Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 by Various
V >>
Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19
Such are the stereoscope and the photograph, by the aid of which _form_
is henceforth to make itself seen through the world of intelligence, as
thought has long made itself heard by means of the art of printing. The
_morphotype_, or form-print, must hereafter take its place by the side
of the _logotype_, or word-print. The _stereograph_, as we have called
the double picture designed for the stereoscope, is to be the card of
introduction to make all mankind acquaintances.
The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope
is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way
into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in
the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The
elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.
Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same
sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us. A painter shows us
masses; the stereoscopic figure spares us nothing,--all must be there,
every stick, straw, scratch, as faithfully as the dome of St. Peter's,
or the summit of Mont Blanc, or the ever-moving stillness of Niagara.
The sun is no respecter of persons or of things.
This is one infinite charm of the photographic delineation.
Theoretically, a perfect photograph is absolutely inexhaustible. In a
picture you can find nothing which the artist has not seen before you;
but in a perfect photograph there will be as many beauties lurking,
unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in forests and
meadows. It is a mistake to suppose one knows a stereoscopic picture
when he has studied it a hundred times by the aid of the best of our
common instruments. Do we know all that there is in a landscape
by looking out at it from our parlor-windows? In one of the glass
stereoscopic views of Table Rock, two figures, so minute as to be
mere objects of comparison with the surrounding vastness, may be seen
standing side by side. Look at the two faces with a strong magnifier,
and you could identify their owners, if you met them in a court of law.
Many persons suppose that they are looking on _miniatures_ of the
objects represented, when they see them in the stereoscope. They will be
surprised to be told that they see most objects as large as they appear
in Nature. A few simple experiments will show how what we see in
ordinary vision is modified in our perceptions by what we think we see.
We made a sham stereoscope, the other day, with no glasses, and an
opening in the place where the pictures belong, about the size of one of
the common stereoscopic pictures. Through this we got a very ample view
of the town of Cambridge, including Mount Auburn and the Colleges, in a
single field of vision. We do not recognize how minute distant objects
really look to us, without something to bring the fact home to our
conceptions. A man does not deceive us as to his real size when we see
him at the distance of the length of Cambridge Bridge. But hold a common
black pin before the eyes at the distance of distinct vision, and
one-twentieth of its length, nearest the point, is enough to cover him
so that he cannot be seen. The head of the same pin will cover one of
the Cambridge horse-cars at the same distance, and conceal the tower of
Mount Auburn, as seen from Boston.
We are near enough to an edifice to see it well, when we can easily
read an inscription upon it. The stereoscopic views of the arches
of Constantine and of Titus give not only every letter of the old
inscriptions, but render the grain of the stone itself. On the pediment
of the Pantheon may be read, not only the words traced by Agrippa, but a
rough inscription above it, scratched or hacked into the stone by some
wanton hand during an insurrectionary tumult.
This distinctness of the lesser details of a building or a landscape
often gives us incidental truths which interest us more than the central
object of the picture. Here is Alloway Kirk, in the churchyard of which
you may read a real story by the side of the ruin that tells of more
romantic fiction. There stands the stone "Erected by James Russell,
seedsman, Ayr, in memory of his children,"--three little boys, James,
and Thomas, and John, all snatched away from him in the space of three
successive summer-days, and lying under the matted grass in the shadow
of the old witch-haunted walls. It was Burns's Alloway Kirk we paid
for, and we find we have bought a share in the griefs of James Russell,
seedsman; for is not the stone that tells this blinding sorrow of real
life the true centre of the picture, and not the roofless pile which
reminds us of an idle legend?
We have often found these incidental glimpses of life and death running
away with us from the main object the picture was meant to delineate.
The more evidently accidental their introduction, the more trivial they
are in themselves, the more they take hold of the imagination. It is
common to find an object in one of the twin pictures which we miss in
the other; the person or the vehicle having moved in the interval of
taking the two photographs. There is before us a view of the Pool of
David at Hebron, in which a shadowy figure appears at the water's edge,
in the right-hand farther corner of the right-hand picture only. This
muffled shape stealing silently into the solemn scene has already
written a hundred biographies in our imagination. In the lovely glass
stereograph of the Lake of Brienz, on the left-hand side, a vaguely
hinted female figure stands by the margin of the fair water; on the
other side of the picture she is not seen. This is life; we seem to see
her come and go. All the longings, passions, experiences, possibilities
of womanhood animate that gliding shadow which has flitted through our
consciousness, nameless, dateless, featureless, yet more profoundly
real than the sharpest of portraits traced by a human hand. Here is
the Fountain of the Ogre, at Berne. In the right picture two women are
chatting, with arms akimbo, over its basin; before the plate for the
left picture is got ready, "one shall be taken and the other left";
look! on the left side there is but one woman, and you may see the blur
where the other is melting into thin air as she fades forever from your
eyes.
Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of
glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the
face of his rock-hewn Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal
that calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops. I pace the length of the three
Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbee,--mightiest masses of quarried
rock that man has lifted into the air; and then I dive into some mass
of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so
delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can
almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices. I
look into the eyes of the caged tiger, and on the scaly train of the
crocodile, stretched on the sands of the river that has mirrored a
hundred dynasties. I stroll through Rhenish vineyards, I sit under Roman
arches, I walk the streets of once buried cities, I look into the chasms
of Alpine glaciers, and on the rush of wasteful cataracts. I pass, in
a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and
leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I
am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.
"Give me the full tide of life at Charing Cross," said Dr. Johnson. Here
is Charing Cross, but without the full tide of life. A perpetual stream
of figures leaves no definite shapes upon the picture. But on one side
of this stereoscopic doublet a little London "gent" is leaning pensively
against a post; on the other side he is seen sitting at the foot of the
next post;--what is the matter with the little "gent"?
The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly,
the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions
perfect. What is the picture of a drum without the marks on its head
where the beating of the sticks has darkened the parchment? In three
pictures of the Ann Hathaway Cottage, before us,--the most perfect,
perhaps, of all the paper stereographs we have seen,--the door at the
farther end of the cottage is open, and we see the marks left by the
rubbing of hands and shoulders as the good people came through the
entry, or leaned against it, or felt for the latch. It is not impossible
that scales from the epidermis of the trembling hand of Ann Hathaway's
young suitor, Will Shakspeare, are still adherent about the old latch
and door, and that they contribute to the stains we see in our picture.
Among the accidents of life, as delineated in the stereograph, there is
one that rarely fails in any extended view which shows us the details of
streets and buildings. There may be neither man nor beast nor vehicle to
be seen. You may be looking down on a place in such a way that none of
the ordinary marks of its being actually inhabited show themselves. But
in the rawest Western settlement and the oldest Eastern city, in
the midst of the shanties at Pike's Peak and stretching across the
court-yards as you look into them from above the clay-plastered roofs of
Damascus, wherever man lives with any of the decencies of civilization,
you will find the _clothes-line_. It may be a fence, (in Ireland,)--it
may be a tree, (if the Irish license is still allowed us,)--but
clothes-drying, or a place to dry clothes on, the stereoscopic
photograph insists on finding, wherever it gives us a group of houses.
This is the city of Berne. How it brings the people who sleep under that
roof before us to see their sheets drying on that fence! and how real it
makes the men in that house to look at their shirts hanging, arms down,
from yonder line!
The reader will, perhaps, thank us for a few hints as to the choice
of stereoscopes and stereoscopic pictures. The only way to be sure of
getting a good instrument is to try a number of them, but it may be well
to know which are worth trying. Those made with achromatic glasses may
be as much better as they are dearer, but we have not been able to
satisfy ourselves of the fact. We do not commonly find any trouble from
chromatic aberration (or false color in the image). It is an excellent
thing to have the glasses adjust by pulling out and pushing in, either
by the hand, or, more conveniently, by a screw. The large instruments,
holding twenty-five slides, are best adapted to the use of those who
wish to show their views often to friends; the owner is a little apt
to get tired of the unvarying round in which they present themselves.
Perhaps we relish them more for having a little trouble in placing them,
as we do nuts that we crack better than those we buy cracked. In optical
effect, there is not much difference between them and the best ordinary
instruments. We employ one stereoscope with adjusting glasses for the
hand, and another common one upon a broad rosewood stand. The stand may
be added to any instrument, and is a great convenience.
Some will have none but glass stereoscopic pictures; paper ones are not
good enough for them. Wisdom dwells not with such. It is true that
there is a brilliancy in a glass picture, with a flood of light pouring
through it, which no paper one, with the light necessarily falling _on_
it, can approach. But this brilliancy fatigues the eye much more than
the quiet reflected light of the paper stereograph. Twenty-five glass
slides, well inspected in a strong light, are _good_ for one headache,
if a person is disposed to that trouble.
Again, a good paper photograph is infinitely better than a bad glass
one. We have a glass stereograph of Bethlehem, which looks as if the
ground were covered with snow,--and paper ones of Jerusalem colored and
uncolored, much superior to it both in effect and detail. The Oriental
pictures, we think, are apt to have this white, patchy look; possibly we
do not get the best in this country.
A good view on glass or paper is, as a rule, best uncolored. But some
of the American views of Niagara on glass are greatly improved by being
colored; the water being rendered vastly more suggestive of the reality
by the deep green tinge. _Per contra_, we have seen some American views
so carelessly colored that they were all the worse for having been
meddled with. The views of the Hathaway Cottage, before referred to, are
not only admirable in themselves, but some of them are admirably colored
also. Few glass stereographs compare with them as real representatives
of Nature.
In choosing stereoscopic pictures, beware of investing largely in
_groups_. The owner soon gets tired to death of them. Two or three
of the most striking among them are worth having, but mostly they
detestable,--vulgar repetitions of vulgar models, shamming grace,
gentility, and emotion, by the aid of costumes, attitudes, expressions,
and accessories worthy only of a Thespian society of candle-snuffers. In
buying brides under veils, and such figures, look at the lady's _hands_.
You will very probably find the young countess is a maid-of-all-work.
The presence of a human figure adds greatly to the interest of all
architectural views, by giving us a standard of size, and should often
decide our choice out of a variety of such pictures. No view pleases the
eye which has glaring patches in it,--a perfectly white-looking river,
for instance,--or trees and shrubs in full leaf, but looking as if they
were covered with snow,--or glaring roads, or frosted-looking stones and
pebbles. As for composition in landscape, each person must consult his
own taste. All have agreed in admiring many of the Irish views, as those
about the Lakes of Killarney, for instance, which are beautiful alike in
general effect and in nicety of detail. The glass views on the Rhine,
and of the Pyrenees in Spain, are of consummate beauty. As a specimen of
the most perfect, in its truth and union of harmony and contrast, the
view of the Circus of Gavarni, with the female figure on horseback in
the front ground, is not surpassed by any we remember to have seen.
* * * * *
What is to come of the stereoscope and the photograph we are almost
afraid to guess, lest we should seem extravagant. But, premising that we
are to give a _colored_ stereoscopic mental view of their prospects,
we will venture on a few glimpses at a conceivable, if not a possible
future.
_Form is henceforth divorced from matter._ In fact, matter as a visible
object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form
is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from
different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or
burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in
the loss of color; but form and light, and shade are the great things,
and even color can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct
from Nature.
There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of
potential negatives have they shed,--representatives of billions of
pictures,--since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always
be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the
fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core.
Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its
surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as
they hunt the cattle in South America, for their _skins_, and leave the
carcasses as of little worth.
The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection
of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast
libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes
to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial,
National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form,
as he would for a book at any common library. We do now distinctly
propose the creation of a comprehensive and systematic stereographic
library, where all men can find the special forms they particularly
desire to see as artists, or as scholars, or as mechanics, or in any
other capacity. Already a workman has been travelling about the country
with stereographic views of furniture, showing his employer's patterns
in this way, and taking orders for them. This is a mere hint of what is
coming before long.
Again, we must have special stereographic collections, just as we have
professional and other special libraries. And as a means of facilitating
the formation of public and private stereographic collections, there
must be arranged a comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may
grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or
promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the
great Bank of Nature.
To render comparison of similar objects, or of any that we may wish to
see side by side, easy, there should be a stereographic _metre_ or
fixed standard of focal length for the camera lens, to furnish by its
multiples or fractions, if necessary, the scale of distances, and the
standard of power in the stereoscope-lens. In this way the eye can
make the most rapid and exact comparisons. If the "great elm" and the
Cowthorpe oak, if the State-House and St. Peter's, were taken on the
same scale, and looked at with the same magnifying power, we should
compare them without the possibility of being misled by those
partialities which might tend to make us overrate the indigenous
vegetable and the dome of our native Michel Angelo.
The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is
asserted that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps
at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the
lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall
preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies
that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually
photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just
blasted,--so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing
sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness
as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it
self-pictured.
We should be led on too far, if we developed our belief as to the
transformations to be wrought by this greatest of human triumphs over
earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. Let our readers
fill out a blank check on the future as they like,--we give our
indorsement to their imaginations beforehand. We are looking into
stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a
charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will
be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates
from the time when He who
----never but in uncreated light
Dwelt from eternity--
took a pencil of fire from the hand of the "angel standing in the sun,"
and placed it in the hands of a mortal.
THE MINISTER'S WOOING.
[Continued.]
CHAPTER XIV.
At the period of which we are speaking, no name in the New Republic was
associated with ideas of more brilliant promise, and invested with a
greater _prestige_ of popularity and success, than that of Colonel Aaron
Burr.
Sprung of a line distinguished for intellectual ability, the grandson of
a man whose genius has swayed New England from that day to this, the son
of parents eminent in their day for influential and popular talents, he
united in himself the quickest perceptions and keenest delicacy of
fibre with the most diamond hardness and unflinching steadiness of
purpose;--apt, subtle, adroit, dazzling, no man in his time ever began
life with fairer chances of success and fame.
His name, as it fell on the ear of our heroine, carried with it the
suggestion of all this; and when, with his peculiarly engaging smile, he
offered his arm, she felt a little of the flutter natural to a modest
young person unexpectedly honored with the notice of one of the great
ones of the earth, whom it is seldom the lot of humble individuals to
know, except by distant report.
But, although Mary was a blushing and sensitive person, she was not
what is commonly called a diffident girl;--her nerves had that healthy,
steady poise which gave her presence of mind in the most unwonted
circumstances.
The first few sentences addressed to her by her new companion were in a
tone and style altogether different from any in which she had ever been
approached,--different from the dashing frankness of her sailor lover,
and from the rustic gallantry of her other admirers.
That indescribable mixture of ease and deference, guided by refined
tact, which shows the practised, high-bred man of the world, made
its impression on her immediately, as the breeze on the chords of a
wind-harp. She felt herself pleasantly swayed and breathed upon;--it was
as if an atmosphere were around her in which she felt a perfect ease and
freedom, an assurance that her lightest word might launch forth safely,
as a tiny boat, on the smooth, glassy mirror of her listener's pleased
attention.
"I came to Newport only on a visit of business," he said, after a few
moments of introductory conversation. "I was not prepared for its many
attractions."
"Newport has a great deal of beautiful scenery," said Mary.
"I have heard that it was celebrated for the beauty of its scenery, and
of its ladies," he answered; "but," he added, with a quick flash of his
dark eye, "I never realized the fact before."
The glance of the eye pointed and limited the compliment, and, at the
same time, there was a wary shrewdness in it;--he was measuring how deep
his shaft had sunk, as he always instinctively measured the person he
talked with.
Mary had been told of her beauty since her childhood, notwithstanding
her mother had essayed all that transparent, respectable hoaxing by
which discreet mothers endeavor to blind their daughters to the real
facts of such cases; but, in her own calm, balanced mind, she had
accepted what she was so often told, as a quiet verity; and therefore
she neither fluttered nor blushed on this occasion, but regarded her
auditor with a pleased attention, as one who was saying obliging things.
"Cool!" he thought to himself,--"hum!--a little rustic belle, I
suppose,--well aware of her own value;--rather piquant, on my word!"
"Shall we walk in the garden?" he said,--"the evening is so beautiful."
They passed out of the door and began promenading the long walk. At the
bottom of the alley he stopped, and, turning, looked up the vista of box
ending in the brilliantly-lighted rooms, where gentlemen, with powdered
heads, lace ruffles, and glittering knee-buckles, were handing ladies in
stiff brocades, whose towering heads were shaded by ostrich-feathers and
sparkling with gems.
"Quite court-like, on my word!" he said. "Tell me, do you often have
such brilliant entertainments as this?"
"I suppose they do," said Mary. "I never was at one before, but I
sometimes hear of them."
"And _you_ do not attend?" said the gentleman, with an accent which made
the inquiry a marked compliment.
"No, I do not," said Mary; "these people generally do not visit us."
"What a pity," he said, "that their parties should want such an
ornament! But," he added, "this night must make them aware of their
oversight;--if you are not always in society after this, it will surely
not be for want of solicitation."
"You are very kind to think so," replied Mary; "but even if it were
to be so, I should not see my way clear to be often in such scenes as
this."
Her companion looked at her with a glance a little doubtful and amused,
and said, "And pray, why not? if the inquiry be not too presumptuous."
"Because," said Mary, "I should be afraid they would take too much time
and thought, and lead me to forget the great object of life."
The simple gravity with which this was said, as if quite assured of the
sympathy of her auditor, appeared to give him a secret amusement. His
bright, dark eyes danced, as if he suppressed some quick repartee; but,
drooping his long lashes deferentially, he said, in gentle tones, "I
should like to know what so beautiful a young lady considers the great
object of life."
Mary answered reverentially, in those words then familiar from infancy
to every Puritan child, "To glorify God, and enjoy Him forever."
"_Really?_" he said, looking straight into her eyes with that
penetrating glance with which he was accustomed to take the gauge of
every one with whom he conversed.
"Is it _not_?" said Mary, looking back, calm and firm, into the
sparkling, restless depths of his eyes.
At that moment, two souls, going with the whole force of their being in
opposite directions, looked out of their windows at each other with a
fixed and earnest recognition.
Burr was practised in every art of gallantry,--he had made womankind
a study,--he never saw a beautiful face and form without a sort of
restless desire to experiment upon it and try his power over the
interior inhabitant; but, just at this moment, something streamed into
his soul from those blue, earnest eyes, which brought back to his mind
what pious people had so often told him of his mother, the beautiful
and early-sainted Esther Burr. He was one of those persons who
systematically managed and played upon himself and others, as a skilful
musician, on an instrument. Yet one secret of his fascination was the
_naivete_ with which, at certain moments, he would abandon himself to
some little impulse of a nature originally sensitive and tender. Had the
strain of feeling which now awoke in him come over him elsewhere, he
would have shut down some spring in his mind, and excluded it in a
moment; but, talking with a beautiful creature whom he wished to please,
he gave way at once to the emotion:--real tears stood in his fine eyes,
and he raised Mary's hand to his lips, and kissed it, saying--
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19