compensations in being handed down like the Iliad or the masonic ritual by word of mouth rather than by agencies associated with the arrogant stare of the lens. But, after all, we do not conduct the trial wholly with expert witnesses, and the camera has been a useful commentator--perhaps we are more willing to say that it will be than that it has been, though we never shall surpass in delicately literal perfection the image of the daguerreotype. A new confusion may arise from the fact that photography wants to be more than a science--is tired of being literal, and seeks to be an art. If it shall become an art--that is to say, an agency of personal opinion--posterity must, like ourselves, go on being influenced in its judgments of pictorial fact by the expressions of art, which the world has been doing from the beginning of time. [Illustration] Certainly it would be very hard for us to think of the English girl, for example, however well we might know her personally, without feeling the influence of the English artists, of Romney, and Reynolds, and Sir John Millais, and Sir Frederick Leighton, and the multitudinous expressions of her from the pencil of the author of “Trilby.” Du Maurier’s English girl is an image, agreeable or not according to one’s taste, which we cannot get out of our minds. A number of years before he achieved a second fame by writing romances, Du Maurier made a sketch in which he undertook to indicate his idea of a pretty woman. He wrote of his ideal at that time: “She is rather tall, I admit, and a trifle stiff; but English women _are_ tall and stiff just now; and she is rather too serious; but that is only because I find it so difficult, with a mere stroke of black ink, to indicate the enchanting little curved lines that go from the nose to the mouth corners, causing the cheeks to make a smile--and without them the smile is incomplete.” I always have been glad to hear Mr. Ruskin say of the Venus of Melos, with her “tranquil, regular and lofty features,” that she “could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.” [Illustration] And in the same way our notion of the American girl, of the typical American girl, is inevitably affected by the pictures we see of her. Our illustrators naturally have the best opportunity to mould our judgments in this matter. I recall hearing one woman say of another at a tea: “That girl is always sitting around in Gibson poses.” They used to say the same thing in England of the girls who imitated Du Maurier. Thus we see that the illustrator of life not only is reflecting but creating forms and manners; and if you would know not merely what the American girl is, but what she is going to be, study the picture-makers and story-makers who influence her. [Illustration] [Illustration]