The Stereoscope
and the Stereograph
by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly
(June 1859), pp. 738-48.
- 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from their illuminated source, and perish instantly when it is withdrawn.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.
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