English Book-Illustration of To-day / Appreciations of the Work of Living English Illustrators, with Lists of Their Books

by R. E. D. Sketchley

An illustrator of many books, and one whose illustrations have unusual importance, both as interpretations of literature and for their artistic force, Mr. William Strang is yet so incongruous with contemporary black-and-white artists of to-day that he must be considered first and separately. For the traditions of art and of race that find a focus in the illustrative etchings of this artist, the creative traditions, and instinctive modes of thought that are represented in the forms and formation of his art, are forces of intellect and passion and insight not previously, nor now, by more than the one artist, associated with the practice of illustration. To consider his work in connection with modern illustration is to speak of contrasts. It represents nothing that the gift-book picture represents, either in technical dexterities, founded on the requirements of process reproduction, or in its decorative ideals, or as expressive of the pleasures of literature. One phase of Mr. Strang's illustrative art is, indeed, distinct from the mass of his work, with which the etched illustrations are congruous, and the line-drawings to three masterpieces of imaginary adventure—to Lucian, to Baron Munchausen and to Sindbad—show, perhaps, some infusion of Aubrey Beardsley's spirit of fantasy into the convictions of which Mr. Strang's art is compounded. But these drawings represent an excursion from the serious purpose of the artist's work. The element in literature expressed by that epithet 'weird'—exiled from power to common service—is lacking in the extravagances of these voyages imaginaires, and, lacking the shadows cast by the unspeakable, the intellectual chiaroscuro of Mr. Strang's imagination, loses its force. These travellers are too glib for the artist, though his comprehension of the grotesque and extravagant, and his humour, make the drawings expressive of the text, if not of the complete personality of the draughtsman. The 'types, shadows and metaphors' of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' with its poignancies of mental experience and conflict, its transcendent passages, its theological and naïve moods, gave the artist an opportunity for more realized imagination. The etchings in this volume, published in 1894, represent little of the allegorical actualities of the text. Not the encounters by the way, the clash of blows, the 'romancing,' but the 'man cloathed with rags and a great Burden on his back,' or Christiana his wife, when 'her thoughts began to work in her mind,' are the realities to the artist. The pilgrims are real and credible, poor folk to the outward sight, worn with toil, limited, abused in the circumstances of their lives; and these peasant figures are to Mr. Strang, as to his master in etching, Professor Legros, symbols of endurance, significant protagonists in the drama of man's will and the forces that strive to subdue its strength. To both artists the peasant confronting death is the climax of the drama. In the etchings of Professor Legros death fells the woodman, death meets the wayfarer on the high-road. There is no outfacing the menace of death. But to Mr. Strang, the sublimity of Bunyan's 'poor man,' who overcomes all influences of mortality by the strength of his faith, is a possible fact. His ballad illustrations deal finely with various aspects of the theme. In 'The Earth Fiend,' a ballad written and illustrated with etchings by Mr. Strang in 1892, the peasant subdues and compels to his service the spirit of destruction. He maintains his projects of cultivation, conquers the adverse wildness of nature, makes its force productive of prosperity and order; then, on a midday of harvest, sleeps, and the 'earth fiend,' finding his tyrant defenceless, steals on him and kills him as he lies. 'Death and the Ploughman's Wife' (1894) has a braver ending. It interprets in an impressive series of etchings how 'Death that conquers a'' is vanquished by the mother whose child he has snatched from its play. The title-page etching shows a little naked child kicking a skull into the air, while the peasant-mother, patient, vigilant, keeps watch near by. In 'The Christ upon the Hill' of the succeeding year, a ballad by Cosmo Monkhouse with etchings by Mr. Strang, the artist follows, of course, the conception of the writer; but here, too, his work is expressive of the visionary faith that discerns death as one of those 'base things' that 'usher in things Divine.'

FROM WILLIAM STRANG'S BALLAD, 'DEATH AND THE PLOUGHMAN'S WIFE' (REDUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL ETCHING).
BY LEAVE OF MR. A. H. BULLEN.

The twelve etchings to 'Paradise Lost' (1896) do not, as I think, represent Mr. Strang's imagination at its finest. It is in the representation of rude forms of life, subjected to the immeasurable influences of passion, love, sorrow, that the images of Mr. Strang's art, at once vague and of intense reality, primitive and complex, have most force. Adam and Eve driven from Paradise by the angel with the flaming sword, are not directly created by the artist. They recall Masaccio, and are undone by the recollection. Eve, uprising in the darkness of the garden where Adam sleeps, the speech of the serpent with the woman, the gathering of the fruit, are traditionary in their pictorial forms, and the tradition is too great, it imposes itself between the version of Mr. Strang and our admiration. But in the thirty etchings illustrative of Mr. Kipling's works, as in the ballad etchings, the imagination of the artist is unfettered by tradition. The stories he pictures deal, for all their cleverness and definition, with themes that, translated out of Mr. Kipling's words into the large imagination of Mr. Strang, have powerful purpose. As usual, the artist makes his picture not of matter-of-fact—and the etching called 'A Matter of Fact' is specially remote from any such matter—but of more purposeful, more overpowering realities than any particular instance of life would show. He attempts to realize the value, not of an instance of emotion or of endeavour, but of the quality itself. He sets his mind, for example, to realize the force of western militarism in the east, or the attitude of the impulses of life towards contemplation, and his soldiers, his 'Purun Bhagat,' express his observations or imaginations of these themes. Certainly 'a country's love' never went out to this kind of Tommy Atkins, and the India of Mr. Strang is not the India that holds the Gadsbys, or of which plain tales can be told. But he has imagined a country that binds the contrasts of life together in active operation on each other, and in thirty instances of these schemed-out realities, or of dramatic events resulting from the clash of racial and national and chronological characteristics, he has achieved perhaps his most complete expression of insight into essentials. Mr. Strang's etchings in the recently published edition of 'The Compleat Angler,' illustrated by him and by Mr. D. Y. Cameron, are less successful. The charm of his subject seems not to have entered into his imagination, whereas forms of art seem to have oppressed him. The result is oppressive, and that is fatal to the value of his etchings as illustrations of the book that 'it would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read.' Intensity and large statement of dark and light; fine dramatizations of line; an unremitting conflict with the superfluous and inexpressive in form and in thought; an art based on the realities of life, and without finalities of expression, inelegant, as though grace were an affectation, an insincerity in dealing with matters of moment: these are qualities that detach the illustrations of Mr. Strang from the generality of illustrations. Save that Mr. Robert Bryden, in his 'Woodcuts of men of letters' and in the portrait illustrations to 'Poets of the younger generation,' shows traces of studying the portrait-frontispieces of Mr. Strang, there is no relation between his art and the traditions it represents and any other book-illustrations of to-day.

Turning now to illustrators who are representative of the tendencies and characteristics of modern book-illustration, and so are less conspicuous in a general view of the subject than Mr. Strang, there is little question with whom to begin. Mr. Abbey represents at their best the qualities that belong to gift-book illustration. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that gift-book illustration represents the qualities of Mr. Abbey's black and white with more or less fidelity, so effective is the example of his technique on the forms of picturesque character-illustration. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the artist, then a young man fresh from Harper's drawing-office in New York, came to England. That first visit, spent in studying the reality of English pastoral life in preparation for his 'Herrick' illustrations, lasted for two years, and after a few months' interval in the States he returned to England. Resident here for nearly all the years of his work, a member of the Royal Academy, his art expressive of traditions of English literature and of the English country to which he came as to the actuality of his imaginings, one may include Mr. Abbey among English book-illustrators with more than a show of reason. In 1882, when the 'Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick' was published, few of the men whose work is considered in this chapter had been heard of. Chronologically, Mr. Abbey is first of contemporary character-illustrators, and nowhere but first would he be in his proper place, for there is no one to put beside him in his special fashion of art, and in the effect of his illustrative work on his contemporaries. There is inevitable ease and elegance in the pen-drawings of Mr. Abbey, and for that reason it is easy to underestimate their intellectual quality. He is inventive. The spirit of Herrick's muse, or of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' or of the comedies of Shakespeare, is not a quality for which he accepts any formula. He finds shapes for his fancies, rejecting as alien to his purpose all that is not the clear result of his own understanding of the poet. Accordingly there is, in all his work, the expression of an intellectual conception. He sees, too, with patience. If he isolates a figure, one feels that figure has stepped forward into a clear place of his imagination as he followed its way through the crowd. If he sets a pageant on the page, or some piece of turbulent action, or moment of decision, the actors have their individual value. He thinks his way through processes of gradual realization to the final picture of the characters in the play or poem. One writes now with special reference to the illustrations of the comedies of Shakespeare—so far, the illustrative work most exigent to the intellectual powers of the artist. Herrick's verse, full of sweet sounds and suggestive of happy sights, 'She Stoops to Conquer,' where all the mistakes are but for a night, to be laughed over in the morning, the lilt and measure of 'Old Songs,' and of the charming verses in 'The Quiet Life,' called for sensitive appreciation of moods, lyrical, whimsical, humorous, idyllic, but—intellectually—for no more than this. As to Mr. Abbey's technique, curious as he is in the uses of antiquity as part of the pleasure of a fresh realization, clothing his characters in textiles of the great weaving times, or of a dainty simplicity, a student of architecture and of landscape, of household fittings, of armoury, of every beautiful accessory to the business of living, his clever pen rarely fails to render within the convention of black and white the added point of interest and of charm that these things bring into actuality. Truth of texture, of atmosphere, and of tone, an alertness of vision most daintily expressed—these qualities belong to all Mr. Abbey's work, and in the Shakespearean drawings he shows with greater force than ever his 'stage-managing' power, and the correctness and beauty of his 'mounting.' The drawings are dramatic: the women have beauty and individuality, while the men match them, or contrast with them as in the plays; the rogues are vagabonds in spirit, and the wise men have weight; the world of Shakespeare has been entered by the artist. But there are gestures in the text, moments of glad grace, of passion, of sudden amazement before the realities of personal experience, that make these active, dignified figures of Mr. Abbey 'merely players,' his Isabella in the extremity of the scene with Claudio no more than an image of cloistered virtue, his Hermione incapable of her undaunted eloquence and silence, his Perdita and Miranda and Rosalind less than themselves.

As illustrations, the drawings of Mr. Abbey represent traditions brought into English illustrative art by the Pre-Raphaelites, and developed by the freer school of the sixties. But, as drawings, they represent ideas not effective before in the practice of English pen-draughtsmen; ideas derived from the study of the black and white of Spain, of France, and of Munich, by American art students in days when English illustrators were not given to look abroad. Technically he has suggested many things, especially to costume illustrators, and many names might follow his in representation of the place he fills in relation to contemporary art. But to work out the effect of a man's technique on those who are gaining power of expression is to labour in vain. It adds nothing to the intrinsic value of an artist's work, nor does it represent the true relationship between him and those whom he has influenced. For if they are mere imitators they have no relation with any form of art, while to insist upon derived qualities in work that has the superscription of individuality is no true way of apprehension. What a man owes to himself is the substantial fact, the fact that relates him to other men. The value of his work, its existence, is in the little more, or the much more, that himself adds to the sum of his directed industries, his guided achievements. And to estimate that, to attempt to express something of it, must be the chief aim of a study, not of one artist and his 'times,' but of many artists practising a popular art.

So that if, in consideration of their 'starting-point,' one may group most character-illustrators, especially of wig-and-powder subjects, as adherents either of Mr. Abbey and the 'American school,' or of Mr. Hugh Thomson and the Caldecott-Greenaway tradition, such grouping is also no more than a starting-point, and everything concerning the achievements of the individual artist has still to be said.

Considering the intention of their technique, one may permissibly group the names of Mr. Fred Pegram, Mr. F. H. Townsend, Mr. Shepperson, Mr. Sydney Paget, and Mr. Stephen Reid as representing in different degrees the effect of American black and white on English technique, though, in the case of Mr. Paget, one alludes only to pen-drawings such as those in 'Old Mortality,' and not to his Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hewitt performances. The art of Mr. Pegram and of Mr. Townsend is akin. Mr. Pegram has, perhaps, more sense of beauty, and his work suggests a more complete vision of his subject than is realized in the drawings of Mr. Townsend, while Mr. Townsend is at times more successful with the activities of the story; but the differences between them seem hardly more than the work of one hand would show. They really collaborate in illustration, though, except in Cassell's survey of 'Living London,' they have never, I think, made drawings for the same book.

Mr. Pegram served the usual apprenticeship to book-illustration. He was a news-illustrator before he turned to the illustration of literature; but he is an artist to whom the reality acquired by a subject after study of it is more attractive than the reality of actual impressions. Neither sensational nor society events appeal to him. The necessity to compose some sort of an impression from the bare facts of a fact, without time to make the best of it, was not an inspiring necessity. That Mr. Pegram is a book-illustrator by the inclination of his art as well as by profession, the illustrations to 'Sybil,' published in 1895, prove. In these drawings he showed himself not only observant of facial expression and of gesture, but also able to interpret the glances and gestures of Disraeli's society. From the completeness of the draughtsman's realization of his subject, illustrable situations develop themselves with credibility, and his graceful women and thoughtful men represent the events of the novel with distinction. With 'Sybil' may be mentioned the illustrations to 'Ormond,' wherein, five years later, the same understanding of the ways and activities of a bygone, yet not remote society, found equally satisfactory expression, while the technique of the artist had gained in completeness. In 'The Last of the Barons' (1897), Mr. Pegram had a picturesque subject with much strange humanity in it, despite Lord Lytton's conventional travesty of events and character. The names of Richard and Warwick, of Hastings and Margaret of Anjou, are names that break through conventional romance, but the illustrator has to keep up the fiction of the author, and, except that the sham-mediævalism of the novel did not prevent a right study of costumes and accessories in the pictures, the artist had to be content to 'Bulwerize.' Illustrations to 'The Arabian Nights' gave him opportunity for rendering textures and atmosphere, and movements charming or grave, and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' drawings show a sweet-faced Lucy Ashton, and a Ravenswood who is more than melancholy and picturesque. Mr. Pegram's drawings are justly dramatic within the limits prescribed by a somewhat composed ideal of bearing. A catastrophe is outside these limits, and the discovery of Lucy after the bridal lacks real illustration in the artist's version, skilful, nevertheless, as are all his drawings, and expressed without hesitation. Averse to caricature, and keeping within ideas of life that allow of unbroken expression, the novels of Marryat, where action so bustling that only caricatures of humanity can endure its exigencies, and sentimental episodes of flagrant insincerity, swamp the character-drawing, are hardly suited to the art of Mr. Pegram. Still, he selects, and his selection is true to the time and circumstance of Marryat's work. In itself it is always an expression of a coherent and definite conception of the story.