Holiday Books

THE use of photography in connection with various chemical and mechanical processes of fixing and printing has led to a marked effect upon the decoration and illustration of books. The artist who once was satisfied with the aid of photography, because it relieved him of the necessity of drawing his design upon the block, now is supposed to take an added pleasure in having his work made ready for the printer without the intervention of an engraver, who bears to him somewhat the relation of a translator to an original author. It cannot be gainsaid that the step taken when an artist’s design was transferred by photograph to the block at once enlarged enormously the scope of wood-engraving ; for whereas, before, there was a special class of designers who mastered the technique of drawing for the engraver, and rarely painted at all, now not a painter but could see his work engraved even though he never put pencil to block, and that without the perilous aid of a draughtsman.

When the next step was taken, and a dumb process was substituted for an intelligent engraver, the artist had reason to be divided in his mind. The first effect undoubtedly was to play havoc with the engraver’s trade, and for a time some seemed to fear that the engraver’s art also would be lost. The most serious impact thus far has been upon the art of engraving on steel, which indeed was at a somewhat low ebb when the photo-gravure process sprang into existence, and it is doubtful if it will ever recover its old standing. Engraving on wood, on the other hand, though suffering a temporary check in prosperity, is now gaining from the use of the processes what portrait painting gained by the introduction of the daguerreotype and the photograph; the art of the engraver is confirmed, but there is little place left for the mere mechanical artisan. It appears, moreover, that the illustrated magazines which gave an impulse to the art of engraving on wood, and then began to experiment with the process, thereby causing something of a panic in the engraving camp, are now perceiving the limitations of process, and settling down to more uniform reliance upon the graver. The artist, therefore, who began to fear that the multiplication of his designs through printing was to be accompanied by a loss of artistic excellence is now adjusting his work to the conditions, and is adding process to his resources, not substituting it for engraving.

So far, then, as the relations of the artist to the engraver are concerned there has been a gain, and both our illustrated magazines and holiday books show this gain; but the introduction of processes in connection with photography is leading to another result, which deserves to be considered with some care. The publisher, who is most frequently the plotter of illustrated books, has been a very interested observer of the changes which have been going on. The element of cost has been that which he has most closely studied. As the processes have been developed, he has seen with increasing gratification that he could get rid of the engraver, and so reduce greatly the expense of his plant and the amount of his risk. An immense addition of illustrated books, of every degree of slovenliness, bears witness to this activity of the publishing mind. Having rid himself of the engraver, he has speculated if he cannot rid himself of the artist also, and thus still further reduce the cost of manufacture. While thus studying the case, he has been greatly aided by the improvement which has been going forward in photography, especially as practiced by amateurs. The artistic sense, which might not be so accompanied by patient study as to make its possessor a good painter, may yet be so cultivated as to permit him to place his camera in exactly the right spot for obtaining a pleasing effect. Nature now and then arranges herself to the eye of man or woman, and keeps still for a time even longer than is required to press a button. Hence the multitudinous studies in landscape and architecture which are hung in exhibitions of photography by societies of amateurs. It is needed only to add, not portraits alone, but figures, then groups, then tableaux, and presto ! the work is done ; the artist has gone after the engraver.

It will be seen by this that there are scarcely any limits to the extent to which photography may be employed for book illustration. It is a common enough occurrence for tableaux to be arranged illustrative of the successive scenes in a poem. How easy to reproduce these groups in a series of photographs, to pass the photographs through the photogravure process, and thus to publish them as accompaniments to the text in a holiday edition ! Instead of the artist, then, we should have the costumer to deal with, the stage manager, and a new field would be opened for the exercise of the talent of the leisure class.

We are moved to these rather random speculations by considering certain tendencies in book illustration which are in evidence this season. It is not a new thing to provide books with photogravures, but the number which place their chief reliance on photogravures after nature, so to speak, is conspicuously large and respectable. The fashion may be said to have been set last year by the issue of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun ¹ in this style. As the preface of that book states, the scheme was suggested by the very common practice, indulged in by travelers to Rome and Florence, of binding in photographs of localities and monuments referred to in the tale, insomuch that booksellers in those cities did a thriving business in furnishing books thus extended, ready made for the tourist. It is at once a cheapening of a pretty fancy when the trader steps in to do for the indolent or ignorant what the intelligent enthusiast does for himself; but the change from the photographer’s or bookseller’s clumsy extension of The Marble Faun to the publisher’s edition, in which all the arts of bookmaking were studied with patience and nice attention to detail, was one worth making, and the result was notable for the good taste which marked it throughout.

A more agreeable because more legitimate use of the same scheme of book illustration is seen in the edition this year of another of Hawthorne’s works. The Marble Faun was a work of the imagination, using for its background a scene which was transferred from actuality with pretty close and full regard for fidelity to nature. Hawthorne could not help touching even inanimate objects in his story with something of the glow which suffused his human creations, but one can readily see that there are masses in his picture which are almost literal transcripts from his note-book. He meant to employ his English notebooks in somewhat the same manner, as his several ineffective attempts intimate ; but whether from a sense of his failing power or because he was tired of waiting for the right subject, he made a more prosaic use of his material, and followed such a merely topical arrangement of his notes as issued in the series of papers gathered into the volume Our Old Home. In the illustrated edition of this book,² which is an exceedingly beautiful example of the bookmaker’s art, Hawthorne has been made to annotate himself; and if the editor could have had access to the original manuscript of the note-books from which Hawthorne drew his papers, we do not doubt that he would have been able to show even more conclusively the art which sprang into form so soon as the great artist set himself to building his daily record into the simple literary structure of the descriptive essay.

The annotation which the photographer has made is of a similar sort. Here the study has been to reproduce the objects which Hawthorne described as they might have been made, so to speak, in the note-book of Hawthorne stripped of his personality, of that divine reason which transmutes nature and the work of men’s hands into an image seen in

The process of the footnotes is carried a step farther, and one observes by this the gradual divergence of art as seen in literature, and the mere reflex of nature as seen in the permanent photograph. The separation is less obtrusive, as we have intimated, because Hawthorne’s art, in this instance, borrows least from his higher power, and also because the photogravures are in most cases copies of human art. It is when we leave cathedral and castle and statue, and come to look upon some representation of nature, even where nature is modified by human touch, as in the Devonshire Farmhouse and the Bridge over the Avon, that the questions rise, What does this print add to the text ? Is it in itself beautiful ? Does it illustrate, — that is, throw light upon the printed page ? The most that can he said for such a picture is that it stimulates the memory of one who has seen the original spot. But if we ask ourselves, What would such a picture be, if, reproduced by whatever process, it was the design of a painter who had Hawthorne’s eye, and a corresponding power of expression through light and shade, line and mass ? we perceive at once how far the photogravure from nature falls short of the possible photogravure from the picture of an artist. Instead of getting the real thing, as we sometimes triumphantly exclaim, we are getting the mere superficies.

The doubt which springs up as to the satisfactoriness of an illustrated The Marble Faun, where the background only is illustrated, recurs with even greater force in the case of Romola, which has been issued in much the same style, in two rival editions.³ To take up these books and judge them by the illustrations alone, one would suppose they were histories of Florence in the time of Savonarola. One of them does, indeed, contain a solitary picture of Romola and her father, which has a pathetically human air amidst the palaces, and streets, and churches, and statues, and mural decorations which afford the subjects for the abundant photogravures. It is indeed a bit of irony that the writer who took the human soul for her subject, and traveled with weary steps the countless roads down which her pursuit led her, should be illustrated, forsooth, by stone walls, and towers, and prisons. It is as if one asked to be shown a city, and was conducted to the cemetery.

We do not deny that pains has been taken with these books; that they are intended to be exemplars of the bookmaker’s art; that the photographs thus made permanent have been selected with care ; and that the text itself refers to the subjects of the pictures, so that one has in the accompanying illustrations a slight substitute for a walk through Florence or Rome with Romola or The Marble Faun in his mind. But we deny that they are in any true sense illustrated books; they are simply, in the parlance of the collector, extended books. As such they have an interest and a certain value, but it is idle to suppose that they serve any ends of art except as by their cheapness and attractiveness they drive out of the market inferior specimens of illustrated books; on the same principle as daguerreotypes and photographs indirectly served the art of portraiture by diverting into that occupation many who might otherwise have made a trade of portrait painting.

The use of mechanical processes for making an artist’s work available in illustrating a book is well shown in a noticeable book of the season. Mr. Frederic Remington, whose designs have a curious likeness to instantaneous photographs, and whose nimble pencil has long been busy over Indian subjects, brings his skill and knowledge to the ample illustration of Hiawatha.⁴ In a score or more of photogravures he takes up salient points in the poem, and treats them as if he caught the Indian of this day putting himself in the attitude or going through the motions of Mr. Longfellow’s mythical Indian. Now and then something in the woods, or the water, or the sky, comes to his aid, and his naturalistic figures are suddenly invested with a direct poetic value, as in the Death of Kwasind and Hiawatha’s Departure; but when he essays the supernatural, his frankness is in his way, and his ghosts have no nonsense about them. In a word, his interpretation of the poem is refreshingly candid and openly rebellious. Mr. Longfellow saw Hiawatha, but never saw the North American Indian. Mr. Remington has seen the North American Indian, but never has seen Hiawatha. His gloss on the poem, for such it is, is admirably enriched by a great number of marginal drawings, winch copy with every mark of fidelity the objects which form the furniture of an Indian’s life, — wigwams, weapons, animals, dress, pipes, utensils. The only point we note as questionable is the moose head on page 185. Is the position of the ears correct ? The collection, a graphic museum of Indian objects, is so comprehensive that we know not where else to look for so striking a commentary on the limitations of existence in this race. It is like being told that the ordinary English farm laborer uses only about two hundred words. We cannot dismiss this book without high praise for the care with which all parts of it have been considered, and the skill which has been shown in harmonizing the parts. The ingeniously fit binding, the well-proportioned sheet, the clear type and good page, the admirably arranged marginal sketches, and the good color and printing of the photogravures combine to leave a most agreeable impression. It is an illustrated book which gives pleasure by its studious regard for the best form.

Perhaps some day we shall have Daudet’s trilogy of Tartarin set forth with photogravure illustrations of railway station and bridge and castle and the like from Nîmes. But happily time has not yet set its final seal upon the classic, and we may at present enjoy a bit of contemporary wit, and enjoy it all the more because such contemporary artists as Rossi, Myrbach, Montégut, Bieler, and Montenard have appreciated the wit, and have quickened the perception of the reader by their clever characterization of the persors and scenes. Port Tarascon ⁵ is translated with volatile energy by Mr. James, who makes one almost content to read Daudet in English; the French artists who accompany the text need no translation, but speak a French dialect of pictorial art which is not merely intelligible, but penetrates the sense with a pungency of meaning which is truly exhilarating. One may indeed guess that these artists never visited an island in the southern seas, and even forgot once or twice the wretched idealities of island architecture which Daudet insists upon ; but when it comes to the figures in this lively tale, and the scenes which are independent of locality, one is entirely satisfied, and finds the delicate, witty drawings not extrusive of his own conceptions, but most happy materializations. To discover how successfully a draughtsman, possessed of the spirit of the literature he is illustrating, may throw light by the very simplest treatment, let the reader study the figure of Tartarin in his rockingchair, on page 259. If a few slightly commonplace pictures, hard in treatment, were thrown out, the book would represent an entirely satisfactory combination of text and illustration, and as such would be placed in the small class of illustrated books where a new piece of literature carries with it embodiments of its characters not likely ever to be dissociated from it.

We began our discussion of the holiday books of the season by noting the departure from old ways which the introduction of new processes of reproduction is bringing about. We close with calling attention to a book which owes its excellence to no experiment in new ways, but to a faithful use of the best resources of artist, engraver, printer, and binder. There is an uncommon pleasure in taking up a work like Mr. Parsons’s selections from Wordsworth’s sonnets,⁶ merely as regards the solidity of the execution. Here is the result of patient, steadfast labor. No short cuts have been taken ; the artist has, one may guess, studied his pictorial treatinent in Wordsworth’s own country, and has placed himself as nearly as may be at the same point of view as that taken by the poet himself; the engravers have done their part firmly and with admirable success in preserving color, and the entire effect of the volume as a piece of bookmaking is one of thoroughness and dignity. More than this, Mr. Parsons’s attitude toward nature is poetic, like Wordsworth’s, so that we have a great deal more than a cartographic representation of the scenery which lay under the poet’s eye and recurred to his imaginatively vivified memory. No one can feast his eyes on these lovely pastoral pictures, and call to mind what the same book would be illustrated by the most faithful photographs of Westmoreland and Cumberland, without perceiving that as Wordsworth’s sonnets are not a guide-book, so Mr. Parsons’s pictures are not photographic reports. The book is a worthy addition to the very small class of illustrated books which are works of art. It is a pleasure to think that the separate pictures, with the verses they accompany, have found inexpensive publication through their appearance in successive numbers of Harper’s Magazine, that multitudes have had the opportunity to enjoy high poetry and art in fine communion, and that the sum of the matter is now in permanent and most fit form.