READERS of the ‘Echoes’ in the Illustrated
London News may remember that, some two or three years ago, I took the
liberty of introducing them to Muybridge,’ who (hitherto an unknown quantity
in my mind) had introduced himself by sending me from Palo Alto, in California,
a number of very curious productions, being instantaneous photographs of the
various attitudes of a fast-trotting horse in motion. One could scarcely help
being struck, and admiringly struck, first by the ingenuity of the idea itself;
next by the phenomenal celerity of the operation (the photographing of each
attitude occupying, so I heard, only the five-thousandth part of a second); and,
finally, by the unutterably hideous aspect of the attitudes assumed by the
animal in the various stages of trotting. These attitudes, however, the operator
asserts to be the true and natural ones; while, on the other hand, he as stoutly
asserts that the accepted, conventional, traditional, and artistic rendering of
the movements of the horse are, and have been (with a few Greek exceptions),
altogether false amid unnatural these forty centuries since. So I spake
Muybridge fair, and exhorted him to persevere in his experiments.
He has so persevered, and has largely
developed them. On Monday, 6th March, in the theatre at the Royal Institution, a
select and representative audience assembled to witness a series of most
interesting demonstrations of animal locomotion, given by Mr. Muybridge, who ins
only very recently arrived in England. The Prince and Princess of Wales,
Princesses Victoria, Louise, and Maud, and the Duke of Edinburgh, honoured the
occasion by their presence ; likewise did I note among the brilliant company
Earl Stanhope, Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A., Professors Huxley, Gladstone,
and Tyndali; and last, not least, Alfred Tennyson, Poet-Laureate. Mr. Muybridge
exhibited a large number of photographs of the horse, walking, ambling,
galloping, and leaping; and the postures were quite as hideous as those in the
sun-pictures which had been sent me from California; but, by the aid of an
astonishing apparatus, called a ‘Zoopraxiscope,’ which the lecturer
described as an improvement on the old ‘Zoetrope,’ but which may be more
briefly defined as a magic lantern run mad (with method in the madness), the
ugly animals suddenly became motile and beautiful, and walked, cantered, ‘ambled,
galloped, and leaped over hurdles in the field of vision in a perfectly natural
and lifelike manner. I am afraid that, had Muybridge exhibited his ‘Zoopraxiscope’
three hundred years ago, he would have been burnt for a wizard.
George Augustus Sala Living London 1882