Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 40))

still wonder! For however sympathetic one may feel towards this new criti-
cism, however one may recognize that the recording of impression has a wider,
more elastic, and more lasting value than the delivery of arbitrary judgment
based on rigid laws of taste; however one may admit that it approaches the
creative gift in so far as it demands the qualities of receptivity and reproduction
—is there not still lacking to this “new” critic something of that thirsting
spirit of discovery which precedes the creation—hitherto so-called—of any-
thing? Criticism, taste, aesthetic judgment, by the very nature of their task,
wait till life has been imprisoned for them before they attempt to reproduce
the image which that imprisoned fragment of life makes on the mirror of their
minds. But a thing “created” springs from a germ unconsciously implanted
by the direct impact of unfettered life on the whole range of the creator’s
temperament; and round the germ thus engendered the creative artist—ever
penetrating, discovering, selecting—goes on building cell on cell, gathered
from a million little fresh impacts and visions. And to say that this is also
exactly what the re-creative critic does is to say that the interpretative musi-
cian is creator in the same sense as is the composer of the music that he inter-
prets. And if, indeed, these processes be the same in kind, they are in degree
so far apart that one would think the word creative unfortunately used of both.
But this speculation—I thought—is going beyond the bounds of vague-
ness. Let there be some thread of coherence in the progress of your thoughts,
as in the progress of this evening, fast fading into night. Return to the con-
sideration of the nature and purposes of Art! And recognize that you will
seem, on the face of it, a heretic to the school whose doctrine was incarnated
by Oscar Wilde in that admirable apotheosis of half truths, The Decay of the
Art of Lying. Did he not there say, “No great artist ever sees things as they
really are”; while you have put it thus: The seeing of things as they really
are—the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the power
of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a great
artist is that high fervor of spirit which produces a superlative, instead of a
comparative, clarity of vision.
Close to this house of mine there are some pines with gnarled red limbs
flanked by beech trees. And there is often a very deep blue sky behind. Gen-
erally, that is all I see. But once in a way, in those trees against that sky I
seem to see all the passionate life and glow that Titian painted into his Pagan
pictures. I have a vision of mysterious meaning, of a mysterious relation
between that sky and those trees with their gnarled red limbs, and Life as I
know it. When I have had that vision I always feel that it is reality, and all
those other times, when I am not so blessed, simple unreality; and if I were
a painter, it is for such fervent feeling I should wait before moving brush. This,
so intimate, inner vision of reality, seems in duller moments well-nigh grotesque;
and hence that other glib half-truth: “Art is greater than Life itself.” Art is
greater than Life in the sense that the power of Art is the disengagement from
Life of its real spirit and significance. But in any other sense, to say that Art
is greater than Life from which it emerges, and into which it must remerge,

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