When the camera reproduces the chorus girl herself, suddenly strangely plain and painted, there is to the observing and reflective instead of sauciness the hollowness of sauciness. There can be few things more awful than those silent photographs of some gay chorus, reproducing, as they do, the spectacle with solemn critical aloofness from the spirit. It is as though the dawn of Judgment Day had suddenly broken upon the unspeakably wretched and tawdry scene. There is something, it would seem, indescribably tender, affectionate, in the irony of the gods which arranges that men should display in theatre lobbies, as an inducement to buy tickets of admission within, these death's heads of frivolity. As if the Comic Spirit itself were touched by the charm of the naiveté of man. But, indeed, twinkling in the sympathetic light upon the Broadway stage, the professional chorus girl leg, well selected no doubt to begin with, and shaped with all the science of art, has beguiled even the reflective. A light intoxicant, it swirls in the veins like champagne for the careless moment it makes. It is pleasant because it is false. The real leg, remarks the camera, is the amateur leg; it is depressing, but terribly convincing. As it stands in the raw light of the cheap photographer (and this too, too human document, the likeness of the poor girl who has performed somewhere in curiously home-made looking "tights," and been photographed thus afterward, is one of the stock exhibits of that most realistic of historians, the cheap photographer) the amateur leg decidedly lacks dash. The knee joint somehow seems to work somewhat the wrong way. Sometimes, in circumference, this limb is immense, sometimes the reverse. But the terribleness of it always is that it is so human. That is, it is the leg of an animal. Subconsciously it suggests surgery. Conspicuous among the postures assumed for its iconoclastic purpose by the genius of photography is that of "art." That fetish of the great body of the unenlightened, the dim feeling that to the enlightened bodily nakedness in pictorial representation is something very fine, is played upon. The "art photograph" is an ironic tour de force. If specimens of this have ever fallen in the way of your observation, then you have reflected upon the strange discrepancy between the female nude as presented in painting and sculpture and in photographs. (Oh, souls of Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau, what romantic rogues you were!) You will have perceived, with some grim humor, that until the invention of photography, nobody, apparently, had ever seen a nude female figure.