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.
[Illustration: FROM MR. LEWIS BAUMER'S 'HERMY.'