Occasionally an artist seems to have resolved to be new and a few brilliant efforts are made, but considering all, little has been done by the average amateur to exchange cheap portraiture and studio orientality and mediaevalism for a style more true to his existing surroundings. The passions of life and the passions of art are not the same to them.

They seem unaware that the best art is that which is most clearly the outcome of the time of its production, and the art signifying most in respect to the characteristics of its age is that which ultimately becomes classic. To give to art the complexion of our time, boldly to express the actual, is the thing infinitely desirable. What artistic photography needs most is a Steinlen, who has succeeded in expressing in his weekly illustrations for the Gil Blas supplement -- as valuable as any Japanese wood cuts -- the heat, the hurry, the vexations, the lurid excitements and frivolous graces, the tragedies and comedies of Parisian life, and in a more perfect manner than Zola has in his long-drawn series of novels.

All these years our artistic photographers -- and painters and sculptors as well -- with a few exceptions have been mumbling old formulas, and have apparently combined in a gigantic trust of imitation. The dignified vigor of the old masters, the restless desires of modern art, the incomparable suggestiveness of the Japanese, have all been mortgaged. No past effort has escaped their versatility for reproducing. Everything seems to have struck their fancy, even that which is only questionably good.

I know that large majority will object to my arguments: those who do not feel that there is an imposing grandeur in the Brooklyn Bridge; who do not acknowledge the beauty of the large sweeping curves in the new Speedway, which would set a Munich Secessionist wild; who do not feel the poetry of our waterfronts, the semi-opaque water reflecting the gray sky, the confusion of square-rigged vessels with their rusty sides and the sunburnt faces peering from the deck; and who would laugh outright if anyone would dare to suggest that Paddy's market on Ninth Avenue or the Bowery could be reduced to decorative purposes.

Such men claim that there is nothing pictorial and picturesque in New York and our modern life, and continue their homage to imitation. The truth is that they lack the inspiration of the true artist, which wants to create and not merely to revive or adapt. They are satisfied with an incongruous mixture of what they have learned in school and what comes to them easily, no matter whether at second or at third hand, it saves them experiments and shields them from failures. They work as do the journalists, who write of things they know nothing about, and whose superficial knowledge is concealed by the rapid succession of publications. But for that reason their work can also be likened to the wake of a ship -- it foams a little to be seen no more.

To open new realms of art takes a good share of courage and patience. It always takes moral courage to do what the rest of the profession does not; that of course the man possesses who starts out to conquer the beauties of New York. It takes actual physical courage to go out into the crowd with your camera, and to be stared and laughed at on the most inopportune occasions. But that even Mr. J. G. Brown braved; why not you? It takes also a marvelous amount of patience to stand for hours at the same spot, perhaps in very bad weather -- in rain, snow, or even in a thunder-storm -- until at last one sees before him what he considers essential for a picture; or persistently to return at every opportunity to a subject -- perhaps to something that may recur only once in a year, as the "May Festival" in Central Park -- until he has at last mastered it. And even after one has succeeded, there is no harvest of praise to reap, for all those who are in quest of beauty will experience that the very people who said there could be no beauty there will later on point out that it undoubtedly was there long before it was discovered.

But what does it matter? The true artist works for himself, and does not care a rap for the opinion of others, as long as he knows -- if that should be his aim -- that his work has been infused with the spirit of to-day, with something unmistakably the outcome of the present. I would like to make his acquaintance; I might feel inclined to become his Ruskin.

I am well aware that much is lacking here which makes European cities so interesting and inspiring to the sightseer and artist. No monuments of past glory, no cathedral spires of Gothic grandeur, no historic edifices, scarcely even masterpieces of modern architecture lift their imposing structures in our almost alarmingly democratic land. Despite this, I stick to my assertion, and believe that I can prove its truth. For years I have made it my business to find all the various picturesque effects New York is capable of -- effects which the eye has not yet got used to, nor discovered and applied in painting and literature, but which nevertheless exist.

Have you ever watched a dawn on the platform of an elevated railroad station, when the first rays of the rising sun lay glittering on the rails? This Vance Thompson compared to the waterways of Venice in pictorial effect. The morning mist, in strange shapes and forms, played in the distance where the lines of the houses on both sides of the street finally united.

Have you ever dined in one of the roof-garden restaurants and watched twilight descending on that sea of roofs, and seen light after light flame out, until all the distant windows began to glimmer like sparks, and the whole city seemed to be strewn with stars? If you have not, you are not yet acquainted with New York.

Then take Madison Square. Place yourself at one of its corners on a rainy night and you will see a picture of peculiar fascination. Dark silhouettes of buildings and trees, surrounded by numerous light reflections, are mirrored in the wet pavement as in a sheet of water. But also in daytime it is highly attractive. The paths are crowded with romping children, and their gay-colored garments make a charming contrast to the lawn and the foliage of the trees, to which the Diana's tower and the rows of houses with windows glittering in the sun form a suitable background.

The Boulevard has many interesting parts. The rows of trees in the middle, the light brick fronts of the new apartment houses, and the many vehicles and bicyclists on a Sunday afternoon offer ample opportunity for snap-shots.

Comparing New York with other cities, it can boast of a decided strain of gayety and vitality in its architecture. The clear atmosphere has encouraged bright colors which, when subdued by the mist that hovers at times over all large cities, afford delightful harmonies that can be suggested even by the photographer's black and white process.

Almost any wide street with an elevated station is interesting at those times when the populace does to or returns from work. The nearer day approaches these hours, the more crowded are the sidewalks. Thousands and thousands climb up or down the stairs, reflecting in their varied appearances all the classes of society, all the different professions, the lights and shadows of a large city, and the joys and sorrows of its inhabitants.

In Central Park we meet with scenes of rare elegance and dignity. Many a tourist will find himself transported to the palace gardens of the old world, as his eyes gaze on these quiet lakes peopled with swans and on the edifices shimmering in the sun and rising from the autumnal foliage into the sky.

A peculiar sight can be enjoyed standing on a starlit night at the block house near the northwest entrance of the Park. One sees in the distance the illumined windows of the West Side and the Elevated, which rises at the double curve at One Hundred and Tenth Street to dizzy heights, and whose construction is hardly visible in the dimness of night. A train passes by, like a fantastic fire-worm from some giant fairyland, crawling in mid-air. The little locomotive emits a cloud of smoke, and suddenly the commonplace and yet so mystic scene changes into a tumult of color, red and saffron, changing every moment into an unsteady gray and blue. This should be painted, but as our New York artists prefer to paint Paris and Munich reminiscences, the camera can at least suggest it.

A picture genuinely American in spirit is afforded by Riverside Park. Old towering trees stretch their branches toward the Hudson. Almost touching their trunks the trains on the railroad rush by. On the water, heavily loaded canal boats pass on slowly, and now and then a white river steamboat glides by majestically, while the clouds change the chiaroscuro effects at every gust of wind.

Another picture of surprising beauty reveals itself when you approach New York by the Jersey City ferry. The gigantic parallelograms of office buildings and skyscrapers soar into the clear atmosphere like the towers, turrets, and battlements of some ancient fortress, a modern Cathay, for whose favor all nations contend.

The traffic in the North and East rivers and the harbor offer abundant material; only think of the graceful four-masted East Indiamen that anchor in the bay, laden with spices which recall even in these northern climes quaint Oriental legends, of indolent life under tropical suns. I am also very fond of the vista of the harbor from Battery Park, particularly at dawn. How strange this scene looks in the cold morning mist. There is no difference and no perspective; the outlines of Jersey City and Brooklyn fade ghost-like in the mist; soft shimmering sails, dark shadows, and long pennants of smoke interrupt the gray harmony, and are in their uncertain contours not unlike the fantastic birds which enliven at times the background of Japanese flower designs.

Whoever is fond of panoramic views should place himself at the Highbridge Reservoir and look northwards. At sunset this scene -- the wide Harlem River sluggishly flowing through a valley over which two aqueducts span their numerous arches -- reminds one involuntarily of a landscape by Claude Lorrain.

For the lovers of proletarian socialism -- who like Dudley Hardy and Gaston Latouche, and would like to depict the hunger and the filth of the slums, the unfathomable and inexhaustible misery, which hides itself in every metropolitan city -- subjects are not lacking in New York. Only it is more difficult to find them than in European cities.

Rafaelli, the French painter, once asked me to show him the poorest quarters. I took him through Stanton, Cherry, Baxter and Essex Streets. I could not satisfy him. But when he saw a row of dilapidated red brick houses with black fire-escapes covered all over with bedding, clothes lines, and all sorts of truck, he exclaimed: "C'est fort curieux!" and like a ferret ran from one side to the other to take a number of snap-shots.

True enough we have not such scenes of extreme poverty as Rafaelli found in the outskirts of Paris, at least not so open, but one only needs to leave the big thoroughfares and go to the downtown back alleys, to Jewtown, to the village (East Twenty-ninth Street), of Frog Hollow, to prove sufficiently that many a portfolio could be filled with pictures of our slums, which would teach us better than any book "how the other half lives."

From there you should go to the Potter's Field, on Hart's Island, that ragged little island where the nameless dead are buried in long trenches, each of which is marked by a stone to record that one hundred and fifty paupers lie below. And out beyond the sandy shore gleam the shimmering waters of the Sound.

But you can find mortuary themes in New York, without boarding at 6 A.M., the Fidelity, that sad little charity steamer which plies between the Morgue and Hart's Island. There lies in the very heart of the city, in the midst of a block bounded by Second Avenue, the Bowery, Second Street, and Third Street, a neglected little graveyard, as romantic as anything of that nature I have ever seen. The gravestones are sadly dilapidated, and almost disappear in the wild flowers that sprout in great abundance from the untrimmed grass and weeds. Clotheslines cross this desolate spot everywhere, and on week days long rows of linen flap gayly in the breeze. More than half a century has passed over these graves and left plain traces of the flight of the years. There the two gravediggers might dig up Yorick's skull and prepare the grave for the fair Ophelia.

Vereschagin was particularly interested in our telegraph poles, now largely a thing of the past, and the net of wires that is spread all over the city.

Whenever some large building is being constructed, the photographer should appear. It would be so easy to procure an interesting picture, and yet I have never had the pleasure to see a good picture of an excavation or an iron skeleton framework. I think there is something wonderful in iron architecture, which as if guided by magic, weaves its networks with scientific precision over the rivers or straight into the air. They create, by the very absence of unnecessary ornamentation, new laws of beauty, which have not yet been determined and are perhaps not even realized by the originators. I am weary of the everlasting complaint that we have no modern style of architecture. It would indeed be strange if an age as fertile as ours had produced nothing new in that art which has always, more than others, reflected the aspirations and accomplishments of mankind at certain epochs of history. The iron architecture is our style.

I still could add hundreds and hundreds of suggestions for pictures, but I fear I would tire my readers. I will therefore mention only a few haphazard. There is the Fulton fish market, a wonderful mixture of hustling human life and the slimy products of Neptune's realm, at its best on a morning during Lent; then the Gansevoort market on Saturday mornings or evenings; the remnants of Shantytown; the leisure piers; the open-air gymnasiums at Stryker's Lane and the foot of Hester Street; the starting of a tally-ho coach from the Waldorf-Astoria on its gay drive to Westchester; the canal-boat colony at Coenties Slip; the huge storage houses of Gowanus Bay. Another kind of subjects now comes to mind -- the children of the tenement districts returning from school; or the organ-grinder, and little girls showing off their terpsichorean skill on the sidewalk to an admiring crowd.

But really what would be the use of specifying any further? Any person with his eyes open, and with sympathy for the time, place, and conditions in which he lives, has only to take a walk or to board a trolley, to find a picture worthy of depiction almost in every block he goes.

I am perfectly aware that only a few of my readers endorse my assertions and see something in my ardent plea. In thirty years, however, nobody will believe that I once fought for it, for then the beauty of New York will have been explored by thousands.

But who will be the first to venture on these untrodden fields and teach New Yorkers to love their own city as I have learned to love it, and to be proud of its beauties as the Parisians are of their city? He will have to be a great poet and of course an expert photographer.

May he soon appear!