All that one knew was contained in a short note by the publisher: Vierge had been stricken with a grave malady, for some years he disappeared as a working artist. Those years, however, were spent in struggling against an affliction which would have killed a man less strong, but from which he has emerged able to complete his most important work. I am sure that Vierge would be the last, either himself to advertise his frightful misfortune, now happily over, or to wish to have it advertised by others. It is enough to say that when his entire right side was paralysed, and he lost the power of speech, he simply trained himself to work with his left hand, and to-day, as is proved by the last twenty illustrations in this book, and the pages of Le Monde Illustré week after week, he is producing drawings which are unsurpassed.
I hate and abominate the painter who fills columns with the recital of his misfortunes, telling you how he lost his paint brush, or how he had never a canvas of the right size, and soulfully lamenting the degeneracy of an age which knows quite too much to appreciate him. I can almost worship a man who silently conquers a living death.
Vierge is an artist who, like all great artists, has worked for his art—and his bread and butter. He is an illustrator, and, though therefore he has no hope of devoting a gallery to his own glorification, any Museum which might be so fortunate as to secure the original drawings from which these reproductions were made, would become for artists a place of pilgrimage.
His first publisher thought it enough to state, in the smallest possible types on the title page, that the story of Pablo was illustrée de nombreux dessins par D. Vierge—many publishers are not even so generous as this, and ignore the artist-illustrator altogether. To give the man, to whose genius the whole reason of the new edition was due, a few lines in a publisher’s preface, was, I suppose, very kind and thoughtful and considerate. But the French Government has since decorated Vierge with the Legion of Honour, and the French artists have awarded him a gold medal for these very designs. The charm and interest of the old illuminated missals lie not in the text, which often can be gotten elsewhere or is of no account, but in the pictures or decorations themselves, the work of the illustrators of that day. While the illuminations are prized, the names of the artists are usually forgotten. So, too, the work of contemporary illustrators is almost invariably dismissed by the critic with a sneer or with patronage, if indeed it be noticed at all. Still, there are some of us who know that these great little masters of illustration have spent more time and thought over the production of the cuts which embellish an author, than the author himself did on the text, and not infrequently knows far more about the subject. But because the criticism of books is, as a rule, in the hands of men who know nothing about art, their drawings are ignored. Or perhaps the degeneracy of modern illustration, and the want of ability of engravers and reproductive artists, is lamented by men who could not tell the difference between a process block and an etching, though they are certain that the old work, the originals of which they never saw, is much better than that which we are doing to-day and which they do not want to see.
Fewer people, probably, have seen Vierge’s Quevedo since it has been published, than in a day sit and gape, and yawn in awe-struck ignorance before the Sistine Madonna; and yet the latter is as blatant a piece of shoddy commercialism as has ever been produced; the Quevedo is a pure work of art. Indeed, never in the history of the world were there such marvellous drawings produced as to-day. But while collectors, dealers, and directors of Museums squabble over a piece of dirty paper, or throw public funds and private money away for drawings of which, if Dürer or Rembrandt, or any painter of distinction, perpetrated them, he should have been ashamed, none has the wit to spend as many pennies on the drawings of modern men with no popular reputation, as they do pounds for the work of others who have a widespread, and possibly justly merited fame, but no knowledge of the art they practise.
Go through the National Galleries of Germany, and though you will find tons of miserable scrawls produced by painters, outside of Berlin you will scarcely come across a drawing by Menzel or Klinger. In the much-[Pg ]belauded gallery of Munich, you will not find an example of Dietz or any of the men who to-day are the leaders of German art; if you want to see them you must go to the publishing offices of Fliegende Blätter. And how many Charles Keenes or Frederick Sandys’ does the British nation possess? Or where, outside of the offices of the Century Magazine and Harper’s, can you see a comprehensive collection of the work of American illustrators? In France, if you wish to study drawings produced by the cleverest of French draughtsmen, you must go, not to the Louvre or the Luxembourg, but to the Elysée Montmartre or the Chat Noir. So long as print sellers and curators have no real knowledge of art, one may expect the present state of affairs to continue.
Until art be taken as seriously as literature, and be discussed with as much thought and care and attention by men who understand it practically as well as theoretically—for the theory of art is or no value, and the practice is everything—illustration will not find its proper place as one of the most living and important of the fine arts. But, no matter—the great illustrator is quite as much of a creator as the great painter or the great sculptor. If the illustrator print his conception of an author’s meaning upon the same page as the latter’s text, this does not belittle him any more than it increases a painter’s greatness to give his picture the place of honour in a Museum, or the sculptor’s genius to allow him to obstruct the traffic of a street.
The first issue of Pablo de Segovia completely revolutionised the art of illustration and created a new school of illustrators, the influence of which is now felt all over the world, even by artists to whom the name of Vierge is absolutely unknown, and by critics who, in praising their friends, are really only testifying to the greatness of the master whose name they never heard. And here I should like to say that I make no pretension to having discovered Daniel Vierge, although I have been accused of it; this book discovered him to all artists.
When it came to reproduction, most of the drawings had to be much reduced. This was beautifully done by Gillot (and it is interesting to compare the latter’s work of ten years ago with that in this volume done by him to-day), while the printing of Lahure was most careful and satisfactory; but the appearance of Vierge’s work in many cases was entirely changed, though he himself knew how it would be changed. Vierge, as anyone can see from these new reproductions, drew openly, freely, boldly, but most carefully. The reproductions in Bonhoure’s edition gave one the impression of exquisite delicacy, a refinement of line which did not altogether exist in the original drawings, but was produced because the artist knew exactly what he wanted, and because the engraver was able to obtain it.
The drawings were made upon white paper—Bristol board or drawing paper—with a pen and liquid Indian ink. Vierge uses now a glass pen like an old stylus, and this, I believe, he prefers to all others. The drawings were then given to Gillot, the photo-engraver, who, by means of photography and handwork, produced in a metal block a reproduction of the original drawing which could be printed with type. It is a favourite, but fallacious, statement of the art critics that mechanical reproduction not only ruins the drawing, but is not to be compared to facsimile woodcutting. This is absolutely untrue if the artist is a craftsman, and the engraver, who is a craftsman, is also an artist. Vierge and Gillot fulfill these conditions. No woodcutter, not even Whitney, Collins, Gamm or Léveillé (there are, unfortunately, none in England to be considered) could reproduce any one of these drawings in the wood a bit better than Gillot has done by the mechanical process. Many of Vierge’s lines are so clear and so pure and so simple, that they would be comparatively easy to cut in the wood. Other arrangements of lines are so complex, that no woodcutter could ever follow them, but would have to suggest them. Gillot has reproduced them perfectly, and almost altogether by mechanical means. But, granted that the woodcutters could have made equally good reproductions, unless you could find a consummate artist, who, for the love of the thing, was willing to give years of his life to it, it would be much more sensible to do what has been done—give the work to a mechanical engraver like Gillot. For the woodcutter would be sure to put some of his own personality into his block, and for my part I prefer Vierge unadulterated. But it is one of the art critic’s absurd canons of belief