Page:Camera Work No. 1 (January 1903).pdf/23

 HOW HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

T WAS many centuries ago. Primitive man had but lately mastered the first reader of progress. He had achieved the opposition of his thumbs. He had caught the knack of standing on his hind legs. He had learned the taste of burned pig. Suddenly, one Spring, the rumor of a great discovery spread from cave to cave. The art of baking bricks had been perfected. Ah, what enthusiasm ensued! What a chattering there was in the scanty and hardly-won vocabulary of our forebears; that compound of the grunts, the barks, and the hisses of a devolved ancestry; the Volapük of the Stone Age! A new ambition stirred in those rugged breasts. With baked bricks and unity of purpose they would scale high heaven! That year was organized The Corporation of the Tower of Babel, Unlimited.

THEN, indeed, came a busy and harmonious time. Kaufmeyer molding rough bricks; Perkins evolving Tertiary ideals in Euphrates clay; O'Flanagan carrying mud-mortar; each with a cheerful word for his fellow-enthusiast. Alas, we know the sequel! One morning Perkins, forgetting his ideals, accused Kaufmeyer of bad language. O'Flanagan said that the foreman was talking through his hat. Bosom friends had their first misunderstanding. It was the beginning of the end. The Tower Company made an assignment.

HISTORY repeats itself and, proverbs to the contrary notwithstanding, patientia does not docet. Some years ago another discovery electrified the peoples. The photographic lens and the dry plate flashed upon a pencil-wielding world like a baked brick upon a cave-dweller. Once again man, united in a self-forgetful enthusiasm, vowed to scale the heavens in unity of endeavor. Once again was witnessed a busy and harmonious hustle. Kaufmeyer taking tin-types, Perkins making platinum-prints, O'Flanagan pressing buttons, each with cheery praise and encouragement for the other. But, alas, as we have said, history repeats itself, and we know the sequel! Kaufmeyer calling Perkins a fuzzy-typist, O'Flanagan calling Kaufmeyer—as I say we know the sequel. But though we no longer share a common language, and heaven has once more escaped capture by storm, let us remember, my erstwhile brothers, that that first cataclysmic dispersion at least scattered abroad the germs of new expression and some excellent receipts for making bricks. And who knows, from the clangorous discord of this new Babel may yet spring photographic epics to which an artistic philology of the future will point as classic. Here's hoping!

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