THE LIMITS OF ILLUSTRATION.
AS this is the season of the Illustrated Books, we propose to offer a few words of suggestion to the public and the pub- lishers on a subject which is too little considered both by the buyers and the purveyors of illustrated books,—the true limits of Illustration. As a rule, nothing is more objectionable than illustrated poems. Unless it happen, as now and then it may, that the genius of a poet and the genius of a painter really con- verge on the same class of subjects,—as, for example, the genius of Flaxman to a certain extent really suited in no ordinary degree the noble and simple outlines of the Homeric pictures, or the genius of Dore the grim and grotesque horrors of Dante's " Inferno," or the genius of Retsch the Mephistophelian con- ceptions of Goethe's " Faust,"—the mood of mind in which men read poetry is simply disturbed by the efforts of the painter to extract from it subjects for his art. We are not now speaking merely of poor conceptions. There may be really excellent designs derived from the suggestions of a poem which are not, in any true sense, illustrations of it. For example, we take up an illustrated book of poems of former years, and find in it a clever picture by Duncan, intended to illustrate Lord Byron's grand description of the shipwreck in "Don Juan." The picture was no doubt really suggested by Byron's lines,—which, however, by no means happens universally in the case of illustrated books. It is meant to illustrate the particular passage,— "There was no light in heaven but a few stars; The boats put off, o'ercrowded with their crews ; She gave a heel, and then a lurch to port, And going down head-foremost—sank, in short."
Well, the picture, which was drawn by a competent man, puts in the stars, and the vessel going down bead-foremost, and an attempt at a raft, and a boat or two ; but so far from really helping the reader to conceive the poem, it simply interrupts and jars the mind of any one who appreciates the poem. The key-note of that description is the derisive, scoffing tone in which the agony is treated,—a tone probably intended to con- vey the effect of the seeming cruelty of Nature on the mind. Of course, the sardonic tone is the tone of the whole poem, and not merely of this description ; but evidently it is worked carefully into this otherwise grand description under the feeling that it specially suited it. Lord Byron describes the raft as,—
" A sort of thing at which one would have laughed,
If any laughter at such times could be, Unless with people who too much have quaffed, And have a kind of wild and horrid glee,— Half-epileptical and half-hysterical;- Their preservation would have been a miracle."
That sufficiently conveys the mood of the whole description,—a mood of capricious, contemptuous indifference, the mood of one who fiddles while Rome burns, just as the stars shine and the sun dawns brightly over drowning men. Mr. Duncan's picture gives no hint of this mood. It is simply a ship going down in a roll- ing sea, and nothing more. To look at it vexes the mind full of Byron's poem, instead of stimulating it. And what is true of this illustration is true a hundredfold more of almost all the others in the same book. Except where the poem is so namby - pamby that anything decently drawn to look at, is a relief from the poem, the illustrations spoil the poems. And in the opposite case, the poems spoil the illus- trations. Or take a book now before us, a newly illustrated edition of Shelley. We turn to the wonderful lines (perhaps the most overwhelming, in the pathos of their profound dejection, which Shelley ever wrote), the "Lines written in dejection at Naples," and find opposite them a picture of Naples and its dancing waves, with Vesuvius sending up a cloud of smoke at a distance, and a good many boats on the shore. Well, there is no harm in the picture, except the harm of a most impertinent bit of interruption. It no more assists or supplements the poem, than it would help you to understand "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to have pictures interpolated of a doll-fairy and an ass's head. Indeed publishers have no judgment in these things. They think that if something is mentioned in a poem, it should
necessarily be agreeable to the reader of that poem to have a picture of that something presented to him. It is just like Mr. Micawber's idea, when his friends proposed to him to carry coals on the Medway, that the first step to take was " to run down and have a look at the Medway." It would be just as wise, and no wiser, to illustrate Mr. Jevons or Mr. Bonamy Price on Money by a picture of a pound sterling and a five- pound note, or Mr. Tyndall on Heat by a picture of a ton of coals. But this is not even the worst illustration in the edition of Shelley now before us. There is an illustration to Shelley's "Sensitive Plant" which is still more distressing. Shelley had a dream of a garden inhabited by a lady " whose form was upborne by a lovely mind," and who had " no com- panion of mortal race." Of course, like all Shelley's visions, the details concerning the lady are not to be particularised. She is a feminine essence rather than a real woman. She tends the flowers, and we are told that,— "Wherever her airy footstep trod
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod Erased its slight vestige with shadowy sweep, Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep,"
But here we have an illustration of a fashionably-dressed young woman, whose sweeping gown certainly would make a great deal more impression on the grass than her trailing hair could ever efface. To try and embody such a conception as Shelley's in a real woman would have been a mistake in any artist. And this particular artist only makes the conception of the "Power in this sweet place" ridiculous, by embodying a delicate and poetical ab- straction in a substantial feminine form. But worst of all is the illustration of Prometheus on the rocks of Caucasus, say- ing,—"No change, no pause, no hope, yet I endure." The figure would not be a bad illustration of Dickens's Captain Cuttle, if he had ever been chained to the Caucasus ; but as an illustration of the "awful sufferer," the " mighty Titan" on whose mind "past ages crowd," who "closes his tearless eyes," yet tells the tyrant who torments him, " I see more clear thy work within my woe-illumined mind," the picture is more than an absurdity,—a gross offence. The illustrations do not illustrate, but darken the poems ; they are intrusions, and irritating in- trusions, on them. Probably Flaxman might have illustrated " Prometheus Unbound " fairly ; even Blake would have given us something mysterious and striking ; but not one painter in a thousand could do anything but spoil Shelley. As a rule, then, except in a few very rare cases,—we can imagine some of Turner's illustrations lending a new meaning to some of Wordsworth's meditative poems on Nature,—illustra- tions of poems are blunders, and irritating blunders, too, to any one who cares for the poetry ; and the appending of poems to pictures is a blunder, and an irritating blunder to those who care chiefly for the drawings.
It is different, however, when we come to fiction, though here, too, most illustrations are disfigurements. The old illustrations of Scott's novels, for instance,—does any one recollect the pictures of Di Vernon and Rebecca, which used to adorn the old editions and those wonderful illus- trations of Miss Austen's novels, in which Elizabeth Bennett, in "Pride and Prejudice," is made so astonishingly artificial, and Fanny Price, in " Mansfield Park," in a hideously big bonnet and veil, with short sleeves and a scarf, is trying on a necklace, Miss Crawford standing by ?—are amusing to us now, only because they show us the old-fashioned costumes which now appear so very funny. They no more illustrate anything than Millais's picture of the good wife helping her husband on with his coat to go away from home illustrates the Scotch song, " There is nae luck about the house," celebrating the husband's return home, to which it is appended. And, indeed, it is only rarely that even in fiction true illustrations are possible. Cruikshank's illustrations of " Pickwick" and " Oliver Twist" are, indeed, part and parcel of the genius of those wonderful books. We should hardly know " the Artful Dodger" without Cruikshank's help in realising Dickens's wonderful study. We should have nothing like the true conception of Noah Claypole's cunning, cowardice, and selfishness without Mr. Cruikshank's aid ; and as for the wicked Fagin and his terrible horror of death, even the genius of Dickens acting alone would never have impressed it upon us as Cruikshank has impressed it. But then, Dickens's genius, with its strongly-marked physical features, its emphasis on all the superficial gesture and dress of life, and its leaning to caricature, is expressly calculated for illustration, and especially for the illustration of such a man as Cruikshank, who may be said to have been born to complete Dickens, and make the marvels of
German fairy tales visible to the eyes of children. Directly you
turn from Cruikshank to the illustrations by Phiz, you see how im- perfectly the latter has grasped many of Dickens's conceptions,— though one or two, Mr. Pecksniff, the American rowdies, Bailey Junior, and Mrs. Gamp, are admirably portrayed. Mr. Moddle, for instance, "the youngest gentleman in company" (who entreats Miss Pecksniff to " become the bride of a ducal coronet, and forget me. I will not reproach, for I have wronged you ; may the furniture make some amends "), is a complete failure ; and the grim avarice and murderous vindictiveness of Jonas Chuzzle- wit are never conceived by Phiz at all. Still, Dickens was one of the most eminently illustratable of our novelists. His sharp, over- outlined conceptions lend themselves to the artist, especially if he has a good spice of the caricaturist in him ; and Dickens hardly ever attempts to describe what is not in some way plainly written in lines upon the face or the gestures. Thackeray, again, was not only a satirist, but in his illustrations of his own tales became the satirist of his own satire, and showed you the snob beneath the gentleman and the selfish adventurer beneath the flatterer far more plainly than most men would have found them in the literary delineations themselves. But Trollope, again, has never really lent. himself to illustration, except in the fragments of vulgar life which are to be found in most of his writings. The .Mr. Cheesmans and Mrs. Greenwoods, the Mr. Kantwises and Mr. Moulders, the Mr. Slopes and Mrs. Proudies admit of lively illustration, and some of them have found it ; but his best char- acters, and his most truly humorous sketches, his Dean Arabins, Archdeacon Grantlys, Mr. Hardings, and Phineas Phinns, do not very well lend themselves to illustration, and certainly have seldoni been fortunate enough to find it. Mr. Trollope's delinea- tions of common life are too true to reality to admit of being so drawn as to tell you more, or even as much, about them as he tells in his dialogues. There are very few real men whose characters are so written in their face, that you could tell nearly as much by seeing their outward forms as you could learn by hearing them converse.
We believe, then, that almost all illustrations to poems are worse than superfluous ; that they injure the poems to which they are offered, except in the very rare cases in which the painter and the poet have a common element of genius, though expressed through different media ; that novels are quite as often injured as helped by illustration, and always injured unless the novelist lived chiefly in his eyes as Dickens did, or has a good talent for cari- cature ; and that almost the only kind of book to which respect- able illustrations really add a good deal, are books in which there is some deep vein of the grotesque, like Dante's " Inferno," or " Don Quixote," or " Baron Munchausen," or again, almost all the fairy tales which delight children,—for in all these the artist's appeal to the eye really helps very materially in bringing home to the imagination of the reader the fancy-feats of the author. But certainly nine out of ten illustrated books that arc not of this last class would be in better taste and more enjoyable without the illustrations than with them.
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