Читать книгу English Illustration 'The Sixties': 1855-70 - Gleeson White - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Once a Week.—On the second of July 1859 appeared the first number of Once a Week, 'an illustrated miscellany of Literature, Art, Science, and Popular Information.' Despite the choice of an extraordinary time of year, as we should now consider it, to float a new venture, the result proved fortunate. Not merely does the first series of this notable magazine deserve recognition as the pioneer of its class; its superiority is no less provable than its priority. The earliest attempt to provide a magazine with original illustrations by the chief artists of its time was not merely a bold and well-considered experiment but, as the thirteen volumes of its first series show, an instant and admirably sustained triumph. No other thirteen volumes of an English magazine, at any period, contain so much first-class work. The invention and knowledge, the mastery of the methods employed, and the superb achievements of some of its contributors entitle it to be ranked as one of the few artistic enterprises of which England may be justly proud.

When the connection of Dickens with his old publishers was severed, and All the Year Round issued from its own office, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans projected a rival paper that was in no sense an imitation of the former. The reasons for its success lie on the surface. Started by the proprietors of Punch, with the co-operation of an artistic staff that has been singularly fortunate in enlisting always the services of the best men of their day, it is obvious that few periodicals have ever been launched under happier auspices. Its aim was obviously to do for fiction, light literature, and belles-lettres, what Punch had accomplished so admirably for satire and caricature. At that time, with no rivals worth consideration, a fixed intention to obtain for a new magazine the active co-operation of the best men of all schools was within the bounds of possibility. To-day a millionaire with a blank cheque-book could not even hope to succeed in such a project. He would find many first-rate artists, whom no amount of money would attract, and others with connections that would be imperilled if they contributed to a rival enterprise. There are many who prefer the safety of an established periodical to the risk which must needs attend any 'up-to-date' venture. Now Once a Week was not merely 'up-to-date' in its period, but far ahead of the popular taste. As we cannot rival it to-day in its own line, even the most ardent defender of the present at the expense of the past must own that the improvement in process-engraving and the increased truth of facsimile reproductions it offers have not inspired draughtsmen to higher efforts. Why so excellent a magazine is not flourishing to-day is a mystery. It would seem as if the public, faithful as they are to non-illustrated periodicals, are fickle where pictures are concerned. But the memory of the third series of Once a Week relieves the public of the responsibility; changes in the direction and aim of the periodical were made, and all for the worse; so that it lost its high position and no more interested the artist. Punch, its sponsor, seems to have the secret of eternal youth, possibly because its original programme is still consistently maintained.

In another feature it resembled Punch more than any previous periodical. In The London Charivari many of the pictures have always been inserted quite independently of the text. Some have a title, and some a brief scrap of dialogue to explain their story; but the picture is not there to elucidate the anecdote, so much as the title, or fragment of conversation, helps to elucidate the picture. Unless an engraving be from a painting, or a topographical view, the rule in English magazines then, as now, is that it must illustrate the text. This is not the place to record an appreciation of the thorough and consistent way in which the older illustrators set about the work of reiterating the obvious incident, depicting for all eyes to see what the author had suggested in his text already, for it is evident that a design untrammelled by any fixed programme ought to allow the artist more play for his fancy. Nevertheless, the less frequent illustrations to its serial fiction are well up to the level of those practically independent of the text. In Once a Week there are dozens of pictures which are evidently purely the invention of the draughtsman. That a modest little poem, written to order usually, satisfies the conventions of established precedent, need not be taken as evidence that traverses the argument. Once a Week ranked its illustrators as important as its authors, which is clearly an ideal method for an illustrated periodical to observe. To write up to pictures has often been attempted; were not The Pickwick Papers begun in this way? But the author soon reversed the situation, and once more put the artist in a subordinate place. It is curious to observe that readers of light literature had been satisfied previously with a very conventional type of illustration. For, granting all sorts of qualities to those pictures by Cruikshank, 'Phiz,' and Thackeray, which illustrated the Dickens, Ainsworth, Lever, and Thackeray novels, you can hardly refer the source of their inspiration to nature, however remotely. Their purpose seems to have been caricature rather than character-drawing, sentimentality in place of sentiment, melodrama in lieu of mystery, broad farce instead of humour. These aims were accomplished in masterly fashion, perhaps; but is there a single illustration by Cruikshank, 'Phiz,' Thackeray, or even John Leech, which tempts us to linger and return again and again purely for its art? Its 'drawing' is often slipshod, and never infused by the perception of physical beauty that the Greeks embodied as their ideal, that ideal which the illustrators of Once a Week, especially Walker, revived soon after this date. Nor are they inspired by the symbolists' regard for nature, which attracted the 'primitives' of the Middle Ages, and their legitimate followers the pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, as you study the so-called 'immortal' designs which illustrate the early Victorian novels, you feel that if many of the artists were once considered to be as great as the authors whose ideas they interpreted, time has wreaked revenge at last. If a boy happens to read for the first time Thackeray's Vanity Fair with its original illustrations, the humour and pathos of the masterpiece lose half their power when the ridiculously feeble drawings confront him throughout the book. This is not the case with Millais' illustrations to Trollope, or those by Fred Walker to Thackeray. The costume may appear grotesque, but the men and women are vital, and as real in the picture as in the literature.

Lacking the virility of Hogarth, or the coarse animal vigour of Rowlandson, these caricaturists kept one eye on the fashion-book and one on the grotesque. It was 'cumeelfo' to depict the English maiden a colourless vapid nonentity, to make the villain look villainous, and the benevolent middle-aged person imbecile. Accidental deformities and vulgar personal defects were deemed worthy themes for laughter. The fat boy in Pickwick, the fat Joe Sedley in Vanity Fair, the Marchioness and Dick Swiveller, the Quilps' Tea-Party, and the rest, all belong to the order of humour that survives to-day in the 'knockabout artists,' or the 'sketch' performances at second-rate music-halls. Even the much-belauded Fagin in the Condemned Cell appears a trite and ineffective bit of low melodrama to-day. We know the oft-repeated story of the artist's despondency, his failure to realise an attitude to express Fagin's despair, and how as he caught sight of his own face in the glass he saw that he himself, a draughtsman troubled by a subject, was the very model for one about to be hanged. All the personality of anecdote and the sentimental log-rolling which gathered round the pictures, that by chance were associated with a series of masterpieces in fiction, no longer fascinate us. We recognise the power of the writers, but wish in our hearts that they had never been 'illustrated,' or if so, that they had enjoyed the good fortune which belongs to the novelists of the sixties. But to refuse to endorse the verdict of earlier critics does not imply that there was no merit in these designs, but merely that their illustrators must be classed for the most part (Leech least of all) with the exaggerators—those who aimed at the grotesque—with Gilray or Baxter, the creator of Ally Sloper, and not with true satirists like Hogarth or Charles Keene, who worked in ways that are pre-eminently masterly, even if you disregard the humorous element in their designs.

Without forcing the theory too far, it may be admitted that the idea of Once a Week owes more to these serial novels than to any previous enterprise. Be that as it may, the plan of the magazine, as we find in a postscript (to vol. i.), was at once 'ratified by popular acceptance.' Further, its publishers admit that its circulation was adequate and its commercial success established, after only thirty-six numbers had appeared. It is no new thing for the early numbers of magazines and papers to contain glowing accounts of their phenomenal circulation; but, in this case, there can be no doubt that the self-congratulation is both well deserved and genuine. To Once a Week may be accorded the merit of initiating a new type of periodical which has survived with trifling changes until to-day. Its recognition of 'fiction' and 'pictures,' as the chief items in its programme, has been followed by a hundred others; but the editing, which made it readable as well as artistic, is a secret that many of its imitators failed to understand. Although A Good Fight (afterwards rewritten and entitled The Cloister and the Hearth) is the only novel within its pages that has since assumed classic rank, yet the average of its art—good as it was—is not as far above the standard of its literature, as the illustrations of its predecessors fell below the text they professed to adorn.

In sketching the life-history of other illustrated magazines it seemed best to follow a chronological order, because the progress of the art of illustration is reflected more or less faithfully in the advance and retrogression they show. But the thirteen volumes which complete the first series of Once a Week may be considered better in a different way. For to-day it is prized almost entirely for its pictures, and they were contributed for the most part by the same artists year after year. While in other periodicals you find, with every new volume, a fresh relay of artists, Once a Week, during its palmy days, was supported by the same brilliant group of draughtsmen, who admitted very few recruits, and only those whose great early promise was followed almost directly by ample fulfilment.

The very first illustration is a vignette by John Leech to a rhymed programme of the magazine by Shirley Brooks. But Leech, who died in 1864, cannot be regarded as a typical illustrator of 'the sixties'—not so much because his work extended only a few years into that decade, as that he belonged emphatically to the earlier school, and represented all that is not characteristic of the period with which this book is concerned.

It is unnecessary to belittle his art for the sake of glorifying those who succeeded him in popularity. That he obtained a strong hold upon English taste, lettered and unlettered, is undeniable. It has become part and parcel of that English life, especially of the insular middle-class, whose ideal permitted it to regard the exhibition building of 1851 not as a big conservatory, but as a new and better Parthenon, and to believe honestly enough that the millennium of universal peace with art, no less than morals, perfected to the 'nth' degree (on purely British lines), was dawning upon humanity. That the efforts of 1851 made much possible to-day which else had been impossible may be granted.

The grace and truth of John Leech's designs may be recognised despite their technical insufficiency, but at the same time we may own that, in common with Cruikshank and the rest, he has received infinitely more appreciation than his artistic achievement merited, and leave his share unconsidered here, although no doubt it was a big commercial factor in the success. To vol. i. of Once a Week he contributed no less than thirty-two designs, to vol. ii. forty-six, to vol. iii. seven, to vol. iv. one, and to vol. v. four.

John Tenniel, although he began to work much earlier, and is still an active contemporary, may be considered as belonging especially to the sixties, wherein he represents the survival of an academic type in sharply accentuated distinction to the pre-Raphaelism of one group or to the romantic naturalism of a still larger section. On page 4 of vol. i. we find his first drawing, a vignette, and page 5 a design, Audun and the White Bear, no less typically 'a Tenniel' in every particular than is the current cartoon in Punch. Those on pages 21, 30, 60, 90, 101, 103, and 170 are all relatively unimportant. The King of Thule (p. 250) is an illustration to Sir Theodore Martin's familiar translation of Goethe's poems. Others are on pp. 285, 435, 446. To vol. ii. he is a less frequent contributor. The designs, pp. 39, 98, 99, and 103 call for no comment. The one on p. 444 (not p. 404 as the index has it), to Tom Taylor's ballad Noménoë, is reprinted in Songs and Ballads of Brittany (Macmillan, 1865). In vol. iii. there is one (p. 52) of small value. On pp. 533, 561, 589, 617, 645, 673, and 701 are pictures to Shirley Brooks's The Silver Cord, showing the artist in his less familiar aspect as an illustrator of fiction. The one on p. 589 is irresistibly like a 'Wonderland' picture, while that on p. 225 (vol. iv.) suggests a Punch cartoon; but, on the whole, they are curiously free from undue mannerism in the types they depict. In vol. iv. are more illustrations to The Silver Cord (pp. 1, 29, 57, 85, 113, 141, 169, 197, 225, 253, 281, 309, 337, 365, 393, 421, 449, 477, 505, 533, 561, 589, 617, 645, 673, and 701), and illustrations to Owen Meredith's poem, Fair Rosamund (pp. 294, 295). In volume v. The Silver Cord is continued with ten more designs (pp. 1, 29, 57, 85, 113, 141, 169, 197, 225, 253), and there is one to Mark Bozzari (p. 659), translated from Müller by Sir Theodore Martin.

In volume vi. Tenniel appears but four times: At Crutchley Prior (p. 267), The Fairies (p. 379), a very delicate fancy, Prince Lulu (p. 490), and Made to Order (p. 575). From the seventh and eighth volumes he is absent, and reappears in the ninth with only one drawing, Clytè (p. 154), and in the tenth (Dec. 1863-June 1864) with one, Bacchus and the Water Thieves (p. 658). Nor does he appear again in this magazine until 1867, with Lord Aythan, the frontispiece to vol. iii. of the New Series. Sir John Tenniel, however, more than any other of the Punch staff, seems never thoroughly at home outside its pages. The very idea of a Tenniel drawing has become a synonym for a political cartoon; so that now you cannot avoid feeling that all his illustrations to poetry, fiction, and fairy-tale must have some satirical motive underlying their apparent purpose.