On four square walls men have their world, their strife,
Their painted, framed endeavors, joys and pain;
And two curators known as man and wife
Hang up the sunrise, wipe the dust from rain,
And gaze excitedly on painted life.
A picture on the wall is like a window—only more so! A window looks out on the garden or the street; a picture is an opening into infinity. The view from my window is controlled by circumstances. I cannot, for example, live in this Australian home of mine and command, from my window, a view of York Minster, the Bridge of Sighs, or the Rocky Mountains. And, even if I could, the darkness of each night would enfold the pleasing prospect in its sombre and impenetrable veil. But the pictures do for me what windows could never do. By means of the pictures I cut holes in the walls and look out upon any landscape that takes my fancy. And, when evening comes, I draw the blinds, illumine the room from within, and the panorama that has so delighted me in the day-time reveals fresh charms in the softer radiance of the lamps.
We all owe more to pictures than we have ever yet begun to suspect. Here is a merry young romp of a schoolboy, of tousle-head and swarthy face; loving the open-air and hating books like poison. A lady gives him a ponderous volume, and he turns away with a sneer. But one day he casually opens it. There is a colored picture. It represents Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday in the midst of one of their most exciting adventures. The boy—George Borrow—seized the book, carried it off, and never rested until he had read it from cover to cover. It opened his eyes to the possibilities of literature; and, to his dying day, he declared that, but for that colored print, the world would never have heard his name or read a line from his pen. Nor is this all. For it is probable that, in infancy, our minds receive their first bias towards—or away from—sacred things from the pictures of biblical subjects and biblical characters that are then, wisely or unwisely, exposed to our gaze. The Face that, in the secret chambers of our hearts, we think of as the Face of Jesus is, in all likelihood, the Face that we saw in the first picture-book that mother showed us.
But I fear that I have wandered. I set out to talk, not so much about pictures, as about photographs—photographs in general and old photographs in particular. Have photographs—and especially old photographs—no ethical or spiritual value? Is there a man living who has not, at some time, felt himself rebuked by eyes that looked down at him from a frame on the wall? I often feel, in relation to the photographs around the room, as Tennyson felt in relation to the spirits of those whom he had loved long since and lost awhile. It is lovely to think that those who have passed from our sight are not, in reality, far from us. And yet—
Do we indeed desire the dead
Should still be near us at our side?