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cosmic Professor Fiske observed, speaking of Shakespeare, a supreme genius "gets himself born into the world" and proceeds to dominate it. Sometime such a genius will enter the photographic field so ably prepared for him by the host of sincere, though modest, pictorialists of The Linked Ring, of the Photo Secession, of the Salon Club of America, of the famous photo clubs of Paris, London, Munich and Vienna. We would not assert that the marvels thus far wrought by Kühn, Henneberg, Watzek, Demachy, Steichen, White, Stieglitz, Herzog, Coburn, and the rest, are valuable and utile merely as acid phosphate for the glorious growths of the future. They are rather the perfect but minute starlets which spring and bloom and fade to form the rich humus, whence, in due season and in ways beyond human understanding, issues forth a floral sun of passing loveliThe tiny star of blue serves well its purpose, affords pleasure to the casual

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beholder, gives guerdon to the botanist, and good to all; there is nought to lament that it is not a victoria regia. Nor is there anything to lament in the thought that greater hands than ours will mix gum bichromate, and from negatives conceived on a scale we dream not of, will achieve pictorial photographs which may change forever the current of human emotion.

Nomenclature and conventions change, but the great truths are static. As Professor Cooke remarked of the alchemists: They called their causative entity "phlogiston" and the moderns fancy that they were visionaries or charlatans; but if you amend their texts by reading "energy" where they wrote "phlogiston" you will find that you have a substantially correct restatement of the theory of conservation. In like manner the conventions of Moronobu and of Harunobu and of Hiroshige have changed and are out of vogue; but if your Salon photographer were to take a

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A Japanese Print by Misses W. and G. Parrish

his corn studies at Urbana, Illinois. Likewise the "thus-far-and-no-farther" school of artistic thought must be vastly dismayed to see, with the eyes of the flesh, a Lumiére autochrome, three-color, potatostarch plate putting Turner to the blush as a percipient and recorder of color sensation.

As we have said before, empiricism got its coup de grace when gentlemen deficient in reverence but armed with the higher mathematics began to apply the calculus to the sacred shrines of popular idolatry. The Slade professor spoke from a very safe vantage point when he exalted the colorists to the rank of archangels and avatars. It is another question what Mr. Ruskin would be compelled to say of Tintoretto and Titian if he were to pass a day or so in the laboratory of Pére Lumiére at Lyons in France, or if he might have seen our own John Powrie with his three-color rulings, making pho

tographs of the liquid fire and sublimated rubies which pour over the Wooded Island at Jackson Park almost any evening in August.

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The more one knows about the ancients the less he admires the ancients and the more he venerates and adores the magnificent thaumaturgy of Time, by which supernal magic they have been made to appear so transcendently great. And then how much a live modern appreciates modernity when he contemplates in parallel a Greek Herakles and St. Gaudens' Lincoln, or when he compares a Hobbema landscape with a multiple gumprint by the Gebrüder Hofmeister, or when he looks at Alvin Langdon Coburn's "Notre Dame de Paris" side by side with any of the Lake Biwa series of Hiroshige.

The ideal of individual culture which has obtained respect among thinking men is that which proposes for each the highest development he is capable of attaining in as many departments of life as his brain and spinal cord have inferent and efferent agencies to essay and sustain. Perfection of attainment is not to be expected often when the ideal is so high, but we have Rabbi Ben Ezra's solace - "The man I yearned to be and am not comforts me.

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And herein we find the analogue of the spirit which is motive in the pictorial. photographic movement of this year of grace. Not a man or woman of mature mind and earnest heart who sallies forth with a camera on the gray-blue days which Bastien-LePage and Hiroshige and Whistler equally loved, is without absolutely the same quality of artistic intention that any of them possessed, though the voltage of the intent may be lower and the amperage smaller. The difference is only of degree, not at all of kind. It is hard to believe that anything but pure cant can assert that Steichen's photograph of William M. Chase is inferior to Fantin

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Latour's "Manet." It is a truism of mineralogy that color is the least characteristic and most variable property of crystals. The fundamental forms and goniometric constants are absolute to the limits of our means of measurement. And so in portraiture everything is secondary to the soul which informs the effigy. Monochrome is nothing, color is nothing, pose is nothing, effect is nothing, except as each and all serve to reveal that most amazing of the works of God, the vital, motive, overwhelming, majesty of the soul of man.

Monsieur Lumiére's spectroscope and the Elberfeld analin-fabrik conspire to give you any color to a wavelength of light. Schott and the Jena opticians conspire with the chemists to provide the perfect means and media of unerring monochrome. They are nothing. But lo! cometh the artist, seeing in nature hints of all possible pictures as the musician sees in the keyboard hints of all possible harmonies; seeing

"Midwinter" by Edward Brown

in the human form that wherewithal he may declare the nobility of human endeavor and the divinity of human destiny; seeing in the blaze of noonday or in the mists of evening themes which may make the hearts of men pulse with a purer delight than is found in counting-rooms; seeing in the cañons of the cities and in ghetto purlieus beauties of form, balance, design and proportion such as the gods might envy if envy were of the gods and then? Ah, then, you begin to be awake to the fact that we are in a new era, guests, as it were, at the silver-wedding anniversary of Science and Art, touching elbows with men and women old enough to remember the nuptials, young enough to survive for the golden anniversary when it rolls around; in an age of triumph for exact knowledge and of discomfiture for

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in abundance photographic prints so consummate in design, so veracious in natural fact, so subtle in their appeal to the emotions that if Rembrandt van Ryn or Hiroshige had seen their like we may conceive that neither would have scratched copper or graven wood thereafter, save in the way of hopeless emulation.

Modern science has given us the means; modern enthusiasm and world-wide coöperation have developed a community of method or the technic of a distinctively modern art that of the pictorial photographers. Only one thing is lacking: We must develop great men endowed with the sovereignty of supreme ideals.

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And if Professor Fiske is right in his statement, the present century ought to see born upon this planet, the master of masters in graphic art and a Salon

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