A Growl for the Unpicturesque

As to the popularity of the pictured newspaper of the present day, there is no controversy. When people said that Lucan was no poet, Martial made him reply posthumously, “Ask my bookseller.” A similar reply would, no doubt, be made now to any one who questioned the value of the grotesque art of the daily press, — grotesque, surely, whenever it ceases to be photographic. If the value of things is to be measured merely by the magnitude of the material returns, then, of course, the answer is conclusive. But the newspapers which outrage good taste to gratify the undiscriminating ignobile vulgus are the very ones which scream the loudest against the sin of mere money-grubbing. In the face of the inflamed prejudice of the present day, it must be confessed candidly that Mr. Harriman was right in protesting against the injustice done by newspaper headlines, since the makers of these in some quarters are guided solely by the desire to attract attention. Mr. Harriman added that only the headlines are read, while the proper report of a matter, which might correct the false impression of the headlines, is thrown aside without a glance. He might have added that in most cases the efforts of the cartoonist reinforce those of the headliner, rather than those of the honest and painstaking reporter. Cynicism itself can hardly imagine a more bitter travesty of human nature than to see on the same page, or on neighboring pages, a diatribe in unmeasured language on any one of a score or more men who happen to be the targets of public hatred, and a cartoon that defies every maxim of morals and æsthetics. In the so-called colored supplement, — which should be called the discolored supplement, — now an almost universal feature of the Sunday morning volume, cruelties are depicted worse than those of a bull fight or a gladiatorial show; violations of the moral law, particularly of the fifth commandment, that would send a shiver through the whole fabric of Chinese civilization, are made to seem amusing, and all these things are done with a species of art which is laughed at only because it is so atrocious that its atrocity is too contemptible to excite aversion. These things are supposed to interest children. In ancient Greece, from Athens to Tanagra, the things meant to appeal to the domestic instincts were made beautiful. It would have been an unpardonable offense in the eyes of heathenism to have made them less than beautiful. Modern Christianity permits its votaries to think, or at least to act, on the principle that ugliness is a means of grace. Is it strange, or not, that the age which allows childhood to train its perceptions with such things is the one which also tolerates declamations against the Arabian Nights, against fairy tales, against folklore, against Mother Goose, indeed, against almost everything which delighted the infantile mind in the past ?

From a distinctive and very restricted point of view, this newspaper art is certainly realistic. It reflects the souls of those who make it and of those who admire and enjoy it, in all their wooden deformity. It is the last cry of materialism, gross, strident, clumsy, proud of its denial that there can be anything higher than itself. In the sense that all things which affect the mind are educative, this art must be so, too; but it is surely calculated to make the judicious grieve in contemplation of the possible, the probable effect upon human nature. If there is exclusive merit in an education which is solely utilitarian, it may be well to have the department of æsthetics in schools hereafter presided over by the adepts in burlesque. Let Vavassor say, if he likes, that burlesque was unknown both to the literature and to the art of the ancients. Vavassor was admired by Thomas Gray to that extent that a whole line occasionally found its way from the Latin poems of the French Jesuit into those of the English university recluse. Let Vavassor say that there is never any occasion for burlesque, and many reasons why it should be avoided. The poet of the Elegy was too fastidious, and perhaps the man whom he admired and sometimes copied was more than fastidious. Yet, even at that, it requires no second sight to see what would be the response if the suggestion to make burlesque the mistress of art and letters were offered in serious earnest. Pardon the ludicrous contrast of words. To be funny in earnest is one of the privileges of this new art. But the fact is that, in the great school which all humanity attends perforce, the new art is already the mistress, and its lessons necessarily sink into the grain of human nature far more deeply than the education vouchsafed by the schools of art and letters.

With the etcher, the engraver, the woodcutter, the painter, the sculptor, of other times, and even yet, so little was or is left to assistants,—and that little so purely routine in kind,— that both idea and execution belonged to the one who rightfully put his mark on the finished work. With the new art, the man whose name goes to the product frequently owes his idea to an editor who could not draw a sawhorse, though it were standing still, and all the rest of the process, except the mere sketch, to a series of unknown workers and a more or less complicated mechanism. The lifelong, all-around training of the artist is to him unnecessary. Sometimes he can draw, but he certainly need not draw well. He is not required to be a colorist. The process will do his coloring for him, if he indicates where he wants his tints and in what variety. In his absence, a resourceful editor with cardboard, paste-pot, a pair of shears, and some fragments of earlier works of art, has been known to do surprising things, which have gone through the process and over the press without loosening a single screw. And his readers never knew the difference. Thus this art, like most other activities of modern life, is getting to be a highly composite affair. The more nearly it approaches perfection, the less individual it must necessarily become. Very few men, if successful within the circle thus created, will have the courage of Gibson, to desert it and seek to be true artists, in the sense which shortly may become historic, if not obsolete.

The tendency to mere symbolism in the newspaper picture is inveterate. Buster Brown’s costume is as fixed as the green tunic of St. Peter which attracted the philosophic attention of Max O’Rell; Father Knickerbocker in buckled shoes, stockings, breeches, long waistcoat, flaring frock, and cocked hat; Cincinnatus, usually without a toga; St. Paul with a nimbus ostentatiously fastened by an upright rod to the back of his neck; General Moses Cleveland in Continental uniform; Pitt in something like court costume; the late William Penn looking like an eighteenth-century publican; Saint Louis in a marvelous mediæval undress, — these are examples of symbolic figures which are probably destined to rival Uncle Sam and John Bull in permanence. Most cities are still in a state of unstable equilibrium as to their pictorial identity; but there is no doubt that circumstances will soon or late give them each a distinctive emblem. It were, perhaps, to court a vain surmise to inquire whether or not Chicago will ever be able to make Mephitis Americana embody the local satire of a day. Still, there are Lokman and Æsop and Phædrus and Babrius to show how animals can be induced to talk. And there are Alciatus and Jacob Cats, and a whole series of poetasters down to Quarles, to show how trifling a motive emblematism is in art and literature. In fact, the result of this sort of thing is exemplified in the decaying periods of all artistic nations, and it can be studied in every country graveyard in America, with its reliefs of angels, weeping willows, and open books, never willingly changed in a single line.

Of course, this tendency to fixed symbolic forms need not affect legitimate art. But the lesson of history is that it has always had a malign influence. Originality, the power of initiative, was lost in the recurrent discovery by every decaying epoch that imitation and fixed formulas were easier and more remunerative. The difficulty with the symbolism of the present day is that it starts at a lower level, with more ignoble themes and with less imagination, than any of its predecessors. Naturally it must find a lower depth into which to fall. To some this may seem a matter of indifference. They will say that the vulgarizing, specializing, machinifying of art are of no significance, that art at the best is only an efflorescence of human nature, and that the flower makes the plant neither better nor worse. If that were true, still the disposition to make art a mere product is a symptom of the disease of the times, worth considering in the effort to complete a diagnosis. But it is certainly not wholly true. Most artists and critics of art would say that it is not true in any sense, that genuineness in art is as fundamental as sincerity can be anywhere, and that an age in which genius and laborious culture are discredited by slipshod facility must necessarily be an age in which a New Morality flourishes.