Some persons (I beg pardon of the ladies) take the habiliments as the standard of recognition. I do not accuse them of doing it wilfully; they do not know it themselves. For example, Miss Smith will know Miss Jones a mile or so off. By her general air, or her face? Oh no! It's by the bonnet she helped her to choose at Madame What-d'ye-call's, because the colour suited he complexion.
These are some of the mortifications attendant on artistic labour, and if they occur with the educated classes, they are more likely to happen even to "intelligent policemen," as the newspaper have it. If I dissent from the plan it is because I doubt its efficiency, but do not deny that it is worth a trial. If the French like to carry their portraits about with them on their passports to show to policemen, let them submit to the humiliation. I doubt very much whether the Chamber of Deputies would have made a law of it: it appears a new idea in jurisprudence that a man must sit for his picture. Any one, however, understanding the camera, would be alive before the removal of the cup of the lens, and be ready with a wry face; I do not suppose he could be imprisoned for that.
Both plans are miserable travesties on the lovely uses of portrait painting and photography. Side by side with Cowper's passionate address to his mother's picture, how does it look?
"Oh, that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I saw thee last."
And,
"Blest be the art that can immortalise."
If photography has an advantage over canvas, it does indeed immortalise (the painting may imitate, and the portrait may be good; but there is something more profoundly affecting in having the actual, the real shade of a friend perhaps long
since in his grave); and we ought not only to be grateful to the illustrious inventors of the art, but prevent these base uses being made of it.
In short, apart from the uncertainty of recognition, which I have not in the least caricatured, if Giles Scroggins, housebreaker and coiner, and all the swell mob, are to be photographed, it will bring the art into disgrace, and people's friends will inquire delicately where it was done, when they show their lively effigies. It may also mislead by a sharp rogue's adroitness; and I question very much its legality.