Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/278

274 paper the features of the original in all their refinement of details and values that to look on the reproduction in a book is now comparable with looking on the scene or composition itself. The result has been a still further widening of the breach between text and illustration; and the temptation must often be great to introduce a picture because it is good in subject and admirably reproduced, though in its composition little regard has been paid to the situation which it is intended to represent. This defect is no less noticeable in the flotsam of periodical literature and the daily press than in the more elaborate composition of book-illustrations. When pictures are looked for, pictures will be forthcoming, whether appropriate or not. The waste corners of the newspaper are often filled with odds and ends of wit, humor and anecdote, in which the union of text and illustration too often suggests that the items have been thrown together and then drawn forth in pairs at haphazard.

The significance of such variations in the place of illustration, as well as the factors in their production, will perhaps be more clearly apprehended if the changes of value which the picture undergoes in individual mental development are recalled. In adult literature the text has complete meaning in itself, the picture has not; the text is made first, then the picture is composed; for the latter aims simply to present in a concrete visual image what has been set forth through verbal analysis in the text. The picture is thus completely subordinate to the text; it serves only to reinforce a feeble visual imagination in its effort to get before the mind a scene which the writer of necessity presents in fragments by successive statements.

But this is not the primitive way of conceiving the relation between these two constituents, nor is it the association which at first existed for the child. The picture, in those earliest days, was primary, the text secondary. For the adult the picture illustrates the text; for the young child the text explains the picture—it is needful only in case the picture can not be understood by itself. The text marks the imperfection of the picture, or series of pictures, in telling a story, and is added to supplement its deficiencies.

Pictures have a meaning for the child long before he begins to read or understand printed words. From babyhood they form part of his perennial delights, and are among the most treasured of his sources of pleasure. They have splendor of color and never-failing variety of forms; they represent objects of enduring interest, whether familiar or novel; they are full of action or suggestive of manifold and significant relationships; they tell, singly or in series, stories vivid and direct in their appeal, which are made scarcely the less alluring by their partial incomprehensibility.

The appreciation of pictures is a part of the child's introduction to language and representative thought. They have something of the controllability of images and, except for motion, the vividness and