The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
What is true of the faces of our friends is still more true of the
places we have seen and loved. No picture produces an impression on the
imagination to compare with a photographic transcript of the home of our
childhood, or any scene with which we have been long familiar. The very
point which the artist omits, in his effort to produce general effect,
may be exactly the one that individualizes the place most strongly to
our memory. There, for instance, is a photographic view of our own
birthplace, and with it of a part of our good old neighbor's dwelling.
An artist would hardly have noticed a slender, dry, leafless stalk which
traces a faint line, as you may see, along the front of our neighbor's
house next the corner. That would be nothing to him,--but to us it marks
the stem of the _honeysuckle-vine_, which we remember, with its pink
and white heavy-scented blossoms, as long as we remember the stars in
heaven.
To this charm of fidelity in the minutest details the stereoscope adds
its astonishing illusion of solidity, and thus completes the effect
which so entrances the imagination. Perhaps there is also some
half-magnetic effect in the fixing of the eyes on the twin
pictures,--something like Mr. Braid's _hypnotism_, of which many of our
readers have doubtless heard. At least the shutting out of surrounding
objects, and the concentration of the whole attention, which is a
consequence of this, produce a dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a
kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us
and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied
spirits.
"Ah, yes," some unimaginative reader may say; "but there is no color and
no motion in these pictures you think so life-like; and at best they are
but petty miniatures of the objects we see in Nature."
But color is, after all, a very secondary quality as compared with form.
We like a good crayon portrait better for the most part in black and
white than in tints of pink and blue and brown. Mr. Gibson has never
succeeded in making the world like his flesh-colored statues. The color
of a landscape varies perpetually, with the season, with the hour of the
day, with the weather, and as seen by sunlight or moonlight; yet our
home stirs us with its old associations, seen in any and every light.
As to motion, though of course it is not present in stereoscopic
pictures, except in those toy-contrivances which have been lately
introduced, yet it is wonderful to see how nearly the effect of motion
is produced by the slight difference of light on the water or on the
leaves of trees as seen by the two eyes in the double-picture.
And lastly with respect to size, the illusion is on the part of those
who suppose that the eye, unaided, ever sees anything but miniatures
of objects. Here is a new experiment to convince those who have not
reflected on the subject that the stereoscope shows us objects of their
natural size.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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