[Illustration: Black and White Page Image]
If there be nothing new under the sun there are some things a good
deal less old than others. The illustration of books, and even more of
magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as
variety and abundance are the signs of it; or born, at any rate, the
comprehensive, ingenious, sympathetic spirit in which we conceive and
practise it.
If the centuries are ever arraigned at some bar of justice to answer
in regard to what they have given, of good or of bad, to humanity, our
interesting age (which certainly is not open to the charge of having
stood with its hands in its pockets) might perhaps do worse than put
forth the plea of having contributed a fresh interest in “black and
white.” The claim may now be made with the more confidence from the very
evident circumstance that this interest is far from exhausted. These
pages are an excellent place for such an assumption. In Harper they have
again and again, as it were, illustrated the illustration, and they
constitute for the artist a series of invitations, provocations and
opportunities. They may be referred to without arrogance in support of
the contention that the limits of this large movement, with all its new
and rare refinement, are not yet in sight.
I
It is on the contrary the constant extension that is visible, with
the attendant circumstances of multiplied experiment and intensified
research--circumstances that lately pressed once more on the attention
of the writer of these remarks on his finding himself in the particular
spot which history will perhaps associate most with the charming
revival. A very old English village, lying among its meadows and hedges,
in the very heart of the country, in a hollow of the green hills of
Worcestershire, is responsible directly and indirectly for some of the
most beautiful work in black and white with which I am at liberty to
concern myself here; in other words, for much of the work of Mr. Abbey
and Mr. Alfred Parsons. I do not mean that Broadway has told these
gentlemen all they know (the name, from which the American reader has to
brush away an incongruous association, may as well be written first as
last); for Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows everything that can be
known about English fields and flowers, would have good reason to insist
that the measure of his large landscape art is a large experience. I
only suggest that if one loves Broadway and is familiar with it, and
if a part of that predilection is that one has seen Mr. Abbey and Mr.
Parsons at work there, the pleasant confusion takes place of itself;
one’s affection for the wide, long, grass-bordered vista of brownish
gray cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied, immemorial,
grows with the sense of its having ministered to other minds and
transferred itself to other recipients; just as the beauty of many a
bit in many a drawing of the artists I have mentioned is enhanced by the
sense, or at any rate by the desire, of recognition. Broadway and much
of the land about it are in short the perfection of the old English
rural tradition, and if they do not underlie all the combinations by
which (in their pictorial accompaniments to rediscovered ballads, their
vignettes to story or sonnet) these particular talents touch us almost
to tears, we feel at least that they _would_ have sufficed: they cover
the scale.
[Illustration: Priory]
In regard, however, to the implications and explications of this
perfection of a village, primarily and to be just, Broadway is, more
than any one else. Mr. Frank Millet. Mr. Laurence Hutton discovered but
Mr. Millet appropriated it: its sweetness was wasted until he began to
distil and bottle it. He disinterred the treasure, and with impetuous
liberality made us sharers in his fortune. His own work, moreover,
betrays him, as well as the gratitude of participants, as I could easily
prove if it did not perversely happen that he has commemorated most of
his impressions in color. That excludes them from the small space here
at my command; otherwise I could testify to the identity of old nooks
and old objects, those that constitute both out-of-door and in-door
furniture.
[Illustration: The village-green, Broadway]
In such places as Broadway, and it is part of the charm of them to
American eyes, the sky looks down on almost as many “things” as
the ceiling, and “things” are the joy of the illustrator. Furnished
apartments are useful to the artist, but a furnished country is still
more to his purpose. A ripe midland English region is a museum of
accessories and specimens, and is sure, under any circumstances,
to contain the article wanted. This is the great recommendation of
Broadway; everything in it is convertible. Even the passing visitor
finds himself becoming so; the place has so much character that it rubs
off on him, and if in an old garden--an old garden with old gates and
old walls and old summer-houses--he lies down on the old grass (on
an immemorial rug, no doubt), it is ten to one but that he will be
converted. The little oblong sheaves of blank paper with elastic straps
are fluttering all over the place. There is portraiture in the air and
composition in the very accidents. Everything is a subject or an effect,
a “bit” or a good thing. It is always some kind of day; if it be not one
kind it is another. The garden walls, the mossy roofs, the open doorways
and brown interiors, the old-fashioned flowers, the bushes in figures,
the geese on the green, the patches, the jumbles, the glimpses, the
color, the surface, the general complexion of things, have all a value,
a reference and an application. If they are a matter of appreciation,
that is why the gray-brown houses are perhaps more brown than gray, and
more yellow than either. They are various things in turn, according to
lights and days and needs. It is a question of color (all consciousness
at Broadway is that), but the irresponsible profane are not called upon
to settle the tint.
It is delicious to be at Broadway and to _be_ one of the irresponsible
profane--not to have to draw. The single street is in the grand style,
sloping slowly upward to the base of the hills for a mile, but you may
enjoy it without a carking care as to how to “render” the perspective.
Everything is stone except the general greenness--a charming smooth
local stone, which looks as if it had been meant for great constructions
and appears even in dry weather to have been washed and varnished by the
rain. Half-way up the road, in the widest place, where the coaches used
to turn (there were many of old, but the traffic of Broadway was blown
to pieces by steam, though the destroyer has not come nearer than half a
dozen miles), a great gabled mansion, which was once a manor or a
house of state, and is now a rambling inn, stands looking at a detached
swinging sign which is almost as big as itself--a very grand sign, the
“arms” of an old family, on the top of a very tall post. You will find
something very like the place among Mr. Abbey’s delightful illustrations
to, “She Stoops to Conquer.” When the September day grows dim and some
of the windows glow, you may look out, if you like, for Tony Lumpkin’s
red coat in the doorway or imagine Miss Hardcastle’s quilted petticoat
on the stair.