The admiration which we have for Thackeray the man of letters, and the way in which we have already expressed that admiration, render it unlikely that the drift of these remarks will be misunderstood. While rejoicing that the admirable tales and satires of the humourist are uninjured by illustrations which are altogether unworthy of them, we venture to suggest how much better the result might have been had the latter been entrusted, as in the case of “The Newcomes,” to other hands, and the artist contented himself with the initial letters and designs on wood with which his writings are pleasantly interspersed. We have seen it somewhere stated (we think in the volume entitled “Thackerayana”) that the author’s rapid facility of sketching was the one great impediment to his attainment of excellence in illustrative art. Some of his designs indeed bear on their face evidence of the rapidity with which they were thrown off; but no satisfactory explanation appears to be possible of his contempt for what Mr. Hodder has termed the “practical laws which regulate the academic exercise of the pictorial art,” and his apparent ignorance of the art of balancing his figures so as to enable them to stand upright, to walk straight, or to move their limbs with the grace and freedom assigned to them by nature. One of the designs to “The Virginians” shows a horseman, who in the letterpress is described as crossing a bridge at full gallop, whereas in the picture both man and horse will inevitably leap over the parapet into the river below. Nothing could possibly avert the catastrophe, and the effect thus produced is due, not to the manifest carelessness and haste with which the sketch is thrown off, but to a palpable defect in the artistic powers of the designer himself. Yet in the face of defects so patent and so palpable we have found it gravely stated, “The world which is loth to admit high excellence in more than one direction, has never fitly recognised Thackeray’s great gift as a comic draftsman. Here [i.e. in a work edited by his daughter] he will be found advantageously represented; inferior, it is true to the unjustly neglected Hablot Browne (’Phiz’), but often equalling if not sometimes surpassing the greatly over-rated John Leech.”
Ay! “the world is loth to admit high excellence in more than one direction,” and experience has taught it that few men, however gifted, are capable of exercising two different arts with an equal measure of success. Thackeray was both a genius and an artist, but the world has long recognised the fact that the former manifested itself only when he laid down the pencil and took up the pen. If called on to prove his incapacity to illustrate his own work, we will refer the reader to his admirable novel of “Vanity Fair.” The time selected for the story is the early part of the present century; and on the plea that he had “not the heart to disfigure his heroes and heroines” by the correct but “hideous” costumes of the period, Thackeray has actually habited these men and women of 1815 in the dress of 1848! Cruikshank, Leech, “Phiz,” or Doyle, it is unnecessary to say, would have been guiltless of such an absurdity; and the difficulty in which the gifted author found himself, and the confession of his inability to cope with it, afford the clearest possible evidence of his utter incapacity to illustrate the story itself. If any further proof be wanted, look at the designs themselves. Captain Dobbin would be laughed out of any European military service; such a guardsman as Rawdon Crawley could find no place in her Majesty’s guards; “Jemima” (at p. 7), “Miss Sharp in the schoolroom” (p. 80), the children waiting on Miss Crawley (p. 89), the figures in the fencing scene (p. 207), “The Family Party at Brighton,” “Gloriana” trying her fascinations on the major, “Jos” (at p. 569), and “Becky’s second appearance as Clytemnestra,” without meaning to be so, are caricatures pure and simple; and yet these are admirable compared with the designs to “The Virginians,” which may safely be reckoned amongst the worst in the entire range of English illustrative art. Contrast them with illustrations confessedly not up to the severe standard of excellence required by the art critic, but admirably adapted for their purpose, Mr. Doyle’s etchings to “The Newcomes,” and remark the immeasurable superiority of the latter.
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“GRUFFANUFF.” | |
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“PRINCE BULBO SEIZED BY THE GUARDS.” | “MONKS OF THE SEVEREST ORDER OF FLAGELLANTS.” |
SKETCHES BY THACKERAY FROM HIS “ROSE AND THE RING.” [Back to p. 378. | |
| W. M. Thackeray. [“The Rose and the Ring.” “ANGELICA ARRIVES JUST IN TIME.” [Back to p. 379. |
And yet, in justice to the great humourist of the nineteenth century, let us hear what another great writer has to say upon the very illustrations which seem to us to call for such severe animadversion. After telling us that Thackeray studied drawing at Paris, affecting especially Bonnington (the young English artist who died in 1828), Mr. Anthony Trollope goes on to say, “He never learned to draw,—perhaps never could have learned. That he was idle and did not do his best, we may take for granted. He was always idle, and only on some occasions, when the spirit moved him thoroughly, did he do his best even in after life. But with drawing—or rather without it—he did wonderfully well, even when he did his worst. He did illustrate his own books, and every one knows how incorrect were his delineations. But as illustrations they were excellent. How often have I wished that characters of my creating might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the intended purpose. Let any one look at the ‘plates,’ as they are called, in ‘Vanity Fair,’ and compare each with the scenes and the characters intended to be displayed, and then see whether the artist—if we may call him so—has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling which he has described in the text. I have a little sketch of his, in which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an aide-de-camp,—messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront military feelings,—who is kneeling on the field of battle and delivering a despatch to Marlborough on horseback. The graceful ease with which the duke receives the message though the messenger’s head be gone, and the soldierlike precision with which the headless hero finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been portrayed with well-drawn figures, but no finished illustration ever told its story better.”[185] We read these remarks with profound astonishment, and can only ask in reply: If, as Mr. Trollope has admitted, Thackeray “never learned to draw,—perhaps never could have learned,” how he could manage “to convey” in any of his pictures “the exact feeling he has described in the text”?—how, in the face of the admitted incorrectness of “his delineations,” he could be in any way fitted to illustrate a novel of such transcendent excellence as “Vanity Fair”?
It has been assumed, without any sort of authority, that it was only when Thackeray found he could not succeed as an artist that he turned to literature. The statement is altogether unwarranted. At or about the very time he was engaged in drawing the cuts for “Figaro in London,” he was—if we are to judge of the sketch of “the Fraserians” in the “Maclise Portrait Gallery,” in which young Thackeray may easily be recognised—writing for “Fraser’s Magazine.” Be this, however, as it may, it seems tolerably certain that the rebuff he received from Dickens had no hand in turning him into the path of letters, towards which his genius and unerring judgment alone most fortunately guided him.
[177] There is a scarce edition of the “Bon Gaultier Ballads,” which contains some unacknowledged tailpieces, etc., by Kenny Meadows; in all subsequent editions these are omitted—why, we know not.
[178] So great was the scarcity of good engravers in 1880, that in September of that year the proprietors of the Graphic newspaper acknowledged the difficulty they experienced in obtaining the assistance of high-class engravers, and stated their intention to found a school of engraving on wood. Specimens of a new style of illustration have lately come from America, which appear in illustrated serials; some are good, but the majority, notwithstanding the song of praise with which they were first received, are nothing less than abominable.
[179] Onwhyn’s name occurs frequently in illustrative literature. He etched a set of designs for “Pickwick” and “Nicholas Nickleby;” for Mr. Henry Cockton’s “George St. Julian,” and a translation of Eugene Sue’s “Mysteries of Paris.” He is well known as the illustrator of “Valentine Vox,” “Fanny the Little Milliner,” and other works. Some of his best designs will be found in Mrs. Trollope’s “Michael Armstrong.” He occasionally displays some ability, but his performances are very unequal.