Part 7

Save by stringing names of artists together on the thread of their connection with some one of the illustrated papers or magazines, it would be impossible to include in this chapter mention of the enormous amount of capable black-and-white art produced in illustration of 'serial' fiction. Such name-stringing, on the connection--say--of 'The Illustrated London News,' 'The Graphic,' or 'The Pall Mall Magazine,' would fill a page or two, and represent nothing of the quality of the work, the attainment of the artist. Neither is it practicable to summarize the illustration of current fiction. One can only attempt to give some account of illustrated literature, except where the current illustrations of an artist come into the subject 'by the way.' Mr. Frank Brangwyn may be isolated from the group of notable painters, including Mr. Jacomb Hood, Mr. Seymour Lucas and Mr. R. W. Macbeth, who illustrate for 'The Graphic,' by reason of his illustrations to classics of fiction such as 'Don Quixote' and 'The Arabian Nights,' as well as to Michael Scott's two famous sea-stories. To some extent his illustrations are representative of the large-phrased construction of Mr. Brangwyn's painting, especially in the drawings of the opulent orientalism of 'The Arabian Nights,' with its thousand and one opportunities for vivid art. Mr. Brangwyn's east is not the vague east of the stay-at-home artist, nor of the conventional traveller; his imagination works on facts of memory, and both memory and imagination have strong colour and concentration in a mind bent towards adventure. One should not, however, narrow the scope of Mr. Brangwyn's art within the limits of his work in black and white, and what is no more than an aside in the expression of his individuality, cannot, with justice to the artist, be considered by itself. Other 'Graphic' illustrators--Mr. Frank Dadd, Mr. John Charlton, Mr. William Small, and Mr. H. M. Paget, to name a few only--represent the various qualities of their art in black-and-white drawings of events and of fiction, and the 'Illustrated,' with artists including Mr. Caton Woodville, Mr. Seppings Wright, Mr. S. Begg, M. Amedée Forestier and Mr. Ralph Cleaver, fills a place in current art to which few of the more recently established journals can pretend. Mr. Frank Dadd and Mr. H. M. Paget made drawings for the 'Dryburgh' edition of the Waverleys. In this edition, too, is the work of well-known artists such as Mr. William Hole, whose Scott and Stevenson illustrations show his inbred understanding of northern romance, and together with the character etchings to Barrie, shrewd and valuable, represent with some justice the vigour of his art; of Mr. Walter Paget, an excellent illustrator of 'Robinson Crusoe,' and of many boys' books and books of adventure, of Mr. Lockhart Bogle, and of Mr. Gordon Browne. In the same edition Mr. Paul Hardy, Mr. John Williamson and Mr. Overend, showed the more serious purpose of black and white that has earned the appreciation of a public critical of any failure in vigour and in realization--the public that follows the tremendous activity of Mr. Henty's pen, and for whom Dr. Gordon Stables, Mr. Manville Fenn and Mr. Sydney Pickering write. Of M. Amedée Forestier, whose illustrations are as popular with readers of the 'Illustrated' and with the larger public of novel-readers as they are with students of technique, one cannot justly speak as an English illustrator. He, and Mr. Robert Sauber, contributed to Ward Lock's edition of Scott illustrated by French artists. Their work, M. Forestier's so admirable in realization of episode and romance, Mr. Sauber's, vivacious up to the pitch of 'The Impudent Comedian'--as his illustrations to Mr. Frankfort Moore's version of Nell Gwynn's fascinations showed--needs no introduction to an English public. The black and white of Mr. Sauber and of Mr. Dudley Hardy--when Mr. Hardy is in the vein that culminated in his theatrical posters--has many imitators, but it is not a style that is likely to influence illustrators of literature. Mr. Hal Hurst shows something of it, though he, and in greater measure Mr. Max Cowper, also suggest the unforgettable technique of Charles Dana Gibson.

IV. SOME CHILDREN'S-BOOKS ILLUSTRATORS.

LEIGH Hunt is one of many authors gratefully to praise the best-praised publisher of any day, Mr. Newbery, who, at "The Bible and Sun" in St. Paul's Churchyard, dispensed to long-ago children 'Goody Two Shoes,' 'Beauty and the Beast,' and other less famous little books, bound in gilt paper and rich with many pictures. Charming memories prompt Leigh Hunt's mention of the little penny books 'radiant with gold,' that 'never looked so well as in adorning literature,' and if the radiance of his estimate of these nursery volumes is from an actual memory of gilt-paper binding, his words exemplify the spirit that makes right appreciation of the newest picture-books so difficult.

In no other part of the subject of book-illustration are the books of yesterday fraught with charm so inimical to delight in the books of to-day. The modern child's book--except, let us hope, to the child-owner--is merely a book as other books are. Its qualities are as patent as its size, or number of illustrations. The pictures are to the credit or discredit of a known and realized artist; they are, moreover, generally plain to see as a development of the ideas of some 'school' or 'movement.' One knows about them as examples of English book-illustration of to-day. But the pictures between the worn-out covers of the other child's books were known with another kind of knowledge, discovered in a long intimacy, and related, not to any artist, or fashion of art, but to all manner of unreasonable and delightful things.

So it is well, perhaps, that the break between a subject of enthralling associations and a subject whose associations are unsentimental, should, by the ordering of facts, occur before the proper beginning of a study of contemporary illustration in children's books. For one reason or another, little work by artists whose reputation is of earlier date than to-day comes within present subject-limits. Some, like Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, are dead, some have ceased to draw, or draw no longer for children. Happily, the witching drawings of Arthur Hughes are still among nursery pictures, in reprints of 'At the Back of the North Wind,' and its companions--though the illustrator of these books, of 'The Boy in Grey,' and of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays,' has long ceased to weave his fortunate dreams into pictures to content a child. The drawings of Robert Barnes, of Mrs. Allingham and of Miss M. E. Edwards--illustrators of a sound tradition--are known to the present nursery generation; and so are the outline and tinted drawings of 'T. Pym,' who devised, so far back as the seventies, the naïve and sympathetic style of illustration that is pleasantly unchanged in recent child-books, such as 'The Gentle Heritage' (1893), and 'Master Barthemy' (1896). The later work of Walter Crane is so bent to decorative and allegorical purpose, that the creator of the best nursery-rhyme pictures ever printed in colours--Randolph Caldecott's are rather ballad than nursery-rhyme pictures--is in his place among decorative illustrators rather than in this connection. Sir John Tenniel's neat, immortal little Alice, with her ankle-strap shoes and pocketed apron, is still followed to Wonderland by as many children as in 1866, when she and the splendid prototypes of the degenerate jargon-beasts of to-day first captivated attention. The drawings of these artists, and perhaps also of 'E. V. B.'--for 'Child's Play,' though published in 1858, is familiar to present children in a reprint--are mentioned because of the place they still take on nursery book-shelves. But from such brief record of some among the books 'radiant with gold' that 'never looked so well as in adorning literature,' one must turn to work that has no such radiance of sentiment and association over its merits and defects.

Since the eighties Mr. Gordon Browne has been in the forefront of illustrators popular with story-book publishers and with readers of story-books. He is the son of Hablot Browne, but no trace of the 'caricaturizations' of 'Phiz' is in Mr. Gordon Browne's work. Probably his earliest published work appeared in 'Aunt Judy's Magazine' some time in the seventies. These unenlivening drawings suggest nothing of the picturesque and unhesitating invention that has shaped his style to its present serviceableness in the rapid production of effective illustrations. The range and quantity of his work is best realized in the bibliographical list, which records his illustrations to Shakespeare and Henty, to fairy-tales and boys' stories, girls' stories and toy-books, Gulliver, Cervantes, and Sunday-school books, at the rate of six or seven volumes a year. In addition, one must remember unnumbered illustrations in domestic magazines. And, on the whole, the stories illustrated by Gordon Browne are adequately illustrated. It is true that as a general rule he illustrates stories whose plan is within limits of familiarity, such as those by Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. L. T. Meade, or, in a different vein, the boys' stories of Henty, Manville Fenn, or Ascott Hope. Romance and the clash of swords engaged the artist in the pages of 'Sintram,' of Froissart, of Sir Walter Scott, and--pre-eminently--in the illustrations to the 'Henry Irving Shakespeare,' numbering nearly six hundred, and representing the work of five years. Illustrating these subjects, though in varying degree, the vitality and importance of an artist's conception of life and of art is put to the test. So far as prompt and definite representation of persons, places, and encounters, and unflagging facility in devising effective forms of composition constitute interpretation, the artist maintained the level of the undertaking. The illustration of stories such as those collected by the brothers Grimm, or those Andersen discovered in his exile of dreams among the facts of life, demands a quality of thought differing from, yet hardly less rare than, the thought needed to interpret Shakespeare. A fine aptitude for discerning and rendering 'the mysterious face of common things,' a fancy full of shapes, perception of the _rationale_ of magic, are essential to the writer or artist who elects to send his fancy after the elusive forms of fairyland. The recent drawings to Andersen, a volume of tales from Grimm, published in 1894, and illustrations to modern inventions, such as 'Down the Snow Stairs' (1886), and Mr. Andrew Lang's 'Prince Prigio,' show that Mr. Gordon Browne's ideas of fairyland, ancient and modern, are no less brisk and picturesque than are his ideas of everyday and of romance. His technique is so familiar that it is surely unnecessary to make even a brief disquisition on its merits in expressing facts as they exist in a popular scheme of reality and imagination. It is a healthy style, the ideals of beauty and of strength are never coarse, wanton or listless, the humour is friendly, and if the pathos occasionally verges on sentimentality, the writer, perhaps, rather than the artist is responsible.

Mr. Gordon Browne draws the average child, and represents fun, fancy and adventure as the average child understands them. His art is unsophisticated. To him, the child is no _motif_ in a decorative fantasy, nor a quaint diagram figuring in nursery-Gothic elements of design, nor a bold invention among picture-book monsters. The artists whose basis of art is the unadapted child, may, perhaps, be classed as the 'realists' among children's illustrators. Among these realists are the illustrators of Mrs. Molesworth--with the exception of Walter Crane, first and chief of them.

Mr. Leslie Brooke succeeded Mr. Crane in 1891 as the illustrator of Mrs. Molesworth's stories, and the careful un-selfconscious fashion of his drawing, his understanding of child-life and home-life as known to children such as those of whom and for whom Mrs. Molesworth writes, make these pen-drawings true illustrations of the text. His drawings are the result of individual observation and of a sense of what is fit and pleasant, though neither in his filling of a page, nor in the conception of beauty, is there anything definitely inventive to be marked. On the whole, his children and young people are rather representative of a class that maintains a standard of good looks among other desirable things, than of a type of beauty; and if they are not artistic types, neither are they strongly individualized. In his 'everyday' illustrations Mr. Leslie Brooke does not idealize, but that his talent has a range of fancy is proved in illustrations to 'A School in Fairyland' (1896), and to some imaginings by Roma White. Graceful, regardful of an unspoilt ideal in the fairies, elves and flower-spirits, there are also frequent hints in these drawings of the humour that finds more complete expression in 'The Nursery Rhyme Book' of 1897, and in the happy extravagance of 'The Jumblies' and 'The Pelican Chorus' (1900). Outside the scope of picture-book drawings are the dainty tinted designs to Nash's 'Spring Song,' and the skilful pen-drawings to 'Pippa Passes.'

Mr. Lewis Baumer's drawings of children, whether in 'The Boys and I' and other stories by Mrs. Molesworth, or in less known child-stories, have distinction that is partly a development of an admiration for Du Maurier, though Mr. Baumer is too quick-sighted and appreciative of charm to remain faithful to any model in art with the model in life before his eyes. The children of Mr. Baumer are of to-day. The effect of the earlier 'Punch' artist on the work of the younger man is hardly more than suggested in certain felicities of pose and expression added to those that a delightful kind of child discovers to an observer unusually sensitive to the vivid and engaging qualities of his subject. These children are swift of movement and of spirit, and the _verve_ of the artist's style is rarely forced, and still more rarely inadequate to the occasion.

The acceptance of a formula, rather than the expression of a hitherto unexpressed order of form, is the basis of page-decoration by members of the Birmingham School, whose work in its wider aspect has already been considered. Originality finds exercise in modifying details, but, pre-eminent over differences in style, is the similarity of style that suggests 'Birmingham' before the variations in detail suggest the work of an individual artist. The influence of Kate Greenaway is strongly marked in the work of many of these designers for children's books. Indeed, Miss Winifred Green's drawings to Charles and Mary Lamb's 'Poetry for Children,' and to 'Mrs. Leicester's School,' contain figures that, if one allows for some assertion necessary to justify their reappearance, might have come direct from 'Under the Window.'

The typical illustrative art of Birmingham is, however, of another kind. The quaint propriety of 'old-fashioned' childhood, which Kate Greenaway's delicate pencil first represented at its artistic value, is akin to the conception of the child that prevails on the pages decorated by Mrs. Arthur Gaskin, but the work of Mrs. Gaskin shows nothing of the Stothard-like ideal that seems to have been the suggesting cause of 'Greenaway' play-pictures. In the arabesques of flowers and leaves which decorate many pages designed by Mrs. Gaskin one sees a freedom and fluency of line that are checked to quaintness and naïve angularity when the child is the subject. Her conception of a pictorial child is very definite, and in her later work, one must confess, it is a conception hardly corroborated by observation of fact. 'Horn Book Jingles' and 'The Travellers' of 1897 and 1898 show the culmination of a style that had more sympathetic charm in the tinted pages of the 'A. B. C.' (1895), or the 'Divine and Moral Songs' of the following year. Book-illustration is with Mrs. Gaskin, as with many members of the school, only a part of craftsmanship.

Miss Calvert's winsome drawings in 'Baby Lays' and 'More Baby Lays' are obviously related to the drawings of Mrs. Gaskin, though observation of real babies seems to have come between a rigid adherence to the model. The decorative illustrations by the Miss Holdens to 'Jack and the Beanstalk' (1895), and to 'The Real Princess,' show evidence of fancy that finds expression while nothing of Mr. Gaskin's teaching is forgotten.

As different in spirit from the drawings of the Birmingham designers as is the Lambs' 'Poetry for Children' from 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' the captivating illustrations of Mr. Charles Robinson seem a direct pictorial evocation of the mood of Stevenson's child's rhymes, or of Eugene Field's lullabies. Familiar now, and exaggerated in imitations and in some of the artist's later work, the children and child-fantasies of Mr. Robinson, as they were realized in the first unspoilt freshness of improvisation, are among the delightful surprises of modern book-illustration. In the pages of 'A Child's Garden of Verses' (1896), of 'The Child World,' and of Field's 'Lullaby Land,' the frolic babes of his fancy play hide and seek wherever the text leaves space for them, rioting, or attitudinizing with spritely ceremony, from cover to cover. The mood of imaginative play, of daylight make-believe with its realistic and romantic excesses, and of the make-believe enforced by flickering fire-light, and by the shadows in the darkened house, is expressed in Mr. Robinson's drawings. Not children, but child's-play, and the unexplored shadows and mysteries that lie 'up the mountain side of dreams' are the motives of the fantasies he sets on the page beside Stevenson's rhymes of old delights, and the rhymes of the land of counterpane, where Wynken Blynken and Nod, the Rockaby lady from Hushaby Street, and all kind drowsy fancies close round and shut away the crooked shadows into the night outside the nursery.

The three books mentioned represent, as I think, the artist's work at its truest value. There is variety of touch and of method, and the heavier fact-enforcing line of 'Child Voices,' of 'Lilliput Lyrics,' or of the coloured pictures to 'Jack of all Trades' is used, as well as the fanciful line of the by-the-way drawings, and the arabesques and delicate detail of the fantasy and dream pictures. A scheme of solid black and white, connected and rendered fully valuable by interweaving with line, white lines telling against black masses, and black lines relieved against white, with pattern as a resource to fill spaces when plain black or plain white seem uninteresting, is, of course, the scheme of the majority of decorative illustrators. But of this scheme Mr. Charles Robinson has made individual use. Whether his lines trace a fairy's transparent wing on a background of night-sky, of drifting cloud or of dream mountain-side, or make the child visible among dream-buildings, or seated on the world of fancy in the immensity of night, or passing in a sleep-ship through faëry seas, they have the quality of imagination, imagination in their disposition to form a decorative effect, and in the forms they express. The full-page drawings to 'King Longbeard' have this quality, and hardly a drawing to any theme of fancy, whether in old or in new fairy tales, or in verses, but is the result of a vision of charm and distinction.

It would seem that the imagination of Mr. Charles Robinson realizes a subject with more delight when the text is suggestive, rather than impressive with definite conceptions. The mighty forms of 'The Odyssey,' the chivalric symbolism of 'Sintram and Aslaugas Knight,' even the magical particularity of Hans Andersen, are not, apparently, supreme in his imagination, as is his vision of fairy-seeing childhood. One is unenlightened by the graceful drawings to 'The Adventures of Odyseus,' or the romances of De la Motte Fouqué.

That Miss Alice Woodward has, on occasion, made one of the many illustrators who have profited by the example of Mr. Charles Robinson, various drawings seem to show, but few of these illustrators have the originality and purpose that allow Miss Woodward to enlarge her range of expression without nullifying the spontaneity of her work. She has illustrated over a dozen books, beginning with 'Banbury Cross' in 1895, and mostly she treats her subject with humour and variety and with a consistent idea of the pictorial aspect of things. She has quick appreciation of unconscious humour in attitude and in expression, though she seems at times to rely too much on memory, thereby diminishing vividness. When most successful she can draw a pleasing child with lines almost as few as those used by any modern artist. Miss Gertrude Bradley is another pleasant illustrator. Her later drawings of children are modified from the print-pinafore freshness of those in 'Songs for Somebody' (1893), to a type that has evident affinities with the Charles Robinson child, though in 'Just Forty Winks' (1897) Miss Bradley proves her individual sense of humour. The taking simplicity of Miss Marion Wallace-Dunlop's illustrations of elf-babies in 'Fairies, Elves and Flower Babies,' and of the human twins who adventure in 'The Magic Fruit Garden' also suggests the influence of the fortunate inventor of an admirable child.

The greater amount of Mr. Bedford's work for children consists of coloured illustrations to nursery-books, and, when the humour of half-penny paper journalism is supposed to be entertainment for babies, one may be thankful for the pleasant and peaceful drawings of this artist. Little Miss Muffet, Wee Willie Winkie, and the activities of town and country, are a relief from the _jeunesse dorée_, and the lethargy of the War Office as toy-book subjects, while 'The Battle of the Frogs and Mice'--though Miss Barlow's version of Aristophanes, with Mr. Bedford's effective decorations, is hardly a nursery-book--is a better child's subject than the punishable pretensions of other nations.

In work hitherto noticed, the child may be regarded as the central figure of the design, whether fact or fancy be set about his little personality. Besides the illustrators whose subject is childhood in some aspect or another, and those children's illustrators who pictorialize the wide imaginings of the national fairy tales, there are others in whose work the child figures incidentally, but not as the central fact. In this connection one may consider those draughtsmen who illustrate modern wonder-books with Zankiwanks, Krabs and Wallypugs.

Mr. Archie Macgregor should be classed, perhaps, among artists of the child in wonderland, but the personalities of Tomakin and his sisters, though Judge Parry sets them forth in prose and in verse with his usual high spirits, are not the illustrator's first care. 'Katawampus,' 'The First Book of Krab,' and 'Butterscotia,' have made Mr. Macgregor's robust and strongly-defined drawings familiar, and, within the limits of the author's hearty imagination, his droll and unflagging representations of adventures, ceremonies and humours, are extremely apt. Children, goblins, animals and queer monsters are drawn with unhesitating spirit and humour, and with decorative invention that would be even more successful if it were less fertile in devising detail. More fortunate in rendering action than facial expression, without the mystery that is the atmosphere of the magical fairy-land, the fact and fancy of Mr. Macgregor are so admirably illustrative of Judge Parry's text that one is almost inclined to attribute the absence of glamour to the artist's strong conception of the function of an illustrator.