|
|
Apart from all the above considerations, these invaluable pictures are well worth attention from the standpoint of pictorial art. We talk a great deal nowadays about the astonishing advances of modern art-photographv; and it is quite true that patient investigators have immeasurably increased the range and flexibility of camera methods and results. We now manipulate negatives and print to produce any sort of effect; we print in tint or color, omitting or adding what we wish; numberless men of artistic capacity are daily showing how to transmit personal feeling through the intricacies of the mechanical process. But it is just as true as when the caveman scratched on a bone his recollections of mammoth and reindeer, that the artist will produce work that moves the beholder, no matter how crude may be his implements. Clearly there were artists among these Civil War photographers.
Probably this was caused by natural selection. It took ardor and zest for this particular thing above all others to keep a man at it in face of the hardships ank disheartening handicaps. In any case, the work speaks for itself. Over and over one is thrilled by a sympathetic realization that the vanished man who pointed the camera at some particular scene, must have felt precisely the same pleasure in a telling composition of landscape, in a lifelike grouping, in a dramatic glimpse of a battery in action, in a genre study of a wounded soldier watched over by a comrade-that we feel to-day and that some seeing eye will respond to generations in the future. This is the true immortality of art. And when the emotions thus aroused center about a struggle which determined the destiny of a great nation, the picture that arouses them takes its proper place as an important factor in that heritage of the past which gives us to-day increased stature over all past ages, just because we add all their experience to our own.
 |
|
