In all these pages, it will be observed, what is called “colour” in black and white is preserved throughout; showing that a page can be thoroughly decorative without illustrations to the text. Closely criticised, some of the old block designs may appear crude and capable of more skilful treatment, but the pages, as a rule, show the artistic sense—unmistakably, mysteriously, wonderfully.
In these and similar pages, such, for instance, as Le Mer des Histoires, produced in Paris by Pierre le Rouge in 1488 (also in the British Museum), the harmony of line drawing with the printed letters is interesting and instructive. (See Appendix.)
It is in the production of the decorative page that wood engraving asserts its supremacy still in some quarters, as may be seen in the beautiful books produced in England during the past few years by Mr. William Morris, where artist, wood engraver, typefounder, papermaker, printer, and bookbinder work under the guiding spirit (when not the actual handwork) of the author. They are interesting to us rather as exotics; an attempt to reproduce the exact work of the past under modern conditions, conditions which render the price within reach only of a few, but they are at least a protest against the modern shams with which we are all familiar.
The nineteenth-century author’s love for the literature of his past has led him to imitate not only the style, but the outward aspect of old books; and by a series of frauds (to which his publisher has lent himself only too readily) to produce something which appears to be what it is not.
The genuine outcome of mediæval thought and style—of patience and leisure—seems to be treated at the end of the nineteenth century as a fashion to be imitated in books, such as are to be seen under glass cases in the British Museum. It is to be feared that the twentieth-century reader, looking back, will see few traces worth preserving, either of originality or of individuality in the work of the present.
What are the facts? The typefounder of to-day takes down a Venetian writing-master’s copybook of the fifteenth century, and, imitating exactly the thick downward strokes of the reed pen, forms a set of movable type, called in printer’s language “old face”; a style of letter much in vogue in 1894, but the style and character of which belongs altogether to the past. Thus, with such aids, the man of letters of to-day—living in a whirl of movement and discovery—clothes himself in the handwriting of the Venetian scholar as deliberately as the Norwegian dons a bear-skin.