The Golden Treasury Series (Macmillan and Co.) contains, in each volume, a vignette engraved on steel by Jeens, after drawings by J. E. Millais, T. Woolner, W. Holman Hunt, Sir Noel Paton, Arthur Hughes, etc.
Although the 'Household Edition' of Charles Dickens's complete works was issued early in the seventies, it is illustrated almost entirely by men of the sixties, and was possibly in active preparation during that decade. Fred Barnard takes the lion's share, the largest number of drawings to the most important volumes. His fame as a Dickens illustrator might rest secure on these alone, although it is supplemented by many other character-drawings of the types created by the author of Pickwick. To Sketches by Boz he supplies thirty-four designs, to Nicholas Nickleby fifty-nine, to Barnaby Rudge forty-six, to Christmas Books twenty-eight, to Dombey and Son sixty-four, to David Copperfield sixty, to Bleak House sixty-one, and to the Tale of Two Cities twenty-five. 'Phiz' re-illustrates The Pickwick Papers with fifty-seven designs, concerning which silence is best. J. Mahoney shows excellent work in twenty-eight drawings to Oliver Twist and fifty-eight each to Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend; Charles Green's thirty-nine illustrations to the Old Curiosity Shop are also admirable. F. A. Fraser is responsible for thirty to Great Expectations, E. G. Dalziel for thirty-four to Christmas Stories (from All the Year Round), twenty-six to the Uncommercial Traveller, and a few to minor pieces, issued with Edwin Drood, which contain S. L. Fildes's excellent designs. H. French contributes twenty to Hard Times, A. B. Frost illustrates American Notes, J. Gordon Thomson Pictures from Italy, and J. M'L. Ralston supplies fifteen for A Child's History of England. To re-embody characters already stereotyped, for the most part, by the earlier plates of the original editions, was a bold enterprise: that it did not wholly fail is greatly to its credit. It is quite possible that as large a number of readers made their first acquaintance with the dramatis personæ of the novels in these popular editions as in the older books, and it would be interesting to discover what they really felt when the much-vaunted copper-plates afterwards fell under their notice. The sentiment of English people has been amply expended on the Hablot K. Browne designs. Cruikshank is still considered a great master by many people; but if one could 'depolarise' their pictures (to use Wendell Holmes's simile), and set them before their admirers free from early associations, free from the glamour of Dickens romance, and then extract a frank outspoken opinion, it would be, probably, quite opposite to that which they are now ready to maintain.
Recognising that the old illustrations are still regarded with a halo of memory and romance, not unlike that which raises Mumbo Jumbo to a fetish among his worshippers, a wish to estimate anew the intrinsic value, considered as works of art, of these old illustrations, is not provoked by merely destructive tendencies. So long as Thackeray's drawing of Amelia is accepted as a type of grace and beauty, how can the believer realise the beauty of Millais's Was it not a lie? in Framley Parsonage. In the earlier and later engravings alike, the costume repels; but in the one there is real flesh and blood, real passion, real art, in the other a merely conventional symbol, which we agree to accept as an interesting heroine, in the way a child of five accepts the scratches on his slate as real pirates and savages. There is little use in trying to appreciate the best, if the distinctly second-best is reverenced equally; and so, at any cost of personal feeling, it is simply the duty of all concerned to rank the heroes of the sale-room, 'Phiz,' Cruikshank, and Leech at their intrinsic value. This is by no means despicable. For certain qualities which are not remotely connected with art belong to them; but the beauty of truth, the knowledge born of academic accomplishment, or literal imitation of nature, were alike absolutely beyond their sympathy. Hence to praise their work as one praises a Dürer, a Whistler, or a Millais, is apt to confuse the minds of the laity, already none too clear as to the moment when art comes in. This protest is not advanced to prove that every drawing mentioned in these pages surpasses the best work of the men in question, but merely to suggest whether it would not be better to recognise that the praise bestowed for so many years was awarded to a conventional treatment now obsolete, and should not be regarded as equivalent to that bestowed upon works of art which owe nothing to parochial conventions, and are based on unalterable facts, whether a Hokousaï or a Menzel chances to be the interpreter.
The Chandos Poets (Warne), a series of bulky octavos, with red-line borders, are of unequal merit. Some, Willmott's Poets of the Nineteenth Century, James Montgomery's Poems, Christian Lyrics, and Heber's Poetical Works, appear to be merely reprints of earlier volumes with the original illustrations; others have new illustrations by men of the sixties. The Longfellow has several by A. Boyd Houghton, who is also represented by a few excellent designs in the Byron; Legendary Ballads (J. S. Roberts) has three full-page designs, by Walter Crane, to Thomas of Ercildoune (p. 357), The Jolly Harper (p. 462), and Robin Hood (p. 580). Later volumes, with designs by F. A. Fraser and H. French, do not come into our subject.
Other series of the works of 'standard poets,' as they were called, all resplendent in gold and colours, and more or less well illustrated, were issued by Messrs. Routledge, Nimmo, Warne, Cassell, Moxon, and others, beginning in the fifties. Here and there a volume has interest, but one suspects that many of the plates had done duty before, and those which had not are not always of great merit; as, for instance, the drawings by W. B. Scott to the poetical works of L. E. L. (Routledge). In these various books will be found, inter alia, examples of Sir John Gilbert, Birket Foster, E. H. Corbould, W. Small, and Keeley Halswelle.
Hurst and Blackett's Standard Library is the title of a series of novels by eminent hands in single volumes, each containing a frontispiece engraved on steel. That to Christian's Mistake is by Frederick Sandys, engraved by John Saddler. John Halifax, Nothing New, The Valley of a Hundred Fires, and Les Misérables, each have a drawing by Millais, also engraved by John Saddler. In Studies from Life Holman Hunt is the draughtsman and Joseph Brown the engraver. No Church, Grandmother's Money, and A Noble Life, contain frontispieces by Tenniel, Barbara's History, one by J. D. Watson, and Adèle, a fine design by John Gilbert. Others by Leech and Edward Hughes are not particularly interesting. The steel engraving bestowed upon most of these obliterated all character from the designs, and superseded the artist's touch by hard unsympathetic details; but, all the same, compositions by men of such eminence deserve mention.
With 1870 the end of our subject is reached; it is the year of Edwin Drood, which established S. L. Fildes's position as an illustrator of the first rank; it also has a pleasant book of quasi-mediæval work, Mores Ridicula, by J. E. Rogers (Macmillan), (followed later by Ridicula Rediviva and The Fairy Book, by the author of John Halifax, with coloured designs by the same artist), of which an enthusiastic critic wrote: 'Worthy to be hung in the Royal Academy side by side with Rossetti, Sandys, Barnes, and Millais'; Whymper's Scrambles on the Alps, a book greatly prized by collectors, with drawings by Whymper and J. Mahoney; The Cycle of Life (S.P.C.K.); and Episodes of Fiction (Nimmo, 1870) containing twenty-eight designs by R. Paterson, after C. Green, C. J. Staniland, P. Skelton, F. Barnard, Harrison Weir, and others. Novello's National Nursery Rhymes, by J. W. Elliott, published in 1871, belongs to the sixties by intrinsic right. It includes two delightful drawings by A. Boyd Houghton—one of which, Tom the Piper's Son (owned by Mr. Pennell), has been reproduced from the original by photogravure in Mr. Laurence Housman's monograph—and many by H. S. Marks, W. Small, J. Mahoney, G. J. Pinwell, W. J. Wiegand, Arthur Hughes, T. and E. Dalziel, and others.
H. Leslie's Musical Annual (Cassell, 1870) contains a fine drawing, The Boatswain's Leap, by G. J. Pinwell, and a steel engraving, A Reverie, after Millais, which was re-issued in The Magazine of Art, September 1896. Pictures from English Literature (Cassell) is an excuse for publishing twenty full-page engravings after elaborate drawings by Du Maurier, S. L. Fildes, W. Small, J. D. Watson, W. Cave Thomas, etc. etc. This anthology, with a somewhat heterogeneous collection of drawings, seems to be the last genuine survivor of the old Christmas gift-books, which is lineally connected with the masterpieces of its kind.
Soon after the inevitable anthology of poems reappeared, in humbler pamphlet shape, as a birthday souvenir, or a Christmas card, embellished with chromo-lithographs, as it had already been allied with photographic silver-prints; but it is always the accident of the artists chosen which imparts permanent interest to the otherwise feeble object; whether it take the shape of a drawing-room table-book, gaudy, costly, and dull, or of a little booklet, it is a thing of no vital interest, unless by chance its pictures are the work of really powerful artists. The decadence of a vigorous movement is never a pleasant subject to record in detail. Fortunately, although the king died, the king lived almost immediately, and The Graphic, with its new ideals and new artists, quickly established a convention of its own, which is no less interesting. If it does not seem, so far as we can estimate, to have numbered among its articles men who are worthy in all respects to be placed by Rossetti, Millais, Sandys, Houghton, Pinwell, Fred Walker, and the rest of the typical heroes of the sixties, yet in its own way it is a worthy beginning of a new epoch.
Before quitting our period, however, a certain aftermath of the rich harvest must not be forgotten; and this, despite the comparatively few items it contains, may be placed in a chapter by itself.