The Library, Andrew Lang [online e book reading txt] 📗

the Looking-Glass,” to the always correctly-drawn but sometimes stiffly-conceived cartoons. What, for example, could be more delightful than the picture, in “Alice in Wonderland,” of the “Mad Tea Party?” Observe the hopelessly distraught expression of the March hare, and the eager incoherence of the hatter! A little further on the pair are trying to squeeze the dormouse into the teapot; and a few pages back the blue caterpillar is discovered smoking his hookah on the top of a mushroom. He was exactly three inches long, says the veracious chronicle, but what a dignity!—what an oriental flexibility of gesture! Speaking of animals, it must not be forgotten that Tenniel is a master in this line. His “British Lion,” in particular, is a most imposing quadruped, and so often in request that it is not necessary to go back to the famous cartoons on the Indian mutiny to seek for examples of that magnificent presence. As a specimen of the artist’s treatment of the lesser felidae, the reader’s attention is invited to this charming little kitten from “Through the Looking-Glass.”

 

Mr. Tenniel is a link between Leech and the younger school of “Punch” artists, of whom Mr. George du Maurier, Mr. Linley Sambourne, and Mr. Charles Keene are the most illustrious. The first is nearly as popular as Leech, and is certainly a greater favourite with cultivated audiences. He is not so much a humorist as a satirist of the Thackeray type,—unsparing in his denunciation of shams, affectations, and flimsy pretences of all kinds. A master of composition and accomplished draughtsman, he excels in the delineation of “society”—its bishops, its “professional beauties”

and “aesthetes,” its nouveaux riches, its distinguished foreigners,-

-while now and then (but not too often) he lets us know that if he chose he could be equally happy in depicting the lowest classes.

There was a bar-room scene not long ago in “Punch” which gave the clearest evidence of this. Some of those for whom no good thing is good enough complain, it is said, that he lacks variety—that he is too constant to one type of feminine beauty. But any one who will be at the pains to study a group of conventional “society” faces from any of his “At Homes” or “Musical Parties” will speedily discover that they are really very subtly diversified and contrasted. For a case in point, take the decorously sympathetic group round the sensitive German musician, who is “veeping” over one of his own compositions. Or follow the titter running round that amused assembly to whom the tenor warbler is singing “Me-e-e-et me once again,” with such passionate emphasis that the domestic cat mistakes it for a well-known area cry. As for his ladies, it may perhaps be conceded that his type is a little persistent. Still it is a type so refined, so graceful, so attractive altogether, that in the jarring of less well-favoured realities it is an advantage to have it always before our eyes as a standard to which we can appeal.

Mr. du Maurier is a fertile book-illustrator, whose hand is frequently seen in the “Cornhill,” and elsewhere. Some of his best work of this kind is in Douglas Jerrold’s “Story of a Feather,” in Thackeray’s “Ballads,” and the large edition of the “Ingoldsby Legends,” to which Leech, Tenniel, and Cruikshank also contributed.

One of his prettiest compositions is the group here reproduced from “Punch’s Almanack” for 1877. The talent of his colleague, Mr.

Linley Sambourne, may fairly be styled unique. It is difficult to compare it with anything in its way, except some of the happier efforts of the late Mr. Charles Bennett, to which, nevertheless, it is greatly superior in execution. To this clever artist’s invention everything seems to present itself with a train of fantastic accessory so whimsically inexhaustible that it almost overpowers one with its prodigality. Each fresh examination of his designs discloses something overlooked or unexpected. Let the reader study for a moment the famous “Birds of a Feather” of 1875, or that ingenious skit of 1877 upon the rival Grosvenor Gallery and Academy, in which the late President of the latter is shown as the proudest of peacocks, the eyes of whose tail are portraits of Royal Academicians, and whose body-feathers are paint brushes and shillings of admission. Mr. Sambourne is excellent, too, at adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than happy parodies of Herrman’s “A Bout d’Arguments,” and “Une Bonne Histoire.” His book-illustrations have been comparatively few, those to Burnand’s laughable burlesque of “Sandford and Merton”

being among the best. Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” a subject which might almost be supposed to have been created for his pencil. There are indications, it may be added, that Mr. Sambourne’s talents are by no means limited to the domain in which for the present he chooses to exercise them, and it is not impossible that he may hereafter take high rank as a cartoonist. Mr. Charles Keene, a selection from whose sketches has recently been issued under the title of “Our People,” is unrivalled in certain bourgeois, military, and provincial types. No one can draw a volunteer, a monthly nurse, a Scotchman, an “ancient mariner” of the watering-place species, with such absolutely humorous verisimilitude. Personages, too, in whose eyes—to use Mr. Swiveller’s euphemism—“the sun has shone too strongly,” find in Mr. Keene a merciless satirist of their “pleasant vices.” Like Leech, he has also a remarkable power of indicating a landscape background with the fewest possible touches. His book-illustrations have been .mainly confined to magazines and novels.

Those in “Once a Week” to a “Good Fight,” the tale subsequently elaborated by Charles Reade into the “Cloister and the Hearth,”

present some good specimens of his earlier work. One of these, in which the dwarf of the story is seen climbing up a wall with a lantern at his back, will probably be remembered by many.

 

After the “Punch” school there are other lesser luminaries. Mr. W.

S. Gilbert’s drawings to his own inimitable “Bab Ballads” have a perverse drollery which is quite in keeping with that erratic text.

Mr. F. Barnard, whose exceptional talents have not been sufficiently recognised, is a master of certain phases of strongly marked character, and, like Mr. Charles Green, has contributed some excellent sketches to the “Household Edition” of Dickens. Mr.

Sullivan of “Fun,” whose grotesque studies of the “British Tradesman” and “Workman” have recently been republished, has abounding vis comica, but he has hitherto done little in the way of illustrating books. For minute pictorial stocktaking and photographic retention of detail, Mr. Sullivan’s artistic memory may almost be compared to the wonderful literary memory of Mr. Sala.

Mr. John Proctor, who some years ago (in “Will o’ the Wisp”) seemed likely to rival Tenniel as a cartoonist, has not been very active in this way; while Mr. Matthew Morgan, the clever artist of the “Tomahawk,” has transferred his services to the United States. Of Mr. Bowcher of “Judy,” and various other professedly humorous designers, space permits no further mention.

 

There remains, however, one popular branch of book-illustration, which has attracted the talents of some of the most skilful and original of modern draughtsmen, i.e. the embellishment of children’s books. From the days when Mulready drew the old “Butterfly’s Ball”

and “Peacock at Home” of our youth, to those of the delightfully Blake-like fancies of E. V. B., whose “Child’s Play” has recently been republished for the delectation of a new generation of admirers, this has always been a popular and profitable employment; but of late years it has been raised to the level of a fine art.

Mr. H. S. Marks, Mr. J. D. Watson, Mr. Walter Crane, have produced specimens of nursery literature which, for refinement of colouring and beauty of ornament, cannot easily be surpassed. The equipments of the last named, especially, are of a very high order. He began as a landscapist on wood; he now chiefly devotes himself to the figure; and he seems to have the decorative art at his fingers’ ends as a natural gift. Such work as “King Luckieboy’s Party” was a revelation in the way of toy books, while the “Baby’s Opera” and “Baby’s Bouquet” are petits chefs d’oeuvre, of which the sagacious collector will do well to secure copies, not for his nursery, but his library. Nor can his “Mrs. Mundi at Home” be neglected by the curious in quaint and graceful invention. {14} Another book—the “Under the Window” of Miss Kate Greenaway—comes within the same category. Since Stothard, no one has given us such a clear-eyed, soft-faced, happy-hearted childhood; or so poetically “apprehended”

the coy reticences, the simplicities, and the small solemnities of little people. Added to this, the old-world costume in which she usually elects to clothe her characters, lends an arch piquancy of contrast to their innocent rites and ceremonies. Her taste in tinting, too, is very sweet and spring-like; and there is a fresh, pure fragrance about all her pictures as of new-gathered nosegays; or, perhaps, looking to the fashions that she favours, it would be better to say “bow-pots.” But the latest “good genius” of this branch of book-illustrating is Mr. Randolph Caldecott, a designer assuredly of the very first order. There is a spontaneity of fun, an unforced invention about everything he does, that is infinitely entertaining. Other artists draw to amuse us; Mr. Caldecott seems to draw to amuse himself,—and this is his charm. One feels that he must have chuckled inwardly as he puffed the cheeks of his “Jovial Huntsmen;” or sketched that inimitably complacent dog in the “House that Jack Built;” or exhibited the exploits of the immortal “train-band captain” of “famous London town.” This last is his masterpiece. Cowper himself must have rejoiced at it,—and Lady Austen. There are two sketches in this book—they occupy the concluding pages—which are especially fascinating. On one, John Gilpin, in a forlorn and flaccid condition, is helped into the house by the sympathising (and very attractive) Betty; on the other he has donned his slippers, refreshed his inner man with a cordial, and over the heaving shoulder of his “spouse,” who lies dissolved upon his martial bosom, he is taking the spectators into his confidence with a wink worthy of the late Mr. Buckstone. Nothing more genuine, more heartily laughable, than this set of designs has appeared in our day. And Mr. Caldecott has few limitations. Not only does he draw human nature admirably, but he draws animals and landscapes equally well, so one may praise him without reserve. Though not children’s books, mention should here be made of his “Bracebridge Hall,” and “Old Christmas,” the illustrations to which are the nearest approach to that beau-ideal, perfect sympathy between the artist and the author, with which the writer is acquainted. The cut on page 173 is from the former of these works.

 

Many of the books above mentioned are printed in colours by various processes, and they are not always engraved on wood. But—to close the account of modern wood-engraving—some brief reference must be made to what is styled the “new American School,” as exhibited for the most part in “Scribner’s” and other Transatlantic magazines.

Authorities, it is reported, shake their heads over these performances. “C’est magnifique, mais ce nest pas la gravure,” they whisper. Into the matter in dispute, it is perhaps presumptuous for an “atechnic” to adventure himself. But to the outsider it would certainly seem as if the chief ground of complaint is that the new comers do not play the game according to the old rules, and that this (alleged) irregular mode of procedure tends to lessen the status of the engraver as an artist. False or true, this, it may fairly be advanced, has nothing whatever to do with the matter, as far, at least, as the public are concerned. For them the question is, simply and solely—What is the result obtained? The new school,