Paintings
  Church
    Heart of the Andes
  Cole
    Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
    Course of Empire
      Savage State
      Consummation
      Desolation
    Voyage of Life
      Childhood
      Manhood
      Old Age
      Youth
Art and Mechanical Reproduction
  Daguerreotype
  Daguerreian Society
  Currier and Ives
  Images of Whitman (w/essay)
  Oliver Wendell Holmes on Photography
  Edgar Allan Poe on The Daguerreotype
Attractions
  Lost Museum (Barnum's Museum)
  Grand Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress
Illustrating the Text
  E.W. Kemble's Huck illustrations
  Kemble's "Illustrating Huck Finn"
  Henry James on Illustration
Texts
  Emerson - The Poet
                                                                                           

Henry James on Illustration (from the preface to The Golden Bowl)


I should in fact be tempted here, but for lack of space, by the very
question itself at large--that question of the general acceptability of
illustration coming up sooner or later, in these days, for the author of any
text putting forward illustrative claims (that is producing an effect of
illustration) by its own intrinsic virtue and so finding itself elbowed, on
that ground, by another and a competitive process. The essence of any
representational work is of course to bristle with immediate images; and I,
for one, should have looked much askance at the proposal, on the part of my
associates in the whole business, to graft or "grow," at whatever point, a
picture by another hand on my own picture--this being always, to my sense, a
lawless incident. Which remark reflects heavily, of course, on the
"picture-book" quality that contemporary English and American prose appears
more and more destined, by the conditions of publication, to consent,
however grudgingly, to see imputed to it. But a moment's thought points the
moral of the danger.
Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed
before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of
picture, pictorial enough, above all (x) IN ITSELF, does it the worst of
services, and may well inspire in the lover of literature certain lively
questions as to the future of that institution. That one should, as an
author, reduce one's reader, "artistically" inclined, to such a state of
hallucination by the images one has evoked as doesn't permit him to rest
till he has noted or recorded them, set up some semblance of them in his own
other medium, by his own other art--nothing could better consort than THAT,
I naturally allow, with the desire or the pretension to cast a literary
spell. Charming, that is, for the projector and creator of figures and
scenes that are as nought from the moment they fail to become more or less
visible appearances, charming for this manipulator of aspects to see such
power as he may possess approved and registered by the springing of such
fruit from his seed. His own garden, however, remains one thing, and the
garden he has prompted the cultivation of at other hands becomes quite
another; which means that the frame of one's own work no more provides place
for such a plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the same
platter. One welcomes illustration, in other words, with pride and joy; but
also with the emphatic view that, might one's "literary jealousy" be duly
deferred to, it would quite stand off and on its own feet and thus, as a
separate and independent subject of publication, carrying its text in its
spirit, just as that text correspondingly carries the plastic possibility,
become a still more glorious tribute. So far my invidious distinction
between the writer's "frame" and the draughtsman's; and if in spite of it I
could still make place for the idea of a contribution of value by Mr. A. L.
Coburn to each of these volumes--and a contribution in as different a
"medium" as possible--this was just because the proposed photographic
studies were to seek the way, which they have happily found, I think, not to
keep, or to pretend to keep, anything like dramatic step with their
suggestive matter. This would quite have disqualified them, to my rigour;
but they were "all right," in the so analytic modern critical phrase,
through their discreetly disavowing emulation. Nothing in fact could more
have amused the (xi) author than the opportunity of a hunt for a series of
reproducible subjects--such moreover as might best consort with
photography--the reference of which to Novel or Tale should exactly be NOT
competitive and obvious, should on the contrary plead its case with some
shyness, that of images always confessing themselves mere optical symbols or
echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type
or idea of this or that thing. They were to remain at the most small
pictures of our "set" stage with the actors left out; and what was above all
interesting was that they were first to be constituted.