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4 Sidney Fairfield From “The Tyranny of the Pictorial” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, June 1895, pp. 861–64. Certain aspects of the illustration of newspapers and periodicals are interesting just now as indicative of modern tendencies and as marking the difference between the standard of what is worth publishing to-day and the standard that prevailed a decade or two ago. The editor of a prominent weekly says that his paper wants no literary matter beyond a very small amount,—about enough to fill three columns. What he does want and gives all his energies to secure is illustrations; the reading matter to carry them is easy enough to get, probably without calling upon outside help. In other words, the purely pictorial element is the controlling end and be-all of this enterprising publisher. While this may be an extreme instance of the craze for pictures, it cannot be denied that the same spirit, if in a less degree, actuates the entire secular weekly press and, in larger measure than ever before, the daily press. It has also invaded the large and important field of trade publication, so that to-day no trade paper that claims to be up to date is without the inevitable half-tone. Of the latter feature of the reign of the pictorial I do not desire to say more, but rather to call attention to the almost unlimited field that has been opened in the literary and journalistic world to the man who is skilled as a draughtsman and who can put into his drawings the quality which stamps them as art. Precious few of these young fellows have this quality, it is true, and more’s the pity for it, for if there is any department of American publication that should be improved, it is that of illustration. The trouble is not that there are too many artists, but that there are too few good ones. There are almost as many men drawing pictures, good, bad, and indifferent, as there are writers. And it is far easier for an artist of ability, as newspaper artists go, to get profitable work, than it is for the equally good writer. [. . .] Coincident with this ascendancy of the art pictorial is the peculiar character of the illustration itself. If the average picture-paper is a criterion of the public taste, the race has developed a predominant curiosity regarding the female adorned and unadorned. Woman is the summum bonum and the sine qua non of the art of the modern illustrator. The clever ones do her adequate justice and show her to us in satisfactory poses and correct costumes, although we tire of their weekly or monthly iteration of the same subject with a new joke or dialogue as its only excuse for existence. [. . .] With all this space in our publications pre-empted by the pictorial, the gentry who live by selling what they write must take metaphorically to the woods, for the reading public has suddenly become picture-mad. The highest thought, the deepest truth, the most exquisite bit of sustained description, poetry, dialogue, love, tragedy, humor, realism of any kind, all are subjected by the weeklies and monthlies to the tyranny of the pictorial, until everything a writer writes, and too often, alas, that which he doesn’t write, is seized upon and illustrated as if in the endeavor to help him make himself understood. And does the illustrator really help the writer? Not necessarily. Often he takes most outrageous license with the truth as written. He is essentially an exaggerator, a perverter of the facts. He sins on the side of his picture, never on that of the manuscript . He makes effects; he does not inform. If his picture is not an attractive one, we are apt not to read what accompanies it, and in such a case he does the writer an absolute injury. If the picture is an attractive one, the reader’s curiosity is often satisfied by the picture alone, and he doesn’t care to read what has been written. And it is very frequently true that the pictorial attractiveness of a publication is such that the mere contemplation of its pictures suffices, and the purchaser tosses it aside without reading a line. Let it not be supposed that I would do away entirely with the illustrator. Far from it. What I object to is over-illustration, the picture-on-every-other-page idea. Let us have things proportioned to their true...

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