Too Many Pictures

Are the works of the best modern lit?rary artists improved by illustration? Can an artist with his brush or pen add anything to the well developed characterization of our successful novelist? In other words, is it not the llterary art of a master amply suilicient to portrny ail in his book that is charraing or thrilllng or pathetic or humorous? I e that it is, and also that it is a literary crime for the average j tion to inject into the pages of a great work of flction, of whose creative forces he can know no more trian the reader. Sorae of this sort of iliustration Is amazingly clever, but most of it is just the opposite. To distinguish the pictorial opportunity in a mook manuschipt Is a work requiring rare distinction, and too many of Our illustrators, with the approval of the publishers, take their cue for a picture from such inadequate ind puerüe suggestion as that conveyed in the familiar climax of love storie-:"And she feil on his breast and wept fears of unutterable Joy." - Stdney Fairiield, in I,ippincott's.