FullReads

Of such shows is the freedom of the kingdom of heaven. There is the other young man in a show window a bit further on who all day long gashes blocks of wood with a magic razor, only to sharpen it to greater keenness, so that before you he continually cuts with it the finest hairs. There is the young woman garbed as a nurse who treats the corns on a gigantic plaster foot. In show windows cooks are cooking appetising dishes; damsels are combing magnificent, patent-medicine grown tresses; and in show windows are spectacles of infinite variety and without number. All for the delight without cost of a penny of those whose hearts are as a little child. There is the trim maid who folds and unfolds a Davenport couch. I had a friend one time of a roving disposition (alas! he is now in jail) who once got the amazingly enviable job of doing nothing but smoke an endless succession of cigars in a show window.

Brother (as Lavengro used to say), there is nothing high about the cost of pleasure. But hold! would you, without a thought, pass by here? Though this, yon show, is without its rapt throng to do it reverence, it is, to an ardent mind, the most enticing, and the most instructive, of all the classic exhibitions to be seen from the pavement, the one fullest of all of (in the words of one Quinney) “meat and gravy.” Always tarry, fellow man, before the cheap photographer’s.

Any one who has ever been enough interested in human matters to examine the sidewalk exhibitions of the cheap photographer does not need to be told that the fine old star character there, a character somewhat analogous in popular appeal and his permanency as an institution to the heavy villain of melodrama, a character old as the hills, yet fresh as the morning, is the naked baby. Nobody ever saw a cheap photographer’s display without its naked baby. Just why he should be naked is not clear. However, there is undoubtedly inherent in the mind of the race this instinct,–that you should begin your photographic life naked. Perhaps this is in response to a sentiment for symbol: naked came ye into the world. Perhaps it is because your face at the time of your initial photograph is as yet so uncarved by time that it is deemed more interesting to display the whole of you, clothed, as it were, in innocence. The art of painting, of course, from the earliest rendering of the Child of the Virgin down to Mary Cassatt, has been fond of portraying infants nude,–the photographer may be said only to continue a very old tradition. But painting has always observed the baby with ceremonious respect; painting stripped him to admire him and softly caress him. The broad humanity of the cheap photographer “jokes” him, as you may say.

The most popular way of presenting the baby at the cheap photographer’s,–seated, standing, on his back, or on his belly; stark naked, or (as sometimes he is found) girded about the loins, or (as, again, he is seen) less naked and wearing an abbreviated shirt, and in various other stages of habilimentation,–is on a whitish hairy rug. No background but the hairy rug. It is background (very largely), one suspects, that gives one the sense of a baby’s value. The idea occurs to a thoughtful observer of his photograph that it is to a considerable degree from background, surrounding atmosphere, local colour, that the baby derives personal identity. Twenty cabinet-sized naked babies, each on a hairy rug:–one conceives how an unscrupulous photographer (as may very likely commonly be the case) might save money on negatives, after he had a stock of a little variety, by snapping babies with an unloaded camera and printing from old plates, without anybody’s being the wiser. (Here, indeed, would be a utilitarian motive behind the baby’s being naked of articles of identification.) It is, alas! undermining to the pride of race to reflect that that photograph of one’s cousin’s fine new baby Edward, which reminded every one so much of the infant’s mother, may not impossibly have been the original likeness of some baby now long extinct.