SALTWOOD CASTLE. BY WILLIAM HYDE. FROM F. M. HUEFFER'S 'THE CINQUE PORTS.' BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. BLACKWOOD.SALTWOOD CASTLE. BY WILLIAM HYDE.FROM F. M. HUEFFER'S 'THE CINQUE PORTS.'BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. BLACKWOOD.
Mr. D. Y. Cameron has illustrated a book or two with etchings—notably White's 'Selborne' 1902,—but to consider him as a book-illustrator would be to stretch a point. A few of his etchings are to be seen in books, and one would like to make them the text for the consideration of other etchings by him, but it would be a digression. He is not among painter-illustrators, but among painters who have illustrated, and that would bring more names into this chapter than it could hold except in catalogue arrangement.
Coming to artists who are illustrators, not on occasion but always, there is no question with whom to begin. It is true that Mr. Pennell is American, but he is such an important figure in English illustration that to leave him out would be impossible. He has been illustrating Europe for more than fifteen years, and the forcible fashion of his work, and all that he represents, have influenced black-and-white artists in this country, as his master Rico influenced him. In range and facility, and in getting to the point and keeping there, there is no open-air illustrator to put beside Mr. Pennell. Always interested and always interesting, he is apparently never bewildered, always ready and able to draw. Surely there was never a mind with a greater faculty for quick study; and he can apply this power to the realization of an architectural detail, or of a cathedral, of miles of country withriver curves and castles, trees, and hills and fields, and a stretch of sky over all; or of a great city-street crowded with traffic, of new or old buildings, of Tuscany or of the Stock Exchange, with equal ease. To attempt a record of Mr. Pennell's work would leave no room for appreciation of it. As far as the English public is concerned, it began in 1885 with the publication of 'A Canterbury Pilgrimage,' and since then each year has added to Mr. Pennell's notes of the world at the rate of two or three volumes. The highways and byways of England—east, west, south and north—France from Normandy to Provence, the cities and spaces of Italy, the Saone and the Thames, the 'real' Alps and the New Zealand Alps, London and Paris, the Cathedrals of Europe, the gipsy encampment and the Ghetto, Chelsea and the Alhambra—Mr. Pennell has been everywhere and seen most things as he went, and one can see it in his drawings.
He draws architecture without missing anything tangible, and his buildings belong to cities that have life—and an individual life—in their streets. But where he is unapproachable, or at all events unapproached among pen-draughtsmen, is in drawing a great scheme of country from a height. If one could reproduce a drawing such as that of the country of Le Puy in Mr. Wickham Flower's 'Aquitaine,' or, better still, the etching of the same amazing country, one need say no more about Mr. Pennell's art in this kind. Unluckily the page is too small. This strange and lovely landscape, where curving road and river and tree-borderedfields are dominated by two image-crowned rocks, built about with close-set houses, looks like a design from a dream fantasy worked out by a master of definite imagination. One knows it is not. Mr. Pennell is concerned to give facts in picturesque order, and here he has a theme that affects us poetically, however it may have affected Mr. Pennell. His eye measures a landscape that seems outside the measure of observation, and his ability to grasp and render the characteristics of actuality serves him as ever. It is an unforgettable drawing, though the skill displayed in the simplification and relation of facts is no greater than in other drawings by the artist. That power hardly ever fails him. The 'Devils of Notre Dame' again stands out in memory, when one thinks generally of Mr. Pennell's drawings. And again, though it seems as if he were working above his usual pitch of conception, it is only that he is using his keenness of sight, his logical grasp of form and power of expression, on matter that is expressive of mental passion. The man who carved the devils, like those who crowned the rocks of Le Puy with the haloed figures, created facts. The outrageous passion that made these evil things made them in stone. You can measure them. They are matter-of-fact. Mr. Pennell has drawn them as they are, with so much trenchancy, such assertion of their hideous decorativeness, their isolation over modern Paris, that no drawings could be better, and any others would be superfluous. It is impossible to enumerate all that Mr. Pennell has done and can do in black-and-white. He is a master of so many methods. From the sheer blackink and white paper of the 'Devils,' to the light broken line that suggests Moorish fantastic architecture under a hot sun in the 'Alhambra' drawings, there is nothing he cannot do with a pen. Nor is it only with a pen that he can do what he likes and what we must admire. He covers the whole field of black-and-white drawing.
THE HARBOUR, SORRENTO. BY JOSEPH PENNELL. FROM HOWELL'S "ITALIAN JOURNEYS." BY LEAVE OF MR. HEINEMANN.THE HARBOUR, SORRENTO. BY JOSEPH PENNELL. FROM HOWELL'S "ITALIAN JOURNEYS."BY LEAVE OF MR. HEINEMANN.
After Mr. Pennell comes Mr. Herbert Railton. No architectural drawings are more popular than his, and no style is better known or more generally 'adopted' by the illustrators of little guide-books or of magazine articles. An architect's training and knowledge of structure underlies the picturesque dilapidation prevalent in his version of Anglo-gothic architecture. His first traceable book-illustrations belong to 1888, though in 'The English Illustrated,' in 'The Portfolio,' and elsewhere, he had begun before then to formulate the style that has served him so admirably in later work with the pen. The illustrations to Mr. Loftie's 'Westminster Abbey' (1890) show his manner much as it is in his latest pen drawings. There is a lack of repose. One would like to undecorate some of the masonry, to reveal the austere lines under the prevalence of pattern. At the same time one realizes that here is the style needed in illustration of picturesquely written books about picturesque places, and that the stone tracery of Westminster, or the old brick and tiles of the Inns of Court, are more interesting to many people in drawings such as these than in actuality. But Rico's 'broken line' is responsible for much, and not every draughtsman who adopts it direct, or through a mixed tradition,has the architectural knowledge of Mr. Railton to support his deviations from stability. Mr. Railton is the artist of the Cathedral Guide; he has drawn Westminster, St. Paul's, Winchester, Gloucester, Peterborough, and many more cathedrals, inside and out, within the last ten years. In illustrations to books where a thread of story runs through historical fact, books such as those written by Miss Manning concerning Mary Powell, and the household of Sir Thomas More, the artist has collaborated with Mr. Jellicoe, who has put figures in the streets and country lanes.
There are so many names in the list of those who, in the beginning, profited by the initiative of Mr. Pennell or of Mr. Railton that generally they may be set aside. Of artists who have made some position for themselves, there are enough to fill this chapter. Mr. Holland Tringham and Mr. Hedley Fitton were at one time unmistakable in their Railtonism. Mr. Fitton has illustrated cathedral books, and in later drawings by Mr. Tringham exaggeration of his copy has given place to a more direct record of beautiful buildings. Miss Nelly Erichsen and Miss Helen James[1]are two artists whose work is much in request for illustrated series, such as Dent's 'Mediæval Towns.' Miss James' drawings to 'Rambles in Dickens' Land' (1899) showed study of Mr. Railton, which is also observable in other books, such as 'The Story of Rouen.' At the same time, she carries out her work from individual observation, andgets an effect that belongs to study of the subject, whether from actuality or from photographs. Miss James and Miss Erichsen have collaborated in certain books on Italian towns, but architectural drawing is only part of Miss Erichsen's illustrative work, though an important part, as the illustrations to the recently-published 'Florentine Villas' of Mrs. Ross show. Illustrating stories, she works with graceful distinctness, and many of the drawings in the 'Story of Rome'—though one remembers that Rome is in Mr. Pennell's province—show what she can do.
Mr. C. G. Harper and Mr. C. R. B. Barrett are the most prominent among those writers of travel-books who are also their own illustrators. They belong, though with all the difference of time and development, to the succession of Mr. Augustus Hare. Mr. Hissey also has made many books out of his driving tours through England, and may be said to have first specialized the subject that Mr. Harper and Mr. Barrett have made their own. It is plain that the kind of book has nothing to do with the kind of art that is used in its making. Mr. Hare's famous 'Walks' may be the prototypes of later books, but each man makes what he can out of an idea that has obvious possibilities in it. Mr. Harper has taken to the ancient high-roads of England, and has studied their historical and legendary, past, present, and imagined aspects. Of these he has written; while his illustrations rank him rather among illustrators who write than among writers who illustrate. Since 1889 he has published a dozen books and more. In 'RoyalWinchester'—the first of these—he is illustrator only. 'The Brighton Road' of 1892 is the first of the road-books, and the illustrations of the road as it was and is, of town and of country, have colour and open air in their black-and-white. Since then Mr. Harper has been from Paddington to Penzance, has followed Dick Turpin along the Exeter road, and bygone fashion from London to Bath, while accounts of the Dover road from Southwark Bridge to Dover Castle, by way of Dickens' country and hop-gardens, and of the Great North Road of which Stevenson longed to write, are written and drawn with spirited observation. His drawing is not so picturesque as his writing. It has reticence and justness of expression that would not serve in relating tales of the road, but which, together with a sense of colour and of what is pictorial, combine to form an effective and frequently distinctive style of illustration. The drawing reproduced, chosen by the artist, is from Mr. Harper's recent book on the Holyhead road.
DUNCHURCH. BY C. G. HARPER. FROM 'THE HOLYHEAD ROAD.' BY HIS PERMISSION.DUNCHURCH. BY C. G. HARPER.FROM 'THE HOLYHEAD ROAD.'BY HIS PERMISSION.
Mr. Barrett has described and illustrated the 'highways and byways and waterways' of various English counties, as well as published a volume on the battlefields of England, and studies of ancient buildings such as the Tower of London. He is always well informed, and illustrates his subject fully from pen-and-ink drawings. Mr. F. G. Kitton also writes and illustrates, though he has written more than he has drawn. St. Albans is his special town, and the old inns and quaint streets of the little red city with its long cathedral, are truthfully and dexterously given in his pendrawings and etchings. Mr. Alexander Ansted, too, as a draughtsman of English cathedrals and of city churches, has made a steady reputation since 1894, when his etchings and drawings of Riviera scenery showed ambition to render tone, and as much as possible of colour and atmosphere, with pen and ink. Since then he has simplified his style for general purposes, though in books such as 'London Riverside Churches' (1897), or 'The Romance of our Ancient Churches' of two years later, many of the drawings are more elaborate than is common in modern illustration. The names of Mr. C. E. Mallows and of Mr. Raffles Davison must be mentioned among architectural draughtsmen, though they are outside the scope of a study of book-illustration. Some of Mr. Raffles Davison's work has been reprinted from the 'British Architect,' but I do not think either of them illustrates books. An extension of architectural art lies in the consideration of the garden in relation to the house it surrounds, and Mr. Reginald Blomfield's 'Formal Garden' treats of the first principles of garden design as distinct from horticulture. The drawings by Mr. Inigo Thomas, whether one considers them as illustrating principles or gardens, are worth looking at, as 'The Yew Walk' sufficiently shows.
THE YEW WALK; MELBOURNE DERBYSHIRE BY F. INIGO THOMAS. FROM BLOMFIELD'S 'THE FORMAL GARDEN.' BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. MACMILLAN.THE YEW WALK; MELBOURNE DERBYSHIREBY F. INIGO THOMAS.FROM BLOMFIELD'S 'THE FORMAL GARDEN.'BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. MACMILLAN.
The sobriety and decorum of Mr. New's architectural and landscape drawings are the antithesis of the flagrantly picturesque. I do not know whether Mr. Gere or Mr. New invented this order of landscape and house drawing, but Mr. New is the chief exponent of it, and has placed it among popular styles of to-day. It has the effect of sincerity, andof respectful treatment of ancient buildings. Mr. New does not lapse from the perpendicular, his hand does not tremble or break off when house-walls or the ridge of a roof are to be drawn. His is a convention that is frankly conventional, that confines nature within decorous bounds, and makesformality a function of art. But though a great deal of Mr. New's work is mechanical and done to pattern, so that sometimes little perpendicular strokes to represent grass fill half the pictured space, while little horizontal strokes to represent brick-work, together with 'touches' that represent foliage, fill up the rest except for a corner left blank for the sky; yet, at his best, he achieves an effective and dignified way of treating landscape for the decoration of books. Sensational skies that repeat one sensation to monotony, scattered blacks and emphasized trivialities, are set aside by those who follow Mr. New. When they are trivial and undiscriminating, they are unaffectedly tedious, and that is almost pleasant after the hackneyed sparkle of the inferior picturesque.
Mr. New's reputation as a book-illustrator was first made in 1896, when an edition of 'The Compleat Angler' with many drawings by him appeared. The homely architecture of Essex villages and small towns, the low meadows and quiet streams, gave him opportunity for drawings that are pleasant on the page. Two garden books, or strictly speaking, one—for 'In the Garden of Peace' was succeeded by 'Outside the Garden'—contain natural history drawings similar to those of fish in 'The Compleat Angler' and of birds in White's 'Selborne.' The illustrations to 'Oxford and its Colleges,' and 'Cambridge and its Colleges,' are less representative of the best Mr. New can do than books where village architecture, or the irregular house-frontage of country high-streets are his subject. Illustrating Shakespeare's country,'Sussex,' and 'The Wessex of Thomas Hardy,' brought him into regions of the country-town; but the most important of his recent drawings are those in 'The Natural History of Selborne,' published in 1900. The drawing of 'Selborne Street' is from that volume.
Selborne Street BY E. H. NEW. FROM WHITE'S 'SELBORNE.' BY LEAVE OF MR. LANE.Selborne StreetBY E. H. NEW.FROM WHITE'S 'SELBORNE.'BY LEAVE OF MR. LANE.
With Mr. New, Mr. R. J. Williams and Mr. H. P. Clifford illustrated Mr. Aymer Vallance'stwo books on William Morris. Their illustrations are fit records of the homes and working-places of the great man who approved their art. Mr. Frederick Griggs, who since 1900 has illustrated three or four garden books, also follows the principles of Mr. New, but with more variety in detail, less formality in tree-drawing and in the rendering of paths and roads and streams and sunshine, in short, with more of art outside the school, than Mr. New permits himself.
The open-air covers so much that I have little room to give to another aspect of open-air illustration—drawings of bird and animal-life. The work of Mr. Harrison Weir, begun so many years ago, is chiefly in children's books; but Mr. Charles Whymper, who has an old reputation among modern reputations, has illustrated the birds and beasts and fish of Great Britain in books well known to sportsmen and to natural historians, as also books of travel and sport in tropical and ice-bound lands. The work of Mr. John Guille Millais is no less well known. No one else draws animals in action, whether British deer or African wild beast, from more intelligent and thorough observation, and of his art the graceful rendering of the play of deer in Cawdor Forest gives proof that does not need words. Birds in flight, beasts in action—Mr. Millais is undisputably master of his subject. Many drawings show the humour which is one of the charms of his work.
FIGURE-OF-EIGHT RING IN CAWDOR FOREST. BY J. G. MILLAIS. FROM HIS 'BRITISH DEER AND THEIR HORNS.' BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. SOTHERAN.FIGURE-OF-EIGHT RING IN CAWDOR FOREST. BY J. G. MILLAIS.FROM HIS 'BRITISH DEER AND THEIR HORNS.'BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. SOTHERAN.
FOOTNOTES:[1]Since this book was in type, I have learned with regret of the death of Miss Helen James.
[1]Since this book was in type, I have learned with regret of the death of Miss Helen James.
[1]Since this book was in type, I have learned with regret of the death of Miss Helen James.
SO far, in writing of decorative illustrators and of open-air illustrators, the difference in scheme between a study of book-illustration and of 'black-and-white' art has not greatly affected the scale and order of facts. The intellectual idea of illustration, as a personal interpretation of the spirit of the text, finds expression, formally at least, in the drawings of most decorative black-and-white artists. The deliberate and inventive character of their art, the fact that such qualities are non-journalistic, and ineffective in the treatment of 'day by day' matters, keeps the interpretative ideal, brought into English illustration by Rossetti, and the artists whose spirits he kindled, among working ideals for these illustrators. For that reason, with the exception of page-decorations such as those of Mr. Edgar Wilson, the subject of decorative illustration is almost co-extensive with the subject of decorative black-and-white. The open-air illustrator represents another aspect of illustration. To interpret the spirit of the text would, frequently, allow his art no exercise. Much of his text is itinerary.His subject is before his eyes in actuality, or in photographs, and not in some phrase of words, magical with suggested forms, creating by its gift of delight desire to celebrate its beauty. Still, if the artist be independent of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the book, his is no independent form of black and white. It is illustration; the author's subject is the subject of the artist. Open-air facts, those that are beautiful and pleasurable, are too uneventful to make 'news illustration.' Unless as background for some event, they have, for most people, no immediate interest. So it happens that open-air drawings are usually illustrations of text, text of a practical guide-book character, or of archæological interest, or of the gossiping, intimate kind that tells of possessions, of journeys and pleasurings, or, again, illustrations of the open-air classics in prose and verse.
But in turning to the work of those draughtsmen whose subject is the presentment of character, of every man in his own humour, the illustration of literature is a part only of what is noteworthy. These artists have a subject that makes the opportunities of the book-illustrator seem formal; a subject, charming, poignant, splendid or atrocious, containing all the 'situations' of comedy, tragedy or farce; the only subject at once realized by everyone, yet whose opportunities none has ever comprehended. The writings of novelists and dramatists—life narrowed to the perception of an individual—are limitary notions of the matter, compared with the illimitable variety of character and incident to be found in the world that changes from day today. And 'real' life, purged of monotony by the wit, discrimination or extravagance of the artist, or—on a lower plane—by the combination only of approved comical or sentimental or melodramatic elements, is the most popular and marketable of all subjects. The completeness of a work of art is to some a refuge from the incompleteness of actuality; to others this completeness is more incomplete than any incident of their own experience. The first bent of mind—supposing an artist who illustrates to 'express himself'—makes an illustrator of a draughtsman, the second makes literature seem no more thanla resteto the artist as an opportunity for pictorial characterization.
Character illustration is then a subject within a subject, and if it be impossible to consider it without overseeing the limitations, yet a different point of view gives a different order of impressions. Caricaturists, political cartoonists, news-illustrators and graphic humorists, the artists who pictorialize society, the stage, the slums or some other kind of life interesting to the spectator, are outside the scheme of this article—unless they be illustrators also. For instance, the illustrations of Sir Harry Furniss are only part of his lively activities, and Mr. Bernard Partridge is the illustrator of Mr. Austin Dobson's eighteenth-century muse as well as the 'J. B. P.' of 'socials' in 'Punch.'
An illustrator of many books, and one whose illustrations have unusual importance, both as interpretations of literature and for their artistic force, Mr. William Strang is yet so incongruous with contemporary black-and-white artists of to-day that hemust be considered first and separately. For the traditions of art and of race that find a focus in the illustrative etchings of this artist, the creative traditions, and instinctive modes of thought that are represented in the forms and formation of his art, are forces of intellect and passion and insight not previously, nor now, by more than the one artist, associated with the practice of illustration. To consider his work in connection with modern illustration is to speak of contrasts. It represents nothing that the gift-book picture represents, either in technical dexterities, founded on the requirements of process reproduction, or in its decorative ideals, or as expressive of the pleasures of literature. One phase of Mr. Strang's illustrative art is, indeed, distinct from the mass of his work, with which the etched illustrations are congruous, and the line-drawings to three masterpieces of imaginary adventure—to Lucian, to Baron Munchausen and to Sindbad—show, perhaps, some infusion of Aubrey Beardsley's spirit of fantasy into the convictions of which Mr. Strang's art is compounded. But these drawings represent an excursion from the serious purpose of the artist's work. The element in literature expressed by that epithet 'weird'—exiled from power to common service—is lacking in the extravagances of thesevoyages imaginaires, and, lacking the shadows cast by the unspeakable, the intellectualchiaroscuroof Mr. Strang's imagination, loses its force. These travellers are too glib for the artist, though his comprehension of the grotesque and extravagant, and his humour, make the drawings expressiveof the text, if not of the complete personality of the draughtsman. The 'types, shadows and metaphors' of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' with its poignancies of mental experience and conflict, its transcendent passages, its theological and naïve moods, gave the artist an opportunity for more realized imagination. The etchings in this volume, published in 1894, represent little of the allegorical actualities of the text. Not the encounters by the way, the clash of blows, the 'romancing,' but the 'man cloathed with rags and a great Burden on his back,' or Christiana his wife, when 'her thoughts began to work in her mind,' are the realities to the artist. The pilgrims are real and credible, poor folk to the outward sight, worn with toil, limited, abused in the circumstances of their lives; and these peasant figures are to Mr. Strang, as to his master in etching, Professor Legros, symbols of endurance, significant protagonists in the drama of man's will and the forces that strive to subdue its strength. To both artists the peasant confronting death is the climax of the drama. In the etchings of Professor Legros death fells the woodman, death meets the wayfarer on the high-road. There is no outfacing the menace of death. But to Mr. Strang, the sublimity of Bunyan's 'poor man,' who overcomes all influences of mortality by the strength of his faith, is a possible fact. His ballad illustrations deal finely with various aspects of the theme. In 'The Earth Fiend,' a ballad written and illustrated with etchings by Mr. Strang in 1892, the peasant subdues and compels to his service the spirit of destruction. He maintains his projectsof cultivation, conquers the adverse wildness of nature, makes its force productive of prosperity and order; then, on a midday of harvest, sleeps, and the 'earth fiend,' finding his tyrant defenceless, steals on him and kills him as he lies. 'Death and the Ploughman's Wife' (1894) has a braver ending. It interprets in an impressive series of etchings how 'Death that conquers a'' is vanquished by the mother whose child he has snatched from its play. The title-page etching shows a little naked child kicking a skull into the air, while the peasant-mother, patient, vigilant, keeps watch near by. In 'The Christ upon the Hill' of the succeeding year, a ballad by Cosmo Monkhouse with etchings by Mr. Strang, the artist follows, of course, the conception of the writer; but here, too, his work is expressive of the visionary faith that discerns death as one of those 'base things' that 'usher in things Divine.'
FROM WILLIAM STRANG'S BALLAD, 'DEATH AND THE PLOUGHMAN'S WIFE' (REDUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL ETCHING). BY LEAVE OF MR. A. H. BULLEN.FROM WILLIAM STRANG'S BALLAD, 'DEATH AND THE PLOUGHMAN'S WIFE' (REDUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL ETCHING).BY LEAVE OF MR. A. H. BULLEN.
The twelve etchings to 'Paradise Lost' (1896) do not, as I think, represent Mr. Strang's imagination at its finest. It is in the representation of rude forms of life, subjected to the immeasurable influences of passion, love, sorrow, that the images of Mr. Strang's art, at once vague and of intense reality, primitive and complex, have most force. Adam and Eve driven from Paradise by the angel with the flaming sword, are not directly created by the artist. They recall Masaccio, and are undone by the recollection. Eve, uprising in the darkness of the garden where Adam sleeps, the speech of the serpent with the woman, the gathering of the fruit, are traditionary in their pictorialforms, and the tradition is too great, it imposes itself between the version of Mr. Strang and our admiration. But in the thirty etchings illustrative of Mr. Kipling's works, as in the ballad etchings, the imagination of the artist is unfettered by tradition. The stories he pictures deal, for all their cleverness and definition, with themes that, translated out of Mr. Kipling's words into the large imagination of Mr. Strang, have powerful purpose. As usual, the artist makes his picture not of matter-of-fact—and the etching called 'A Matter of Fact' is specially remote from any such matter—but of more purposeful, more overpowering realities than any particular instance of life would show. He attempts to realize the value, not of an instance of emotion or of endeavour, but of the quality itself. He sets his mind, for example, to realize the force of western militarism in the east, or the attitude of the impulses of life towards contemplation, and his soldiers, his 'Purun Bhagat,' express his observations or imaginations of these themes. Certainly 'a country's love' never went out to this kind of Tommy Atkins, and the India of Mr. Strang is not the India that holds the Gadsbys, or of which plain tales can be told. But he has imagined a country that binds the contrasts of life together in active operation on each other, and in thirty instances of these schemed-out realities, or of dramatic events resulting from the clash of racial and national and chronological characteristics, he has achieved perhaps his most complete expression of insight into essentials. Mr. Strang's etchings in the recently published edition of 'The Compleat Angler,'illustrated by him and by Mr. D. Y. Cameron, are less successful. The charm of his subject seems not to have entered into his imagination, whereas forms of art seem to have oppressed him. The result is oppressive, and that is fatal to the value of his etchings as illustrations of the book that 'it would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read.' Intensity and large statement of dark and light; fine dramatizations of line; an unremitting conflict with the superfluous and inexpressive in form and in thought; an art based on the realities of life, and without finalities of expression, inelegant, as though grace were an affectation, an insincerity in dealing with matters of moment: these are qualities that detach the illustrations of Mr. Strang from the generality of illustrations. Save that Mr. Robert Bryden, in his 'Woodcuts of men of letters' and in the portrait illustrations to 'Poets of the younger generation,' shows traces of studying the portrait-frontispieces of Mr. Strang, there is no relation between his art and the traditions it represents and any other book-illustrations of to-day.
Turning now to illustrators who are representative of the tendencies and characteristics of modern book-illustration, and so are less conspicuous in a general view of the subject than Mr. Strang, there is little question with whom to begin. Mr. Abbey represents at their best the qualities that belong to gift-book illustration. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that gift-book illustration represents the qualities of Mr. Abbey's black and white with more or less fidelity, so effective is the example ofhis technique on the forms of picturesque character-illustration. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the artist, then a young man fresh from Harper's drawing-office in New York, came to England. That first visit, spent in studying the reality of English pastoral life in preparation for his 'Herrick' illustrations, lasted for two years, and after a few months' interval in the States he returned to England. Resident here for nearly all the years of his work, a member of the Royal Academy, his art expressive of traditions of English literature and of the English country to which he came as to the actuality of his imaginings, one may include Mr. Abbey among English book-illustrators with more than a show of reason. In 1882, when the 'Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick' was published, few of the men whose work is considered in this chapter had been heard of. Chronologically, Mr. Abbey is first of contemporary character-illustrators, and nowhere but first would he be in his proper place, for there is no one to put beside him in his special fashion of art, and in the effect of his illustrative work on his contemporaries. There is inevitable ease and elegance in the pen-drawings of Mr. Abbey, and for that reason it is easy to underestimate their intellectual quality. He is inventive. The spirit of Herrick's muse, or of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' or of the comedies of Shakespeare, is not a quality for which he accepts any formula. He finds shapes for his fancies, rejecting as alien to his purpose all that is not the clear result of his own understanding of the poet. Accordingly there is, in all hiswork, the expression of an intellectual conception. He sees, too, with patience. If he isolates a figure, one feels that figure has stepped forward into a clear place of his imagination as he followed its way through the crowd. If he sets a pageant on the page, or some piece of turbulent action, or moment of decision, the actors have their individual value. He thinks his way through processes of gradual realization to the final picture of the characters in the play or poem. One writes now with special reference to the illustrations of the comedies of Shakespeare—so far, the illustrative work most exigent to the intellectual powers of the artist. Herrick's verse, full of sweet sounds and suggestive of happy sights, 'She Stoops to Conquer,' where all the mistakes are but for a night, to be laughed over in the morning, the lilt and measure of 'Old Songs,' and of the charming verses in 'The Quiet Life,' called for sensitive appreciation of moods, lyrical, whimsical, humorous, idyllic, but—intellectually—for no more than this. As to Mr. Abbey's technique, curious as he is in the uses of antiquity as part of the pleasure of a fresh realization, clothing his characters in textiles of the great weaving times, or of a dainty simplicity, a student of architecture and of landscape, of household fittings, of armoury, of every beautiful accessory to the business of living, his clever pen rarely fails to render within the convention of black and white the added point of interest and of charm that these things bring into actuality. Truth of texture, of atmosphere, and of tone, an alertness of vision most daintily expressed—thesequalities belong to all Mr. Abbey's work, and in the Shakespearean drawings he shows with greater force than ever his 'stage-managing' power, and the correctness and beauty of his 'mounting.' The drawings are dramatic: the women have beauty and individuality, while the men match them, or contrast with them as in the plays; the rogues are vagabonds in spirit, and the wise men have weight; the world of Shakespeare has been entered by the artist. But there are gestures in the text, moments of glad grace, of passion, of sudden amazement before the realities of personal experience, that make these active, dignified figures of Mr. Abbey 'merely players,' his Isabella in the extremity of the scene with Claudio no more than an image of cloistered virtue, his Hermione incapable of her undaunted eloquence and silence, his Perdita and Miranda and Rosalind less than themselves.
As illustrations, the drawings of Mr. Abbey represent traditions brought into English illustrative art by the Pre-Raphaelites, and developed by the freer school of the sixties. But, as drawings, they represent ideas not effective before in the practice of English pen-draughtsmen; ideas derived from the study of the black and white of Spain, of France, and of Munich, by American art students in days when English illustrators were not given to look abroad. Technically he has suggested many things, especially to costume illustrators, and many names might follow his in representation of the place he fills in relation to contemporary art. But to work out the effect of a man's technique onthose who are gaining power of expression is to labour in vain. It adds nothing to the intrinsic value of an artist's work, nor does it represent the true relationship between him and those whom he has influenced. For if they are mere imitators they have no relation with any form of art, while to insist upon derived qualities in work that has the superscription of individuality is no true way of apprehension. What a man owes to himself is the substantial fact, the fact that relates him to other men. The value of his work, its existence, is in the little more, or the much more, that himself adds to the sum of his directed industries, his guided achievements. And to estimate that, to attempt to express something of it, must be the chief aim of a study, not of one artist and his 'times,' but of many artists practising a popular art.
So that if, in consideration of their 'starting-point,' one may group most character-illustrators, especially of wig-and-powder subjects, as adherents either of Mr. Abbey and the 'American school,' or of Mr. Hugh Thomson and the Caldecott-Greenaway tradition, such grouping is also no more than a starting-point, and everything concerning the achievements of the individual artist has still to be said.
Considering the intention of their technique, one may permissibly group the names of Mr. Fred Pegram, Mr. F. H. Townsend, Mr. Shepperson, Mr. Sydney Paget, and Mr. Stephen Reid as representing in different degrees the effect of American black and white on English technique,though, in the case of Mr. Paget, one alludes only to pen-drawings such as those in 'Old Mortality,' and not to his Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hewitt performances. The art of Mr. Pegram and of Mr. Townsend is akin. Mr. Pegram has, perhaps, more sense of beauty, and his work suggests a more complete vision of his subject than is realized in the drawings of Mr. Townsend, while Mr. Townsend is at times more successful with the activities of the story; but the differences between them seem hardly more than the work of one hand would show. They really collaborate in illustration, though, except in Cassell's survey of 'Living London,' they have never, I think, made drawings for the same book.
Mr. Pegram served the usual apprenticeship to book-illustration. He was a news-illustrator before he turned to the illustration of literature; but he is an artist to whom the reality acquired by a subject after study of it is more attractive than the reality of actual impressions. Neither sensational nor society events appeal to him. The necessity to compose some sort of an impression from the bare facts of a fact, without time to make the best of it, was not an inspiring necessity. That Mr. Pegram is a book-illustrator by the inclination of his art as well as by profession, the illustrations to 'Sybil,' published in 1895, prove. In these drawings he showed himself not only observant of facial expression and of gesture, but also able to interpret the glances and gestures of Disraeli's society. From the completeness of the draughtsman's realization of his subject, illustrable situationsdevelop themselves with credibility, and his graceful women and thoughtful men represent the events of the novel with distinction. With 'Sybil' may be mentioned the illustrations to 'Ormond,' wherein, five years later, the same understanding of the ways and activities of a bygone, yet not remote society, found equally satisfactory expression, while the technique of the artist had gained in completeness. In 'The Last of the Barons' (1897), Mr. Pegram had a picturesque subject with much strange humanity in it, despite Lord Lytton's conventional travesty of events and character. The names of Richard and Warwick, of Hastings and Margaret of Anjou, are names that break through conventional romance, but the illustrator has to keep up the fiction of the author, and, except that the sham-mediævalism of the novel did not prevent a right study of costumes and accessories in the pictures, the artist had to be content to 'Bulwerize.' Illustrations to 'The Arabian Nights' gave him opportunity for rendering textures and atmosphere, and movements charming or grave, and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' drawings show a sweet-faced Lucy Ashton, and a Ravenswood who is more than melancholy and picturesque. Mr. Pegram's drawings are justly dramatic within the limits prescribed by a somewhat composed ideal of bearing. A catastrophe is outside these limits, and the discovery of Lucy after the bridal lacks real illustration in the artist's version, skilful, nevertheless, as are all his drawings, and expressed without hesitation. Averse to caricature, and keeping within ideas of life that allow of unbroken expression,the novels of Marryat, where action so bustling that only caricatures of humanity can endure its exigencies, and sentimental episodes of flagrant insincerity, swamp the character-drawing, are hardly suited to the art of Mr. Pegram. Still, he selects, and his selection is true to the time and circumstanceof Marryat's work. In itself it is always an expression of a coherent and definite conception of the story.
FROM MR. PEGRAM'S 'THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR.' BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.FROM MR. PEGRAM'S 'THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR.'BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.
Mr. Townsend has illustrated Hawthorne and Peacock, as well as Charlotte Brontë and Scott. Hawthorne's men and women—embodiments always of some essential quality, rather than of the combination of qualities that make 'character'—lend themselves to fine illustration as regards gesture, and Mr. Townsend's drawings represent, not insensitively, the movement and suggestion of 'The Blithedale Romance' and 'The House of the Seven Gables.' In the Peacock illustrations the artist had to keep pace with an essentially un-English humour, an imagination full of shapes that are opinions and theories and sarcasms masquerading under fantastic human semblances. Mr. Townsend kept to humanity, and found occasions for representing the eccentrics engaged in cheerful open-air and society pursuits in the pauses of paradoxical discussion. One realizes in the drawings the pleasant aspect of life at Gryll Grange and at Crotchet Castle, the courtesies and amusements out of doors and within, while the subjects of 'Maid Marian,' of 'The Misfortunes of Elphin' and of 'Rhododaphne' declare themselves in excellent terms of romance and adventure. Mr. Townsend has humour, and he is in sympathy with the vigorous spirit in life; whether the vigour is intellectual as in Jane Eyre and in Shirley Keeldar, or muscular as in 'Rob Roy,' in drawings to a manual of fencing, and in Marryat's 'The King's Own,' or eccentric as in the fantasies ofPeacock. His work is never languid and never formal; and if in technique he is sometimes experimental, and frequently content with ineffectual accessories to his figures, his conception of the situation, and of the characters that fulfil the situation, is direct and effective enough.
FROM MR. TOWNSEND'S 'SHIRLEY.' BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.FROM MR. TOWNSEND'S 'SHIRLEY.'BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.
As an illustrator of current fiction, Mr. Townsend has also a considerable amount of dexterous work to his name, but a record of drawings contributed to the illustrated journals cannot even be attempted within present limits of space.
Mr. Shepperson in his book-illustrations generally represents affairs with picturesqueness, and with a nervous energy that takes the least mechanical way of expressing forms and substances. Illustrating the modern novel of adventure, he is happy in his intrigues and conspiracies, while in books of more weight, such as 'The Heart of Midlothian' or 'Lavengro,' he expresses graver issues of life with un-elaborate and suggestive effect. The energy of his line, the dramatic quality of his imagination, render him in his element as an illustrator of events, but the vigour that projects itself into subjects such as the murder of Sir George Staunton, or the fight with the Flaming Tinman, or the alarms and stratagems of Mr. Stanley Weyman, informs also his representation of moments when there is no action. Technically Mr. Shepperson represents very little that is traditional in English black and white, though the tradition seems likely to be there for future generations of English illustrators.