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-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.
[Illustration: FROM MR. PEGRAM'S 'THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR.'