III Some Character Illustrators
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 to day. 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 than la reste to 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 he must 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 these voyages imaginaires, and, lacking the shadows cast by the unspeakable, the intellectual chiaroscuro of 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 expressive of 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 projects of 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.’
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 pictorial forms, 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 of his 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 his work, 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—these qualities 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 on those 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 situations develop 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 circumstance of Marryat’s work. In itself it is always an expression of a coherent and definite conception of the story.
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 of Peacock. 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.
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.
In a recent work, illustrations to Leigh Hunt’s ‘Old Court Suburb,’ Mr. Shepperson collaborates with Mr. E. J. Sullivan and Mr. Herbert Railton, to realize the associations, literary, historical and gossiping, that have Kensington Palace and Holland House as their principal centres. On the whole, of the three artists, the subject seems least suggestive to Mr. Shepperson. Mr. Sullivan contributes many portraits, and some subject drawings that show him in his lightest and most dexterous vein. These drawings of beaux and belles are as distinct in their happy flattery of fact from the rigid assertion of the artist’s ‘Fair Women,’ as they are from the undelightful reporting style that in the beginning injured Mr. Sullivan’s illustrations. One may describe it as the ‘Daily Graphic’ style, though that is to recognize only the basis of convenience on which the training of the ‘Daily Graphic’ school was necessarily founded. Mr. Sullivan’s early work, the news-illustration and illustrations to current fiction of Mr. Reginald Cleaver and of his brother Mr. Ralph Cleaver, the black and white of Mr. A. S. Boyd and of Mr. Crowther, show this journalistic training, and show, too, that such a training in reporting facts directly is no hindrance to the later achievement of an individual way of art. Mr. A. S. Hartrick must also be mentioned as an artist whose distinctive black and white developed from the basis of pictorial reporting, and how distinctive and well-observed that art is, readers of the ‘Pall Mall Magazine’ know. As a book-illustrator, however, his landscape drawings to Borrow’s ‘Wild Wales’ represent another art than that of the character-illustrator. Nor can one pass over the drawings of Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen, also a contributor to the ‘Pall Mall Magazine,’ if better known in illustrations to fiction in ‘The Ladies’ Pictorial,’ though in an article on book-illustration he has nothing like his right place. As an admirable and original technician and draughtsman of society, swift in sight, excellent in expression, he ranks high among black-and-white artists, while as a painter, his reputation, if based on different qualities, is not doubtful.
Mr. Sullivan’s drawings to ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ (1896) are mechanical and mostly without charm of handling, having an appearance of timidity that is inexplicable when one thinks of the vigorous news-drawings that preceded them. The wiry line of the drawings appears in the ‘Compleat Angler,’ and in other books, including ‘The Rivals’ and ‘The School for Scandal,’ ‘Lavengro’ and ‘Newton Forster,’ illustrated by the artist in ’96 and ’97; but the decorative purpose of Mr. Sullivan’s later work is, in all these books, effective in modifying its perversity. Increasing elaboration of manner within the limits of that purpose marks the transition between the starved reality of ‘Tom Brown’ and the illustrations to ‘Sartor Resartus’ (1898). These emphatic decorations, and those illustrative of Tennyson’s ‘Dream of Fair Women and other Poems,’ published two years later, are the drawings most representative of Mr. Sullivan’s intellectual ideals. They show him, if somewhat indifferent to charm, and capable of out-facing beauty suggested in the words with statements of the extreme definiteness of his own fact-conception, yet strongly appreciative of the substance and purpose of the text. Carlyle gives him brave opportunities, and the dogmatism of the artist’s line and form, his speculative humour, working down to a definite certainty in things, make these drawings unusually interesting. Tennyson’s ‘Dream,’ and his poems to women’s names, are not so fit for the exercise of Mr. Sullivan’s talent. He imposes himself with too much force on the forms that the poet suggests. There is no delicacy about the drawings and no mystery. They do not accord with the inspiration of Tennyson, an inspiration that substitutes the exquisite realities of memory and of dream for the realities of experience. Mr. Sullivan’s share of the illustrations to White’s ‘Selborne’ and to the ‘Garden Calendar,’ are technically more akin to the Carlyle and Tennyson drawings than to other examples by him. In these volumes he makes fortunate use of the basis of exactitude on which his work is founded, exactitude that includes portraiture among the functions of the illustrator. No portrait is extant of Gilbert White, but the presentment of him is undertaken in a constructive spirit, and, as in ‘The Compleat Angler’ and ‘The Old Court Suburb,’ portraits of those whose names and personalities are connected with the books are redrawn by Mr. Sullivan.
Except Mr. Abbey, no character-illustrator of the modern school has so long a record of work, and so visible an influence on English contemporary illustration, as Mr. Hugh Thomson. In popularity he is foremost. The slight and apparently playful fashion of his art, deriving its intention from the irresistible gaieties of Caldecott, is a fashion to please both those who like pretty things and those who can appreciate the more serious qualities that are beneath. For Mr. Thomson is a student of literature. He pauses on his subject, and though his invention has always responded to the suggestions of the text, the lightness of his later work is the outcome of a selecting judgment that has learned what to omit by studying the details and facts of things. In rendering facial expression Mr. Thomson is perhaps too much the follower of Caldecott, but he goes much farther than his original master in realization of the forms and manners of bygone times. Some fashions of life, as they pass from use, are laid by in lavender. The fashions of the eighteenth century have been so laid by, and Mr. Abbey and Mr. Thomson are alike successful in giving a version of fact that has the farther charm of lavender-scented antiquity.
When ‘Days with Sir Roger de Coverley,’ illustrated by Hugh Thomson, was published in 1886, the young artist was already known by his drawings in the ‘English Illustrated,’ and recognized as a serious student of history and literature, and a delightful illustrator of the times he studied. His powers of realizing character, time, and place, were shown in this earliest work. Sir Roger is a dignified figure; Mr. Spectator, in the guise of Steele, has a semblance of observation; and if Will Wimble lacks his own unique quality, he is represented as properly engaged about his ‘gentleman-like manufactures and obliging little humours.’ Mr. Thomson can draw animals, if not with the possessive understanding of Caldecott, yet with truth to the kind, knowledge of movement. The country-side around Sir Roger’s house—as, in a later book, that where the vicarage of Wakefield stands—is often delightfully drawn, while the leisurely and courteous spirit of the essays is represented, with an appreciation of its beauty. ‘Coaching Days and Coaching Ways’ (1888) is a picturesque book, where types and bustling action picturesquely treated were the subjects of the artist. The peopling of high-road and county studies with lively figures is one of Mr. Thomson’s successful achievements, as he has shown in drawings of the cavalier exploits of west-country history, illustrative of ‘Highways and Byways of Devon and Cornwall,’ and in episodes of romance and warfare and humour in similar volumes on Donegal, North Wales, and Yorkshire. Here the presentment of types and action, rather than of character, is the aim, but in the drawings to ‘Cranford’ (1891), to ‘Our Village,’ and to Jane Austen’s novels, behaviour rather than action, the gentilities and proprieties of life and millinery, have to be expressed as a part of the artistic sense of the books. That is, perhaps, why Jane Austen is so difficult to illustrate. The illustrator must be neither formal nor picturesque. He must understand the ‘parlour’ as a setting for delicate human comedy. Mr. Thomson is better in ‘Cranford,’ where he has the village as the background for the two old ladies, or in ‘Our Village,’ where the graceful pleasures of Miss Mitford’s prose have suggested delightful figures to the illustrator’s fancy, than in illustrating Miss Austen, whose disregard of local colouring robs the artist of background material such as interests him. Three books of verses by Mr. Austin Dobson, ‘The Ballad of Beau Brocade’ (1892), ‘The Story of Rosina,’ and ‘Coridon’s Song’ of the following years, together with the illustrations to ‘Peg Woffington,’ show, in combination, the picturesque and the intellectual interests that Mr. Thomson finds in life. The eight pieces that form the first of these volumes were, indeed, chosen to be reprinted because of their congruity in time and sentiment with Mr. Thomson’s art. And certainly he works in accord with the measure of Mr. Austin Dobson’s verses. Both author and artist carry their eighteenth-century learning in as easy a way as though experience of life had given it them without any labour in libraries.
Mr. C. E. Brock and Mr. H. M. Brock are two artists who to some extent may be considered as followers of Mr. Thomson’s methods, though Mr. C. E. Brock’s work in ‘Punch,’ and humorous characterizations by Mr. H. M. Brock in ‘Living London,’ show how distinct from the elegant fancy of Mr. Thomson’s art are the latest developments of their artistic individuality. Mr. C. E. Brock’s illustrations to Hood’s ‘Humorous Poems’ (1893) proved his indebtedness to Mr. Thomson, and his ability to carry out Caldecott-Thomson ideas with spirit and with invention. An active sense of fun, and facility in arranging and expressing his subject, made him an addition to the school he represented, and, as in later work, his own qualities and the qualities he has adopted combined to produce spirited and graceful art. But in work preceding the pen-drawing of 1893, and in many books illustrated since then, Mr. Brock at times has shown himself an illustrator to whom matter rather than a particular charm of manner seems of paramount interest. In the illustrated Gulliver of 1894 there is little trace of the daintiness and sprightliness of Caldecott’s illustrative art. He gives many particulars, and is never at a loss for forms and details, representing with equal matter-of-factness the crowds, cities and fleets of Lilliput, the large details of Brobdingnagian existence, and the ceremonies and spectacles of Laputa. In books of more actual adventure, such as ‘Robinson Crusoe’ or ‘Westward Ho,’ or of quiet particularity, such as Galt’s ‘Annals of the Parish,’ the same directness and unmannered expression are used, a directness which has more of the journalistic than of the playful-inventive quality. The Jane Austen drawings, those to ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ and to a recent edition of the ‘Essays of Elia,’ show the graceful eighteenth-centuryist, while, whether he reports or adorns, whether action or behaviour, adventure or sentiment, is his theme, Mr. Brock is always an illustrator who realizes opportunities in the text, and works from a ready and observant intelligence.
Mr. Henry M. Brock is also an effective illustrator, and his work increases in individuality and in freedom of arrangement. ‘Jacob Faithful’ (1895) was followed by ‘Handy Andy’ and Thackeray’s ‘Songs and Ballads’ in 1896. Less influenced by Mr. Thomson than his brother, the lively Thackeray drawings, with their versatility and easy invention, have nevertheless much in common with the work of Mr. Charles Brock. On the whole, time has developed the differences rather than the similarities in the work of these artists. In the ‘Waverley’ drawings and in those of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ Mr. H. M. Brock represents action in a more picturesque mood than Mr. Charles Brock usually maintains, emphasizing with more dramatic effect the action and necessity for action.
The illustrations of Mr. William C. Cooke, especially those to ‘Popular British Ballads’ (1894), and, with less value, those to ‘John Halifax, Gentleman,’ may be mentioned in relation to the Caldecott tradition, though it is rather of the art of Kate Greenaway that one is reminded in these tinted illustrations. Mr. Cooke’s wash-drawings to Jane Austen’s novels, to ‘Evelina’ and ‘The Man of Feeling,’ as well as the pen-drawings to ‘British Ballads,’ have more force, and represent with some distinction the stir of ballad romance, the finely arranged situations of Miss Austen, and the sentiments of life, as Evelina and Harley understood it.
In a study of English black-and-white art, not limited to book-illustration, ‘Punch’ is an almost inevitable and invaluable centre for facts. Few draughtsmen of notability are outside the scheme of art connected with ‘Punch,’ and in this connection artists differing as widely as Sir John Tenniel and Mr. Phil May, or Mr. Linley Sambourne and Mr. Raven Hill, form a coherent group. But, in this volume, ‘Punch’ itself is outside the limits of subject, and, with the exception of Mr. Bernard Partridge in the present, and Sir Harry Furniss in the past, the wits of the pencil who gather round the ‘mahogany tree’ are not among character-illustrators of literature. Mr. Partridge has drawn for ‘Punch’ since 1891, and has been on the staff for nearly all that time. His drawings of theatrical types in Mr. Jerome’s ‘Stage-land’ (1889)—which, according to some critics, made, by deduction, the author’s reputation as a humorist—and to a first series of Mr. Anstey’s ‘Voces Populi,’ as well as work in many of the illustrated papers, were a substantial reason for ‘Punch’s’ invitation to the artist. From the ‘Bishop and Shoeblack’ cut of 1891, to the ‘socials’ and cartoons of to-day, Mr. Partridge’s drawings, together with those of Mr. Phil May and of Mr. Raven Hill, have brilliantly maintained the reputation of ‘Punch’ as an exponent of the forms and humours of modern life. His actual and intimate knowledge of the stage, and his actor’s observation of significant attitudes and expressions, vivify his interpretation of the middle-class, and of bank-holiday makers, of the ‘artiste,’ and of such a special type as the ‘Baboo Jabberjee’ of Mr. Anstey’s fluent conception. If his ‘socials’ have not the prestige of Mr. Du Maurier’s art, if his women lack charm and his children delightfulness, he is, in shrewdness and range of observation, a pictorial humorist of unusual ability. As a book-illustrator, his most ‘literary’ work is in the pages of Mr. Austin Dobson’s ‘Proverbs in Porcelain.’ Studied from the model, the draughtsmanship as able and searching as though these figures were sketches for an ‘important’ work, there is in every drawing the completeness and fortunate effect of imagination. The ease of an actual society is in the pose and grouping of the costumed figures, while, in the representation of their graces and gallantries, the artist realizes ce superflu si nécessaire that distinguishes dramatic action from the observed action of the model. Problems of atmosphere, of tone, of textures, as well as the presentment of life in character, action, and attitude, occupy Mr. Partridge’s consideration. He, like Mr. Abbey, has the colourist’s vision, and though the charm of people, of circumstance, of accessories and of association is often less his interest than characteristic facts, in non-conventional technique, in style that is as un-selfconscious as it is individual, Mr. Abbey and Mr. Partridge have many points in common.
Sir Harry Furniss, alone of caricaturists, has, in the many-sided activity of his career, applied his powers of characterization to characters of fiction, though he has illustrated more nonsense-books and wonder-books than books of serious narrative. Sir John Tenniel and Mr. Linley Sambourne among cartoonists, Sir Harry Furniss, Mr. E. T. Reed, and Mr. Carruthers Gould among caricaturists, mark the strong connection between politics and political individualities, and the irresponsible developments and creatures of nonsense-adventures, as a theme for art. To summarize Sir Harry Furniss’ career would be to give little space to his work as a character-illustrator, but his character-illustration is so representative of the other directions of his skill, that it merits consideration in the case of a draughtsman as effective and ubiquitous in popular art as is ‘Lika Joko.’ The pen-drawings to Mr. James Payn’s ‘Talk of the Town,’ illustrated by Sir Harry Furniss in 1885, have, in restrained measure, the qualities of flexibility, of imagination so lively as to be contortionistic, of emphasis and pugnacity of expression, of pantomimic fun and drama, that had been signalized in his Parliamentary antics in ‘Punch’ for the preceding five years. His connection with ‘Punch’ lasted from 1880 to 1894, and the ‘Parliamentary Views,’ two series of ‘M.P.s in Session,’ and the ‘Salisbury Parliament,’ represent experience gained as the illustrator of ‘Toby M.P.’ His high spirits and energy of sight also found scope in caricaturing academic art, ‘Pictures at Play’ (1888), being followed by ‘Academy Antics’ of no less satirical and brilliant purpose. As caricaturist, illustrator, lecturer, journalist, traveller, the style and idiosyncrasies of Sir Harry Furniss are so public and familiar, and so impossible to emphasize, that a brief mention of his insatiable energies is perhaps as adequate as would be a more detailed account.
Other book-illustrators whose connection with ‘Punch’ is a fact in the record of their work are Mr. A. S. Boyd and Mr. Arthur Hopkins. Mr. Jalland, too, in drawings to Whyte-Melville used his sporting knowledge on a congenial subject. Mr. A. S. Boyd’s ‘Daily Graphic’ sketches prepared the way for ‘canny’ drawings of Scottish types in Stevenson’s ‘Lowden Sabbath Morn,’ in ‘Days of Auld Lang Syne,’ and in ‘Horace in Homespun,’ and for other observant illustrations to books of pleasant experiences written by Mrs. Boyd. Mr. Arthur Hopkins, and his brother Mr. Everard Hopkins, are careful draughtsmen of some distinction. Without much spontaneity or charm of manner, the pretty girls of Mr. Arthur Hopkins, and his well-mannered men, fill a place in the pages of ‘Punch,’ while illustrations to James Payn’s ‘By Proxy,’ as far back as 1878, show that the unelaborate style of his recent work is founded on past practice that has the earlier and truer Du Maurier technique as its standard of thoroughness. Mr. E. J. Wheeler, a regular contributor to ‘Punch’ since 1880, has illustrated editions of Sterne and of ‘Masterman Ready,’ other books also containing characteristic examples of his rather precise, but not uninteresting, work.
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.