HABLOT BROWNE AND BOOK-ILLUSTRATION.

THE illustration of the novel, from the days of Richardson to those of Thomas Hardy, has gone through several phases, with one of the brightest of which the name of Hablot Browne must always be associated. At the moment of writing, a temporary exhibition of his work makes him one of the most convenient subjects for the talk of drawing-rooms; but he will always be a subject for the analysis of criticism, and his position is one that can hardly be weakened by the passage of time. We are entitled, therefore, to consider him not only as the text for a short exposition on his own labour, but to view him in relation to certain fellow-workers-his forerunners, his contemporaries, his successors-and to try to describe with care, if with inevitable brevity, the ways in which he differs from some of his earlier and later comrades.

It is exactly a hundred years ago that book-illustration, whether by the woodcut or by the highly finished copper-plate engraving, rose into real importance in England. More than half a century before the satirist had written in the Dunciad respecting volumes where

"the pictures for the page atone,

And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own."

But, indeed, these "beauties" are not such as we should to-day admire profoundly, and Quarles is saved by them no longer. But in 1779 Bewick issued his woodcuts to Gay's Fables, and only a year or so afterwards Stothard, then in the happy beginnings of his unequal art, made his designs for Peregrine Pickle, for Sir Charles Grandison, and for Clarissa. That was really the beginning of the best English book-illustration, and it is worth remembering that the time of it is divided by twenty years from that of the production, across the Channel, of the volumes which the French collector of our day somehow prizes most highly where he has good reason to prize much; I mean the volumes of the Contes of La Fontaine, known as the "edition of the Fermiers Généraux." La Fontaine's Contes were published in this, their most luxurious form, in 1726. It was upon that that Voltaire wrote to congratulate Eisen, the vignettist. But perhaps the best of Gravelot's work was still earlier, and Gravelot's drawings of the figure had a dexterity of grace which Eisen's could not claim. The style of Eisen after all was little altogether; Gravelot in his littleness was great. A momentary comparison of these dates, then, shows that the French were at all events before us; but a hundred years ago we overtook them, so to say, by the simultaneous production of the accomplished engraving

and the suggestive woodcut. Bewick and Stothard came together, Bewick standing unaided, and Stothard owing much to the patient craftsmanship of the engraver who reproduced or completed him. Heath, Angus, Birrell, and others carried out into firm and definite line the sometimes vague elegance of Stothard's work in washes of monochrome; and from that day to this, with, of course, a constantly varying measure of success, the woodcut and the plate of copper or steel have gone on together in England.

The design of Stothard has been one of the chief sources of inspiration for several of the more refined book-illustrators of our own time. Mr. Walter Crane and Miss Kate Greenaway owe much to the promptings of that gentle and feminine art. Crane, in his domestic work-in the work in which he avoids allegory and eschews that something which is known by the pretentious phrase "ideal design"-has often been inspired by that suavity in the group, that absence of strong characterization in the placid type, which we note in Clarissa and in Grandison. He is of the succession of Stothard at least as much as Caldecott is of the succession of Cruikshank, and as Barnard and Charles Green are of the succession of Hogarth and of Hablot Browne. Stothard's freshest, loveliest, most exquisite work was much of it done in his early manhood; many of the things by which he will be best remembered are things for which he was paid a few shillings apiece. He lived a long life, full of industrious if facile labour, and many artistic kinsmen, who were more or less his followers, poured forth designs which had a likeness to his own before his own career closed, at a moment when a change was arising in the very spirit of the illustration of the English novel. The grace which Stothard caught, and which his followers more or less learned from him, had first of all been observed from Nature; but Nature was hardly responsible for that uniformity of elegance into which the style degenerated; and as the novel of the epoch of Miss Austen was succeeded by that of the epoch of Dickens, so the illustration which based its greatest charm on a monotony of prettiness and on an easy comprehension of the world of the gentle, was succeeded by the illustration which took account of human life in wider and more varied forms. It was something more than pure accident that along with Dickens there came George Cruikshank and Hablot Browne to illustrate him.

It is difficult for any of us to gauge accurately the amount of the debt which the fame of Dickens owes to Cruikshank and Hablot Browne. That the force of the draughtsman was a force to be reckoned with is even now very plain. Half of us, when we think of Oliver Twist and of Bill Sykes, think of them as they are drawn by Cruikshank. Copperfield and Mr. Peggotty, Mr. Tulkinghorn, Joe, and Mr. Snagsby come mental vision through the medium of "Phiz." There are many

even

now to our

marked differences between George Cruikshank and Hablot Browne, the two rivals in the illustration of the English novel whom, of all one could select, it is perhaps most profitable to compare and contrast; and the earliest that must be noted is a difference of condition at the moment when each approached his task. Cruikshank came to the illustration of Sketches by Boz and of Oliver Twist with a reputation ready made-nay, with two reputations, for the effective caricaturist had made a fame quite apart from the melodramatic illustrator of romance. Hablot Browne, on the other hand, was very young and almost untried when he began to be associated with the author of Pickwick. Artist and writer were practically contemporaries-the one was born in 1815, the other in 1812 to both belonged the mental flexibility, not alone of genius, but of fewness of years. These men changed and developed together, while George Cruikshank, even had his services been wanted after those earliest books which he best understood, would have failed to adapt himself to the requirements of a style which was losing the extravagances of youth only to gain fresh characteristics, into which the imagination of Cruikshank might with difficulty enter. The element of caricature comes largely into George Cruikshank's illustrations. It comes also into the earlier work of Hablot K. Browne. Cruikshank drew horses badly and dogs indifferently. Women he drew atrociously. Of childhood he was somehow a better, though of course not a really satisfactory, exponent; and of the beauty of old age he can give us, as in Mr. Edward Barrett's drawing of the death of Falstaff, a rare and pathetic suggestion. But he is greater, of course, in eccentric character-in all that his predecessors had not touched at all; and he is greatest, perhaps, in rendering the action of large groups, the multiform vivacity of a crowd, such as it is shown, for instance, in certain drawings for the Irish Rebellion. As a draughtsman of landscape his vision, though it was limited, was true and keen. Not for him the majesty of Nature or its abundance. He acquired his tastes in a day too early for it to be likely that he should care for scenes that are solemn or remote; one could hardly expect him to fall under the influence of Wordsworth or of Turner, and the opulence of the open country in its yielding time never held his imagination for a moment; but he appreciated the shabby effort at rusticity which is made on the confines of London; drew, as if he really loved it, the scanty tree or the dwarfed hillside that he visited in his walks by Islington and Pentonville; and had such an understanding of the life of the Thames, where the Thames is grimiest, as must have commended him to Charles Dickens, who was, perhaps, more alive to the interest of the associations of London than any other man of genius who has ever lived. Cruikshank, too, had a pleasant appreciation of street architecture, and especially of that pretty sedateness of the Georgian

style which is now seen best in cathedral closes and in the smaller streets of Bloomsbury. It seems that a collection of architectural drawings, somehow missing at present, show Hablot Browne to have been a yet more vigorous and refined draughtsman of architecture.

Cruikshank and Hablot Browne were draughtsmen with the pencil and with the etching-needle; neither was really a proficient in water-colour, Cruikshank possibly being the better of the two. That is to say, he did in certain of his smaller designs overlay his significant pencil outlines with delicate and dainty washes of colour in ways that leave nothing to be desired. They accomplished his ends; but the work in which he relies upon colour exclusively is rarely harmonious or refined. Hablot Browne's colouring charms yet more seldom; rarely is it a gain to his work. His command of oil and of water-colour is not of a kind that can commend itself to any tribunal more severe than that which is constituted by the blameless partiality of friends. And this brings us to the main fact that has to be recognised in any candid study of Hablot Browne-the fact that he will be remembered as the illustrator of Dickens. His separate inventions may now and again have been valuable in idea, but they were almost invariably deficient in technique. His illustrations to Lever are lively and happy. Fresh and graceful enough to have won a reputation, they could yet hardly have sustained it. It is to the Dickens illustrations-to the pencil drawings even more than the etchings that we must turn if we would understand the sources and the real safeguard of Hablot Browne's fame; and in doing so we cannot affect to consider that his task was either too limited in range or too deficient in quality. It is good fortune that comes to a man, and nothing in the world besides, when he is invited to bestow his labour in co-operation with the genius of Dickens.

And Hablot Browne, as a whole, was worthy of fellowship with his great contemporary. Dickens, it is true, was not invariably charmed with his work. The length of time during which the association of the two men lasted did not suffice to bring them at all moments into complete accord, for, a dozen years after their bitter winter journey into Yorkshire to obtain material for Dotheboys Hall, the novelist expressed himself dissatisfied with the earlier illustrations to Dombey. Hablot Browne's ambition soared too far; the illustrations, Dickens thought, departed too widely from the text. But this dissatisfaction was, of course, exceptional; generally the artist's work would have contented even the most exacting demands. Moreover, the manner and the substance of it changed somewhat with the changes in Dickens's own style, so that until almost the very end Hablot Browne as an artist did not age. He was fit for the later manner of the novelist even if he was not fit for the latest. And it was only towards the very end that the association was broken, when the elegance of Mr. Marcus Stone was desired for Our Mutual Friend,

and the vigorous realism of Mr. Fildes, with his accomplished draughtsmanship, was found conveniently employed in those few illustrations which add an interest to the almost invaluable fragment of Edwin Drood. Hablot Browne, as an illustrator, changed not only with the changes in Dickens but with the changes in English taste. He began with a certain measure of artistic coarseness. Like the novelist himself, he exaggerated not a little. He forced the comic effect. Nicholas Nickleby is an instance of it, though even there the obvious caricature does not wholly conceal the underlying truth. Still the theatrical scenes in the novel-I mean Browne's illustrations of them are wanting in a reality never denied by Hogarth to his "Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn." In them comedy passes into the regions of pure farce. And it was not until long after Nicholas Nickleby had been made public that the illustrator acquired that range in his art which allowed him to depict with a fitting meed of seriousness old age and gentle life, and with grace the beauty of women and the charm of a child. Tim Linkinwater is a success, but the Brothers Cheery ble have an inappropriate rigidity and crustiness, and that which dominates throughout the Nickleby series in one's memory is the grim comedy of Wackford Squeers, and the grim melodrama of Ralph Nickleby.

Comedy has more place, and the exaggerations of farce have less, in Martin Chuzzlewit. Throughout it the portrait of Mr. Pecksniff takes a worthy rank in Dickens's gallery of hypocrites. Tom Pinch, with his placid resignation and abnormal naïveté-realised again so well for us a year or two ago by Mr. Thorne at the Vaudeville-is one of the quaintest creations of which it is possible to conceive, and the comparative subordination of Betsy Prig is set alongside of the more potent masterfulness of Sairey Gamp, so that these vulgar heroines of a cockney adventure stand related to each other in some such way as-to compare the common with the poetical-Nerissa is related to Portia, Celia to Rosalind. Their relative position has been understood by the artist as well as by the writer. But "Phiz" has been unnecessarily cruel to the younger Miss Pecksniff. Prettiness of face and grace of figure are here as much lacking as is the sign of that imaginative interest in landscape and in architecture for which the novel under consideration makes no call. Spontaneity, fertility, the quality of inventiveness which several living artists, Hablot Browne's successors, prize so rightly in Martin Chuzzlewit, are indeed in the illustrations, but at a later time the draughtsmanship of Hablot Browne was to gain in refinement and expressive delicacy, and to obtain by gentler means an effect not less sure.

It is in David Copperfield and Dombey that we see, for perhaps the first time, the artist's command of the beauty of youth and of the pathos of beauty. It is here that an art hitherto observant of broad effects and, as it seems, directed to obtaining the applause of imme