Children's Books and Their Illustrators

Excerpt

CHILDREN'S BOOKS AND THEIR ILLUSTRATORS. BY GLEESON WHITE.

There are some themes that by their very wealth of suggestion appal the most ready writer. The emotions which they arouse, the mass of pleasant anecdote they recall, the ghosts of far-off delights they summon, are either too obvious to be worth the trouble of description or too evanescent to be expressed in dull prose. Swift, we are told (perhaps a little too frequently), could write beautifully of a broomstick; which may strike a common person as a marvel of dexterity. After a while, the journalist is apt to find that it is the perfect theme which proves to be the hardest to treat adequately. Clothe a broomstick with fancies, even of the flimsiest tissue paper, and you get something more or less like a fairy-king's sceptre; but take the Pompadour's fan, or the haunting effect of twilight over the meadows, and all you can do in words seems but to hide its original beauties. We know that Mr. Austin Dobson was able to add graceful wreaths even to the fan of the Pompadour, and that another writer is able to impart to the misty twilight not only the eerie fantasies it shows the careless observer, but also a host of others that only a poet feels, and that only a poet knows how to prison within his cage of printed syllables. Indeed, of the theme of the present discourse has not the wonder-working Robert Louis Stevenson sung of "Picture Books in Winter" and "The Land of Story Books," so truly and clearly that it is dangerous for lesser folk to attempt essays in their praise? All that artists have done to amuse the august monarch "King Baby" (who, pictured by Mr. Robert Halls, is fitly enthroned here by way of frontispiece) during the playtime of his immaturity is too big a subject for our space, and can but be indicated in rough outline here.

THE "MONKEY-BOOK"           A FAVOURITE IN THE NURSERY
(By permission of James H. Stone, Esq., J.P.)"ROBINSON CRUSOE." THE WRECK
FROM AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHAP-BOOK

Luckily, a serious study of the evolution of the child's book already exists. Since the bulk of this number was in type, I lighted by chance upon "The Child and his Book," by Mrs. E. M. Field, a most admirable volume which traces its subject from times before the Norman conquest to this century. Therein we find full accounts of MSS. designed for teaching purposes, of early printed manuals, and of the mass of literature intended to impress "the Fear of the Lord and of the Broomstick." Did space allow, the present chronicle might be enlivened with many an excerpt which she has culled from out-of-the-way sources. But the temptation to quote must be controlled. It is only fair to add that in that work there is a very excellent chapter to "Some Illustrators of Children's Books," although its main purpose is the text of the books. One branch has found its specialist and its exhaustive monograph, in Mr. Andrew Tuer's sumptuous volumes devoted to "The Horn Book."

"CRUSOE AND XURY ESCAPING"
FROM AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHAP-BOOK

Perhaps there is no pleasure the modern "grown-up" person envies the youngsters of the hour as he envies them the shoals of delightful books which publishers prepare for the Christmas tables of lucky children....