There is one old fable which Lord Bacon, in his "Wisdom of the
Ancients," has not interpreted. This is the flaying of Marsyas by
Apollo. Everybody remembers the accepted version of it, namely,--that
the young shepherd found Minerva's flute, and was rash enough to enter
into a musical contest with the God of Music. He was vanquished, of
course,--and the story is, that the victor fastened him to a tree and
flayed him alive.
But the God of Song was also the God of Light, and a moment's reflection
reveals the true significance of this seemingly barbarous story. Apollo
was pleased with his young rival, fixed him in position against an iron
rest, (the _tree_ of the fable,) and took a _photograph_, a sun-picture,
of him. This thin film or _skin_ of light and shade was absurdly
interpreted as being the _cutis_, or untanned leather integument of the
young shepherd. The human discovery of the art of photography enables us
to rectify the error and restore that important article of clothing to
the youth, as well as to vindicate the character of Apollo. There is
one spot less upon the sun since the theft from heaven of Prometheus
Daguerre and his fellow-adventurers has enabled us to understand the
ancient legend.
We are now flaying our friends and submitting to be flayed ourselves,
every few years or months or days, by the aid of the trenchant sunbeam
which performed the process for Marsyas. All the world has to submit to
it,--kings and queens with the rest. The monuments of Art and the face
of Nature herself are treated in the same way. We lift an impalpable
scale from the surface of the Pyramids. We slip off from the dome of St.
Peter's that other imponderable dome which fitted it so closely that it
betrays every scratch on the original. We skim off a thin, dry cuticle
from the rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without
breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam. We steal a landscape from
its lawful owners, and defy the charge of dishonesty. We skin the flints
by the wayside, and nobody accuses us of meanness.
These miracles are being worked all around us so easily and so cheaply
that most people have ceased to think of them as marvels. There is a
photographer established in every considerable village,--nay, one may
not unfrequently see a photographic _ambulance_ standing at the wayside
upon some vacant lot where it can squat unchallenged in the midst of
burdock and plantain and apple-Peru, or making a long halt in the middle
of a common by special permission of the "Selectmen."
We must not forget the inestimable preciousness of the new Promethean
gifts because they have become familiar. Think first of the privilege we
all possess now of preserving the lineaments and looks of those dear to
us.
"Blest be the art which can immortalize,"
said Cowper. But remember how few painted portraits really give their
subjects. Recollect those wandering Thugs of Art whose murderous doings
with the brush used frequently to involve whole families; who passed
from one country tavern to another, eating and painting their
way,--feeding a week upon the landlord, another week upon the landlady,
and two or three days apiece upon the children; as the walls of those
hospitable edifices too frequently testify even to the present day. Then
see what faithful memorials of those whom we love and would remember are
put into our hands by the new art, with the most trifling expenditure of
time and money.
This new art is old enough already to have given us the portraits of
infants who are now growing into adolescence. By-and-by it will show
every aspect of life in the same individual, from the earliest week to
the last year of senility. We are beginning to see what it will reveal.
Children grow into beauty and out of it. The first line in the forehead,
the first streak in the hair are chronicled without malice, but without
extenuation. The footprints of thought, of passion, of purpose are all
treasured in these fossilized shadows. Family-traits show themselves in
early infancy, die out, and reappear. Flitting moods which have escaped
one pencil of sunbeams are caught by another. Each new picture gives us
a new aspect of our friend; we find he had not one face, but many.
It is hardly too much to say, that those whom we love no longer leave us
in dying, as they did of old. They remain with us just as they appeared
in life; they look down upon us from our walls; they lie upon our
tables; they rest upon our bosoms; nay, if we will, we may wear their
portraits, like signet-rings, upon our fingers. Our own eyes lose the
images pictured on them. Parents sometimes forget the faces of their own
children in a separation of a year or two. But the unfading artificial
retina which has looked upon them retains their impress, and a fresh
sunbeam lays this on the living nerve as if it were radiated from the
breathing shape. How these shadows last, and how their originals fade
away!
What is true of the faces of our friends is still more true of the
places we have seen and loved. No picture produces an impression on the
imagination to compare with a photographic transcript of the home of our
childhood, or any scene with which we have been long familiar. The very
point which the artist omits, in his effort to produce general effect,
may be exactly the one that individualizes the place most strongly to
our memory. There, for instance, is a photographic view of our own
birthplace, and with it of a part of our good old neighbor's dwelling.
An artist would hardly have noticed a slender, dry, leafless stalk which
traces a faint line, as you may see, along the front of our neighbor's
house next the corner. That would be nothing to him,--but to us it marks
the stem of the _honeysuckle-vine_, which we remember, with its pink
and white heavy-scented blossoms, as long as we remember the stars in
heaven.
To this charm of fidelity in the minutest details the stereoscope adds
its astonishing illusion of solidity, and thus completes the effect
which so entrances the imagination. Perhaps there is also some
half-magnetic effect in the fixing of the eyes on the twin
pictures,--something like Mr. Braid's _hypnotism_, of which many of our
readers have doubtless heard. At least the shutting out of surrounding
objects, and the concentration of the whole attention, which is a
consequence of this, produce a dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a
kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us
and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied
spirits.
"Ah, yes," some unimaginative reader may say; "but there is no color and
no motion in these pictures you think so life-like; and at best they are
but petty miniatures of the objects we see in Nature."
But color is, after all, a very secondary quality as compared with form.
We like a good crayon portrait better for the most part in black and
white than in tints of pink and blue and brown. Mr. Gibson has never
succeeded in making the world like his flesh-colored statues. The color
of a landscape varies perpetually, with the season, with the hour of the
day, with the weather, and as seen by sunlight or moonlight; yet our
home stirs us with its old associations, seen in any and every light.
As to motion, though of course it is not present in stereoscopic
pictures, except in those toy-contrivances which have been lately
introduced, yet it is wonderful to see how nearly the effect of motion
is produced by the slight difference of light on the water or on the
leaves of trees as seen by the two eyes in the double-picture.
And lastly with respect to size, the illusion is on the part of those
who suppose that the eye, unaided, ever sees anything but miniatures
of objects. Here is a new experiment to convince those who have not
reflected on the subject that the stereoscope shows us objects of their
natural size.
We had a stereoscopic view taken by Mr. Soule out of our parlor-window,
overlooking the town of Cambridge, with the river and the bridge in the
foreground. Now, placing this view in the stereoscope, and looking with
the left eye at the right stereographic picture, while the right eye
looked at the natural landscape, through the window where the view was
taken, it was not difficult so to adjust the photographic and real views
that one overlapped the other, and then it was shown that the two almost
exactly coincided in all their dimensions.
Another point in which the stereograph differs from every other
delineation is in the character of its evidence. A simple photographic
picture may be tampered with. A lady's portrait has been known to come
out of the finishing-artist's room ten years younger than when it left
the camera. But try to mend a stereograph and you will soon find the
difference. Your marks and patches float above the picture and never
identify themselves with it. We had occasion to put a little cross on
the pavement of a double photograph of Canterbury Cathedral,--copying
another stereoscopic picture where it was thus marked. By careful
management the two crosses were made perfectly to coincide in the field
of vision, but the image seemed suspended above the pavement, and did
not absolutely designate any one stone, as it would have done, if it
had been a part of the original picture. The impossibility of the
stereograph's perjuring itself is a curious illustration of the law of
evidence. "At the mouth of _two witnesses_, or of three, shall he that
is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one he shall not
be put to death." No woman may be declared youthful on the strength of a
single photograph; but if the stereoscopic twins say she is young, let
her be so acknowledged in the high court of chancery of the God of Love.
Some two or three years since, we called the attention of the readers
of this magazine to the subject of the stereoscope and the stereograph.
Some of our expressions may have seemed extravagant, as if heated by the
interest which a curious novelty might not unnaturally excite. We have
not lost any of the enthusiasm and delight which that article must have
betrayed. After looking over perhaps a hundred thousand stereographs
and making a collection of about a thousand, we should feel the same
excitement on receiving a new lot to look over and select from as
in those early days of our experience. To make sure that this early
interest has not cooled, let us put on record one or two convictions of
the present moment.
First, as to the wonderful nature of the invention. If a strange planet
should happen to come within hail, and one of its philosophers were to
ask us, as it passed, to hand him the most remarkable material product
of human skill, we should offer him, without a moment's hesitation, a
stereoscope containing an _instantaneous_ double-view of some great
thoroughfare,--one of Mr. Anthony's views of Broadway, (No. 203,) for
instance.
Secondly, of all artificial contrivances for the gratification of human
taste, we seriously question whether any offers so much, on the whole,
to the enjoyment of the civilized races as the self-picturing of Art
and Nature,--with three exceptions: namely, dress, the most universal,
architecture, the most imposing, and music, the most exciting, of
factitious sources of pleasure.
No matter whether this be an extravagance or an over-statement; none
can dispute that we have a new and wonderful source of pleasure in
the sun-picture, and especially in the solid sun-_sculptures_ of the
stereograph. Yet there is a strange indifference to it, even up to the
present moment, among many persons of cultivation and taste. They do not
seem to have waked up to the significance of the miracle which the Lord
of Light is working for them. The cream of the visible creation has been
skimmed off; and the sights which men risk their lives and spend their
money and endure sea-sickness to behold,--the views of Nature and Art
which make exiles of entire families for the sake of a look at them,
and render "bronchitis" and dyspepsia, followed by leave of absence,
endurable dispensations to so many worthy shepherds,--these sights,
gathered from Alps, temples, palaces, pyramids, are offered you for
a trifle, to carry home with you, that you may look at them at your
leisure, by your fireside, with perpetual fair weather, when you are in
the mood, without catching cold, without following a _valet-de-place_,
in any order of succession,--from a glacier to Vesuvius, from Niagara
to Memphis,--as long as you like, and breaking off as suddenly as you
like;--and you, native of this incomparably dull planet, have hardly
troubled yourself to look at this divine gift, which, if an angel had
brought it from some sphere nearer to the central throne, would have
been thought worthy of the celestial messenger to whom it was intrusted!
It seemed to us that it might possibly awaken an interest in some of our
readers, if we should carry them with us through a brief stereographic
trip,--describing, not from places, but from the photographic pictures
of them which we have in our own collection. Again, those who have
collections may like to compare their own opinions of particular
pictures mentioned with those here expressed, and those who are buying
stereographs may be glad of some guidance in choosing.
But the reader must remember that this trip gives him only a glimpse of
a few scenes selected out of our gallery of a thousand. To visit them
all, as tourists visit the realities, and report what we saw, with the
usual explanations and historical illustrations, would make a formidable
book of travels.
Before we set out, we must know something of the sights of our own
country. At least we must see Niagara. The great fall shows infinitely
best on glass. Thomson's "Point View, 28," would be a perfect picture of
the Falls in summer, if a lady in the foreground had not moved her shawl
while the pictures were taking, or in the interval between taking the
two. His winter view, "Terrapin Tower, 37," is perfection itself. Both
he and Evans have taken fine views of the rapids, _instantaneous_,
catching the spray as it leaped and the clouds overhead. Of Blondin on
his rope there are numerous views; standing on one foot, on his head,
carrying a man on his back, and one frightful picture, where he hangs by
one leg, head downward, over the abyss. The best we have seen is Evans's
No. 5, a front view, where every muscle stands out in perfect relief,
and the symmetry of the most unimpressible of mortals is finely shown.
It literally makes the head swim to fix the eyes on some of these
pictures. It is a relief to get away from such fearful sights and look
up at the Old Man of the Mountain. There stands the face, without any
humanizing help from the hand of an artist. Mr. Bierstadt has given it
to us very well. Rather an imbecile old gentleman, one would say,
with his mouth open; a face such as one may see hanging about
railway-stations, and, what is curious, a New-England style of
countenance. Let us flit again, and just take a look at the level sheets
of water and broken falls of Trenton,--at the oblong, almost squared
arch of the Natural Bridge,--at the ruins of the Pemberton Mills, still
smoking,--and so come to Mr. Barnum's "Historical Series." Clark's
Island, with the great rock by which the Pilgrims "rested, according to
the commandment," on the first Sunday, or Sabbath, as they loved to call
it, which they passed in the harbor of Plymouth, is the most interesting
of them all to us. But here are many scenes of historical interest
connected with the great names and events of our past. The Washington
Elm, at Cambridge, (through the branches of which we saw the first
sunset we ever looked upon, from this planet, at least,) is here in all
its magnificent drapery of hanging foliage. Mr. Soule has given another
beautiful view of it, when stripped of its leaves, equally remarkable
for the delicacy of its pendent, hair-like spray.
We should keep the reader half an hour looking through this series,
if we did not tear ourselves abruptly away from it. We are bound for
Europe, and are to leave _via_ New York immediately.
Here we are in the main street of the great city. This is Mr. Anthony's
miraculous instantaneous view in Broadway, (No. 203,) before referred
to. It is the Oriental story of the petrified city made real to our
eyes. The character of it is, perhaps, best shown by the use we make of
it in our lectures, to illustrate the physiology of walking. Every foot
is caught in its movement with such suddenness that it shows as clearly
as if quite still. We are surprised to see, in one figure, how long the
stride is,--in another, how much the knee is bent,--in a third, how
curiously the heel strikes the ground before the rest of the foot,--in
all, how singularly the body is accommodated to the action of walking.
The facts which the brothers Weber, laborious German experimenters and
observers, had carefully worked out on the bony frame, are illustrated
by the various individuals comprising this moving throng. But what a
wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as it
rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity of movement! Hundreds of
objects in this picture could be identified in a court of law by their
owners. There stands Car No. 33 of the Astor House and Twenty-Seventh
Street Fourth Avenue line. The old woman would miss an apple from that
pile which you see glistening on her stand. The young man whose back is
to us could swear to the pattern of his shawl. The gentleman between two
others will no doubt remember that he had a headache the next morning,
after this walk he is taking. Notice the caution with which the man
driving the dapple-gray horse in a cart loaded with barrels holds his
reins,--wide apart, one in each hand. See the shop-boys with their
bundles, the young fellow with a lighted cigar in his hand, as you see
by the way he keeps it off from his body, the _gamin_ stooping to
pick up something in the midst of the moving omnibuses, the stout
philosophical carman sitting on his cart-tail, Newman Noggs by the
lamp-post at the corner. Nay, look into Car No. 33 and you may see the
passengers;--is that a young woman's face turned toward you looking
out of the window? See how the faithful sun-print advertises the rival
establishment of "Meade Brothers, Ambrotypes and Photographs." What a
fearfully suggestive picture! It is a leaf torn from the book of God's
recording angel. What if the sky is one great concave mirror, which
reflects the picture of all our doings, and photographs every act on
which it looks upon dead and living surfaces, so that to celestial eyes
the stones on which we tread are written with our deeds, and the leaves
of the forest are but undeveloped negatives where our summers stand
self-recorded for transfer into the imperishable record? And what a
metaphysical puzzle have we here in this simple-looking paradox! Is
motion but a succession of rests? All is still in this picture of
universal movement. Take ten thousand instantaneous photographs of the
great thoroughfare in a day; every one of them will be as still as the
_tableau_ in the "Enchanted Beauty." Yet the hurried day's life of
Broadway will have been made up of just such stillnesses. Motion is as
rigid as marble, if you only take a wink's worth of it at a time.
We are all ready to embark now. Here is the harbor; and there lies the
Great Eastern at anchor,--the biggest island that ever got adrift.
Stay one moment,--they will ask us about secession and the revolted
States,--it may be as well to take a look at Charleston, for an instant,
before we go.
These three stereographs were sent us by a lady now residing in
Charleston. The Battery, the famous promenade of the Charlestonians,
since armed with twenty-four-pounders facing Fort Sumter; the interior
of Fort Moultrie, with the guns spiked by Major Anderson; and a more
extensive view of the same interior, with the flag of the seven stars,
(corresponding to the seven deadly sins,)--the free end of it tied to
a gun-carriage, as if to prevent the winds of the angry heaven from
rending it to tatters. In the distance, to the right, Fort Sumter,
looking remote and inaccessible,--the terrible rattle which our foolish
little spoiled sister Caroline has insisted on getting into her
rash hand. How ghostly, yet how real, it looms up out of the dim
atmosphere,--the guns looking over the wall and out through the
embrasures,--meant for a foreign foe,--this very day (April 13th) turned
in self-defence against the children of those who once fought for
liberty at Fort Moultrie! It is a sad thought that there are truths
which can be got out of life only by the _destructive analysis_ of war.
Statesmen deal in _proximate principles_,--unstable compounds; but war
reduces facts to their simple elements in its red-hot crucible, with its
black flux of carbon and sulphur and nitre. Let us turn our back on this
miserable, even though inevitable, fraternal strife, and, closing our
eyes for an instant, open them in London.
Here we are at the foot of Charing Cross. You remember, of course, how
this fine equestrian statue of Charles I. was condemned to be sold and
broken up by the Parliament, but was buried and saved by the brazier who
purchased it, and so reappeared after the Restoration. To the left, the
familiar words "Morley's Hotel" designate an edifice about half windows,
where the plebeian traveller may sit and contemplate Northumberland
House opposite, and the straight-tailed lion of the Percys surmounting
the lofty battlement which crowns its broad _façade_. We could describe
and criticize the statue as well as if we stood under it, but other
travellers have done that. Where are all the people that ought to be
seen here? Hardly more than three or four figures are to be made out;
the rest were moving, and left no images in this slow, old-fashioned
picture,--how unlike the miraculous "instantaneous" Broadway of Mr.
Anthony we were looking at a little while ago! But there, on one side,
an omnibus has stopped long enough to be caught by the sunbeams. There
is a mark on it. Try it with a magnifier.