Picture Books and Others

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

I.

THERE is, we are told, among certain humble pictorial journals, a habit of buying up old woodcuts which have earned their discharge, but are still capable, like an exhausted soil, of being turned to some account. The humble editor has an eye for tillable material which may be farmed out in small lots, and in due time, irrigated by the humble author’s modest will of text, may really bear some sort of second crop. The illustrator illustrated, — “here ’s fine revolution.” The situation is quite bald, at least ; the writer knows perfectly what he is doing.

An illustrative text assumes a better sort of dignity when it is the work of a draughtsman whose pictures have attained celebrity enough to deserve the gloss of a running commentary. Mr. Harry Furniss¹ has just done himself this office, amusingly, though with extreme diffuseness. Whatever there is dubious in the autobiographer’s business is here got rid of by the simplest means. The minutest Furnissiana are of absorbing interest to the chronicler, and are offered us with the frankest expectation of our sympathy. The demand is perhaps excessive ; we could spare the record of certain minor conversational facetiæ, or of occasional fatuities into which the absolutism of the platform has betrayed him. (Instance the speech before a gathering of American women, pp. 112—114.) Fortunately, the book yields much freshness of another sort ; notably in its side illumination of many of the great English public figures of the past half century, — Disraeli, Parnell, Bright, Bradlaugh, Gladstone, and the rest.

But in the field of professed illustration, particularly in the illustration of fiction, a more equivocal relation between author and artist has grown common of late. We in America are especially inclined to pride ourselves upon the progress we have made in the art of illustrating during the past half century. For one thing, the mechanical facilities have increased remarkably. A dozen cheap processes have supplanted the laborious and expensive steel engraving, which was no longer ago than fifty years the most valued type of illustration ; and the artist’s higher technical skill has led to the perfection of wood engraving, then a far second. No doubt the general taste has grown more exacting ; certainly good drawing is now demanded of all comers, unless indeed of the confessed postermonger, whose canons are plainly apocalyptical. Things are done now in the daily press which would have been the despair, technically, of the American magazine illustrator a generation back. It is a great thing to have outgrown the pictorial absurdities of the Godey’s Lady’s Book phase. We are right in preferring the De Monvel child (to cite a somewhat conventionalized type) to those prim young Rollos with the property hoops and oranges, or the Gibson girl to those wasp-waisted young females of the hectic cheek and corkscrew ringlet whom our grandmothers admired. But our own situation has its dangers ; for, unfortunately, the tendency which made itself felt some time ago in magazine work is carrying over into stiff-covered literature. The draughtsman is assuming such importance in his own eyes and in the eyes of the public that we are in some danger of forgetting or of complaisantly waiving the principle of subordinating the picture to the text, the trimmings to the actual substance. Obviously, a drawing may be good in itself without really illustrating the text ; as, to take more general grounds, the bulk and prominence of the illustrative matter may distract our attention from the legitimate business in hand. Doubtless the illustrator’s highest exploit would be by a sort of divination to come at the living meaning of the author, and by appealing to the eye to strengthen materially the effect of the text. He cannot be expected to invent a new manner for every subject, but he can in some sense subject his personality, or at least curb his mannerisms, for the sake of the text, — which he would hardly deny to be, like the contents of Lumpkin’s letter, the cream of the correspondence. Yet indifference to this apparently simple relation has already done much toward the cheapening of the illustrator’s art, the multiplication of mere picture books, and the growing popular distaste for pure text.

For, unluckily, illustrating, like the stage, has not only its heroes, but its matinée heroes, who are valued for the pretty things they do out of their own heads rather than for their fidelity to the lines and skill in the interpretation of character. In Mr. Howells’s latest volume,² for example, we are continually coming upon the familiar and adored Christy girl under various aliases. Occasionally she is dressed for the part, but not always ; so confident is her creator that, like a Maude Adams, she will win applause because she is so fetching, and may act or not, as she likes. Here, complacent, fresh from the Horse Show, and without removing her hat, she essays the rôle of Sophia Primrose by dint of loosing a curl over one shoulder. She is then “ in character ; ” and we are not to murmur if she fails to shift the horse-showish good breeding of her features in favor of the “soft, modest, and alluring ” femininity with which Goldsmith fondly endows his Sophia. The curl keeps its post in Nancy Sykes, is multiplied for Effie Deans (otherwise these two are much alike in make-up), and finally discarded — or retrenched — in the society part of Gwendolen Harleth, a surprisingly smart girl of the present, rather fast, and utterly unsuggestive of the “Lamia beauty ” which the spectators, according to the author, are supposed to be noticing in her at the moment.

The problem of new illustrations for old books is a difficult one, often a painful one when they come to supplant or to supplement work which we have grown to think of almost as a part of the text. Dickens might have had better illustrators than Cruikshank, but we hardly feel the need of new experiments now ; and Thackeray, badly as he often drew, did all that we really care to have done for his people. The new edition of Alice in Wonderland, with Mr. Newell’s pictures,³ is rather distressing to the age-long lover of Tenniel’s dainty Alice. We are not ready to exchange that sweet and dignified maiden for this little pig-tailed idiot ; it must be confessed, the thing strikes us as pretty near a sacrilege. We are inclined, after glancing at the pictures and laughing at them, to put the book away on a high shelf, among other books not to be perused by the young person. This would not be accusing the artist of a deliberate error ; there are really some people who take Alice in Wonderland as a joke. But we cannot help feeling a little nervous about other favorites. What if Mr. Newell (or his publisher) should, in his castings-about, light upon Pilgrim’s Progress, say? How could one tremble for a saucer-eyed Christian or at a bow-legged Apollyon ?

Apart from the question of interpretation, there is a certain difficulty in the employment of modern methods to fit old books. There is something just a little incongruous, for instance, in a wash drawing of Fanny Burney’s Evelina. Whether it is worth while to suggest deliberately the rougher methods of other periods, as Mr. Howard Pyle has sometimes done, is an open question. That something short of this may give the desired sense of fitness is attested by such work as Hugh Thomson’s, — modern in its delicacy, yet undeniably smacking of the eighteenth century.

But our illustrators are, as a rule, not only cavalier in their attitude toward such general considerations of interpretation and atmosphere ; they do not hesitate to ignore the specifications of the text. The author is particular in stipulating a certain costume, or grouping, or background, or gesture, and the artist blandly furnishes another. In Heroines of Fiction, one is sorry to notice that the inoffensive George Sampson has been ousted from the supper table of the Wilfers, and that Becky Sharp has been removed from her prescribed sofa and Lord Steyne given a chair, perhaps in charity to poor Rawdon, who enters at that famous moment. These are small matters ; but as they interested the author, why not stick to his version of them ?

II.

One book of the day, at least, we may be sure that future illustrators will have little excuse for dealing with. The pictures in Kim ⁴ are as fitting as they are odd, and that is saying a good deal. One would hardly have supposed that a not very numerous series of basreliefs reduced to the flat could have greatly illumined a story abounding in color and action. Yet the thing has been done. Not only the statuesque dignity of the Lama, but the fire and mischief of the gamin Kim, and even something of the spectacular richness of the wayside Orient, has been suggested ; and that without doing violence to the chosen medium. Indeed, one hardly knows how, between this implicitness of simple form and that farthest remove of explicitness which might be attained by some gorgeous panoramic canvas, so good an impression of those persons and scenes could have been gained. For pen-and-ink drawing is, after all, only a sort of go-between, a makeshift, though a noble one, dimly adumbrating the positive virtues of form and color.

So one guesses, until a renewal of contact with such work as Mr. Joseph Pennell’s gives him pause and the layman’s opportunity to guess again ; for here is a pen which manages to render subtly the effects of both form and color. The new edition of Italian Journeys ⁵ might well be bought, with no belittling of the text, for the sake of Mr. Pennell’s drawings alone ; and they may, in fact, stand alone, for they have no direct bearing upon the book as narrative. The sea gate at Pompeii is not submitted to the impertinence of a recognizable young American author in the foreground. Of certain whimsical experiences of Mr. Howells at Herculaneum or on the road to Grossetto nothing is made ; nor is the least advantage taken of such picturesque material — fair game for a Christy — as the stalwart and immaculate market woman of Trieste or the pretty muletress at Capri. The human figure in Mr. Pennell’s drawings, which deal with light and bulk and distance, is nothing more than a decorative suggestion here and there. Nevertheless, these pictures are interesting not only in themselves, but as illustrations ; for the book is frankly a series of impressions of places rather than a study of human types or a narrative of personal adventures. Books of travel and description offer themselves too readily, perhaps, to illustration. We have had a surfeit of foreign photographs and “ views ” of all sorts ; indeed, with the Duomo or the Campanile, Chillon or St. Mark’s, eyeing us from every inward-bound post card, there is not much to be done in a small way by the picture-book maker. One excellent example of self-denial was set not long ago by the Blashfields in their Italian Cities,⁶ the admirable text of which is unbroken, if unadorned, by illustration of any sort.

No such denial could have been required of their latest book,⁷ though the uneven merit of the dramatic sketches it contains may make one a little doubtful of the propriety of so elaborate a setting. But books are not always to be judged absolutely, and that we can seldom safely so judge a new book ought to make us willing to cast into the balance in its favor such advantages of typography and ornamentation as large paper, the De Vinne presswork, and the pictures of Mr. Blashfield have here furnished. The first of the four numbers is a modern farce, of a common and not very pleasing type. It is based upon the vulgar implication, still popular on the stage and in the columns of a certain type of unspeakable “society ” journal, that a woman may be “compromised ” by this or that momentary accident of situation. The reputable world — our Anglo-Saxon world, at least — is, one must believe, pretty well done with this sort of shoddy code, and inclined to resign it to the uses of the dubious half-world which may still find some meaning, or mockery of meaning, in it. The second sketch is a good dramatization of Stevenson’s The Sire of Malétroit’s Door, and the third is a pleasant, Frenchy little comedy. But the fourth, In Cleon’s Garden, is of a much rarer sort, a dramatic prose idyl, as much more delicate in flavor and genuine in characterization than its companion pieces as its action is farther removed from us in point of time.

III.

A lifelong leader of minority, Mr. Howells is still a great name among us; yet it is hard not to feel that in leaving fiction, of late years, to devote himself mainly to what may be agreeably called the higher journalism, he has deprived his special audience of what he is best fitted to give them. Nothing that he now writes is without charm, but much of it is without compactness or definition. The canons of his literary faith were long ago known to us ; his expression of that faith has been, not changed, but rarefied, by iteration ; and though we are not able to be impatient of it, we are not altogether able, either, to be edified by it. It would be unprofitable to urge serious charges of diffuseness and padding against a series of papers which were originally prepared for Harper’s Bazar. Nor can one who knows his Howells take new exception to the main critical contentions of Heroines of Fiction. Here once more are the allusions to the “echoing verbiage ” of Scott’s more popular romances, the “strictly melodramatic gift ” of Dickens, the “dawdling” and “sentimentality ” of Thackeray.

The omissions are what surprise us ; and we hardly know how to take the critic’s offhand disclaimer of responsibility for some of them. “I confess,” he says, “that I never read a novel of Blackmore’s or a novel of Stevenson’s, or more than one novel of Mr. George Meredith’s ; and though I might qualify myself to speak of their heroines by taking a course of their fiction, I am afraid that my appreciation would have a perfunctory look, out of keeping with the prevailing character of these studies. I might learn what those ladies were like, but I should have no associations with them from the past, no remembered passion ; and if it is not now too late for me to form a passion for a new heroine, it would not be, perhaps, becoming.” There is no quarreling with this position ; the personal point of view once admitted can hardly be assailed. But one cannot help wishing that this gallery of cherished loveliness might have contained (in place, say, of certain heroines of Mrs. Radcliffe, Baroness Tautphœus, and J. W. De Forest, all of whom must have gained upon Mr. Howells by early propinquity) the fair Lorna ; that wonderful unfinished sketch of Stevenson’s last, and in truth sole heroine ; and the brilliant, hapless Diana, with whom, in virtue of her need, so good a lover as Mr. Howells might surely have allowed himself some relation of grandfatherly tenderness.

There could be little profit in a set comparison between these informal sketches in criticism and the carefully considered essays of Mr. Brownell.⁸ But the two books are not so different in method, after all, as in point of view and in results. A single instance will suggest what these differences amount to. Mr. Howells says of Thackeray : “He put on a fine literary air of being above his business ; he talked of fiction as fable-land, when he ought to have known it and proclaimed it the very home of truth, where alone we can see through all these disguises ; he formed the vicious habit of spoiling the illusion, or clouding the clear air of his art, by the intrusion of his own personality ; and in fine he showed himself, in spite of his high instincts, a survival of the romanticistic period whose traces in others (especially Bulwer and Disraeli) he knew how so deliciously to burlesque.” So speaks Mr. Howells’s sincerity ; but we perceive that it is the sincerity of partisanship when the same theme comes to be touched by a critic unbiased by practice : “ ‘ The bust outlasts the throne, the coin Tiberius ; ’ but the subject of the novel being rather Tiberius and the throne than busts and coins, it is not modeling and chasing as such and for their own sweet sake that endue it with enduring vitality, but qualities more significant and more profound. And these qualities depend upon the artist’s personality, and are inseparable from it. They are essentially human in distinction from purely intellectual or sensuous qualities. They are qualities without which purely intellectual or sensuous qualities produce a result that is often sterile and always incomplete. . . . Why is there such a sense of life in The Newcomes, compared with Turgenieff’s Virgin Soil, that the story of the latter seems to vibrate idly in vacuo ? Because Thackeray enwraps and embroiders his story with his personal philosophy ; charges it with his personal feeling ; draws out, with inexhaustible perseverance and zest, its typical suggestiveness ; and deals with his material directly instead of dispassionately and disinterestedly, after the manner of the Russian master. . . . The question is, after all, mainly one of technic. When Thackeray is reproached with ' bad art ’ for intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a different technic. And each man’s technic is his own, and that of a master may be accepted as possessing some inner principle of propriety which any suggested improvement would compromise. ”

To personality, or temperament, as in the later papers he prefers to say, Mr. Brownell is continually recurring as the prime essential of creative art. George Eliot’s later work was inferior because her temperament had become subject to intellect ; and Meredith owes his limitations and his small following, not to eccentricity of manner, but to absolute lack of temperament. “He has, if one chooses, the temperament of the dilettante. But the characteristic of the dilettante is really absence of temperament.” The essay on Meredith is, as a whole, the most striking of these studies ; and it is a fact of some interest, with Mr. Howells’s confession in mind, that Mr. Brownell should have owned to reading much of Meredith for the first time with a view to this paper.

The volume itself is a delight to the eye, though it is altogether unembellished ; indeed, any sort of pictorial garnishing of so staid a meal as is here set for us would be an impertinence. At the same time the service is excellent ; paper, type, and binding are all that they should be for such a book. There is much still to be said for the pictureless book. One is not sure even that Mr. Brownell’s French Art⁹ in its sumptuous later form, with its elaborate illustrations, is greatly more effective as criticism than in the original unadorned octavo. Or perhaps it would be more fairly said that the primary effect of such a book may best be had in its pure text form. Afterward it may receive some increment of value from the use of illustrative matter. So Mr. Pennell’s drawings have best served the Italian Journeys ; and so, possibly, the Italian Cities of Mr. and Mrs. Blashfield, a more distinctly critical work, may gain later from that appeal to the eye which it has rightly denied itself as in the first instance adventitious and even a little compromising.

H. W. Boynton.