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Here, therefore, the debt to Science for additional clearness, precision, and size may be gratefully acknowledged. What photography can do, is now, with her help, better done than before; what she can but partially achieve is best not brought too elaborately to light. Thus the whole question of success and failure resolves itself into an investigation of the capacities of the machine, and well may we be satisfied with the rich gifts it bestows, without straining it into a competition with art. For everything for which Art, so-called, has hitherto been the means but not the end, photography is the allotted agent--for all that requires mere manual correctness, and mere manual slavery, without any employment of the artistic feeling, she is the proper and therefore the perfect medium. She is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in a small minority, but the craving, or rather necessity, for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view. What are her unerring records in the service of mechanics, engineering, geology, and natural history, but facts of the most sterling and stubborn kind? What are her studies of the various stages of insanity-pictures of life unsurpassable in pathetic truth-but facts as well as lessons of the deepest physiological interest? What are her representations of the bed of the ocean, and the surface of the moon-of the launch of the Marlborough, and of the contents of the Great Exhibition-of Charles Kean's now destroyed scenery of the Winter's Tale,' and of Prince Albert's now slaughtered prize ox-but facts which are neither the province of art nor of description, but of that new form of communication between man and man-neither letter, message, nor picture-which now happily fills up the space between them? What indeed are nine-tenths of those facial maps called photographic portraits, but accurate landmarks and measurements for loving eyes and memories to deck with beauty and animate with expression, in perfect certainty, that the ground-plan is founded upon fact?

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In this sense no photographic picture that ever was taken, in heaven, or earth, or in the waters underneath the earth, of any thing, or scene, however defective when measured by an artistic scale, is destitute of a special, and what we may call an historic interest. Every form which is traced by light is the impress of one moment, or one hour, or one age in the great passage of time. Though the faces of our children may not be modelled and rounded with that truth and beauty which art attains, yet minor things-the very shoes of the one, the inseparable toy of the

other

other-are given with a strength of identity which art does not even seek. Though the view of a city be deficient in those niceties of reflected lights and harmonious gradations which belong to the facts of which Art takes account, yet the facts of the age and of the hour are there, for we count the lines in that keen perspective of telegraphic wire, and read the characters on that playbill or manifesto, destined to be torn down on the

morrow.

Here, therefore, the much-lauded and much-abused agent called Photography takes her legitimate stand. Her business is to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give. In this vocation we can as little overwork her as we can tamper with her. The millions and millions of hieroglyphics mentioned by M. Arago may be multiplied by millions and millions more,--she will render all as easily and as accurately as one. When people, therefore, talk of photography as being intended to supersede art, they utter what, if true, is not so in the sense they mean. Photography is intended to supersede much that art has hitherto done, but only that which it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of Art to do. The field of delineation, having two distinct spheres, requires two distinct labourers; but though hitherto the freewoman has done the work of the bond woman, there is no fear that the position should be in future reversed. Correctness of drawing, truth of detail, and absence of convention, the best artistic characteristics of photography, are qualities of no common kind, but the student who issues from the academy with these in his grasp stands, nevertheless, but on the threshold of art. The power of selection and rejection, the living application of that language which lies dead in his paint-box, the marriage of his own mind with the object before him, and the offspring, half stamped with his own features, half with those of Nature, which is born of the union-whatever appertains to the free-will of the intelligent being, as opposed to the obedience of the machine,— this, and much more than this, constitutes that mystery called Art, in the elucidation of which photography can give valuable help, simply by showing what it is not. There is, in truth,

nothing in that power of literal, unreasoning imitation, which she claims as her own, in which, rightly viewed, she does not relieve the artist of a burden rather than supplant him in an office. We do not even except her most pictorial feats-those splendid architectural representations-from this rule. Exquisite as they are, and fitted to teach the young, and assist the experienced in art, yet the hand of the artist is but ignobly employed in closely imitating the texture of stone, or in servilely following

the

bad

the intricacies of the zigzag ornament. And it is not only in what she can do to relieve the sphere of art, but in what she can sweep away from it altogether, that we have reason to congratulate ourselves. Henceforth it may be hoped that we shall hear nothing further of that miserable contradiction in terms art'-and see nothing more of that still more miserable mistake in life a bad artist.' Photography at once does away with anomalies with which the good sense of society has always been more or less at variance. As what she does best is beneath the doing of a real artist at all, so even in what she does worst she is a better machine than the man who is nothing but a machine.

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Let us, therefore, dismiss all mistaken ideas about the harm which photography does to art. As in all great and sudden improvements in the material comforts and pleasures of the public, numbers, it is true, have found their occupation gone, simply because it is done cheaper and better in another way. But such improvements always give more than they take. Where ten self-styled artists eked out a precarious living by painting inferior miniatures, ten times that number now earn their bread by supplying photographic portraits. Nor is even such manual skill as they possessed thrown out of the market. There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries-we understand not less than 17. a day-in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation. And it must be remembered that those who complain of the encroachments of photography in this department could not even supply the demand. Portraits, as is evident to any thinking mind, and as photography now proves, belong to that class of facts wanted by numbers who know and care nothing about their value as works of art. For this want, art, even of the most abject kind, was, whether as regards correctness, promptitude, or price, utterly inadequate. These ends are not only now attained, but, even in an artistic sense, attained far better than before. The coloured portraits to which we have alluded are a most satisfactory coalition between the artist and the machine. Many an inferior miniature-painter who understood the mixing and applying of pleasing tints was wholly unskilled in the true drawing of the human head. With this deficiency supplied, their present productions, therefore, are far superior to anything they accomplished, single-handed, before. Photographs taken on ivory, or on substances invented in imitation of ivory, and coloured by hand from nature, such as are seen at the rooms of Messrs. Dickinson, Claudet, Mayall, Kilburn, &c., are all that can be needed to satisfy the mere portrait want, and in some

instances

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instances may be called artistic productions of no common kind besides. If, as we understand, the higher professors of miniature-painting-and the art never attained greater excellence in England than now-have found their studios less thronged of late, we believe that the desertion can be but temporary. At all events, those who in future desire their exquisite productions will be more worthy of them. The broader the ground which the machine may occupy, the higher will that of the intelligent agent be found to stand. If, therefore, the time should ever come when art is sought, as it ought to be, mainly for its own sake, our artists and our patrons will be of a far more elevated order than now and if anything can bring about so desirable a climax, it will be the introduction of Photography.

ART. VI.-1. Lavengro; The Scholar-The Gypsy-The Priest. By George Borrow. 3 vols. 8vo. London, 1851.

2. The Romany Rye; a Sequel to Lavengro. By George Borrow. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1857.

MR.

R. BORROW is very angry with his critics. They have attacked Lavengro with much virulence and malice,' and he relates for their reproof a fable by Yriarte. The viper says to the leech, 'Why do people invite your bite and flee from mine?' 'Because,' says the leech, 'people receive health from my bite and poison from yours.' There is as much difference,' says the clever Spaniard, between true and malignant criticism as between poison and medicine.' This only means that Mr. Borrow prefers praise to censure-that he derives pleasurable sensations from the first, and such torments from the last as are produced by an acrid poison. He confesses, to be sure, that his work is full of blemishes, but the adders who sting him are blind as well as deaf, and have not detected one of them.' This is the universal cry of every irritated author. In whatever part the critic had fixed his fangs, Mr. Borrow would, doubtless, have believed that it was not the seat of his disorder, and would have persuaded himself that he was bitten by a malignant viper instead of by a medicinal leech. He has, we suspect, the same feeling about strictures upon his writings that old Fuller had about mortal sicknesses. Often have I thought with myself what disease I should be best contented to die of. None please me.' But the wise and witty divine subjoins an observation which has not yet found its way into Mr. Borrow's philosophy-The mark must not choose what arrow shall be shot against it.' Mr. Borrow proceeds upon the assumption that the author of a work is the best judge of its merits and

defects,

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defects, which, if it be true, authors ought always to be their own reviewers. Can he seriously imagine that the world would then receive a juster account of books than at present, and is he prepared to admit that all the manufacturers of last year's epics were Miltons, and all the dramatists Shakespeares? Yet this he must do, unless he denies to others the privilege which he claims for himself. The consideration might suggest to him the possibility, that when he differs from his critics he is not necessarily right, nor they invariably wrong. Commonly,' to quote again from old Fuller, that sickness seizeth on men which they least suspect. He that expects to be drowned with a dropsy may be burnt with a fever; and she that fears to be swoln with a tympany may be shrivelled with a consumption.' It is the same in literature. What a man fancies to be his strength is often his weakness. If a work is neglected, he maintains it to be his masterpiece; if he is praised for his humour, he vaunts his pathos; if his prose alone finds favour, he rests his hope of immortality upon

his verse.

Mr. Borrow seems to us to be no exception to the ordinary rule. He asserts that Lavengro is a philological book, and that the philology was the really wonderful part of it.' It is, at least, a very insignificant part, for all the information it contains upon the subject might be written upon a visiting-card, and, when dispersed among three octavo volumes, attracts little more notice than a solitary thistle in a field of corn. Admitting that philology is Mr. Borrow's strength, he has been far too sparing of it in Lavengro to derive much advantage from the plea. Nevertheless the blemishes to which he confesses are confined, by his own account, to this boasted philology: That was the point, and the only point, on which those who wished to vilify the author might have attacked him successfully-he was vulnerable there. How was this?' His answer is, that it was a trap to catch the viper-brood. Resolved to hold them up by their tails and show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws, he quietly prepared a stratagem by means of which he could, at any time, exhibit them helpless in his hand.' He wilfully spelt some Welsh, Italian, and Armenian words wrong, and probably, without designing it, some English words also, and no reviewer thought proper to print for him a list of his errata. 'The word for bread in ancient Armenian is hatz; yet the Armenian on London Bridge is made to say zhatz,' and the author calls upon his opponents to say why they did not discover that weak point?' This is exactly the kind of criticism which may be expected from a man when he sits in judgment on his own works. He can detect no other fault than a few misspellings, and

these,

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