Nevertheless to make use of a picture where a verbal description can be given is to fall back upon a more primitive mode of representing experience, and the tendency to do so marks a degeneration either in the mental habits of those who employ such methods or on the part of the readers to whom they are addressed.
The function of the picture, in a certain large class of writings, has recently been undergoing change, and the direction of this modification seems to indicate a loss of intellectual fiber in the commonalty of readers. The present day is marked by an enormous increase in the amount of illustration which accompanies the text we read. In our books no less than in the daily press, in what is written for adults equally with what is prepared for children, in technical journals and scientific monographs as well as in popular magazines, this progressive encroachment of picture upon text is apparent. The newspaper strives for illustration in connection with all classes of news, and its staff of photographers rivals the corps of reporters in numbers and importance. Every page has its pictures, and even the gist of editorial comment is sometimes indicated by thumb-nail sketches used as paragraph-spacing.
It is probably materially true—and if so it is a significant fact—that the cheaper the journal the greater the amount of space given to pictorial matter. In such cases the aim seems often to make the story intelligible by means of pictures alone, with only secondary dependence upon the text. The appeal to pictorial representation in this way includes an immensely greater range of cases than newspaper and magazine illustration; and in this larger field its uses are of course legitimate as well as vicious. When we advertise, everything which can be represented is pictured within a frame of type or spread upon the poster, the fences and the farm-buildings. When we go abroad, our correspondence no longer takes the form of twelve-page letters, but that of a dozen picture post-cards. Our records of travel do not consist in a description of places and people or a dramatic recital of events, but in a gallery of representations of cities and buildings, of landscapes and portraits. We never describe a thing if we can procure a photograph of it; for writing an account of any occurrence—though it presents phases of the event which no picture can ever convey—is difficult and time-consuming.
Our popular magazines no longer depend upon the excellence of their literary contributions as their sole claim upon attention, but are filled with varied and mechanically admirable pictures. With the increasing dependence upon illustration the value of the text has correspondingly declined. In cheaper periodicals the contents are not uncommonly reduced to a group of departments—travel and places, the drama, celebrities, oddities, jokes—in each of which the substance is largely composed of detached pictures with minor explanatory comment. How far this demoralization has gone is indicated by the character of the text in such periodicals; for where it is not a mere commentary on the illustrations
