Kansas University Weekly.
395
We sat around the stove until three o'clock in the morning, talking and smoking; but the Old Man slept on, and one by one the others left until I was alone with the sleeper. But my eyes grew heavy, and as there seemed to be no signs of the Old Man waking soon, I dumped the last of the coal into the stove and took my way home. When we came back next evening, he was gone. CYLEGICEL.
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Photography and Art.
The advancement of the science of photography during the past ten years, the cheapness of materials, and the ease in which the modus operandi can be acquired, have opened up an interesting field to lovers of illustrative art. For those who do not care to enter into the scientific part of the work, no restrictions seem to be offered in the way of collecting an artistic exposition. No one is so poor in relics as not to possess an album or desk filled with old and faded potraits—not only of those of whom one has been able to "catch the shadow ere the substance fleeth" but also of those still in the flesh, and who have put on record these melancholy mementoes of how they used to appear twenty years ago. Everyone deals in photographs, everyone collects them greedily, and everyone at more or less stated intervals submits or is eager to have his own features "taken" and printed. Yet, there is no more salutary lesson against giving way to this human weakness than to turn up one's own photograph of long ago, and sit down and examine it carefully. "No," you say, "surely I never looked like that! I am not handsome, I know, though I can pass in a crowd; but to realize that I was once so imbecile-looking as that photograph suggests, is enough to make me weep tears of sympathy for those who were condemned to nuture me and be my associates." But you have only to turn the page, or to dip lower in your desk to transfer the sympathy to yourself.
The question is becoming interesting, and you may investigate it more fully in the light of a fascinating science. You may turn, for instance, to the pages of some magazine which
publishes the photographs of celebrities at different stages in their career, and the same astounding problem presents itself. What does it all mean? Is it simply that photography in its earliest stages burlesqued everything it intended to reproduce? Is it that the types of faces in the early part of the century favored imbecility? Or is it all accounted for by the fact that it is the tailor that makes the man, the dressmaker that makes the woman, and that the abiding ugliness of the fashions of the sixties and seventies are responsible for the grotesque stamp of your whole collection?
The question that appeals to us, and we may take it seriously, is, "Will the photograph of yesterday, or the one which we received from a friend to-day, soon become an eye-sore to our fastidious taste?" Even forgetting for the moment all the possible changes and caprices of fashion, will not the advance in the photograyhic art soon outshine whatever beauty today's photo may possess? The introduction of platinum prints, giving a softer and more living expression, the use of more delicate and accurate instruments, and greater skill, are each promising the photograph of the future a finer beauty. So rapid indeed is the progress of the sciences, that the photographer succeeds in catching, each year, a more living expression and more delicacy in delineations and form, and your photo to-day denies relationship to the image recorded a year or so ago. Even the painted portrait seems to become obsolete, though it is, as we know, the painters art to catch, not a momentary expression, but a sort of composite likeness of all that is best in the physiognomy of the sitter, to get at the soul of the subject. And, if time discounts even the artist's best work, what must it do for the camera, which catches only the dogged sternness or the forced smile of the sitter, and knows not how to make allowances? Or, if it be not the set features of the subject, but his or her apparel which is so soon to give our collection its old-fashioned look, why should we not take care that the sitter is at least clothed in a garb which time can never rob of its picturesqueness?