English Book-Illustration of To-day Part 4

Sullivan's ill.u.s.trations. 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-ill.u.s.tration and ill.u.s.trations 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-ill.u.s.trator, however, his landscape drawings to Borrow's 'Wild Wales' represent another art than that of the character-ill.u.s.trator.

Nor can one pa.s.s over the drawings of Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen, also a contributor to the 'Pall Mall Magazine,' if better known in ill.u.s.trations to fiction in 'The Ladies' Pictorial,' though in an article on book-ill.u.s.tration 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. E. J. SULLIVAN'S 'SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL.'

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,'

ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.trations to 'Sartor Resartus' (1898). These emphatic decorations, and those ill.u.s.trative 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 subst.i.tutes the exquisite realities of memory and of dream for the realities of experience. Mr. Sullivan's share of the ill.u.s.trations 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 exact.i.tude on which his work is founded, exact.i.tude that includes portraiture among the functions of the ill.u.s.trator. 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-ill.u.s.trator of the modern school has so long a record of work, and so visible an influence on English contemporary ill.u.s.tration, as Mr. Hugh Thomson. In popularity he is foremost. The slight and apparently playful fas.h.i.+on of his art, deriving its intention from the irresistible gaieties of Caldecott, is a fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+ons of life, as they pa.s.s from use, are laid by in lavender. The fas.h.i.+ons 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,' ill.u.s.trated by Hugh Thomson, was published in 1886, the young artist was already known by his drawings in the 'English Ill.u.s.trated,' and recognized as a serious student of history and literature, and a delightful ill.u.s.trator 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, ill.u.s.trative 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 Yorks.h.i.+re. 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 ill.u.s.trate. The ill.u.s.trator 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 ill.u.s.trator's fancy, than in ill.u.s.trating 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 ill.u.s.trations 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. HUGH THOMSON'S 'BALLAD OF BEAU BROCADE.'

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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trated since then, Mr.

Brock at times has shown himself an ill.u.s.trator to whom matter rather than a particular charm of manner seems of paramount interest. In the ill.u.s.trated Gulliver of 1894 there is little trace of the daintiness and sprightliness of Caldecott's ill.u.s.trative 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 ill.u.s.trator who realizes opportunities in the text, and works from a ready and observant intelligence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. C. E. BROCK'S 'THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. DENT.]

Mr. Henry M. Brock is also an effective ill.u.s.trator, 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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-ill.u.s.tration, '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-ill.u.s.trators 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 ill.u.s.trated papers, were a substantial reason for 'Punch's' invitation to the artist. From the 'Bishop and s...o...b..ack' 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 att.i.tudes and expressions, vivify his interpretation of the middle-cla.s.s, 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-ill.u.s.trator, his most 'literary' work is in the pages of Mr. Austin Dobson's 'Proverbs in Porcelain.' Studied from the model, the draughtsmans.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude, occupy Mr.

Partridge's consideration. He, like Mr. Abbey, has the colourist's vision, and though the charm of people, of circ.u.mstance, of accessories and of a.s.sociation 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 s.p.a.ce to his work as a character-ill.u.s.trator, but his character-ill.u.s.tration 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,' ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.trator 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, ill.u.s.trator, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM SIR HARRY FURNISS' 'THE TALK OF THE TOWN.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER.]

Other book-ill.u.s.trators 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.tration of 'serial' fiction. Such name-stringing, on the connection--say--of 'The Ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.tration of current fiction. One can only attempt to give some account of ill.u.s.trated literature, except where the current ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trate for 'The Graphic,' by reason of his ill.u.s.trations to cla.s.sics 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 ill.u.s.trations 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' ill.u.s.trators--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 'Ill.u.s.trated,' 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trator 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 ill.u.s.trations are as popular with readers of the 'Ill.u.s.trated' and with the larger public of novel-readers as they are with students of technique, one cannot justly speak as an English ill.u.s.trator. He, and Mr. Robert Sauber, contributed to Ward Lock's edition of Scott ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trators 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 ILl.u.s.tRATORS.

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-ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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-ill.u.s.tration 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 fas.h.i.+on of art, but to all manner of unreasonable and delightful things.

So it is well, perhaps, that the break between a subject of enthralling a.s.sociations and a subject whose a.s.sociations are unsentimental, should, by the ordering of facts, occur before the proper beginning of a study of contemporary ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.trator 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--ill.u.s.trators 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 nave and sympathetic style of ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.trators rather than in this connection. Sir John Tenniel's neat, immortal little Alice, with her ankle-strap shoes and pocketed ap.r.o.n, 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 a.s.sociation over its merits and defects.

Since the eighties Mr. Gordon Browne has been in the forefront of ill.u.s.trators 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 ill.u.s.trations. The range and quant.i.ty of his work is best realized in the bibliographical list, which records his ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trations in domestic magazines. And, on the whole, the stories ill.u.s.trated by Gordon Browne are adequately ill.u.s.trated. It is true that as a general rule he ill.u.s.trates 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 ill.u.s.trations to the 'Henry Irving Shakespeare,' numbering nearly six hundred, and representing the work of five years. Ill.u.s.trating 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 const.i.tute interpretation, the artist maintained the level of the undertaking. The ill.u.s.tration 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 apt.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 cla.s.sed as the 'realists' among children's ill.u.s.trators. Among these realists are the ill.u.s.trators of Mrs. Molesworth--with the exception of Walter Crane, first and chief of them.

Mr. Leslie Brooke succeeded Mr. Crane in 1891 as the ill.u.s.trator of Mrs. Molesworth's stories, and the careful un-selfconscious fas.h.i.+on 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 cla.s.s 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' ill.u.s.trations Mr. Leslie Brooke does not idealize, but that his talent has a range of fancy is proved in ill.u.s.trations 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 Pa.s.ses.'