"Old World Japan" (George Allen) has thirty-four, and "Legends from River and Mountain," forty-two, pictures by T. H. Robinson, which must not be forgotten. "The Giant Crab" (Nutt), and "Andersen" (Bliss, Sands), are among the best things W. Robinson has yet done.
"Nonsense," by A. Nobody, and "Some More Nonsense," by A. Nobody (Gardner, Darton & Co.), are unique instances of an unfettered humour. That their apparently naïve grotesques are from the hand of a very practised draughtsman is evident at a first glance; but as their author prefers to remain anonymous his identity must not be revealed. Specimens from the published work (which is, however, mostly in colour), and facsimiles of hitherto unpublished drawings, entitled "The Singing Lesson," kindly lent by Messrs. Gardner, Darton & Co., are here to prove how merry our anonym can be. By the way, it may be well to add that the artist in question is not Sir Edward Burne-Jones, whose caricatures, that are the delight of children of all ages who know them, have been so far strictly kept to members of the family circle, for whom they were produced.
ILLUSTRATION FROM "LITTLE FOLKS." BY MAURICE BOUTET DE MONVEL. (CASSELL AND CO.)
The editor of The Studio, to whose selection of pictures for reproduction these pages owe their chief interest, has spared no effort to show a good working sample of the best of all classes, and in the space available has certainly omitted few of any consequence—except those so very well known, as, for instance, Tenniel's "Alice" series, and the Caldecott toy-books—which it would have been superfluous to illustrate again, especially in black and white after coloured originals.
In Mrs. Field's volume already mentioned, the author says: "It has been well observed that children do not desire, and ought not to be furnished with purely realistic portraits of themselves; the boy's heart craves a hero, and the Johnny or Frank of the realistic story-book, the little boy like himself, is not in this sense a hero." This passage, referring to the stories themselves, might be applied to their illustration with hardly less force. To idealise is the normal impulse of a child. True that it can "make believe" from the most rudimentary hints, but it is much easier to do so if something not too actual is the groundwork. Figures which delight children are never wholly symbolic, mere virtues and vices materialised as personages of the anecdote. Real nonsense such as Lear concocted, real wit such as that which sparkles from Lewis Carroll's pages, find their parallel in the pictures which accompany each text. It is the feeble effort to be funny, the mildly punning humour of the imitators, which makes the text tedious, and one fancies the artist is also infected, for in such books the drawings very rarely rise to a high level.
ILLUSTRATION FROM "GOULD'S BOOK OF FAIRY TALES." BY ARTHUR GASKIN. (METHUEN AND CO.)
The "pretty-pretty" school, which has been too popular, especially in anthologies of mildly entertaining rhymes, is sickly at its best, and fails to retain the interest of a child. Possibly, in pleading for imaginative art, one has forgotten that everywhere is Wonderland to a child, who would be no more astonished to find a real elephant dropping in to tea, or a real miniature railway across the lawn, than in finding a toy elephant or a toy engine awaiting him. Children are so accustomed to novelty that they do not realise the abnormal; nor do they always crave for unreality. As coaches and horses were the delight of youngsters a century ago, so are trains and steamboats to-day. Given a pile of books and an empty floor space, their imagination needs no mechanical models of real locomotives; or, to be more correct, they enjoy the make-believe with quite as great a zest. Hence, perhaps, in praising conscious art for children's literature, one is unwittingly pleasing older tastes; indeed, it is not inconceivable that the "prig" which lurks in most of us may be nurtured by too refined diet. Whether a child brought up wholly on the æsthetic toy-book would realise the greatness of Rembrandt's etchings or other masterpieces of realistic art more easily than one who had only known the current pictures of cheap magazines, is not a question to be decided off-hand. To foster an artificial taste is not wholly unattended with danger; but if humour be present, as it is in the works of the best artists for the nursery, then all fear vanishes; good wholesome laughter is the deadliest bane to the prig-microbe, and will leave no infant lisping of the preciousness of Cimabue, or the wonder of Sandro Botticelli, as certain children were reported to do in the brief days when the æsthete walked his faded way among us. That modern children's books will—some of them at least—take an honourable place in an iconography of nineteenth-century art, many of the illustrations here reproduced are in themselves sufficient to prove.