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.
[Illustration: FROM MISS WOODWARD'S 'TO TELL THE KING THE SKY IS
FALLING.'