rved 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.

History, so called, deals exclusively with persons of distinction;
fiction, though more catholic, sees man in a glamour, with the various
prejudices this way and that of a mortal eye. The development of the
discovery announced by Daguerre in 1839, and first applied to portraits
by one Draper,--this is the great historian. The photograph business,
sir, alone sees life steadily and sees it whole. Photography is the
supreme sociologist, master psychologist. In the sidewalk display of
the cheap photographer is the poor, naked, human story,--poignantly
touching, chasten