The Image (18 page)

The age of the rising middle class in Victorian England was, of course, the age of the fig leaf. “The fig leaves of decent reticence” which Charles Kingsley described were applied not only to statuary but to literature as well. In order to make works of art a national resource available to all, so that anybody of either sex could without embarrassment be taken on an edifying conducted tour of the greatness of the past, the works of art themselves were garbled, emended, watered down, and taken out of context—all in order to make them bland and digestible to uncultivated palates. The Age of Education thus ironically became the Age of Expurgation. The New Expurgation, unlike the Old (of the days of the licensing of printed matter), aimed less to expunge offensive doctrine than to hide offensive facts of life. All this had its effect on literature. Charles and Mary Lamb’s
Tales from Shakespeare
(1807) were designed to make the bard familiar to the young. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), from whose name we derive the word “bowdlerize,” meaning to expurgate by removing offensive passages, in 1818 published his ten-volume
Family Shakespeare
, “in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” It went through four editions in six years, and numerous others thereafter. Encouraged by his success, he prepared a similar six-volume edition of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, “for the use of Families and Young Persons, reprinted from the original text with the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency.”

What the new public museums were to works of art, the new popularizations were to works of literature. The precious
literary objects, once enjoyed almost exclusively by the aristocrats of birth, wealth, or learning, were now to be put on display for the millions. Some, of course, went into tolerably accurate cheap editions. But while sculpture, painting, tapestries, and
objets d’art
were taken out of context by being removed from monastery and palace to the public museums, much of the best literature was taken out of context by being abridged, expurgated, simplified, and popularized.

How to make the esoteric, difficult, lengthy, archaic, and subtle classics of an aristocratic society “interesting” and “edifying” (the eighteenth-century phrase was “amusing and instructive”) for everyone? In England and elsewhere the age of the Protestant Reformation, the seedtime of modern liberalism, was of course an age of translations—for example, Sir John North’s Plutarch (1579), John Florio’s Montaigne (1603), and above all, the great King James version of the Bible (1611).

In the United States in the nineteenth century popular education and popularization tended to become synonymous. A stigma, the odium of an outdated priestly aristocracy, was put on anything that could not be made universally intelligible. Equalitarian America attached a new, disproportionate importance to the knowledge which all could get and to techniques which all could master. In England, for example, rules of spelling had been slow to develop; Shakespeare himself had been illiterate by the standards of the American schoolmarm. But in the United States, where the people were desperately in search of a cultural standard that any able-bodied citizen could meet with reasonable effort and modest opportunities, the spelling fetish established itself quite rapidly. Noah Webster’s
American Spelling Book
(1789) and his
American Dictionary of the English Language
(1828) sold by the millions. Americans were inclined to overvalue whatever could be made intelligible to all: the work of the journalist (Benjamin Franklin) or of the popular humorist (Mark Twain). Popularity became confused with universality. If the Bible was truly an inspired Great Book, it must
have something to say to everyone; by a quaint reversal, it then became axiomatic that anyone could understand the Bible. In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible “The World’s Best Seller.” And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

The Graphic Revolution accentuated all these tendencies. It brought new forces toward popularizing, toward reshaping—and toward disembodying—works of art. This it did in several ways.

First came the cheapening of printed matter. In the United States until about 1830 books were sturdily made, but expensive to manufacture. The cheap book came in the 1840’s. It had been made possible by the new paper-making machines and cylinder presses, which could turn out large quantities at low cost. What historians of the subject call the “Great Revolution in Publishing” had arrived when, in 1841, two New York weeklies, the
New World
and
Brother Jonathan
, entered into cutthroat competition. These weeklies, printed like newspapers to secure a cheap postal rate, were actually devoted to printing serialized novels which had been pirated from England or written by Americans. When readers objected that they could elsewhere buy some of these novels complete before the serials were finished, the competing weeklies began to issue “supplements” and “extras.” Each of these was a whole novel, printed on newspaper presses, and commonly unbound. Competition became intense and prices came down. In 1842 Bulwer’s
Zanoni
, issued almost simultaneously by the two weeklies (and also by the more reputable
Harper’s
), could be bought for as little as six cents a copy. This intense competition did not last. In April, 1843, the United States Post Office ruled that supplements had to be mailed under book rates; then these weeklies, and with them the appeal of shoddy books, declined. The rise of copyrights laws, and the gradual enforcement of international copyright regulations (not generally effective till the Berne Convention of 1886) later made pirating difficult and reduced
the supply of widely salable, royalty-free books. But never again was the American book trade quite the same. Cheap books were here to stay.

Well before the Civil War book publishing and book selling in the United States had become a highly profitable, highly organized business, offering its wares through retail bookshops, subscription agents, peddlers, and auctioneers. One of the most famous of the early subscription salesmen was Parson Mason Weems. An author as well as a salesman, he wrote the best-selling life of George Washington in which appears the earliest version of the story of the cherry tree. By the time Weems died, in 1825, he had sold for Caleb P. Wayne, a Philadelphia publisher, nearly 4,000 sets of Marshall’s five-volume
Life of Washington
and had collected for him on that book alone the sum of $40,000.

Apart from improvements in paper making and printing, the industrialization of bookbinding was perhaps the most important step in the democratization of the book in America. The crucial change was the departure from the old hand-binding method, by which each book and its own binding were made together. By the new “casing-in” method, the printed sheets were sewn in one operation and then attached to a standard binding that had been made separately. This method came into the United States about 1832. Another important innovation was the introduction of cloth for binding (vellum, calf, or paper-covered cardboard had been the common materials before). Machines were then developed for pressing the pages together, for stamping design and lettering on bookbinding cloth, for folding paper, for sewing the pages; and, finally (an ingenious American invention of the 1890’s) for making the case of the book by machine, and for putting the sheets into the case. All this, of course, brought down the price of hardbound books. Mark Twain’s
Innocents Abroad
(1869) for some time after publication was being sold by subscription agents to about 4,000 purchasers a month.

When Shakespeare had been available only in expensive
leather-bound folios for noble mansions, there was of course little pressure to abridge, bowdlerize, or popularize. But as rising literacy created a demand for cheaper books the industrialization of book making was an incentive to wider sales. A significant, but seldom-noticed, change has taken place in the United States in the subscription sale of books (by book agents who come to the door and sell sets on the installment plan) during the twentieth century. Subscription books of this kind have always had at least as much the character of home furnishings as of reading matter. Before about 1900 the staples of these salesmen were complete sets of authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Thackeray. Since then the staples have come to be the multivolumed encyclopedias (The Britannica, Americana, Child-craft, World Book, Book of Knowledge, Collier’s, International, for example), which give you the gist of anything you want (including the writings of Shakespeare, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Thackeray). One large seller has been a twenty-volume encyclopedia of book digests. Copious photographs and illustrations, many in full color, are the most advertised, and perhaps the most used, features of these works.

Cheap “de luxe” editions (both of books and of magazines) also have had spectacular success. The Limited Editions Club, organized by subscription in 1929, limited its editions to 1,500 in order to give its members only books printed direct from type and from the original illustration plates. The success of the venture led its director, George Macy, to found The Heritage Press for a larger audience. This produced the novel phenomenon of books supposed to have most of the typographical virtues of “limited” editions, but now in almost unlimited numbers. Many imitators have produced books which purport to offer the hand-crafted beauties of small editions at bargain prices to a mass market.

The same newer and cheaper techniques of printing and book making which widened the audience also varied the forms in which literature reached the public. A comparable
change took place in the graphic arts, and especially in the fine arts of painting and sculpture. Well before the middle of the twentieth century an American could buy for a few dollars a full-color copy of the “Mona Lisa” or of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” which, properly framed and viewed at a decent distance, was hardly distinguishable from its original. This was a new development. A few connoisseurs looked down their noses at these “vulgar misrepresentations” of a unique original. Was the old-fashioned traveler in the world of art now to be made into a mere tourist? Was he to be seduced into being satisfied with quick looks at handy copies which, at best, would be no more than a “bicycle ride through the Louvre”? The new techniques provided means for popularizing the original and transforming its general idea into a thousand forms: in cheap books, on lampshades, serving platters, and pencil boxes.

The first reproduction of a photograph in a newspaper appeared as recently as March 4, 1880, when a picture entitled “Shanty-Town” was printed in the New York
Daily Graphic
. This was made by a new process and was called a “halftone.” An object is photographed through a fine screen, and then the shadings are represented in print by the dots on the photographic plate. The technique, still in use, was developed by Stephen Horgan and Frederick Eugene Ives. Horgan had tried without success to persuade James Gordon Bennett to use it in the New York
Herald
. He finally managed to introduce it in the New York
Tribune
, where the first halftones were printed on power presses in 1897.

Improvements in color printing made possible the colored comic strip. Now the “yellow press” could appear in a full range of colors. In the fall of 1896 Hearst issued a comic supplement all in color, which he advertised, with characteristic reticence, as “eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe.” The new collotype presses (first imported to this country from Germany in 1890) soon made possible nuances of color reproduction for fine medical and art books. Henry
Watson Kent, who had lately been with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, joined Max Jaffé’s pioneer color printing establishment in Vienna in 1926. There high-grade art reproductions were made for the Museum, for other institutions, and for book publishers. Jaffé’s son Arthur established his own presses in New York in 1938. Since then the quality of cheap color reproductions has been much improved. This has been reflected in book and magazine illustration, and in the admirable color prints of great paintings now to be found in private homes, hotel rooms, and restaurants throughout the country.

Similar improvements have still more recently appeared in the processes of casting and in the making of metallic and plastic reproductions of sculpture. At the reception desks of museums, in gift shops, and in bookstores it is now possible to purchase cheap reproductions of classic pieces of Egyptian, Greek, or Roman sculpture which only an expert can distinguish from the originals.

The Graphic Revolution, in one area after another, has provided us with mass-produced “originals.” Inevitably, then, we come to think that the “original” is to be distinguished from its technically precise (and often more durable) copy only by its price. Respect for the original comes close to pure snobbery. What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art—especially of a painting—by how widely and how well it is reproduced? Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” which challenged the techniques of color reproduction and which could be tolerably and brightly reproduced at low cost, began to overshadow the drabber classics of the Italian Renaissance. As never before in art it has become easy for the great, the famous, and the cliché to be synonymous.

The original then somehow loses its originality. The copy is far more familiar. Indeed it is only the copy which is
really
popular. It often gives us more pleasure. At the Gauguin show at the Chicago Art Institute in 1959 visitors complained
that the original paintings were less brilliant than the familiar reproductions.

The original itself acquires a technical, esoteric status. It becomes nothing more than a kind of prototype, like the type-castings for our books, or the dies from which other mass-produced items are made. We begin to wonder whether the primary purpose of a great work of art may not be to provide an original matrix from which copies can be produced. From our point of view it is more and more the copy, and not the original, which seems to fulfill the artist’s true democratic-humanitarian-“life-enriching” purpose. It is the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” that hung in our college room, and not that which hangs in the Museum, that is full of meaning for us.