Chapter III: Part 3

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-mediaevalism 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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.]

Mr. Townsend has illustrated Hawthorne and Peacock, as well as Charlotte Bronte 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.

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.

FROM MR. SHEPPERSON'S 'THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN.'

BY LEAVE OF THE GRESHAM PUBLISHING COMPANY.]

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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. MACMILLAN.]

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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. KEGAN PAUL.]

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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. DENT.]

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 necessaire_ 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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER.]

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. Amedee 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. Amedee 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 naive 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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. CHAMBERS.]

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 naive 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 faery 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 Fouque.

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.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. BLACKIE.]

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 doree_, 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.

Mr. Alan Wright's work, again, is inevitably associated with the invention of an author, though Mr. Farrow's 'Wallypug' books have not all been illustrated by one artist. Mr. Wright's drawings are proof of an energetic and serviceable conception of all sorts of out-of-the-way things. His humour is unelaborate, he goes straight to the fact, and, having expressed its extraordinary and fantastic characteristics, he does not linger to develop his drawing into a decorative scheme. Apparently he draws 'out of his head,' whether his subject is fact or extravagance. The three small humans who figure in 'The Little Panjandrum's Dodo,' and the ambassador's son of 'The Mandarin's Kite,' are as briefly sketched as the whimsicalities with whom they consort.

Mr. Arthur Rackham's illustrations to 'Two Old Ladies, Two Foolish Fairies, and a Tom-Cat' (1897), and to 'The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch' show inspiriting talent for nursery extravaganza. The children, whirled from reality into a phantasmagoria of adventure, are deftly and happily drawn, the fairies have fairy grace, and the rout of hobgoblins and grotesques fill their parts. Drawing real animals, Mr. Rackham is equally quick to note what is characteristic, and his facility in realizing fact and magic finds expression in the illustrations to 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' (1900). This is the most important work of Mr. Rackham as a child's illustrator, and if the drawings are somewhat calculated to impress the horrid horror of witches and forest enchantments on uneasy minds, the charm of princesses and peasant maids, the sagacious humour of talking animals and the grotesque enlivenment of cobolds and gnomes are no less vividly represented. That Mr. Rackham admires Mr. E. J. Sullivan's scheme of decorative black-and-white is evident in these drawings, but not to the detriment of their inventive worth.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. FREEMANTLE.]

Mr. J. D. Batten, Mr. H. J. Ford, and Mr. H. R. Millar represent, in various ways, the modern art of fairy-tale illustration at its best. Mr. Batten's connection with Mr. Joseph Jacob's treasuries of fairy-lore, Mr. Ford's long record of work in the multicoloured fairy and true story books edited by Mr. Lang, and the drawings of Mr. Millar in various collections of fairy tales, entitle them to a foremost place among contemporary illustrators of the world's immortal wonder-stories.

Mr. Batten knows the rules of chivalry, of sentiment, humour, and horridness, as they exist in the magical convention of the real fairy-tales, and whether their purpose be merry or sad, heroic or grotesque, he illustrates the old tales of Celt and Saxon, of India, Arabia and Greece with appreciation of the largeness and splendour of their conception. One might wish for more vitality in his women, and think that a representation of the mournful beauty of Deirdre, the passion of Circe or of Medea, should differ from the untroubled sweetness of the King's daughter of faery. Still one appreciates the dignity of these smooth-browed women, and, after all, the passionate figures of Greek and Celtic epics need translation before they can figure in fairy-tale books. Mr. Batten's ideas are never trite and never morbid. His giants are gigantic, his monsters of true devastating breed, and his drawings--especially the later ones--are as able technically as they are apt to the occasion.

BY LEAVE OF DAVID NUTT.]

There can hardly be an existent fairy-story among the hundreds told before the making of books that Mr. Ford has not illustrated in one version or another. The telling-house of every nation has yielded stories for Mr. Lang's annual volumes; and since the appearance of 'The Blue Fairy Book' in 1888, Mr. Ford, alone or in collaboration with Mr. Jacomb Hood, Mr. Lancelot Speed and other well-known artists, has illustrated the stories Mr. Lang has gathered. Moreover, in addition to seven volumes of fairy tales, and many true story and animal story books, Mr. Ford has made drawings for AEsop, for the 'Arabian Nights,' and for 'Early Italian Love Stories.' His decorative and illustrative ideal has never lacked distinction, and his recent work is the coherent development of that of fourteen years ago, though he has gained in freedom and variety of conception and in quality of expression. Mr. Ford's art is obviously founded on that of Walter Crane, but he looks at a subject with greater interest in its dramatic possibilities, and in the facts of place and time than the later 'Crane' convention admits. An abundant fancy, familiarity with the facts of legendary, romantic and animal life, over a wide tract of country and through long ages of time, fill the decorative pages of the artist with a plentitude of graceful, vigorous and persuasive forms. The well-devised pages of Miss Emily J. Harding's 'Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen,' are akin in form to the drawings of Mr. Batten and of Mr. Ford, though regard for the national tone of the stories gives these illustrations individuality and interest.

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. LONGMANS.]

The principles of art represented by the drawings of Mr. Ford have little in common with those which determine the scheme of Mr. Millar's many illustrations. Vierge, and Gigoux, the master of Vierge, are the indubitable suggesters of his style, and the antitheses of sheer black and white, the audacities, evasions and accentuations of these jugglers with line and form, are dexterously handled by Mr. Millar. He has not invented his convention, he has accepted it, and begun original work within accepted limits. A less original artist would thereby have doomed himself to extinction, but Mr. Millar has a lively apprehension of romance, especially in an oriental setting, and interest in subject is incompatible with merely imitative work. Illustrations to 'Hajji Baba' (1895), and to 'Eothen,' show how dramatic and true to picturesque notions of the East are the conceptions, and the same vigour projects itself into themes of western adventure in 'Frank Mildmay' and 'Snarleyow.' But his right to be considered here is determined by the rapid visions of fairy romance realized in the pages of 'Fairy Tales by Q.' (1895), of 'The Golden Fairy Book' with its companions, and on the more concrete but not less sufficient drawings to 'The Book of Dragons,' and 'Nine Unlikely Tales for Children.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. CASSELLS.]