|
Paintings
Church
Heart
of the Andes
Cole
Expulsion
from the Garden of Eden
Course of Empire
Savage
State
Consummation
Desolation
Voyage
of Life
Childhood
Manhood
Old
Age
Youth
Art
and Mechanical Reproduction
Daguerreotype
Daguerreian
Society
Currier
and Ives
Images
of Whitman (w/essay)
Oliver
Wendell Holmes on Photography
Edgar Allan Poe on The
Daguerreotype
Attractions
Lost
Museum (Barnum's Museum)
Grand
Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress
Illustrating the Text
E.W.
Kemble's Huck illustrations
Kemble's
"Illustrating Huck Finn"
Henry James on Illustration
Texts
Emerson
- The Poet
| |
The Stereoscope and the
Stereograph
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Democritus of Abdera, commonly known as
the Laughing Philosopher, probably because he did not consider the study of
truth inconsistent with a cheerful countenance, believed and taught that all
bodies were continually throwing off certain images like themselves, which
subtle emanations, striking on our bodily organs, gave rise to our
sensations. Epicurus borrowed the idea from him, and incorporated it into
the famous system, of which Lucretius has given us the most popular version.
Those who are curious on the matter will find the poet's description at the
beginning of his fourth book. Forms, effigies, membranes, or films
are the nearest representatives of the terms applied to these effluences.
They are perpetually shed from the surfaces of solids, as bark is shed by
trees. Cortex is indeed, one of the names applied to
them by Lucretius.
- These evanescent films may be seen in one of
their aspects in any clear, calm sheet of water, in a mirror, in the eye
of an animal by one who looks at it in front, but better still by the
consciousness behind the eye in the ordinary act of vision. They must be
packed like the leaves of a closed book; for suppose a mirror to give an
image of an object a mile off, it will give one at every point less than a
mile, though this were subdivided into a million parts. Yet the images
will not be the same; for the one taken a mile off will be very small, at
half a mile as large again, at a hundred feet fifty times as large, and so
on, as long as the mirror can contain the image.
- Under the action of light, then, a body
makes its superficial aspect potentially present at a distance, becoming
appreciable as a shadow or as a picture. But remove the cause,--the body
itself,--and the effect is removed. The man beholdeth himself in the glass
and goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and the mirrored forget
what manner of man he was. These visible films or membranous exuviae
of objects, which the old philosophers talked about, have no real
existence, separable from their illuminated source, and perish instantly
when it is withdrawn.
- If a man had handed a metallic speculum to
Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it while his
heart was beating thirty or forty times, promising that one of the films
his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor
anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher
would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that
would have astonished the speaker.
- This is just what the Daguerreotype has
done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the
apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of
instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by
making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a
picture.
- This triumph of human ingenuity is the most
audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,--the one that would seem least
likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the
discoveries man has made. It has become such an everyday matter with us,
that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself,
to which we owe the creations of our new art. Yet in all the prophecies of
dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests
over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable
wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or the proprietor of the small
house on wheels, standing on the village common, will furnish any of us
for the most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of Inventions
includes this among its possibilities. Nothing but the vision of a Laputan,
who passed his days in extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, could have
reached such a height of delirium as to rave about the time when a man
should paint his miniature by looking at a blank tablet, and a
multitudinous wilderness of forest foliage or an endless Babel of roofs
and spires stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so minutely, that
one may creep over the surface of the picture with his microscope and find
every leaf perfect, or read the letters of distant signs, and see what was
the play at the "Variétés" or the "Victoria," on the
evening of the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the real view
with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains.
- Some years ago, we sent a page or two to one
of the magazines,--the "Knickerbocker," if we remember
aright,--in which the story was told from the "Arabian Nights,"
of the three kings' sons, who each wished to obtain the hand of a lovely
princess, and received for answer, that he who brought home the most
wonderful object should obtain the lady's hand as his reward. Our readers,
doubtless, remember the original tale, with the flying carpet, the tube
which showed what a distant friend was doing by looking into it, and the
apple which gave relief to the most desperate sufferings only by
inhalation of its fragrance. The railroad-car, the telegraph, and the
apple-flavored chloroform could and do realize, every day,--as was stated
in the passage referred to, with a certain rhetorical amplitude not
doubtfully suggestive of the lecture-room,--all that was fabled to have
been done by the carpet, the tube, and the fruit of the Arabian story.
- All these inventions force themselves upon
us to the full extent of their significance. It is therefore hardly
necessary to waste any considerable amount of rhetoric upon wonders that
are so thoroughly appreciated. When human art says to each one of us, I
will give you ears that can hear a whisper in New Orleans, and legs that
can walk six hundred miles in a day, and if, in consequence of any defect
of rail or carriage, you should be so injured that your own very
insignificant walking members must be taken off, I can make the surgeon's
visit a pleasant dream for you, on awakening from which you will ask when
he is coming to do that which he has done already,--what is the use of
poetical or rhetorical amplification? But this other invention of the
mirror with a memory and especially that application of it
which has given us the wonders of the stereoscope, is not so easily,
completely, universally recognized in all the immensity of its
applications and suggestions. The stereoscope, and the pictures it gives,
are, however, common enough to be in the hands of many of our readers; and
as many of those who are not acquainted with it must before long become as
familiar with it as they are now with friction-matches, we feel sure that
a few pages relating to it will not be unacceptable.
- Our readers may like to know the outlines of
the process of making daguerreotypes and photographs, as just furnished us
by Mr. Whipple, one of the most successful operators in this country. We
omit many of those details which are everything to the practical artist,
but nothing to the general reader. We must premise, that certain
substances undergo chemical alterations, when exposed to the light, which
produce a change of color. Some of the compounds of silver possess this
faculty to a remarkable degree,--as the common indelible marking-ink, (a
solution of nitrate of silver,) which soon darkens in the light, shows us
every day. This is only one of the innumerable illustrations of the varied
effects of light on color. A living plant owes its brilliant hues to the
sunshine; but a dead one, or the tints extracted from it, will fade in the
same rays which clothe the tulip in crimson and gold,--as our lady-readers
who have rich curtains in their drawing-rooms know full well. The sun,
then, is a master of chiaroscuro and, if he has a
living petal for his pallet, is the first of colorists.--Let us walk into
his studio, and examine some of his painting machinery.
- 1. THE DAGUERREOTYPE.--A silver-plated sheet
of copper is resilvered by electroplating, and perfectly polished. It is
then exposed in a glass box to the vapor of iodine until its surface turns
to a golden yellow. Then it is exposed in another box to the fumes of the
bromide of lime until it becomes of a blood-red tint. Then it is exposed
once more, for a few seconds, to the vapor of iodine. The plate is now
sensitive to light, and is of course kept from it, until, having been
placed in the darkened camera, the screen is withdrawn and the
camera-picture falls upon it. In strong light, and with the best
instruments, three seconds exposure is enough,--but the
time varies with circumstances. The plate is now withdrawn and exposed to
the vapor of mercury at 212 degrees. Where the daylight was strongest, the
sensitive coating of the plate has undergone such a chemical change, that
the mercury penetrates readily to the silver, producing a minute white
granular deposit upon it, like a very thin fall of snow, drifted by the
wind. The strong lights are little heaps of these granules, the middle
lights thinner sheets of them; the shades are formed by the dark silver
itself, thinly sprinkled only, as the earth shows with a few scattered
snow-flakes on its surface. The precise chemical nature of these granules
we care less for than their palpable presence, which may be perfectly made
out by a microscope magnifying fifty diameters or even less.
- The picture thus formed would soon fade
under the action of light, in consequence of further changes in the
chemical elements of the film of which it consists. Some of these elements
are therefore removed by washing it with a solution of hyposulphite of
soda, after which it is rinsed with pure water It is now permanent in the
light, but a touch wipes off the picture as it does the bloom from a plum.
To fix it, a solution of hyposulphite of soda containing chloride of gold
is poured on the plate while this is held over a spirit-lamp. It is then
again rinsed with pure water, and is ready for its frame.
- 2. THE PHOTOGRAPH.--Just as we must have a
mould before we can make a cast, we must get a negative
or reversed picture on glass before we can get our positive or natural
picture. The first thing, then, is to lay a sensitive coating on a piece
of glass,--crown-glass, which has a natural surface, being preferable to
plate-glass. Collodion which is a solution of
gun-cotton in alcohol and ether, mingled with a solution of iodide and
bromide of potassium, is used to form a thin coating over the glass.
Before the plate is dry, it is dipped into a solution of nitrate of
silver, where it remains from one to three or four minutes. Here, then, we
have essentially the same chemical elements that we have seen employed in
the daguerreotype,--namely, iodine, bromine, and silver; and by their
mutual reactions in the last process we have formed the sensitive iodide
and bromide of silver. The glass is now placed, still wet, in the camera,
and there remains from three seconds to one or two minutes, according to
circumstances. It is then washed with a solution of sulphate of iron.
Every light spot in the camera-picture becomes dark on the sensitive
coating of the glass-plate. But where the shadows or dark parts of the
camera-picture fall, the sensitive coating is less darkened, or not at
all, if the shadows are very deep, and so these shadows of the
camera-picture become the lights of the glass picture, as the lights
become the shadows. Again, the picture is reversed, just as in every
camera-obscura where the image is received on a screen direct from the
lens. Thus the glass plate has the right part of the object on the left
side of its picture, and the left part on its right side; its light is
darkness, and its darkness is light. Everything is just as wrong as it can
be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like
the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original
natural image. This is a negative picture.
- Extremes meet. Every given point of the
picture is as far from the truth as a lie can be. But in travelling away
from the pattern it has gone round a complete circle, and is at once as
remote from Nature and as near it as possible.--"How far is it to
Taunton?" said a countryman, who was walking the wrong way to reach
that commercial and piscatory centre.--"'Bäout twenty-five thäousan'
mild,"--said the boy he asked,--" f y' go 'z y' 'r' goin' näow,
'n' bäout häaf a mild 'f y' right räoun' 'n' go t'other way."
- The negative picture being formed, it is
washed with a solution of hyposulphite of soda, to remove the soluble
principles which are liable to decomposition, and then coated with shellac
varnish to protect it.
- This negative is now to
give birth to a positive,--this mass of contradictions to
assert its hidden truth in a perfect harmonious affirmation of the
realities of Nature. Behold the process !
- A sheet of the best linen paper is dipped in
salt water and suffered to dry. Then a solution of nitrate of silver is
poured over it and it is dried in a dark place. This paper is now
sensitive; it has a conscience, and is afraid of daylight. Press it
against the glass negative and lay them in the sun, the glass uppermost,
leaving them so for from three to ten minutes. The paper, having the
picture formed on it, is then washed with the solution of hyposulphite of
soda, rinsed in pure water, soaked again in a solution of hyposulphite of
soda, to which, however, the chloride of gold has been added, and again
rinsed. It is then sized and varnished.
- Out of the perverse and totally depraved
negative,--where it might almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power
had wrenched all things from their properties, where the light of the eye
was darkness, and the deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest
glare,--is to come the true end of all this series of operations, a copy
of Nature in all her sweet graduations and harmonies and contrasts.
- We owe the suggestions to a great wit, who
overflowed our small intellectual home-lot with a rushing freshet of
fertilizing talk the other day,--one of our friends, who quarries thought
on his own premises, but does not care to build his blocks into books and
essays,--that perhaps this world is only the negative
of that better one in which lights will be turned to shadows and shadows
into light, but all harmonized, so that we shall see why these ugly
patches, these misplaced gleams and blots, were wrought into the temporary
arrangements of our planetary life.
- For, lo! when the sensitive paper is laid in
the sun under the negative glass, every dark spot on the glass arrests a
sunbeam, and so the spot of the paper lying beneath remains unchanged; but
every light space of the negative lets the sunlight through, and the
sensitive paper beneath confesses its weakness, and betrays it by growing
dark just in proportion to the glare that strikes upon it. So, too, we
have only to turn the glass before laying it on the paper, and we bring
all the natural relations of the object delineated back again,--its right
to the right of the picture, its left to the picture's left.
- On examining the glass negative by
transmitting light with a power of a hundred diameters, we observe minute
granules, whether crystalline or not we cannot say, very similar to those
described in the account of the daguerreotype. But now their effect is
reversed. Being opaque, they darken the glass wherever they are
accumulated, just as the snow darkens our skylights. Where these particles
are drifted, therefore, we have our shadows, and where they are thinly
scattered, our lights. On examining the paper photographs, we have found
no distinct granules, but diffused stains of deeper or lighter shades.
- Such is the sun-picture, in the form in
which we now most commonly meet it,--for the daguerreotype, perfect and
cheap as it is, and admirably adapted for miniatures, has almost
disappeared from the field of landscape, still life, architecture, and genre
painting, to make room for the photograph. Mr. Whipple tells us that even
now he takes a much greater number of miniature portraits on metal than on
paper; and yet, except occasionally a statue, it is rare to see anything
besides a portrait shown in a daguerreotype. But the greatest number of
sun-pictures we see are the photographs which are intended to be looked at
with the aid of the instrument we are next to describe, and to the
stimulus of which the recent vast extension of photographic copies
of--Nature and Art is mainly owing.
- 3. THE STEREOSCOPE.--This instrument was
invented by Professor Wheatstone, and first described by him in 1838. It
was only a year after this that M. Daguerre made known his discovery in
Paris; and almost at the same time Mr. Fox Talbot sent his communication
to the Royal Society, giving an account of his method of obtaining
pictures on paper by the action of light. Iodine was discovered in 1811,
bromine in 1826, chloroform in 1831, gun-cotton, from which collodion is
made, in 1846, the electroplating process about the same time with
photography; "all things, great and small, working together to
produce what seemed at first as delightful, but as fabulous, as Aladdin's
ring, which is now as little suggestive of surprise as our daily
bread."
- A stereoscope is an instrument which makes
surfaces look solid. All pictures in which perspective and light and shade
are properly managed, have more or less of the effect of solidity; but by
this instrument that effect is so heightened as to produce an appearance
of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth.
- There is good reason to believe that the
appreciation of solidity by the eye is purely a matter of education. The
famous case of a young man who underwent the operation of couching for
cataract, related by Cheselden, and a similar one reported in the Appendix
to Muller's Physioiogy, go to prove that everything is seen only as a
superficial extension, until the other senses have taught the eye to
recognize depth, or the third dimension, which gives
solidity, by converging outlines, distribution of light and shade, change
of size, and of the texture of surfaces. Cheselden's patient thought
"all objects whatever touched his eyes, as what he felt did his
skin." The patient whose case is reported by Muller could not tell
the form of a cube held obliquely before his eye from that of a flat piece
of pasteboard presenting the same outline. Each of these patients saw only
with one eye,--the other being destroyed, in one case, and not restored to
sight until long after the first, in the other case. In two months' time
Cheselden's patient had learned to know solids; in fact, he argued so
logically from light and shade and perspective that he felt of pictures,
expecting to find reliefs and depressions, and was surprised to discover
that they were flat surfaces. If these patients had suddenly recovered the
sight of both eyes, they would probably have learned to
recognize solids more easily and speedily.
- We can commonly tell whether an object is
solid, readily enough with one eye, but still better with two eyes, and
sometimes only by using both. If we look at a square
piece of ivory with one eye alone, we cannot tell whether it is a scale of
veneer, or the side of a cube, or the base of a pyramid, or the end of a
prism. But if we now open the other eye, we shall see one or more of its
sides, if it have any, and then know it to be a solid, and what kind of
solid.
- We see something with the second eye which
we did not see with the first; in other words, the two eyes see different
pictures of the same thing, for the obvious reason that they look from
points two or three inches apart. By means of these two different views of
an object, the mind, as it were, feels rooted it and
gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with
our arms, or with our hands, or with our thumb and finger, and then we
know it to be something more than a surface. This, of course, is an
illustration of the fact, rather than an explanation of its mechanism.
- Though, as we have seen, the two eyes look
on two different pictures, we perceive but one picture. The two have run
together and become blended into a third, which shows us everything we see
in each. But, in order that they should so run together, both the eye and
the brain must be in a natural state. Push one eye a little inward with
the forefinger, and the image is doubled, or at least confused. Only
certain parts of the two retinae work harmoniously together, and you have
disturbed their natural relations. Again, take two or three glasses more
than temperance permits, and you see double; the eyes are right enough,
probably, but the brain is in trouble, and does not report their
telegraphic messages correctly. These exceptions illustrate the every-day
truth, that, when we are in right condition, our two eyes see two somewhat
different pictures, which our perception combines to form one picture,
representing objects in all their dimensions, and not merely as surfaces.
- Now, if we can get two artificial pictures
of any given object, one as we should see it with the right eye, the other
as we should see it with the left eye, and then, looking at the right
picture, and that only, with the right eye, and at the left picture, and
that only, with the left eye, contrive some way of making these pictures
run together as we have seen our two views of a natural object do, we
shall get the sense of solidity that natural objects give us. The
arrangement which effects it will be a stereoscope
according to our definition of that instrument. How shall we attain these
two ends?
- 1. An artist can draw an object as he sees
it, looking at it only with his right eye. Then he can draw a second view
of the same object as he sees it with his left eye. It will not be hard to
draw a cube or an octahedron in this way; indeed, the first stereoscopic
figures were pairs of outlines, right and left, of solid bodies, thus
drawn. But the minute details of a portrait, a group, or a landscape, all
so nearly alike to the two eyes, yet not identical in each picture of our
natural double view, would defy any human skill to reproduce them exactly.
And just here comes in the photograph to meet the difficulty. A first
picture of an object is taken,--then the instrument is moved a couple of
inches or a little more, the distance between the human eyes, and a second
picture is taken. Better than this, two pictures are taken at once in a
double camera.
- We were just now stereographed, ourselves,
at a moment's warning, as if we were fugitives from justice. A skeleton
shape, of about a man's height, its head covered with a black veil, glided
across the floor, faced us, lifted its veil, and took a preliminary look.
When we had grown sufficiently rigid in our attitude of studied ease, and
got our umbrella into a position of thoughtful carelessness, and put our
features with much effort into an unconstrained aspect of cheerfulness
tempered with dignity, of manly firmness blended with womanly sensibility,
of courtesy, as much as to imply,--"You honor me, Sir," toned or
sized, as one may say, with something of the self-assertion of a human
soul which reflects proudly, "I am superior to all this,"--when,
I say, we were all right, the spectral Mokanna dropped his long veil, and
his waiting-slave put a sensitive tablet under its folds. The veil was
then again lifted, and the two great glassy eyes stared at us once more
for some thirty seconds. The veil then dropped again; but in the mean
time, the shrouded sorcerer had stolen our double image; we were immortal.
Posterity might thenceforth inspect us, (if not otherwise engaged,) not as
a surface only, but in all our dimensions as an undisputed solid
man of Boston.
- 2. We have now obtained the double-eyed or
twin pictures, or STEREOGRAPH, if we may coin a name. But the pictures are
two, and we want to slide them into each other, so to speak, as in natural
vision, that we may see them as one. How shall we make one picture out of
two, the corresponding parts of which are separated by a distance of two
or three inches ?
- We can do this in two ways. First, by squinting
as we look at them. But this is tedious, painful, and to some impossible,
or at least very difficult. We shall find it much easier to look through a
couple of glasses that squint for us. If at the same time
they magnify the two pictures, we gain just so much in
the distinctness of the picture, which, if the figures on the slide are
small, is a great advantage. One of the easiest ways of accomplishing this
double purpose is to cut a convex lens through the middle, grind the
curves of the two halves down to straight lines, and join them by their
thin edges. This is a squinting magnifier and if
arranged so that with its right half we see the right picture on the
slide, and with its left half the left picture, it squints them both
inward so that they run together and form a single picture.
- 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 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 rockhewn 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 Baalbec,--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 Shakespeare, 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 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 are detestable,Ñvulgar 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 endorsement 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.
Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly
3 (June 1859), pp. 738-48.
|