I should not be candid if I closed this paper without admitting that my fifteenth-century friends anticipated modern publishers in one of their worst faults, the dragging in illustrations where they are not wanted. In the fifteenth century the same cuts were repeated over and over again in the same book to serve for different subjects. Modern publishers are not so simple-hearted as this, but they add to the cost of their books by unpleasant half-tone reproductions of unnecessary portraits and views, and I do not think that book-buyers are in the least grateful to them. Miss Sketchley, I am glad to see, has not concerned herself with illustrators whose designs require to be produced by the half-tone process. To condemn this process unreservedly would be absurd. It gives us illustrations which are really needed for the understanding of the text when they could hardly be produced in any other way, and while it does this it must be tolerated. But by necessitating the use of heavily-loaded paper—unpleasant to the touch, heavy in the hand, doomed, unless all the chemists are wrong, speedily to rot—it is the greatest danger to the excellence of our English book-work which has at present to be faced, while by wearying readers with endless mechanically produced pictures it is injurious also to the best interests of artistic illustration.
FROM MR. HOUSMAN'S "A FARM IN FAIRYLAND."
BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. KEGAN PAUL.
ENGLISH BOOK-ILLUSTRATION OF TO-DAY.
I. SOME DECORATIVE ILLUSTRATORS.
OF the famous 'Poems by Alfred Tennyson,' published in 1857 by Edward Moxon, Mr. Gleeson White wrote in 1897: 'The whole modern school of decorative illustrators regard it, rightly enough, as the genesis of the modern movement.' The statement may need some modification to touch exact truth, for the 'modern movement' is no single-file, straightforward movement. 'Kelmscott,' 'Japan,' the 'Yellow Book,' black-and-white art in Germany, in France, in Spain, in America, the influence of Blake, the style of artists such as Walter Crane, have affected the present form of decorative book-illustration. Such perfect unanimity of opinion as is here ascribed to a large and rather indefinitely related body of men hardly exists among even the smallest and most derided body of artists. Still, allowing for the impossibility of telling the whole truth about any modern and eclectic form of art in one sentence, there is here a statement of fact. What Rossetti and Millais and Holman Hunt achieved in the drawings to the 'Tennyson' of 1857, was a vital change in the intention of English illustrative art, and whatever form decorative illustration may assume, their ideal is effective while a personal interpretation of the spirit of the text is the creative impulse. The influence of technical mastery is strong and enduring enough. It is constantly in sight and constantly in mind. But it is in discovering and making evident a principle in art that the influence of spirit on spirit becomes one of the illimitable powers.