‘The calotype’

Abstract

There are some two or three slight advantages which real merit has, that fictitious merit has not; among the rest, an especial advantage, which, we think, should recommend it to at least the quieter members of society — the advantage of being unobtrusive and modest. It presses itself much less on public notice than its vagabond antagonist, and makes much less noise; it walks, for a time at least, as if slippered in felt, and leaves the lieges quite at freedom to take notice of it or no, as they may feel inclined. It is content, in its infancy, to thrive in silence. It does not squall in the nursery, to the disturbance of the whole house, like ‘the major roaring for his porridge’. What, for instance, could be quieter or more modest, in its first stages, than the invention of James Watt? What more obtrusive and noisy, on the contrary, than the invention of Mr Henson? And we have illustrations of the same truth in our Scottish metropolis at the present moment that seem in no degree less striking. Phrenomesmerism and the calotype have been introduced to the Edinburgh public at much the same time; but how differently have they fared hitherto! A real invention, which bids fair to produce some of the greatest revolutions in the fine arts of which they have ever been the subject, has as yet attracted comparatively little notice; an invention which serves but to demonstrate that the present age, with all its boasted enlightenment, may yet not be very unfitted for the reception of superstitions the most irrational and gross, is largely occupying the attention of the community and filling column after column in our public prints. We shall venture to take up the quieter invention of the two as the genuine one — as the invention that will occupy the most space a century hence — and direct the attention of our readers to some of the more striking phenomena which it illustrates and some of the purposes which it may be yet made to subserve. There are few lovers of art who have looked on the figures or landscapes of a camera obscura without forming the wish that, among the hidden secrets of matter, some means might be discovered for fixing and rendering them permanent. If nature could be made her own limner, if by some magic art the reflection could be fixed upon the mirror, could the picture be other than true? But the wish must have seemed an idle one — a wish of nearly the same cast as those which all remember to have formed at one happy period of life, in connection with the famous cap and purse of the fairy tale. Could aught seem less probable than that the forms of the external world should be made to convert the pencils of light which they emit into real bona fide pencils, and commence taking their own likenesses? Improbable as the thing may have seemed, however, there were powers in nature of potency enough to effect it, and the newly discovered art of the photographer is simply the art of employing these. The figures and landscapes of the camera obscura can now be fixed and rendered permanent — not yet in all their various shades of colour, but in a style scarcely less striking, and to which the limner, as if by anticipation, has already had recourse. The connoisseur unacquainted with the results of the recent discovery would decide, if shown a set of photographic impressions, that he had before him the carefully finished drawings in sepia of some great master. The stronger lights, as in sketches done in this colour, present merely the white ground of the paper; a tinge of soft warm brown indicates the lights of lower tone; a deeper and still deeper tinge succeeds, shading by scarce perceptible degrees through all the various gradations, until the darker shades concentrate into an opaque and dingy umber that almost rivals black in its intensity. We have at the present moment before us — and very wonderful things they certainly are — drawings on which a human pencil was never employed. They are strangely suggestive of the capabilities of the art.