WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857
THE WATER
NYMPH
Another book of the same year, The Poets of the Nineteenth Century, selected and edited by the Rev. Robert Aris Willmott (Routledge, 1857), is in many respects quite as fine as the Tennyson, always excepting the pre-Raphaelite element, which is not however totally absent. For in this quarto volume Millais' Love (p. 137) and The Dream (p. 123) are worthy to be placed beside those just noticed. Ford Madox Brown's Prisoner of Chillon (p. 111) is another masterpiece of its sort. For this we are told the artist spent three days in a dissecting-room (or a mortuary—the accounts differ) to watch the gradual change in a dead body, making most careful studies in colour as well as monochrome all for a foreshortened figure in a block 3¾ by 5 inches. This procedure is singularly unlike the rapid inspiration which throws off compositions in black and white to-day. In a recent book received with well-deserved applause, some of the smaller 'decorative designs' were produced at the rate of a dozen in a day. The mere time occupied in production is of little consequence, because we know that the apparently rapid 'sketch' by Phil May may have taken far more time than a decorative drawing, with elaborately minute detail over every inch of its surface; but, other qualities being equal, the one produced with lavish expenditure of care and thought is likely to outlive the trifle tossed off in an hour or two. In the Poets of the Nineteenth Century the hundred engravings by the brothers Dalziel include twenty-one of Birket Foster's exquisite landscapes, all with figures; fourteen by W. Harvey, nine by John Gilbert, six by J. Tenniel, five by J. R. Clayton, eleven by T. Dalziel, seven by J. Godwin, five by E. H. Corbould, two by D. Edwards, five by E. Duncan, seven by J. Godwin, and one each by Arthur Hughes, W. P. Leitch, E. A. Goodall, T. D. Hardy, F. R. Pickersgill, and Harrison Weir—a century of designs not unworthy as a whole to represent the art of the day; although Rossetti and Holman Hunt, who figure so strongly in the Tennyson, are not represented. This year John Gilbert illustrated the Book of Job with fifty designs; The Proverbs of Solomon (Nisbet, 1858), a companion volume, contains twenty drawings.
Another noteworthy volume is Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes and other Poems (Chapman and Hall, 1857) illustrated by many of the artists already mentioned. The fifty-seven engravings by Dalziel include one block on p. 45, from a drawing by J. R. Clayton, which is here reprinted—not so much for its design as for its engraving; the way the breadth of the drapery is preserved, despite the elaborate pattern on its surface, stamps it as a most admirable piece of work. Thornbury's Legends of the Cavaliers and Roundheads (Hurst and Blackett, 1857), was illustrated by H. S. Marks.
So far the few books of 1857 noticed have considerable family likeness. The Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Nisbet, 1857), illustrated with twenty designs by G. H. Thomas, more slight in its method, reflects the journalistic style of its day rather than the elaborate 'book' manner, which in many an instance gives the effect of an engraving 'after' a painting or a large and highly-wrought fresco. As one of the many attempts to illustrate the immortal Protestant romance it deserves noting. To this year belongs The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated with some striking designs by John Tenniel, and others by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., Birket Foster, Percival Skelton; and besides these, Felix Darley, P. Duggan, Jasper Cropsey, and A. W. Madot—draughtsmen whose names are certainly not household words to-day. In the lists of 'artists' the portrait of the author is attributed to 'daguerreotype'! one of the earliest instances I have encountered of the formal appearance of the ubiquitous camera as an artist. Longfellow's prose romance, Kavanagh (Kent, 1857), with exquisite illustrations by Birket Foster, appeared this year; Hyperion (Dean), illustrated by the same author, being issued the following Christmas.
Poetry and Pictures from Thomas Moore (Longman, 1857), the Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (Bell and Daldy, 1857), both illustrated by Birket Foster and others, and The Fables of Æsop, with twenty-five drawings by C. H. Bennett, also deserve a passing word. Gertrude of Wyoming, by Thomas Campbell (Routledge, 1857), is only less important from its dimensions, and the fact that it contains only thirty-five illustrations, engraved by the brothers Dalziel, as against the complete hundred of most of its fellows. The drawings by Birket Foster, Thomas Dalziel, Harrison Weir, and William Harvey include some very good work.
Lays of the Holy Land (Nisbet, 1858), clad in binding of a really fine design adapted from Persian sources, is another illustrated quarto, with one drawing at least—The Finding of Moses—by J. E. Millais, which makes it worth keeping; a 'decorative' Song of Bethlehem, by J. R. Clayton, is ahead of its time in style; the rest by Gilbert, Birket Foster, and others are mostly up to their best average. The title-page says 'from photographs and drawings,' but as every block is attributed to an artist, the former were without doubt redrawn and the source not acknowledged—a habit of draughtsmen which is not obsolete to-day.
J. R. CLAYTON
