Ethel Osbourne Folder VII

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No one will have forgotten Thackeray's dissatisfaction with the designer of his illustrations; it can never be easy, probably it can never be possible to fit these full-blooded phantoms with a visible body; but even with the incidents of a rough-and-tumble story, and the countenances of such rag-dolls as carry it on, and do the broad-sword combats and are the heroes of the miraculous escapes, are not to be treated by the first comer. Art has now grown to be so high and mighty in its own province that it will no longer condescend to be the handmaid of letters; and the modern illustrator, even if it be Mrs. Allingham or Mr. Small, is perhaps too much devoted to purely pictorial considerations. A picture in a story book must be something more than a mere pretty picture; it should do more even than represent a suitably selected type; it should narrate; This was the way with those fine plates to Jack Shepperd which Thackeray so much admired; the series tells the tale at length; to turn to the text is but to hear it in a sister dialect, and much diluted. Ainsworth had the merit of inventing a string of incidents, highly picturesque; he had a vigorous fancy, such as it was; But Cruikshank was the man of imagination, it was he who lent a body and face to these inventions, and it is in the role of his braggadocio etchings, not in the boards of the author, that we summon them up again before the eye of memory.

It is in books where there is much ado, hustling, hard-hitting, books, that artists find their chance. The features of Lily Dale, which make very good reading, offer little variety to the designer; and the prevalence of this sort of literature has probably damped the aspirations and relaxed the fibre of our artists. They adhere to the special conditions of their own art; delighting in values, elegant in composition, turning out a set of drawings which might equally illustrate one novel as well as another. An admirably drawn young lady in a conservatory, thinking, may be Lily Dale if you please, but she might be Grace Crawley; and whichever she is, (if there be any story in the book, her effigy does little to emphasize it.) It should be the handmaid of the text, competing with it upon equal terms, telling the same story in all typical moments, with another accent and the stamp of a different mind. (Jack Shepperd)

There is nothing more delightful than the first skimming of a storybook with pictures; the faces, the costumes, the strange incidents, the clearness and mystery, the story told and still remaining unknown. It is hard indeed upon the author; he can never come up to the expectations raised; but no more can the artist if he has read their book before we see the pictures. The first blow on the fancy is decisive; all subsequent glories miss the mark. Ainsworth might have written with the pen of an angel; his Jonathan Wild was nothing, he was not my old love, he was not that startling figure with the bludgeon that stood in the prints. And so with Jules Verne, when de Neuville and the others were set upon him. The first skimming of the pictures was the true perusal the tale gave up its marrow at glance; and when we read the words, it was in a critical spirit, as the child takes down the musical cart: we had received the pleasure, we were now going to see how it had been given and whether the laws of the game had been observed.

The story of Treasure Island has been so treated, so illuminated, so condensed and then thrown up into a sort of glory by a French artist - one of the band, if I mistake not, who did the like along with de Neuville for Jules Verne. Henceforth it may be skimmed, swift as a racehorse, the points seized, the story drained of such cheap virtue as it possesses in five living minutes instead of in the tedium of several hours of study. Not only that. There is one man in England, with a particular liking for such boyish

Ethel Osbourne folder VII

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kickshaws, who was yet, by an unalterable law, hitherto debarred
from reading Treasure Island; and that was the man who wrote it.
This was a most hard case; he thought he would like that story, it
was the essence of what he had admired in so many others; and yet
the gates of that penny Paradise were closed against him. He could
read Shakespeare and Dumas, and Homer, thanks to Mr. Lang; and he
could have read (if he hadosen wanted) the whole series of foul
and dreary plays that go by the name of Dodsley; and he could read
"King Solomon's Mines", and did. But not Treasure Island; that was
shut out from him, the mist always thick drawn over the Spy Glass,
not even the surf audible; till down stepped Mr. Roux with this new
graphic version, reeling the whole story off in a score of spirited
plates, and introducing him to his own puppets. If any man should
be grateful to M. Roux, I think it should be he; man has a mind
quite disengaged of any fear or favour, for to him M. Roux is the
inventor.

M. Roux has had the good sense, I gather, to go to Hogarth
for the types, and the result is excellent. Pew is a fine scare-
crow; Silver is only quite successful once, at Flint's pointer,
but there he is all that a father's heart could wish him; sitting
at the door with the captain, he is not the man he should be. As
for Captain Smollett, he took my breath away; I had meant him to be
a man of Scotch blood, though perhaps not even born in Scotland;
and behold the man with the stiff legs and back, who sends Jim about
his business at p. 76, the man who listens with his mouth set and
his hands upon the table in the council of war, is a full-blooded,
bruiser-looking Georgian Englishman, a grave-minded Figg or Brough-
ton, and I can simply strike my colours. M. Roux knows more about
the Captain than I did. It was a blow to one of the same nature to
find the Hispaniola figured as a full-rigged brig. Here again this
very annoying artist is quite right; for in the days of John Silver,
there was no such vessel as a schooner upon the seas. But how could
Jim manoeuvre a brig round the island? and how could the author
have superintended him? A schooner it had to be; for it was in a
schooner that this very fresh-water nautical novelist acquired his
shallow knowledge. As for Jim, he is admirable throughout: a tenfold
better Jim than the rather doughy and irritating youth of the text:
a fellow with a fine spice of boyish chivalry and a warm heart,
charming when he says good-bye to his mother in an altogether
charming plate from which perhaps we might have spared the sabots
and the French diligence; excellent on the mast with Hands; and fa-
mous when he holds the tiller of the seatost Hispaniola. He is thus
figured twice: once with an air of sure responsibility on the pic-
ture title and again at p 212, with a highly natural appearance of
enjoyment, in a plate which has been unfortunately lettered. It is
not that this legend is wrong, for the incident plainly occurred
earlier in the volume; but by a very unkind cut of my publishers,
it throws into relief one of those errors of penmanship with which
the little volume is adorned. I do not care for him in the cave
scene; which is besides badly engraved, but is yet endeared to me
by the pleasant art of pictorial narrative displayed.

That a critic, above all in my invidious position, must dis-
play impartiality, and pick a fault or two, I direct attention to
the battle scene which is "one hurly-burly of nonsense."; to the
rattle-snake, who might answer better to a boa-constrictor, and to
the deplorable picture at p. 8 which is equally lacking in con-
struction accuracy and dramatic fitness. Had the doctor so stood,
he would never have lived to swim in the Hispaniola or dispense
quinine to Mr. Merry.