Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 20))

“Nothing,” said Mr. Binny with exaltation. Whatever might have been
my conjectures regarding the sufferings of artists, they were soon forgotten,
as you shall hear, in the consciousness of my own.
For Mr. Binny now began to make preparations for the sitting; and,
considering that his little body was consumed with disease, the vigor of his
actions was amazing. With a kick he sent the big platform spinning into the
center of the studio; simultaneously his right hand removed from it a large
old-fashioned arm-chair and flung it into a corner, while his left hand caught
up a reading-desk and hurled it onto the platform. Then, standing at a
distance from it, he pitched books, sofa-cushions and draperies at the desk;
running hither and thither in search of objects of local color, or dashing up
on to the platform to punch a cushion, work his knees into a drapery, and kick
about the books, with a view to creating an appearance of spontaneousness.
“Get up,” he said imperiously; and, mounting the platform I stood
and leaned upon the reading-desk. By this time I had become so amazed
at the rapidity and energy with which the furniture had flown about, that I
could only debate feebly in my exhausted mind, whether itwould be better to
assume the pose of the figure of the late Horace Greeley in front of the
Tribune Building or that of the Reverend Mr. Channing in Herbert
Adams’s memorial at Boston. I can not recall that I ever settled this point,
for now Mr. Binny with both hands began to pull up and down the blinds
of the skylight, and the light flashed back and forth about my face, until I
began to think of poor mad Lear with the lightnings playing around his
head. Then from a corner Mr. Binny rushed into action a thing that set
me musing on machine-guns. The upper part of him disappeared into its
body which was draped about with a black cloth. Then gripping the thing’s
sides with his arms, he started it on to a run, racing it round and round the
platform, giving the latter every once in a while a hind kick that made it spin.
How long this awful onslaught lasted I can not say; my brain was dazed and
reeling, as if yielding to the influence of an anesthetic; and the last sensation
I recall was that I was gibbering that line of Virgil's—" So arduous a labor
’twas to found the Roman State!” Nothing, my God! nothing, compared
to working up the frenzy of emotional art!
I was awakened from stupor by the voice of Mr. Binny. My uncon-
sciousness must have lasted a long time, for he was emerging from his dark-
room with a freshly developed negative.
“There,” he exclaimed, holding the glass by the tips of his fingers,
first against the light and then against his coat-sleeve; “there, is the first step
in the production of emotional art; the mere bare bones, as you may say,
which my genius through the resourcefulness of gum, will clothe with
emotional expression. Into this material presentment I will breathe the
spirit of my own genius. Were it not that, like all artists, I shun recognition
and abhor self-praise, I would tell you of the solemn, almost saintly obser-
vations of one of my clients. It was Mr. — no, I won't mention his name,
but he was one of the magnates of Standard Oil. ' I myself, he said, ' have
made some trifling success in oils, as Titian did; but you, Mr. Binny, have

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