so unattainable,
for the enjoyment of it presupposes an abnormal refinement of aesthetic per-
ception, which has become as rare as genius itself. Nowadays, one must not
only have a great deal of money to buy art, but one must be an exceptional
creature, of peculiar gifts, to enjoy it. It exists only for the few, and these
are far from being the most admirable or beneficent of mankind; they seem,
indeed, to show all the characteristics of the degenerate. Loftiness of char-
acter, or of intelligence, are not essential to the comprehension of art. The
greatest men of our age have notoriously known nothing about it, and what
is more remarkable, artists themselves often understand it least of all. Artists
have talked more nonsense about art than any other class of men. Modern
artistic culture can scarcely be accounted an indispensable element of general
culture any longer, for the simple reason that art has ceased to play a part
in the general organism/’ Meier-Graefe.

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