English Book-Illustration of To-day Part 1

English Book-Ill.u.s.tration of To-day.

by Rose Esther Dorothea Sketchley.

INTRODUCTION.

SOME PRESENT-DAY LESSONS FROM OLD WOODCUTS.

BY ALFRED W. POLLARD.

SOME explanation seems needed for the intrusion of a talk about the woodcuts of the fifteenth century into a book dealing with the work of the ill.u.s.trators of our own day, and the explanation, though no doubt discreditable, is simple enough. It was to a mere bibliographer that the idea occurred that lists of contemporary ill.u.s.trated books, with estimates of the work found in them, might form a useful record of the state of English book-ill.u.s.tration at the end of a century in which for the first time (if we stretch the century a little so as to include Bewick) it had competed on equal terms with the work of foreign artists. Fortunately the bibliographer's scanty leisure was already heavily mortgaged, and so the idea was transferred to a special student of the subject, much better equipped for the task. But partly for the pleasure of keeping a finger in an interesting pie, partly because there was a fine hobby-horse waiting to be mounted, the bibliographer bargained that he should be allowed to write an introduction in which his hobby should have free play, and the reader, who has got a much better book than he was intended to have, must acquiesce in this meddling, or resort to his natural rights and skip.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM 'LES QUINZE JOIES DE MARIAGE,'

PARIS, TREPEREL, C. 1500.]

It is well to ride a hobby with at least a semblance of moderation, and the thesis which this introduction is written to maintain does not a.s.sert that the woodcuts of the fifteenth century are better than the ill.u.s.trations of the present day, only that our modern artists, if they will condescend, may learn some useful lessons from them. At the outset it may frankly be owned that the range of the earliest ill.u.s.trators was limited. They had no landscape art, no such out-of-door ill.u.s.trations as those which furnish the subject for one of Miss Sketchley's most interesting chapters. Again, they had little humour, at least of the voluntary kind, though this was hardly their own fault, for as the admission is made the thought at once follows it that of all the many deficiencies of fifteenth-century literature the lack of humour is one of the most striking. The rough horseplay of the Life of Aesop prefixed to editions of the Fables can hardly be counted an exception; the wit combats of Solomon and Marcolphus produced no more than a t.i.tle-cut showing king and clown, and outside the 'Dialogus Creaturarum' I can think of only a single valid exception, itself rather satirical than funny, this curious picture of a family on the move from a French treatise on the Joys of Marriage. On the 'Dialogus' itself it seems fair to lay some stress, for surely the picture here shown of the Lion and the Hare who applied for the post of his secretary may well encourage us to believe that in two other departments of ill.u.s.tration from which also they were shut out, those of Caricature (for which we must go back to thirteenth-century prayer-books) and Christmas Books for Children, the fifteenth-century artist would have made no mean mark. It is, indeed, our Children's Gift-Books that come nearest both to his feeling and his style.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE 'DIALOGUS CREATURARUM.' GOUDA, 1480.]

What remains for us here to consider is the achievement of the early designers and woodcutters in the field of Decorative and Character Ill.u.s.trations with which Miss Sketchley deals in her first and third chapters. Here the first point to be made is that by an invention of the last twenty years they are brought nearer to the possible work of our own day than to that of any previous time. It has been often enough pointed out that, not from preference, but from inability to devise any better plan, the art of woodcut ill.u.s.tration began on wholly wrong lines. Starting, as was inevitable, from the colour-work of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, the ill.u.s.trators could think of no other means of simplification than the reduction of pictures to their outlines. With a piece of plank cut, not across the grain of the wood, but with it, as his material, and a sharp knife and, perhaps, a gouge as his only tools, the woodcutter had to reproduce these outlines as best he could, and it is little to be wondered at if his lines were often scratchy and angular, and many a good design was deplorably ill handled. After a time, soft metal, presumably pewter, was used as an alternative to wood, and perhaps, though probably slower, was a little easier to work successfully. But save in some Florentine pictures and a few designs by Geoffroy Tory, the craftsman's work was not to cut the lines which the artist had drawn, but to cut away everything else. This inverted method of work continued after the invention of crosshatching to represent shading, and was undoubtedly the cause of the rapid supersession of woodcuts by copper engravings during the sixteenth century, the more natural method of work compensating for the trouble caused when the ill.u.s.trations no longer stood in relief like the type, but had to be printed as incised plates, either on separate leaves, or by pa.s.sing the sheet through a different press. The eighteenth-century invention of wood-engraving as opposed to woodcutting once again caused pictures and text to be printed together, and the amazing dexterity of successive schools of wood-engravers enabled them to produce, though at the cost of immense labour, work which seemed to compete on equal terms with engravings on copper. At its best the wood-engraving of the nineteenth century was almost miraculously good; at its worst, in the wood-engravings of commerce--the wood-engravings of the weekly papers, for which the artist's drawing might come in on a Tuesday, to be cut up into little squares and worked on all night as well as all day, in the engravers' shops--it was unequivocally and deplorably, but hardly surprisingly, bad.

Upon this strange medley of the miraculously good and the excusably horrid came the invention of the process line-block, and the problem which had baffled so many fifteenth-century woodcutters, of how to preserve the beauty of simple outlines was solved at a single stroke.

Have our modern artists made anything like adequate use of this excellent invention? My own answer would be that they have used it, skilfully enough, to save themselves trouble, but that its artistic possibilities have been allowed to remain almost unexplored. As for the trouble-saving--and trouble-saving is not only legitimate but commendable--the photographer's camera is the most obliging of craftsmen. Only leave your work fairly open and you may draw on as large a scale and with as coa.r.s.e lines as you please, and the camera will photograph it down for you to the exact s.p.a.ce the ill.u.s.tration has to fill and will win you undeserved credit for delicacy and fineness of touch as well. Thus to save trouble is well, but to produce beautiful work is better, and what use has been made of the fidelity with which beautiful and gracious line can now be reproduced? The caricaturists, it is true, have seen their opportunity. Cleverness could hardly be carried further than it is by Mr. Phil May, and a caricaturist of another sort, the late Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, degenerate and despicable as was almost every figure he drew, yet saw and used the possibilities which artists of happier temperament have neglected. With all the disadvantages under which they laboured in the reproduction of fine line the craftsmen of Venice and Florence essayed and achieved more than this. Witness the fine rendering into pure line of a picture by Gentile Bellini of a tall preacher preceded by his little crossbearer in the 'Doctrina' of Lorenzo Giustiniano printed at Venice in 1494, or again the impressiveness, surviving even its little touch of the grotesque, of this armed warrior kneeling at the feet of a pope, which I have unearthed from a favourite volume of Venetian chapbooks at the British Museum. A Florentine picture of Jacopone da Todi on his knees before a vision of the Blessed Virgin (from Bonacorsi's edition of his 'Laude,' 1490) gives another instance of what can be done by simple line in a different style. We have yet other examples in many of the ill.u.s.trations to the famous romance, the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,'

printed at Venice in 1499. Of similar cuts on a much smaller scale, a specimen will be given later. Here, lest anyone should despise these fifteenth-century efforts, I would once more recall the fact that at the time they were made the execution of such woodcuts required the greatest possible dexterity, in cutting away on each side so as to leave the line as the artist drew it with any semblance of its original grace. In many ill.u.s.trated books which have come down to us what must have been beautiful designs have been completely spoilt, rendered even grotesque, by the fine curves of the drawing being translated into scratchy angularities. But draw he never so finely no artist nowadays need fear that his work will be made scratchy or angular by photographic process. It is only when he crowds lines together, from inability to work simply, that the process block aggravates his defects.

[Ill.u.s.tration: La Lega Facta Nouamente a Morte e Destructione de li Franzosi & suoi Seguaci.

VENICE. C. 1500.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI UN MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI GESu, 1572. JAC. CHITI.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. CRISTINA, 1555.]

I pa.s.s on to another point as to which I think the Florentine woodcutters have something to teach us. If we put pictures into our books, why should not the pictures be framed? A hard single line round the edge of a woodcut is a poor set-off to it, often conflicting with the lines in the picture itself, and sometimes insufficiently emphatic as a frame to make us acquiesce in what seems a mere cutting away a portion from a larger whole. Our Florentine friends knew better. Here (pp. xiv-xv), for instance, are two scenes, from some unidentified romance, which in 1572 and 1555 respectively (by which time they must have been about fifty and sixty years old) appeared in Florentine religious chapbooks, with which they have nothing to do. The little borders are simple enough, but they are sufficiently heavy to carry off the blacks which the artist (according to what is the true method of woodcutting) has left in his picture, and we are much less inclined to grumble at the window being cut in two than we should be if the cut were made by a simple line instead of quite firmly and with determination by a frame.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM LORENZO DE' MEDICI'S LA NENCIA DA BARBERINO, S.A.]

I have given these two Florentine cuts, much the worse for wear though they be, with peculiar pleasure, because I take them to be the exact equivalents of the pictures in our ill.u.s.trated novels of the present day of which Miss Sketchley gives several examples in her third paper.

They are good examples of what may be called the diffused characterization in which our modern ill.u.s.trators excel. Every single figure is good and has its own individuality, but there is no attempt to ill.u.s.trate a central character at a decisive moment. Decisive moments, it may be objected, do not occur (except for epicures) at polite dinner parties, or during the 'mauvais quart d'heure,' which might very well be the subject of our first picture. But it seems to me that modern ill.u.s.trators often deliberately shun decisive moments, preferring to ill.u.s.trate their characters in more ordinary moods, and perhaps the Florentines did this also. Where the ill.u.s.trator is not a great artist the discretion is no doubt a wise one. What for instance could be more charming, more completely successful than this little picture of a messenger bringing a lady a flower, no doubt with a pleasing message with it? In our next cut the artist has been much more ambitious. Preceded by soldiers with their long spears, followed by the hideously masked 'Battuti' who ministered to the condemned, Ippolito is being led to execution. As he pa.s.ses her door, Dianora flings herself on him in a last embrace. The lady's att.i.tude is good, but the woodcutter, alas, has made the lover look merely bored. In book-ill.u.s.tration, as in life, who would avoid failure must know his limitations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE STORIA DI IPPOLITO BUONDELMONTI E DIANORA BARDI, S.A.]

Whatever shortcomings these Florentine pictures may have in themselves, or whatever they may lose when examined by eyes only accustomed to modern work, I hope that it will be conceded that as character-ill.u.s.trations they are far from being despicable.

Nevertheless the true home of character-ill.u.s.tration in the fifteenth century was rather in Germany than in Italy. Inferior to the Italian craftsmen in delicacy and in producing a general impression of grace (partly, perhaps, because their work was intended to be printed in conjunction with far heavier type) the German artists and woodcutters often showed extraordinary power in rendering facial expression. My favourite example of this is a little picture from the 'De Claris Mulieribus' of Boccaccio printed at Ulm in 1473, on one side of which the Roman general Scipio is shown with uplifted finger bidding the craven Ma.s.sinissa put away his Carthaginian wife, while on the other Sophonisba is watched by a horror-stricken messenger as she drains the poison her husband sends her. But there is a navete about the figure of Scipio which has frequently provoked laughter from audiences at lantern-lectures, so my readers must look up this ill.u.s.tration for themselves at the British Museum, or elsewhere. I fall back on a picture of a card-party from a 'Guldin Spiel' printed at Augsburg in 1472, in which the hesitation of the woman whose turn it is to play, the rather supercilious interest of her vis-a-vis, and the calm confidence of the third hand, not only ready to play his best, but sure that his best will be good enough, are all shown with absolute simplicity, but in a really masterly manner. Facial expression such as this in modern work seems entirely confined to children's books and caricature, but one would sacrifice a good deal of our modern prettiness for a few more touches of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM INGOLD'S 'GULDIN SPIEL.' AUGSBURG, 1472.]

The last point to which I would draw attention is that a good deal more use might be made of quite small ill.u.s.trations. The full-pagers are, no doubt, impressive and dignified, but I always seem to see written on the back of them the artist's contract to supply so many drawings of such and such size at so many guineas apiece, and to hear him groaning as he runs through his text trying to pick out the full complement of subjects. The little sketch is more popular in France than in England, and there is a suggestion of joyous freedom about it which is very captivating. Such small pictures did not suit the rather heavy touch of the German woodcutters; in Italy they were much more popular. At Venice a whole series of large folio books were ill.u.s.trated in this way in the last decade of the fifteenth century, two editions of Malermi's translation of the Bible, Lives of the Saints, an Italian Livy, the Decamerone of Boccaccio, the Novels of Masuccio, and other works, all in the vernacular. At Ferrara, under Venetian influence, an edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome was printed in 1497, with upwards of one hundred and eighty such little cuts, many of them ill.u.s.trating incidents of monastic life. Both at Venice and Ferrara the cuts are mainly in outline, and when they are well cut and two or three come together on a page the effect is delightful. In France the vogue of the small cut took a very special form. By far the most famous series of early French ill.u.s.trated books is that of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin (with which went other devotions, making fairly complete prayer-books for lay use), which were at their best for some fifteen years reckoning from 1488. These Hour-Books usually contained some fifteen large ill.u.s.trations, but their most notable features are to be found in the borders which surround every page. On the outer and lower margins these borders are as a rule about an inch broad, sometimes more, so that they can hold four or five little pictures of about an inch by an inch and a half on the outer margin, and one rather larger one at the foot of the page. The variety of the pictures designed to fill these s.p.a.ces is almost endless. Figures of the Saints and their emblems and ill.u.s.trations of the games or occupations suited to each month fill the margins of the Calendar. To surround the text of the book there is a long series of pictures of incidents in the life of Christ, with parallel scenes from the Old Testament, scenes from the lives of Joseph and Job, representations of the Virtues, the Deadly Sins being overcome by the contrary graces, the Dance of Death, and for pleasant relief woodland and pastoral scenes and even grotesques. The popularity of these prayer-books was enormous, new editions being printed almost every month, with the result that the ill.u.s.trations were soon worn out and had frequently to be replaced. I have often wished, if only for the sake of small children in sermon time, that our English prayer-books could be similarly ill.u.s.trated. An attempt to do this was made in the middle of the last century, but it was pretentious and unsuccessful. The great difficulty in the way of a new essay lies in the popularity of very small prayer-books, with so little margin and printed on such thin paper as hardly to admit of border cuts. The difficulty is real, but should not be insuperable, and I hope that some bold ill.u.s.trator may soon try his hand afresh.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, GIUNTA, 1490.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM A FRENCH BOOK OF HOURS. PARIS, KERVER, 1498.]

I should not be candid if I closed this paper without admitting that my fifteenth-century friends antic.i.p.ated modern publishers in one of their worst faults, the dragging in ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trators whose designs require to be produced by the half-tone process. To condemn this process unreservedly would be absurd. It gives us ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.tration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. HOUSMAN'S "A FARM IN FAIRYLAND."

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. KEGAN PAUL.]

ENGLISH BOOK-ILl.u.s.tRATION OF TO-DAY.

I. SOME DECORATIVE ILl.u.s.tRATORS.

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 ill.u.s.trators 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,' 'j.a.pan,' 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-ill.u.s.tration. 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 ill.u.s.trative art, and whatever form decorative ill.u.s.tration may a.s.sume, 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.

To Rossetti the ill.u.s.tration of literature meant giving beautiful form to the expression of delight, of penetration, that had kindled his imagination as he read. He ill.u.s.trated the 'Palace of Art' in the spirit that stirred him to rhythmic translation into words of the still music in Giorgione's 'Pastoral,' or of the unpa.s.sing movement of Mantegna's 'Parna.s.sus.' Not the words of the text, nor those things precisely affirmed by the writer, but the spell of significance and of beauty that held his mind to the exclusion of other images, gave him inspiration for his drawings. As Mr. William Michael Rossetti says: 'He drew just what he chose, taking from his author's text nothing more than a hint and an opportunity.' It is said, indeed, that Tennyson could never see what the St. Cecily drawing had to do with his poem.

And that is strange enough to be true.

It is clear that such an ideal of ill.u.s.tration is for the attainment of a few only. The ordinary ill.u.s.trator, making drawings for cheap reproduction in the ordinary book, can no more work in this mood than the journalist can model his style on the prose of Milton. But journalism is not literature, and pictured matter-of-fact is not ill.u.s.tration, though it is convenient and customary to call it so.

However, here one need not consider this, for the decorative ill.u.s.trator has usually literature to ill.u.s.trate, and a commission to be beautiful and imaginative in his work. He has the opportunity of Rossetti, the opportunity for significant art.

The 'Cla.s.sics' and children's books give greatest opportunity to decorative ill.u.s.trators. Those who have ill.u.s.trated children's books chiefly, or whose best work has been for the playful cla.s.sics of literature, it is convenient to consider in a separate chapter, though there are instances where the division is not maintainable: Walter Crane, for example, whose influence on a school of decorative design makes his position at the head of his following imperative.

Representing the 'architectural' sense in the decoration of books, many years before the supreme achievements of William Morris added that ideal to generally recognized motives of book-decoration, Walter Crane is the precursor of a large and prolific school of decorative ill.u.s.trators. Many factors, as he himself tells, have gone to the shaping of his art. Born in 1846 at Liverpool, he came to London in 1857, and there after two years was 'apprenticed' to Mr. W. J. Linton, the well-known wood-engraver. His work began with 'the sixties,' in contact with the enthusiasm and inspiration those years brought into English art. The ill.u.s.trated 'Tennyson,' and Ruskin's 'Elements of Drawing,' were in his thoughts before he entered Mr. Linton's workshop, and the 'Once a Week' school had a strong influence on his early contributions to 'Good Words,' 'Once a Week,' and other famous magazines. In 1865 Messrs. Warne published the first toy-book, and by 1869-70 the 'Walter Crane Toy-book' was a fact in art. The sight of some j.a.panese colour-prints during these years suggested a finer decorative quality to be obtained with tint and outline, and in the use of black, as well as in a more delicate simplicity of colour, the later toy-books show the first effect of j.a.panese art on the decorative art of England. Italian art in England and Italy, the prints of Durer, the Parthenon sculptures, these were influences that affected him strongly.

'The Baby's Opera' (1877) and 'The Baby's Bouquet' (1879) are cla.s.sics almost impossible to criticise, cla.s.sics familiar from cover to cover before one was aware of any art but the art on their pages. So that if these delightful designs seem less expressive of the Greece, Germany, and Italy of the supreme artists than of the 'Crane' countries by whose coasts ships 'from over the sea' go sailing by with strange cargoes and strange crews, it is not in their dispraise. As a decorative draughtsman Mr. Crane is at his best when the use of colour gives clearness to the composition, but some of his most 'serious' work is in the black-and-white pages of 'The Sirens Three,' of 'The Shepheardes Calendar,' and especially of 'The Faerie Queene.' The number of books he has ill.u.s.trated--upwards of seventy--makes a detailed account impossible. Nursery rhyme and fairy books, children's stories, Spenser, Shakespeare, the myths of Greece, 'pageant books' such as 'Flora's Feast' or 'Queen Summer,' or the just published 'Masque of Days,' his own writings, serious or gay, have given him subjects, as the great art of all times has touched the ideals of his art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. WALTER CRANE'S 'GRIMM'S HOUSEHOLD STORIES.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. MACMILLAN.]

But whatever the subject, how strong soever his artistic admirations, he is always Walter Crane, unmistakable at a glance. Knights and ladies, fairies and fairy people, allegorical figures, nursery and school-room children, fulfil his decorative purpose without swerving, though not always without injury to their comfort and freedom and the life in their limbs. An individual apprehension that sees every situation as a conventional 'arrangement' is occasionally beside the mark in rendering real life. But when his theme touches imagination, and is not a supreme expression of it--for then, as in the ill.u.s.trations to 'The Faerie Queene,' an unusual sense of subservience appears to dull his spirit--his humorous fancy knows no weariness nor sameness of device.

The work of most of Mr. Crane's followers belongs to 'the nineties,'

when the 'Arts and Crafts' movement, the 'Century Guild,' the Birmingham and other schools had attracted or produced artists working according to the canons of Kelmscott. Mr. Heywood Sumner was earlier in the field. The drawings to 'Sintram' (1883) and to 'Undine' (1888) show his art as an ill.u.s.trator. Undine--spirit of wind and water, flower-like in gladness--seeking to win an immortal soul by submission to the forms of life, is realized in the gracefully designed figures of frontispiece and t.i.tle-page. Where Mr. Sumner ill.u.s.trates incident he is 'factual' without being matter-of-fact. The small drawing reproduced is hardly representative of his art, but most of his work is adapted to a squarer page than this, and has had to be rejected on that account. Some of the most apt decorations in 'The English Ill.u.s.trated'

were by Mr. Sumner, and during the time when art was represented in the magazine Mr. Ryland and Mr. Louis Davis were also frequent contributors. The graceful figures of Mr. Ryland, uninterested in activity, a garden-world set with statues around them, and the carol-like grace of Mr. Davis's designs in that magazine, represent them better than the one or two books they have ill.u.s.trated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. HEYWOOD SUMNER'S 'UNDINE.'