[In the following essay, Johnson discusses the trends that influenced the development of illustration. Johnson focuses on a Victorian aesthetic theory which held that all arts were in essence a form of poetry, and that, by extension, all visual arts were a form of storytelling.]

Although modern criticism has come to recognize what the ancients knew, how arbitrary a distinction between music and poetry can be, we sometimes still insist upon an artificial purity of genres. This is especially true when the genres are visual and verbal. We hold as suspect pictures that seem literary—as we tend to patronize “program music.” The appeal of mere illustration seems too lower middle-brow, too old-fashioned, too “Victorian.” Yet the extent to which eye and ear are forced into an abstract, distant relationship one with the other, and are denied essentially aesthetic relevance to history in the sense of narrative, may be the extent to which our arts of sight and sound in a too literate, abstracting age verge on superb inanity, defining self-contained and less than humanistic form. Abstraction itself is hardly an issue: all arts abstract. But illustration is. Can true art illustrate, that is, show and illuminate common experience? John Ruskin, whose Victorian ghost haunts criticism, said so, and his contemporaries largely concurred.

The ancients, once again, assumed that this was so. Chinese calligraphy, for a non-western instance, combines picture and narrative meaning; the two are one and inseparable. But our language is not ideographic, and the cultural difference is immense. Although the main American purveyor now of the most accepted, the comic, version of illustrative art—The New Yorker—retains a left-hand margin on its front as though to remind us that its cover picture is a sort of illustrated page, we relegate illumination to the Middle Ages, or the lower pleasures.

In effect we may regard Victorian illustrative art or anything that seems now like a version of that popular art as being debased.

For Ruskin and many Victorians, art does illustrate truths both propositional and “poetic”; it gives information and ethical insight as it reads out what the pre-Victorian Coleridge called “that eternal language, which thy God / Utters” in landscape.

And the Victorian painter often demonstrates his sense of having to illustrate, to illustrate truths of humankind and nature if he is to be distinguished in his work, that is, illustrious. Becoming illustrious in this way means being something of a “literary” artist, a poet. Most of his readers probably agreed with William Morris's 1856 comment in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, echoing Ruskin's declaration in Pre-Raphaelitism, that “a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of creature as a poet in song”:

This is what I have thought about artists, this is what Ruskin in his writings taught me to think, that their gift of painting was a great gift, but not their greatest, which greatest gift was the same as that which God has given him whom we call a poet.¹

This attitude has profound effects not only on the subjects and styles of Victorian pictures but also on the lives, the careers, of aspiring painters—like Morris—who become literary artists in the sense of being writers or in the sense of being story-tellers and illustrators in their drawing and painting, or indeed in both of these senses.

The effect of literature on the fine arts, first of all, was not all prosaic and did not always result in silly pictures. A happy relation between art and fiction is evident in the substantial achievements of Victorian illustrators, some familiar yet today. Among the most familiar, Hablot Knight Browne, or “Phiz,” visualized Charles Dickens' Pickwick and Sam Weller for a generation of readers, as George Cruikshank did the characters of Oliver Twist. The virtues of Dickens' prose were just the sort to bring out the virtues of a Victorian artist whose illustrative drawing might become too flat or sentimental without the inspiration of the absurd, of the character who is a caricature and the setting which is grotesque or at least vividly particular. The poorest illustrations of Dickens are pictures, etched or in oil, of Dolly Varden (Dickens himself commissioned one by William Powell Frith), and the best are boisterously Dickensian sketches, free and vigorous, such as Browne's of Mr. Pickwick. Clearly, the challenge of Pickwick and the other great characters inspired great illustration; and the list of those who illustrated works from Boz to Edwin Drood includes some of the most respected Victorian names: not only Cruikshank, Browne, John Leech and Doyle, but also, among a number of academicians, Daniel Maclise and Edwin Landseer. This was a serious pursuit. Dickens took a deep and constant interest in the illustration of his work, suggesting subjects and carefully scrutinizing the results—although he was not pleased to have even so distinguished a cartoonist as Cruikshank return the favor when that artist proposed to make changes in the text of Sketches by Boz.²

Another prominent illustrator of Dickens, a caricaturist and painter, John Tenniel, was chosen to draw Lewis Carroll's Alice and her animal friends; and, although the unpredictable author, who himself did drawings for an earlier private version, was dissatisfied with the engraving of these, the results show again how literary fantasy and the grotesque could free the pen of the artist from a too literal or sentimental mode. Tenniel elsewhere pictured amazingly wide-eyed Gothic maidens and knights, but drawing the mad hatter, the mock turtle, and the terrible Queen, he did not have to observe pictorial and sentimental convention, the narrower strictures of Ruskin on following nature, or the literal practice of such Pre-Raphaelite art as Madox Brown's and Holman Hunt's with its accurate detail based on research. Those celebrated Wonderland figures can be as far as possible from photography, the other art in which Charles Dodgson, “Lewis Carroll,” excelled, and the art which more and more influenced as it rivalled mid-Victorian painting.

Like Browne, Cruikshank, and Tenniel, other celebrated Victorian magazine artists were as much caricaturists as illustrators, producing their own forms of wit and wisdom: in the pages of Punch, John Leech and Charles Keene practiced an art especially suitable to a rather large reading—and viewing—public. Founded in 1841, that satirical journal contributed largely in its first thirty years both to the great age of English illustration and to the modern tradition of the finely composed cartoon, with caption, another version of the story-telling picture.

An even larger public was reached by the illustrated magazines, which fully exploited the development of wood engraving.³ That high Victorian development contributed more to the wide dissemination of pictorial art among the people than even the promotion of cheap or free museums. Art disseminated, at best in the Swan or Dalziel version of a fine drawing by Keene or Du Maurier and at worst in the crude work of hacks, was for the most part either illustrative or anecdotal; neither the best nor the worst, the pictures in a popular weekly were sometimes competent and often topical, suggesting not a modern magazine cartoon so much as a modern newspaper photograph. And photography was to replace woodcuts in these pages. But Victorian illustration extends, one might argue, from biblical paintings in Royal Academy Exhibitions to pictures of recent crimes in the press. All of this is literary art, in the largest senses of both noun and adjective, for it is all associated specifically with the word. Assisting in their own ways at the wedding of art and literature, along with the caricaturists, cartoonists and periodical illustrators, were most of the major figures in the mid-Victorian world of art. (But some illustrators quite clearly belong in that category, and some, especially Keene, enjoy now a higher reputation than many “serious” paints in oils of the fifties and sixties.) In illustrating books of verse, to be sure, these artists merely continued an English tradition. Turner had illustrated the poetry of Byron and Rogers; and in 1857 John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Rossetti, along with Daniel Maclise, William Mulready and others, contributed to the lavishly illustrated Moxon edition of Tennyson's poems. In the fifties and sixties, furthermore, illustrated volumes of poetry came in astonishing abundance from the presses, testifying to the industry of both artists and such engravers as the brothers Dalziel.⁴ More remarkable, however, than the continuing of that traditional alliance between artist and poet was the employment of distinguished painters and draftsmen to illustrate new volumes of prose fiction. Active here, too, Millais produced drawings to accompany the prose of Thackeray and Trollope as well as the poetry of Hood, Tennyson and Meredith. Not only Millais, but also Arthur Hughes, Maclise, and other prominent artists were at once successful painters and successful illustrators for fiction in both periodical and book form.

This is not surprising in an age when so much painting in and out of academic circles drew its subject matter from fiction. Cervantes, Goldsmith, Scott, even contemporary novelists had become favorite sources, and scenes from their works were painted by virtually all the celebrated artists between the thirties and the fifties: such artists as Mulready, Charles Robert Leslie, and William Frith. Edwin Landseer, another of the most popular early Victorian painters, is missing from this group; but his canvases of animals were also story-telling pictures, for which he usually invented the story.

Even when extremely serious painters devoted their talents to more poetic subjects, their emphasis was likely to be upon the story in the poem. And this is as true of the young Pre-Raphaelites as of the academicians against whose anecdotal triviality they reacted. Their reaction led to simpler and more “realistic” styles, but it never denied the importance of narrative meaning; the Pre-Raphaelites insisted only that a story be noble.⁵

Among the recent poets, Keats at first and then Tennyson were favorite sources, especially for the Pre-Raphaelites. But in Victorian painting one sees always the narrative Keats rather than the purely lyric poet. The Eve of Saint Agnes inspired both Holman Hunt's “Flight of Madeline and Prophyro” and Maclise's richly detailed “Madeline After Prayer,” while Isabella provided the text for Millais' “Lorenzo and Isabella.”⁶ Each painting is more evidently illustrative than, say Madox Brown's “Dr. Primrose and His Daughters,” in which Goldsmith's characters are merely shown in an appropriate setting rather than being made to act out a precise dramatic moment in a plot.

When the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporaries turned to biblical subjects, they produced not visionary art but something like genre painting in literalness and domestic quality and hence something very much like book illustration, again. This is true even of Rossetti's severely simple pictures of the Virgin, the “Childhood of Mary Virgin” in 1849 and “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” dated 1850. In the earlier, details of the lilies, doves, grapes, halos, and symbolic volumes titled according to the virtues of young Mary—modelled by Christina Rossetti—fail to transform an essentially domestic quality of the scene, with two women over their sewing in the parlor and the man of the house pruning vines outside. The Annunciation, too, for all its hard flat quality, gives a sense of the perplexing moment in a young woman's life and not of a timeless gesture or miraculous event.

Millais' yet more detailed and more domestic representation of the holy family, “Christ in the House of His Parents,” went far enough in this direction to outrage many viewers and critics, but the principle was already established. And, although it shows sore feet and shavings in the carpenter's shop, that once controversial painting seems now no more literal-minded than, say, Holman Hunt's gorgeously colored “Christ in the Temple.” The latter work, however, afforded Hunt an opportunity to dress up his characters and put them into an elaborate setting, suggestive of some oriental vista in a painting by the French exoticist Gerome. Perhaps that difference accounts for the popularity of this canvas, which Sir Charles Eastlake offered to give a place of honor in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1860 with a rail around it, as only Wilkie's “Chelsea Pensioners” and Frith's “Derby Day” had been theretofore distinguished.⁷ In any case, all of these paintings display in some degree the artist's interest in a story of events, shown just as they happened, not in theology or the transcendent image. Even such symbolic objects as Rossetti's lilies and Millais' lambs only add dimensions to the tale, as commentary or foreshadowing.

If, then, the fifties and the sixties represent a high point of English illustration, they can be said also to come as a climax in the English tradition of illustrative painting. The highest standards for periodical art were set in 1859 by the magazine Once a Week, with its ambitious program “to provide original illustrations by the chief artists of the time.”⁸ At this same time these chief artists were painting mostly pictures which, whether based on biblical or poetic or modern prose tales, were distinctly literary in their inspiration and their method.

The impact of literature on other forms of mid-Victorian art, on design and architecture, is again significant. Architectural developments in the middle decades were largely the results of Victorian reading, especially in Romantic and Gothic literature—and, of course, in the Romantic and lyric criticism of Ruskin. Gothic was, with the Catholic architect Augustus Welby Pugin, as with Ruskin, a moral tone, an expression of faith. For Ruskin, especially, the all-important sculpture on a Gothic building had the power of scripture: his famous chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice ends with “criticism of the building … conducted precisely on the same principle as that of a book,” as he advises, “Read the sculpture.”

Pugin did the Gothic decoration for the eclectic new buildings of Parliament (designed by Charles Barry) that were completed in the sixties, almost two decades after Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street, the great London neo-Gothic church that Ruskin most admired. He was also one among the great many Victorian artists who tried writing, inspired by moral fervor, by the muse, or by the vogue. His own inspiration was religious, and he produced works that can be called literary only in the largest sense of the word. From his polemical Contrasts of 1836, which demonstrated by text and picture the superiority of late medieval religion, society, and architecture to the early nineteenth-century versions, until his latest tract, An Earnest Appeal for the Revival of Ancient Plain Song in 1851, Pugin was single-minded, didactic, hardly ever poetical. Neither was he, as an influence, negligible.

Of Victorian artists or would-be artists who became literary figures, some are known now largely or entirely for their writing: for examples, Thackeray, Lear, Hopkins, and, later, Hardy, who was trained in architecture. Another one of these writers who had assayed the fine arts, Samuel Butler, studied to be a painter when he returned to England from New Zealand; and by the mid-seventies he achieved a certain academic facility. On one of his early and touchingly primitive pictures, the mature writer jotted, “I did this in 1864 and if I had gone on doing things out of my own head instead of making studies, I should have been all right.”⁹

There are, however, even more artists turned writers who were successful in their day but are now little known or virtually unknown for work in either metier. In this, a dim but still a sizeable group, the talented James Smetham should be included. Painter and etcher, he wrote articles and, in 1868, an essay on Blake. He was a friend of Ruskin and the Rossettis, and went through a brief Pre-Raphaelite period; but he painted after the fifties “small poetic idylls” which John Gere has compared with the minor “Spasmodic” poems of Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith.¹⁰

A more interesting figure is the almost mystical painter Simeon Solomon. The son of a wealthy Jewish family, he may have converted to Roman Catholicism, and he produced a series of finely drawn religious pictures that suggest erotic intensity along with rapt devotion. Solomon, whose work was admired by Thackeray and highly praised at greater length by his friend Swinburne, nevertheless came to a bad end: leading the life of a derelict, he indulged in alcoholic and narcotic excesses and in sexual aberrations, became involved in the London underworld, was arrested in an attempt to steal gold leaf from an artist's supply warehouse, and finally, at his lowest point, was reduced to selling letters Swinburne had written him. He wrote an extraordinary prose poem, published in 1871, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, which is in its allegorical and very vague outlines derivative from Swinburne, although the final “beatific vision” of love attempts an erotic version of Dante, diluted with a strain of Coventry Patmore. Like Swinburne and the later Rossetti, Solomon appears to associate a religious aura with his Eros, and both with swooning, with sleeping, and with death.¹¹

By way of contrast, the older Joseph Noel Paton exemplifies the usual mid-Victorian man of art and letters, Protestant, high-minded, well-established, who aspired to be a man of letters as well, and whose mildly competent work in one medium is matched in quality by his efforts in the other. Paton, a lifelong friend of Millais, sympathized with the Pre-Raphaelites but was never really close to them. Already a popular painter in the forties, he was an academician by 1850, the year when the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood received its worst press. His subjects were the conventional religious and romantic scenes, “romantic” often in the common modern sense. Whether he drew saints or lovers, he followed the simple anecdotal conventions. As J. L. Caw observes, “Paton's gift was that of the illustrator. He valued intention more highly than execution, and set moral purpose above aesthetic charm.”¹² That this is true his poetry quite plainly indicates. “A Confession,” from his Poems by a Painter, reflects as well the extent to which so conventional a mind could soon assimilate tastes that had still been odd before mid-century: the tastes taught by Ruskin and by Christian moralists as well as Gothic partisans, who rejected Renaissance art in favor of the medieval:

No, Buonarroti, thou shalt not subdue
My mind with they Thor-hammer! All that play
of ponderous science with Titanic thew
And spastic tendon—marvellous, 'tis true!—
Says nothing to my soul. Thy “terrible way”
Has led enow of worshippers astray;
I will not walk therein! Nor yet shalt thous,
Majestic Raphael,—though before thee bow
The nations, with their tribute of renown,—
Lead my heart captive. Great thou art, I own,—
Great—but a Pagan still. But Here—breathe low,
The place is hallowed—here, Angelico!
Heart, mind, and soul, with reverent love, confess
The Christian painter; sent to purify and bless!(13)

The sentiment was, by 1861, familiar. As for the poem, which at first looks like a sonnet but resolves at once into couplet rhymes, it comes from a series written in Italy on that nation's art and politics, and its bare adequacy suggests the texture of Paton's verse, both in this volume and in his Spindrift, published in 1867.

For men like Smetham and Paton (if not Solomon), minor artists who incidentally wrote, parallels could be found in other periods.¹⁴ More peculiarly Victorian, more doctrinaire in their views of the arts, are the Pre-Raphaelite literary painters, both the first group and their later followers—including Morris and Burne-Jones—who established journals not to issue manifestos about painting, sculpture and drawing, but in order to express their attitudes and ideals in poems, essays, tales.¹⁵ These were the attitudes that made them, for a time, fair targets of satire—satire done by artists who themselves were incidentally writers, or writers whose talents for drawing and painting now seem minor.

The sheerly Romantic medievalism of Morris and Burne-Jones made an ideal subject for parody and caricature, a subject of which George DuMaurier took advantage in 1866, when his “Legend of Camelot” appeared in the pages of Punch.¹⁶ This poem, with its refrain “O Miserie!,” concerns a Lady who has masses of Pre-Raphelite hair, as verses and pictures reveal. She and another medieval-style lady are finally observed, by a somewhat perplexed peddler, swooning as in a trance together—The peddler comments that Camelot people “always try / To look like that!” Here, and earlier, the poem has some obvious touches.

“Who knows this damsel burning bright,” quote Launcelot,
                                                            “like a northern light”?
                                                                                          O Miserie!
Quoth Sir Gauwaine: “I know her not!” “Who quoth you did?”
                                                            quoth Launcelot.

It also has, within the broadly comic scheme, some strange Tennysonian passages:

The rosebuds wriggle in their bliss,
And lift them for his lips to kiss!
                                        O Miserie!
And if he kiss a rose instead,
It blushes of a deeper red!

But by and large the piece makes most effective parody of the ballad as practiced by Morris (and Rossetti). And the drawings, one of which shows Geoffrey Chaucer looking on as Braunighrindas strides by, are superb and only slight exaggerations of the Burne-Jones manner.

Combined parody of the writer's style and caricature of the artist's can testify again to close relations between art and literature in these decades. Simple caricature involving literary figures was, of course, familiar. Before DuMaurier, Frederick Sandys had drawn his rather crude burlesque version of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford,” showing Ruskin as a great ass on whose sturdy back Millais is carried, along with Rossetti and Holman Hunt. (The attack did not, apparently, rankle long in its victims' minds, for in the later sixties Sandys, now more accomplished as an illustrator and a minor painter, was quite friendly with Rossetti. But Ruskin is not, here, attacked with his own deadliest weapon, language.) A less well-known and more strictly literary example that suggests just how closely supposed schools of writing and art were identified is an anonymous pamphlet made up of verses and drawings on the Manchester Exhibition of 1857. It displays a formidable title page, referring to “the immortal Buskin.” The parody, hardly subtle, indicates some resistance to the mid-Victorian tendency toward veneration of the critic—and some skepticism about fashions in art.

Much of the best burlesque on artists and writers has a double interest, being done by men who are themselves accomplished artists and writers, such men as DuMaurier. Although he may be generally remembered as an author of fiction, this versatile satirist—both French and English, both draftsman and novelist—was originally a painter and an illustrator. The essay in Partial Portraits by the early Henry James considers him only as a caricaturist of society. Caricaturist in drawings as well as words, DuMaurier was a figure of importance, certainly, some years before his successes with the fantastic novels Peter Ibbetson and Trilby.

And yet his art is always literary. He created his own people for Punch, the Duke and Duchess of Stilton, the snobbish Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, the aesthetic Mrs. Cimabue Brown, and he made them memorable through both drawings and dialogue as nineteenth century versions of the Renaissance English “character” sketch. DuMaurier came to England in 1860, after studying art in Paris along with his good friend Whistler, and began at once to draw cartoons and illustrations, first for Once a Week and then for Punch, which he served also as an author, and after the death of Leech in 1864, as an editor. His drawings display the mixture of realism with fantasy which was to appear in his fiction; at first, amusingly, that mixture seemed to some observers a “Pre-Raphaelite” characteristic—as almost any quality not academic or approved in art might well be termed from 1850 to the early sixties—and George Cruikshank remarked bitterly to the editor of Once a Week that its new contributor was one of the “damned” Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.¹⁷ Yet in spite of all his friendships with Millais, Burne-Jones, and Sandys, he can be and has been more aptly compared, even as a cartoonist, with the great Victorian prose satirists.¹⁸ Sometimes a realist, often romantically inclined to picture sheer feminine grace and elegance, he was almost always in his drawings satirizing dullness, or pretension, or some kind of snobbery. In fact, the one person among the illustrators who most influenced DuMaurier as a contributor of drawings to the magazines is the one he admires most as a writer, William Makepeace Thackeray.

DuMaurier never entertained exaggerated notions about the value of his fiction in relation to such satirical and “real” work as Thackeray's. But if he is now judged as a very minor novelist, he retains distinction as contributor and as redactor for Punch, and above all as the illustrator for his literary guide and mentor. His splendid drawings for Henry Esmond and those in the Cornhill for Henry Esmond represent some of his best artistry. Not incidentally, much of this best work was done for the Cornhill, where he illustrated Hardy, Meredith, James and Mrs. Gaskell; and his relationship with that periodical began under Thackeray's editorship. But in his illustrations and most of his artist friends, Thackeray was often fortunate. Among the illustrators were not only DuMaurier but also Cruikshank, the ubiquitous Millais, Leech and Doyle. His circle of artist friends included the last two of these and, among painters, Landseer and G. F. Watts. Editor, novelist, essayist, and caricaturist, he too moved in both the worlds of art and literature.

Thackeray, like DuMaurier after him, began his career as an artist, for his brief study of law was never very serious; and he continued to draw until the last years of his life, illustrating his own Lovel the Widower in his own Cornhill for 1860. His still rather well-known gathering of various essays from periodicals, the Paris Sketch Book of 1840, was Thackeray's second published volume; the first was not a literary effort at all but a book of satirical drawings on the ballet “La Sylphide,” entitled Flore et Zephyr, and published in 1836.

In that same year, Thackeray applied to Dickens to illustrate his Pickwick Papers. Unfortunately, the novelist whose great rival he was to become “did not find [his drawings] suitable”; one can only guess at the results if Dickens had found otherwise.¹⁹ Thackeray illustrated Douglas Jerrold's Men of Character in 1838, and about this time he also made drawings for the anti-corn law movement. But his most celebrated early work, combining visual with verbal caricature, began to appear in 1844, soon after the founding of Punch. For seven years he was closely connected with the magazine and with its artists, including his old friend and schoolfellow John Leech. A pamphlet attacking Punch in 1847 refers to Thackeray as both artist and author of “The Snobs of England” (The Book of Snobs), as “Correggio Rafello Snob Swamper.” During this period he could still be described loosely by Carlyle's phrase of 1837, “One Thackeray, a … kind of painter … who is now writing for his life in London.”²⁰

The 1847 illustrations for Vanity Fair do not consistently reflect that realistic detail which critics observe in the story. In fact, the most striking of Thackeray's sketches are the most free, and the least successful are the most carefully detailed. Even in picturing his Amelia, the illustrator-novelist can hardly resist his habitual bent for exaggeration. And many of the drawings, taking advantage of grotesque figures or odd incidents, somehow suggest—as Thackeray's designs for a title page do—the world of Dickens as much as this more “actual” fictive world.

With freedom allowed his artist's pen by the fantasy of The Rose and the Ring in 1854, Thackeray brings his illustration closer in spirit to the text. But the very word illustration may be misleading here, for some of the drawings preceded the story for this diverting Christmas “pantomime,” so that the history of Prince Giglio, Prince Bulbo, and Princess Angelica has a gay unreality about it which derives from the nature of grotesquely comic art. The prose begins by pointing at a picture: “This is Valoroso XXIV, King of Paflagonia, seated with his Queen and only child at their royal breakfast-table,” and so on. This most remarkable of Thackeray's Christmas books is also “to many readers,” as Gordon Ray remarks, “the most appealing of his shorter works.”²¹ It reveals what might be called the other side, the “comically poetical” aspect, of a genius often associated with veracity and scope of detail in fiction. This is the satirical side. If Victorian artists often designed their pictures as works of prose fiction, the greatest Victorian novelist who also drew pictures often drew them as mock-heroic bits of poetry. Even the engravings in The Rose and The Ring suggest something of his poetry and wit; the original drawings by Thackeray, of the King and Queen, Bulbo and his immense head, and the elaborate Prince of Crim Tartary, embody his most fanciful and accomplished style.²²

More than Thackeray, more certainly than DuMaurier or the lesser Pre-Raphaelites, the Victorian writer and artist who seems problematic now is Edward Lear: problematic because of his cryptic fantasy but also because his more ambitious art and writing appear to be, almost like the several elements in his nonsense verse, quite unrelated.

At nineteen Lear became a draftsman for the Zoological society; his early published drawings of birds and animals show a fine precision of detail, the result of closer observation, in rather striking contrast with the loose free lines of his animal sketches for children that accompany his equally free and peculiar lines of nonsense verse. Some five years later he began to paint landscapes in water color, living and working mostly abroad. He is now known as a landscape artist in this medium, although he painted in oils from 1840 to 1853, exhibiting at the Academy in 1850. In fact, Lear's true metier, whatever the medium, was that of drawing. In 1845 he gave lessons to Queen Victoria, a fairly talented amateur, and the choice of him was as apt as it is interesting. But the difference between Lear's serious painting, competent and nice if always tight, often cramped, sometimes over-literal, and his epistolary of nonsense drawing, inventive and even careless, suggests in extremes the two aspects of the artist-poet.

In oils he wanted to be a “topographical landscape-painter” representing nature exactly as he saw it. His painting was conventionally descriptive—like so much Victorian art, it has been called literary—and Lear considered it to be Pre-Raphaelite. Not surprisingly, he admired Holman Hunt, whose good friend he became: the two men met, for a short time living and painting together, in 1852, when Lear became friendly also with William Rossetti and Millais.

But Turner was his idol as a painter, Tennyson his friend and his ideal in literature: for years he planned and longed to illustrate the Laureate's poems. And Lear complained to Holman Hunt of his inability to represent nature faithfully, declaring that there was yet a vein of poetry in him.²² Against the literal and scientific, the precise and prosaic qualities that dominate Lear's idea of his art, his poetic vein would assert itself. It did and does in the best of his water colors. It does especially in his nonsense verse and drawings.

Perhaps, too, Lear's unconscious reaction against criteria for art which happen not to suit entirely his own lyric talent can be read in his lyrical inversions of both normal narrative logic and moral law. The classic limericks refuse to observe a plot sequence even when they seem to: events follow one another, but they are often madly unrelated. This is much more true of Lear's than of most limericks—including the “Vers nonsensiques” of DuMaurier, surely the first of all limericks in French, which retain an appropriately Gallic degree of logic. And it is true of Lear's other verses. Again and again, in his nonsense, a moral conclusion seems to be drawn, but it is not particularly moral, nor conclusive, nor does it follow from what has preceded it.

Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills.
Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,
And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe
The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!
Such such is life.

Finally, the very limerick form that Lear has exploited, made popular, and illustrated with his nonsense drawings, is the strictest, narrowest form that is often used in modern verse. The poet seems always to thumb his nose at the strict formality, the propriety as it were, of the art within whose rules he does such unruly antics.

In nonsense, then, which is sometimes parody, Lear would seem to react against the literal, narrative and formal demands of his supposedly sensible art. But we have to analyze motives to arrive at this conclusion. As a painter and poet, he does not seem to have a single genius expressing itself through two complementary talents.

There are a good many other illustrative writers among the Victorians beside these and the more or less illustrious Pre-Raphaelites—most notably, the would-be Pre-Raphaelite draftsman and ultimately major poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose youthful sketches suggest Madox Brown and whose mature poems are filled with brilliantly telling landscape imagery.²³ Hopkins again demonstrates how in his age a talent for the visual arts can easily be translated into literary expression. He does not at all demonstrate a fear of art. And he seems, much more strikingly than Lear, to be consistent in style as draftsman and as poet. In this consistency there may—as his poems can declare—be the effect of true reconciliation between observing eye and creative mind, between the vision of landscape and the awareness of the human figure, the self-shape or ego.

One cannot easily define, however, the relationship between quality of vision and literary style—personal style—in the work of others who are both artists and writers. If quality of actual vision, mode as well as intensity of seeing, can enter into the written art of prophet and novelist as well as poet, it is still particularly striking in the verse of men who are active in both arts—Morris and, above all, Rossetti.

Rossetti is the one Victorian figure best-known as both painter and poet. He may be the only Victorian poet who consistently writes iconic poetry, lines that are conceived as illustrating pictures so that the message is essentially visual, the words comment on the image of the fixed and immutable—not the natural scene but the painter's scene. Hopkins, with his kaleidoscopic imagery (often as shifting as Swinburne's), rarely does that: he catches and composes glimpses rather than describing scenes already composed, and his verses are often sacramental, in both the Romantic and the Catholic way, rather than iconic.

If the phrase “art as literature” implies the subordinating of visual to verbal, then “literature as art” may suggest the opposite extreme—Swinburne, Pater, “Art for Art's Sake,” tending to emphasize beauty perceived by the senses more than ideas and ideals that are traditionally communicated by words. But a critic like Ruskin can be read to intend either or both senses (more often either, not both) in the attempt to unify outer nature and inner moral nature—the prophet's truths.

Ruskin can be considered a critic divided against himself. Dante Rossetti can be considered an artist divided within himself.

The division of talent and interest may or may not have been a good thing for Rossetti's work. In any event, it raises a question. Why, in the mid-Victorian decades, with their great interest in painting, are there few painters of great reputation, painters with a claim to be ranked high in the history of modern art? It may be said that just as the vast range of Victorian literature includes no worthwhile drama, until Wilde and the earliest Shaw, because dramatic talents were channelled into poetic and other literary forms, so the promising draftsmen and painters, such men as Butler, Lear, Hopkins, Thackeray and Hardy, as well as others perhaps more promising, channelled their graphic abilities and visual perceptiveness into literature.²⁴ The writer's palm seemed greener than the painter's. So the literary aspirations of other artists—Smethan, Solomon, Paton, and almost all the Pre-Raphaelites—were predominant.

That generalization is suggested by the practice of artist-writers who contributed to The Germ and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and more strikingly by the aspirations of a Lear, whose genius was apparently that of the nature painter rather than the Pre-Raphaelite moralist or the illustrator. Yet the true genius of the age may well be, after all, the genius of illustration as the word is usually understood now. Perhaps it is a question of how the word came to be understood—and often used disparagingly—as it is now; for Turner's great canvases, in which human figures are almost always dwarfed by a vast landscape, skyscape, seascape, can be taken themselves in a large sense to illustrate humanity by the presentation of affective scenery, while such popular pictures as “Derby Day,” for which large vistas have meaning defined through commonplace human actors, also illustrate humanity and its foibles, only more flatly and directly. In fact, illustration of the narrative and literal sense is an ancient tradition of painting, one that extends far, far beyond the eighteenth-century Romantic use of natural masses for symbolic and sometimes iconographic value, and it is a tradition rediscovered by mid-Victorian artists. In fact, the history of at least French and English painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of shifting balance between Romantic background and “literary” narrative foreground (moral, political or biographical). The meanings of ut pictura poesis are evidently many, and the relationships of visual art to literature, untenanted landscape to human figure, remain for any period ambiguous. For many of the most illustrious Victorians they are ambiguous but profoundly important.

Notes

1. June, p. 355. Morris should be, from Ruskin's point of view, one of the most illustrious Victorians. My comments on this topic represent one result of research in Ruskin, the Victorian arts and mid-Victorian criticism, undertaken on an NEH-Huntington Library Fellowship.

2. See Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), 2, 152. Cruikshank claimed, after Dickens' death, to have supplied the plot for Oliver Twist; but, increasingly eccentric in his later years, he seems not to have made the claim persuasive.

3. On periodicals and their publics, see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957). An appendix to that study compares periodical circulations, including those for Punch (40,000) and the Illustrated London News (123,000) in 1854 (p. 394).

4. See, on these illustrated books, chapters 6 through 9 of Gleeson White, English Illustration, ‘The Sixties’: 1855-1870 (London, 1906).

5. As John Steegman points out, “from the 1830s through most of the century” the three main kinds of English painting were genre, illustrative, and historical; both portraiture and landscape had lesser importance. And each of these three categories implies a story-telling purpose. See Consort of Taste 1830-1870 (London, 1950), p. 14.

   In 1864 Philip Hamerton, one of the most respected Victorian art critics, recalled that “whereas other men illustrated poets and novelists, the Pre-Raphaelites were to be their own poets” (The Fine Arts Quarterly Review, 2 May, 1864-259).

6. Holman Hunt's painting is the earliest of these. It was, T.S.R. Boase comments, “a real attempt to interpret the scene and find actions appropriate to the story.” “It is perhaps more important,” he concludes “that it was from a poem by Keats. The Academics of the forties were full of illustrations drawn from literature, but Hunt did not think that Keats had ever before provided a subject. … Keats and Tennyson are the voices which stimulated the lyrical excitement of early Pre-Raphaelite painting, a stimulus eagerly accepted with no reservations as to the danger of literary content for visual art.” See English Art 1800-1870 (Oxford, 1959; Vol. 10 in the Oxford History of English Art), p. 277.

7. Boase, English Art 1800-1870, p. 297.

8. See White, English Illustration, p. 16.

9. See Graham Reynolds, Painters of the Victorian Scene (London, 1953); and, for reproductions of two pictures by Butler—of some biographical if not of much aesthetic interest—see figures 75 and 76.

10. See Robin Ironside and John Gere, Pre-Raphaelite Painters (London, 1948), p. 26. For bibliographical information on Smetham and all the artists associated with the PRB, by far the most thorough and useful source is William Fredeman's Pre-Raphaelitism (Cambridge, Mass.: 1965).

11. Like Rossetti, Solomon moved from an early relatively simple style—the Pre-Raphaelite style of the fifties and early sixties exemplified by his sketch of “Dante's First Meeting with Beatrice”—to a much more lush manner, as in the Vision of Love.

    Aside from Swinburne's essay on him, a few odd comments in biographies and letters (including Swinburne's) and a sketchy chapter in Bernard Falk's Five Years Dead (London, 1937), there is little to be found on the career of this sometimes pathetic and consistently fascinating minor figure. One very rare source is Julia Ellsworth Ford's Simeon Solomon: An Appreciation (New York, 1908), which I have learned of and seen through the kindness of Mr. Robert Isaacson; and there is a brief chapter on Solomon in George Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends (London, 1919), pp. 156-163. See also, on Solomon, Fredeman's account in Pre-Raphaelitism, pp. 212-215.

12. Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement 1901-1911, 3, 79. See also Fredeman, pp. 200-201.

13. Poems by a Painter (Edinburgh, 1861), p. 156. Paton was later knighted—for his pictures, certainly, not for his poems.

14. Furthermore, the number of artists who were amateurs in Victorian letters might be expected in view of the friendly and sometimes professional as well as personal connections between the worlds of the fine arts and literature. The influence not only of Carlyle's ideas on Madox Brown but also of Tennyson's dreamy medievalism on his illustrators, Rossetti and Holman Hunt, is evident. But such lesser or younger writers as Coventry Patmore and George Meredith were more personally involved with art and artists: Patmore as a friend of the sculptor Thomas Woolner and, through him, of the other Pre-Raphaelites; Meredith as an unfortunately close friend of the painter Henry Wallis—for whose “Death of Chatterton” he was the model in 1856—until Meredith's wife bore a child by Wallis and eloped with him, in 1858, to Capri.

15. The Germ, that short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal of 1850, included contributions from John Collinson (briefly Christina Rossetti's fiance), William Bell Scott (her true love, according to Lona Mosk Packer), the handsome painter Walter Deverell, the moralistic critic John Orchard, the minor sculptor John Tupper, the major sculptor Thomas Woolner, and Madox Brown (whose unpublished sonnets in the Troxell collection make it clear why he published so little—only one in The Germ), as well as Patmore and the three Rossetti's. Dante Rossetti's “Blessed Damozel” appeared in its pages. The avowedly imitative Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, founded by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones (then only Jones) in 1856, included a revised version of the “Damozel” and a good deal of verse and prose by Morris; as for Burne-Jones, editor William Fulford complained that “Ted won't write.” In their theory, their exposure of coterie work, and their dimly medieval styles, both periodicals have historical—if not the very highest aesthetic—interest.

16. See Vol. 50, pp. 94, 97, 109, 128. The poem and illustrations are reprinted in a volume (London, 1898) that includes a number of DuMaurier's other parodies and bits of light verse. One prose tale, “The Rise and Fall of Jack Spratt,” is especially noteworthy: it concerns an artist and his family, “all medievally arrayed,” who lose their unworldly attitudes when they are taken up by society—only to be replaced in the favor of academicians and public by an American sculptor and his plump wife.

17. See Lionel Stevenson, “George DuMaurier and the Romantic Novel,” in Essays by Divers Hands, N.S. 30, ed. N.H. Wallis (London, 1960), 36-54, especially 42ff.

18. Martin Wood in George DuMaurier: The Satirist of the Victorians (New York, 1913), compares his satiric art with Meredith's fiction; see pp. 54-8.

19. See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York, 1955), p. 189; and plate opposite p. 238.

20. Lionel Stevenson cites this phrase in The Showman of Vanity Fair (New York, 1947), p. 71; on Carlyle and Thackeray as a young reviewer, see also the New Letters edited by Alexander Carlyle (London, 1904), L, 83-84.

21. Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom (New York, 1958), p. 229. See also The Rose and the Ring: reproduced in facsimile from the Author's original illustrated manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, 1947), with Ray's introduction.

22. See Chapter 8, “Pre-Raphaelite,” in Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (London, 1968), especially pp. 11-114; and, on Holman Hunt (“Daddy” to Lear), and Tennyson, Angus Davidson's Edward Lear (London, 1938), pp. 73-87.

23. Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, Second Edition (London, 1956), p. 214. The letters to Baillie include several sketches, including architectural details in the manner of Ruskin. For more on, and excellent examples of, the early drawing by Hopkins, see Norman White, “The Context of Hopkins' Drawings” (pp. 53-68) and Jerome Bump, “Hopkins' Drawings” (pp. 69-87), in All My Eyes See: The Visual World of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. R.K.R. Thornton (Sunderland, 1975). Both White and Bump show how close the relationship is between the young poet's draftmanship and that of his contemporaries, including the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin. Bump makes the important point that the inscape with which Hopkins is concerned, in visual art as well as poetry, is a matter not simply of unique forms, but one of unifying form—the central order to which all variant detail is integral—so that he is concerned, as Ruskin is, with “scientific-aesthetic laws” (p. 74). (One might add that the interest of Swinburne in “gathering form” is strikingly parallel to this concern; on Swinburne, Ruskin, Hopkins and the balance between detail and shaping conception in art, see Robert L. Peters, The Crowns of Apollo (Detroit, 1965), especially pp. 77 and ff.)

24. All did produce some mildly interesting visual art—including Hardy, who illustrated his own poems. The Hardy illustrations for his 1898 Wessex Poems are rather fine (the volume was first to be called “Wessex Poems: with Sketches of Their Scenes by the Author”); pen and wash drawings, they are partly studies of architecture and partly landscapes, while some are designs that suggest the emblems used by poets of the sixteenth century. Among the most striking are the almost surrealistic sketches for “In a Eweleaze Near Wetherbury”—with eyeglasses superimposed on a sheepfold to create an association from dissociation like that in a Magritte picture—and “Heiress and Architect,” with figures whose heads and tops are cropped as in a snapshot badly taken. These illustrations are reproduced in the Thomas Hardy Commemorative Issue of Victorian Poetry, 17 (1979), 135-154.