Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

of Botticelli, the decorative, doll-like creatures of the Japanese with all their
lineal charms, and the languid demi-virgins of Dewing are a more direct
inlet into the realm of beauty than most other, perhaps more healthy and
normal, depictions of womanhood.

THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON.
Spring has come. Two robins have been reported near Philadelphia,
the note of the bluebird is heard in the land, and pneumonia is in full bloom.
We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that there are two kinds
of Spring, subjective and objective, the kind described in the advertise-
ments and the variety actually furnished by the procession of the equinoxes.
Objectively, Spring is the time of year when Nature stretches her
self, turns over in bed and mumbles drowsily, “ Call me again in three
weeks.” Subjectively, Spring is one of the hallucinations of the artistic
temperament.
The artist may be either a poet, or a painter, or a photographer. It
makes no difference (even a photographer, you know, may have a tempera-
ment), and each in his own way has helped to spread the pleasant superstition.
Your poet always was an uncertain creature. When he sings most
feelingly of feasts you may be sure that he has dined on beer and a rye
sandwich; and as for that lovely lyric on the joys of curds and a cottage,
the inspiration for it lay for ten years in bottle in the cellars of Rheims.
Poets, indeed, like dreams, go by contraries, so that you may put it down
that the Ode to Spring was inspired by a particularly odious day in late
January and that April found the author sneezing in damp boots and a rain-
coat and dreaming of the balminess of June. If for many years, while men
still read poetry, it was the popular notion that the seasons had changed
or that the particular climate under which it was one's misfortune to have
been born differed, vernally, from that of the Lake Country, we can easily
place the blame and, since the Return to Nature, we know better.
Even Thomson, the poetic authority on seasons in general, had his
moments of disillusionment. When he cried impatiently, “ Come, Gentle
Spring! Ethereal Mildness! come.” it must have been getting on toward
the end of April.
“In the Spring,” says the poet, “the young man’s fancy lightly turns
to thoughts of love.” You might know a poet said that. To begin with,
with apartments at three thousand a year and the Beef Trust eking out a
miserable two per cent. on porterhouse steaks, a young man, unless he is
artistic and unpractical, does not at any season turn his thoughts lightly to
love. It is too expensive. And then, in Spring, your well-balanced young
man has other fish to fry. He is busy rubbering for his goloshes and
wondering whether or not to wear his winter-overcoat when he leaves home
mornings, and his thoughts are turned to the uses of sarsaparilla and the
latest discoveries in cold cures.

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