The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863

Attitudes, dresses, features, hands, feet, betray the social grade of the candidates for portraiture. The picture tells no lie about them. There is no use in their putting on airs; the make-believe gentleman and lady cannot look like the genuine article. Mediocrity shows itself for what it is worth, no matter what temporary name it may have acquired. Ill-temper cannot hide itself under the simper of assumed amiability. The querulousness of incompetent complaining natures confesses itself almost as much as in the tones of the voice. The anxiety which strives to smooth its forehead cannot get rid of the telltale furrow. The weakness which belongs to the infirm of purpose and vacuous of thought is hardly to be disguised, even though the moustache is allowed to hide the centre of expression.

All parts of a face doubtless have their fixed relations to each other and to the character of the person to whom the face belongs. But there is one feature, and especially one part of that feature, which more than any other facial sign reveals the nature of the individual. The feature is the mouth, and the portion of it referred to is the corner. A circle of half an inch radius, having its centre at the junction of the two lips will include the chief focus of expression.

This will be easily understood, if we reflect that here is the point where more muscles of expression converge than at any other. From above comes the elevator of the angle of the mouth; from the region of the cheek-bone slant downwards the two zygomatics, which carry the angle outwards and upwards; from behind comes the buccinator, or trumpeter's muscle, which simply widens the mouth by drawing the corners straight outward; from below, the depressor of the angle; not to add a seventh, sometimes well marked,—the "laughing muscle" of Santorini. Within the narrow circle where these muscles meet the ring of muscular fibres surrounding the mouth the battles of the soul record their varying fortunes and results. This is the "noeud vital"—to borrow Flourens's expression with reference to a nervous centre,—the vital knot of expression. Here we may read the victories and defeats, the force, the weakness, the hardness, the sweetness of a character. Here is the nest of that feeble fowl, self-consciousness, whose brood strays at large over all the features.

If you wish to see the very look your friend wore when his portrait was taken, let not the finishing artist's pencil intrude within the circle of the vital knot of expression.

We have learned many curious facts from photographic portraits which we were slow to learn from faces. One is the great number of aspects belonging to each countenance with which we are familiar. Sometimes, in looking at a portrait, it seems to us that this is just the face we know, and that it is always thus. But again another view shows us a wholly different aspect, and yet as absolutely characteristic as the first; and a third and a fourth convince us that our friend was not one, but many, in outward appearance, as in the mental and emotional shapes by which his inner nature made itself known to us.

Another point which must have struck everybody who has studied photographic portraits is the family likeness that shows itself throughout a whole wide connection. We notice it more readily than in life, from the fact that we bring many of these family-portraits together and study them more at our ease. There is something in the face that corresponds to tone in the voice,—recognizable, not capable of description; and this kind of resemblance in the faces of kindred we may observe, though the features are unlike. But the features themselves are wonderfully tenacious of their old patterns. The Prince of Wales is getting to look like George III. We noticed it when he was in this country; we see it more plainly in his recent photographs. Governor Endicott's features have come straight down to some of his descendants in the present day. There is a dimpled chin which runs through one family connection we have studied, and a certain form of lip which belongs to another. As our cheval de bataille stands ready saddled and bridled for us just now, we must indulge ourselves in mounting him for a brief excursion. This is a story we have told so often that we should begin to doubt it but for the fact that we have before us the written statement of the person who was its subject. His professor, who did not know his name or anything about him, stopped him one day after lecture and asked him if he was not a relation of Mr. –, a person of some note in Essex County.—Not that he had ever heard of.—The professor thought he must be,—would he inquire?—Two or three days afterwards, having made inquiries at his home in Middlesex County, he reported that an elder member of the family informed him that Mr. –'s great-grandfather on his mother's side and his own great-grandfather on his father's side were own cousins. The whole class of facts, of which this seems to us too singular an instance to be lost, is forcing itself into notice, with new strength of evidence, through the galleries of photographic family-portraits which are making everywhere.

In the course of a certain number of years there will have been developed some new physiognomical results, which will prove of extreme interest to the physiologist and the moralist. They will take time; for, to bring some of them out fully, a generation must be followed from its cradle to its grave.

The first is a precise study of the effects of age upon the features. Many series of portraits taken at short intervals through life, studied carefully side by side, will probably show to some acute observer that Nature is very exact in the tallies that mark the years of human life.

The second is to result from a course of investigations which we would rather indicate than follow out; for, if the student of it did not fear the fate of Phalaris,—that he should find himself condemned as unlifeworthy upon the basis of his own observations,—he would very certainly become the object of eternal hatred to the proprietors of all the semi-organizations which he felt obliged to condemn. It consists in the study of the laws of physical degeneration,—the stages and manifestations of the process by which Nature dismantles the complete and typical human organism, until it becomes too bad for her own sufferance, and she kills it off before the advent of the reproductive period, that it may not permanently depress her average of vital force by taking part in the life of the race. There are many signs that fall far short of the marks of cretinism,—yet just as plain as that is to the visus eruditus,—which one meets every hour of the day in every circle of society. Many of these are partial arrests of development. We do not care to mention all which we think may be recognized, but there is one which we need not hesitate to speak of from the fact that it is so exceedingly common.

The vertical part of the lower jaw is short, and the angle of the jaw is obtuse, in infancy. When the physical development is complete, the lower jaw, which, as the active partner in the business of mastication, must be developed in proportion to the vigor of the nutritive apparatus, comes down by a rapid growth which gives the straight-cut posterior line and the bold right angle so familiar to us in the portraits of pugilists, exaggerated by the caricaturists in their portraits of fighting men, and noticeable in well-developed persons of all classes. But in imperfectly grown adults the jaw retains the infantile character,—the short vertical portion necessarily implying the obtuse angle. The upper jaw at the same time fails to expand laterally: in vigorous organisms it spreads out boldly, and the teeth stand square and with space enough; whereas in subvitalized persons it remains narrow, as in the child, so that the large front teeth are crowded, or slanted forward, or thrown out of line. This want of lateral expansion is frequently seen in the jaws, upper and lower, of the American, and has been considered a common cause of caries of the teeth.

A third series of results will relate to the effect of character in moulding the features. Go through a "rogues' gallery" and observe what the faces of the most hardened villains have in common. All these villanous looks have been shaped out of the unmeaning lineaments of infancy. The police-officers know well enough the expression of habitual crime. Now, if all this series of faces had been carefully studied in photographs from the days of innocence to those of confirmed guilt, there is no doubt that a keen eye might recognize, we will not say the first evil volition in the change it wrought upon the face, nor each successive stage in the downward process of the falling nature, but epochs and eras, with differential marks, as palpable perhaps as those which separate the aspects of the successive decades of life. And what is far pleasanter, when the character of a neglected and vitiated child is raised by wise culture, the converse change will be found—nay, has been found—to record itself unmistakably upon the faithful page of the countenance; so that charitable institutions have learned that their strongest appeal lies in the request, "Look on this picture, and on that,"—the lawless boy at his entrance, and the decent youth at his dismissal.

The field of photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of strange and sometimes of fearful interest. We have referred in a former article to a stereograph in a friend's collection showing the bodies of the slain heaped up for burial after the Battle of Malignano. We have now before us a series of photographs showing the field of Antietam and the surrounding country, as they appeared after the great battle of the 17th of September. These terrible mementos of one of the most sanguinary conflicts of the war we owe to the enterprise of Mr. Brady of New York. We ourselves were on the field upon the Sunday following the Wednesday when the battle took place. It is not, however, for us to bear witness to the fidelity of views which the truthful sunbeam has delineated in all their dread reality. The photographs bear witness to the accuracy of some of our own sketches in a paper published in the December number of this magazine. The "ditch" is figured, still encumbered with the dead, and strewed, as we saw it and the neighboring fields, with fragments and tatters. The "colonel's gray horse" is given in another picture just as we saw him lying.

Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday. How dear to their little circles far away most of them!—how little cared for here by the tired party whose office it is to consign them to the earth! An officer may here and there be recognized; but for the rest—if enemies, they will be counted, and that is all. "80 Rebels are buried in this hole" was one of the epitaphs we read and recorded. Many people would not look through this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented. Yet war and battles should have truth for their delineator. It is well enough for some Baron Gros or Horace Vernet to please an imperial master with fanciful portraits of what they are supposed to be. The honest sunshine

"Is Nature's sternest painter, yet the best";

and that gives us, even without the crimson coloring which flows over the recent picture, some conception of what a repulsive, brutal, sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we give the name of armies. The end to be attained justifies the means, we are willing to believe; but the sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as a savage might well triumph to show its missionaries. Yet through such martyrdom must come our redemption. War Is the surgery of crime. Bad as it is in itself, it always implies that something worse has gone before. Where is the American, worthy of his privileges, who does not now recognize the fact, if never until now, that the disease of our nation was organic, not functional, calling for the knife, and not for washes and anodynes?

It is a relief to soar away from the contemplation of these sad scenes and fly in the balloon which carried Messrs. King and Black in their aërial photographic excursion. Our townsman, Dr. John Jeffries, as is well recollected, was one of the first to tempt the perilous heights of the atmosphere, and the first who ever performed a journey through the air of any considerable extent. We believe this attempt of our younger townsmen to be the earliest in which the aëronaut has sought to work the two miracles at once, of rising against the force of gravity, and picturing the face of the earth beneath him without brush or pencil.

One of their photographs is lying before us. Boston, as the eagle and the wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South and Trinity Church are two landmarks not to be mistaken. Washington Street slants across the picture as a narrow cleft. Milk Street winds as if the cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its commercial palaces. Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in numbers. Towards the circumference it grows darker, becoming clouded and confused, and at one end a black expanse of waveless water is whitened by the nebulous outline of flitting sails. As a first attempt it is on the whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.

While the aëronaut is looking at our planet from the vault of heaven where he hangs suspended, and seizing the image of the scene beneath him as he flies, the astronomer is causing the heavenly bodies to print their images on the sensitive sheet he spreads under the rays concentrated by his telescope. We have formerly taken occasion to speak of the wonderful stereoscopic figures of the moon taken by Mr. De la Rue in England, by Mr. Rutherford and by Mr. Whipple in this country. To these most successful experiments must be added that of Dr. Henry Draper, who has constructed a reflecting telescope, with the largest silver reflector in the world, except that of the Imperial Observatory at Paris, for the special purpose of celestial photography. The reflectors made by Dr. Draper "will show Debilissima quadruple, and easily bring out the companion of Sirius or the sixth star in the trapezium of Orion." In taking photographs from these mirrors, a movement of the sensitive plate of only one-hundredth of an inch will render the image perceptibly less sharp. It was this accuracy of convergence of the light which led Dr. Draper to prefer the mirror to the achromatic lens. He has taken almost all the daily phases of the moon, from the sixth to the twenty-seventh day, using mostly some of Mr. Anthony's quick collodion, and has repeatedly obtained the full moon by means of it in one-third of a second.

In the last "Annual of Scientific Discovery" are interesting notices of photographs of the sun, showing the spots on his disk, of Jupiter with his belts, and Saturn with his ring.

While the astronomer has been reducing the heavenly bodies to the dimensions of his stereoscopic slide, the anatomist has been lifting the invisible by the aid of his microscope into palpable dimensions, to remain permanently recorded in the handwriting of the sun himself. Eighteen years ago, M. Donné published in Paris a series of plates executed after figures obtained by the process of Daguerre. These, which we have long employed in teaching, give some pretty good views of various organic elements, but do not attempt to reproduce any of the tissues. Professor O.N. Rood, of Troy, has sent us some most interesting photographs, showing the markings of infusoria enormously magnified and perfectly defined. In a stereograph sent us by the same gentleman the epithelium scales from mucous membrane are shown floating or half-submerged in fluid,—a very curious effect, requiring the double image to produce it. Of all the microphotographs we have seen, those made by Dr. John Dean, of Boston, from his own sections of the spinal cord, are the most remarkable for the light they throw on the minute structure of the body. The sections made by Dr. Dean are in themselves very beautiful specimens, and have formed the basis of a communication to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which many new observations have been added to our knowledge of this most complicated structure. But figures drawn from images seen in the field of the microscope have too often been known to borrow a good deal from the imagination of the beholder. Some objects are so complex that they defy the most cunning hand to render them with all their features. When the enlarged image is suffered to delineate itself, as in Dr. Dean's views of the medulla oblongata, there is no room to question the exactness of the portraiture, and the distant student is able to form his own opinion as well as the original observer. These later achievements of Dr. Dean have excited much attention here and in Europe, and point to a new epoch of anatomical and physiological delineation.

The reversed method of microscopic photography is that which gives portraits and documents in little. The best specimen of this kind we have obtained is another of those miracles which recall the wonders of Arabian fiction. On a slip of glass, three inches long by one broad, is a circle of thinner glass, as large as a ten-cent piece. In the centre of this is a speck, as if a fly had stepped there without scraping his foot before setting it down. On putting this under a microscope magnifying fifty diameters there come into view the Declaration of Independence in full, in a clear, bold type, every name signed in fac-simile; the arms of all the States, easily made out, and well finished; with good portraits of all the Presidents, down to a recent date. Any person familiar with the faces of the Presidents would recognize any one of these portraits in a moment.

Still another application of photography, becoming every day more and more familiar to the public, is that which produces enlarged portraits, even life-size ones, from the old daguerreotype or more recent photographic miniature. As we have seen this process, a closet is arranged as a camera-obscura, and the enlarged image is thrown down through a lens above on a sheet of sensitive paper placed on a table capable of being easily elevated or depressed. The image, weakened by diffusion over so large a space, prints itself slowly, but at last comes out with a clearness which is surprising,—a fact which is parallel to what is observed in the stereoscopticon, where a picture of a few square inches in size is "extended" or diluted so as to cover some hundreds of square feet, and yet preserves its sharpness to a degree which seems incredible.

The copying of documents to be used as evidence is another most important application of photography. No scribe, however skilful, could reproduce such a paper as we saw submitted to our fellow-workman in Mr. Black's establishment the other day. It contained perhaps a hundred names and marks, but smeared, spotted, soiled, rubbed, and showing every awkward shape of penmanship that a miscellaneous collection of half-educated persons could furnish. No one, on looking at the photographic copy, could doubt that it was a genuine reproduction of a real list of signatures; and when half a dozen such copies, all just alike, were shown, the conviction became a certainty that all had a common origin. This copy was made with a Harrison's globe lens of sixteen inches' focal length, and was a very sharp and accurate duplicate of the original. It is claimed for this new American invention that it is "quite ahead of anything European"; and the certificates from the United States Coast-Survey Office go far towards sustaining its pretensions.

Some of our readers are aware that photographic operations are not confined to the delineation of material objects. There are certain establishments in which, for an extra consideration, (on account of the difficilis ascensus, or other long journey they have to take,) the spirits of the departed appear in the same picture which gives the surviving friends. The actinic influence of a ghost on a sensitive plate is not so strong as might be desired; but considering that spirits are so nearly immaterial, that the stars, as Ossian tells us, can be seen through their vaporous outlines, the effect is perhaps as good as ought to be expected.

Mrs. Brown, for instance, has lost her infant, and wishes to have its spirit-portrait taken with her own. A special sitting is granted, and a special fee is paid. In due time the photograph is ready, and, sure enough, there is the misty image of an infant in the background, or, it may be, across the mother's lap. Whether the original of the image was a month or a year old, whether it belonged to Mrs. Brown or Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Robinson, King Solomon, who could point out so sagaciously the parentage of unauthenticated babies, would be puzzled to guess. But it is enough for the poor mother, whose eyes are blinded with tears, that she sees a print of drapery like an infant's dress, and a rounded something, like a foggy dumpling, which will stand for a face: she accepts the spirit-portrait as a revelation from the world of shadows. Those who have seen shapes in the clouds, or remember Hamlet and Polonius, or who have noticed how readily untaught eyes see a portrait of parent, spouse, or child in almost any daub intended for the same, will understand how easily the weak people who resort to these places are deluded.

There are various ways of producing the spirit-photographs. One of the easiest is this. First procure a bereaved subject with a mind "sensitized" by long immersion in credulity. Find out the age, sex, and whatever else you can, about his or her departed relative. Select from your numerous negatives one that corresponds to the late lamented as nearly as may be. Prepare a sensitive plate. Now place the negative against it and hold it up close to your gas-lamp, which may be turned up pretty high. In this way you get a foggy copy of the negative in one part of the sensitive plate, which you can then place in the camera and take your flesh-and-blood sitter's portrait upon it in the usual way. An appropriate background for these pictures is a view of the asylum for feeble-minded persons, the group of buildings at Somerville, and possibly, if the penitentiary could be introduced, the hint would be salutary.

The number of amateur artists in photography is continually increasing. The interest we ourselves have taken in some results of photographic art has brought us under a weight of obligation to many of them which we can hardly expect to discharge. Some of the friends in our immediate neighborhood have sent us photographs of their own making which for clearness and purity of tone compare favorably with the best professional work. Among our more distant correspondents there are two so widely known to photographers that we need not hesitate to name them: Mr. Coleman Sellers of Philadelphia and Mr. S. Wager Hull of New York. Many beautiful specimens of photographic art have been sent us by these gentlemen,—among others, some exquisite views of Sunnyside and of the scene of Ichabod Crane's adventures. Mr. Hull has also furnished us with a full account of the dry process, as followed by him, and from which he brings out results hardly surpassed by any method.

A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other's faces (that is, in Nature's original positive, the principal use of which, after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a new form of friendship. After an introduction by means of a few views of scenery or other impersonal objects, with a letter or two of explanation, the artist sends his own presentment, not in the stiff shape of a purchased carte de visite, but as seen in his own study or parlor, surrounded by the domestic accidents which so add to the individuality of the student or the artist. You see him at his desk or table with his books and stereoscopes round him; you notice the lamp by which he reads,—the objects lying about; you guess his condition, whether married or single; you divine his tastes, apart from that which he has in common with yourself. By-and-by, as he warms towards you, he sends you the picture of what lies next to his heart,—a lovely boy, for instance, such as laughs upon us in the delicious portrait on which we are now looking, or an old homestead, fragrant with all the roses of his dead summers, caught in one of Nature's loving moments, with the sunshine gilding it like the light of his own memory. And so these shadows have made him with his outer and his inner life a reality for you; and but for his voice, which you have never heard, you know him better than hundreds who call him by name, as they meet him year after year, and reckon him among their familiar acquaintances.

To all these friends of ours, those whom we have named, and not less those whom we have silently remembered, we send our grateful acknowledgments. They have never allowed the interest we have long taken in the miraculous art of photography to slacken. Though not one of them may learn anything from this simple account we have given, they will perhaps allow that it has a certain value for less instructed readers, in consequence of its numerous and rich omissions of much which, however valuable, is not at first indispensable.

THE WRAITH OF ODIN

The guests were loud, the ale was strong,
King Olaf feasted late and long;
The hoary Scalds together sang;
O'erhead the smoky rafters rang.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The door swung wide, with creak and din;
A blast of cold night-air came in,
And on the threshold shivering stood
An aged man, with cloak and hood.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The King exclaimed, "O graybeard pale,
Come warm thee with this cup of ale."
The foaming draught the old man quaffed,
The noisy guests looked on and laughed.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

Then spake the King: "Be not afraid;
Sit here by me." The guest obeyed,
And, seated at the table, told
Tales of the sea, and Sagas old.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

And ever, when the tale was o'er,
The King demanded yet one more;
Till Sigurd the Bishop smiling said,
"'T is late, O King, and time for bed."
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The King retired; the stranger guest
Followed and entered with the rest;
The lights were out, the pages gone,
But still the garrulous guest spake on.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

As one who from a volume reads,
He spake of heroes and their deeds,
Of lands and cities he had seen,