FIGURE-OF-EIGHT RING IN CAWDOR FOREST. BY J. G. MILLAIS.
FROM HIS 'BRITISH DEER AND THEIR HORNS.'
BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. SOTHERAN.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Since this book was in type, I have learned with regret of the death of Miss Helen James.
III. SOME CHARACTER ILLUSTRATORS.
SO far, in writing of decorative illustrators and of open-air illustrators, the difference in scheme between a study of book-illustration and of 'black-and-white' art has not greatly affected the scale and order of facts. The intellectual idea of illustration, as a personal interpretation of the spirit of the text, finds expression, formally at least, in the drawings of most decorative black-and-white artists. The deliberate and inventive character of their art, the fact that such qualities are non-journalistic, and ineffective in the treatment of 'day by day' matters, keeps the interpretative ideal, brought into English illustration by Rossetti, and the artists whose spirits he kindled, among working ideals for these illustrators. For that reason, with the exception of page-decorations such as those of Mr. Edgar Wilson, the subject of decorative illustration is almost co-extensive with the subject of decorative black-and-white. The open-air illustrator represents another aspect of illustration. To interpret the spirit of the text would, frequently, allow his art no exercise. Much of his text is itinerary. His subject is before his eyes in actuality, or in photographs, and not in some phrase of words, magical with suggested forms, creating by its gift of delight desire to celebrate its beauty. Still, if the artist be independent of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the book, his is no independent form of black and white. It is illustration; the author's subject is the subject of the artist. Open-air facts, those that are beautiful and pleasurable, are too uneventful to make 'news illustration.' Unless as background for some event, they have, for most people, no immediate interest. So it happens that open-air drawings are usually illustrations of text, text of a practical guide-book character, or of archæological interest, or of the gossiping, intimate kind that tells of possessions, of journeys and pleasurings, or, again, illustrations of the open-air classics in prose and verse.
But in turning to the work of those draughtsmen whose subject is the presentment of character, of every man in his own humour, the illustration of literature is a part only of what is noteworthy. These artists have a subject that makes the opportunities of the book-illustrator seem formal; a subject, charming, poignant, splendid or atrocious, containing all the 'situations' of comedy, tragedy or farce; the only subject at once realized by everyone, yet whose opportunities none has ever comprehended. The writings of novelists and dramatists—life narrowed to the perception of an individual—are limitary notions of the matter, compared with the illimitable variety of character and incident to be found in the world that changes from day to day. And 'real' life, purged of monotony by the wit, discrimination or extravagance of the artist, or—on a lower plane—by the combination only of approved comical or sentimental or melodramatic elements, is the most popular and marketable of all subjects. The completeness of a work of art is to some a refuge from the incompleteness of actuality; to others this completeness is more incomplete than any incident of their own experience. The first bent of mind—supposing an artist who illustrates to 'express himself'—makes an illustrator of a draughtsman, the second makes literature seem no more than la reste to the artist as an opportunity for pictorial characterization.
Character illustration is then a subject within a subject, and if it be impossible to consider it without overseeing the limitations, yet a different point of view gives a different order of impressions. Caricaturists, political cartoonists, news-illustrators and graphic humorists, the artists who pictorialize society, the stage, the slums or some other kind of life interesting to the spectator, are outside the scheme of this article—unless they be illustrators also. For instance, the illustrations of Sir Harry Furniss are only part of his lively activities, and Mr. Bernard Partridge is the illustrator of Mr. Austin Dobson's eighteenth-century muse as well as the 'J. B. P.' of 'socials' in 'Punch.'