CHAPTER I

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INTRODUCTORY

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On a Letter to Ruskin.

About the name of Kate Greenaway there floats a perfume so sweet and fragrant that even at the moment of her death we thought more of the artist we admired than of the friend we had lost. Grateful for the work she had produced, with all its charm and tender cheerfulness, the world has recognised that that work was above all things sincere. And, indeed, as her art was, so were her character and her mind: never was an artist’s self more truly reflected in that which her hand produced. All the sincerity and genuine effort seen in her drawings, all the modesty, humour, and love, all the sense of beauty and of charm, all the daintiness of conception and realisation, the keen intelligence, the understanding of children, the feeling for landscape, with all the purity, simplicity, and grace of mind—all those qualities, in short, which sing to us out of her bright and happy pages—were to be found in the personality of the artist herself. All childhood, all babyhood, held her love: a love that was a little wistful perhaps. Retiring, and even shy, to only a few she gave her friendship—a precious possession. For how many are there who, gifted as she was, have achieved a triumph, have conquered the applause and admiration of two hemispheres, and yet have chosen to withdraw into the shade, caring for no praise but such as she might thankfully accept as a mark of what she was trying to accomplish, never realising (such was her innate modesty) the extent and significance of her success?

Here was a fine character, transparently beautiful and simple as her own art, original and graceful as her own genius. Large-hearted and right-minded, Kate Greenaway was gentle in her kindness, lofty and firm in principle, forgiving to the malevolent, and loyal to her friends—a combination of qualities happily not unrivalled among women, but rare indeed when united to attributes of genius.

It is true that what Kate Greenaway mainly did was to draw Christmas cards, illustrate a score or two of toy-books, and produce a number of dainty water-colour drawings; and that is the sum of her work. Why, then, is her name a household word in Great and Greater Britain, and even abroad where the mention of some of the greatest artists of England of to-day scarcely calls forth so much as an intelligent glance of recognition? It is because of the universal appeal she made, almost unconsciously, to the universal heart.

All who love childhood, even though they may not be blessed with the full measure of her insight and sympathy, all who love the fields and flowers and the brightness of healthy and sunny natures, must feel that Kate Greenaway had a claim on her country’s regard and upon the love of a whole generation. She was the Baby’s Friend, the Children’s Champion, who stood absolutely alone in her relations to the public. Randolph Caldecott laboured to amuse the little ones; Mr. Walter Crane, to entertain them. They aimed at interesting children in their drawings; but Kate Greenaway interested us in the children themselves. She taught us more of the charm of their ways than we had seen before; she showed us their graces, their little foibles, their thousand little prettinesses, the sweet little characteristics and psychology of their tender age, as no one else had done it before. What are Edouard FrÈre’s little children to hers? What are FrÖhlich’s, what are Richter’s? She felt, with Douglas Jerrold, that ‘babes are earthly angels to keep us from the stars,’ and has peopled for us a fairy-world which we recognise nevertheless for our own. She had a hundred imitators (from whom she suffered enough), but which of them is a rival on her own ground? M. Boutet de Monvel was inspired by her; but with all his draughtsman’s talent and astonishing invention and resource, he has not what she has: he has given us the insouciance of childhood, but at what sacrifice of touch; he has given us some of the beauty, but at what surrender of nearly all the lovableness and charm. And not babies and school-girls only, but maidens who are past the ignorance though not the innocence of childhood; not roses only, but all the flowers of the garden; not the fields only, but the fair landscape of the English country-side,—all these things Kate Greenaway has shown us, with winning and delightful quaintness, and has made us all the happier for her own happiness in them; and, showing us all these things, she has made us love them and her drawings the more for the teaching and the loveliness in them, and herself as well for having made them.

The children who welcomed her work when it first appeared are grown up now and are looking rather old, and those who bought the picture-books ‘for the little ones’ (as they said) but enjoyed them so much themselves, are mostly wearing spectacles. And all the while Kate Greenaway worked hard, making hundreds, and thousands, of her little pictures, and doing more for the pleasure and happiness of the little folks than most little folks know. So that now when her pencil and her brush are laid aside for ever, and herself has been called away, her life-task being done, it is surely well that we should remember her in affection, and wrap up the memory of her name in a little of the lavender of her love that filled her heart and welled over into her work.

One of the charms, as has been said, most striking in the character of ‘K. G.’ (as she was called by her most intimate friends and relatives) was her modesty. A quiet, bright little lady, whose fame had spread all over the world, and whose books were making her rich, and her publisher prosperous and content—there she was, whom everybody wanted to know, yet who preferred to remain quite retired, living with her relatives in the delightful house Mr. Norman Shaw had designed for her—happy when she was told how children loved her work, but unhappy when people who were not her intimate friends wanted to talk to her about it. She was, therefore, so little seen in the world that M. ArsÈne Alexandre declared his suspicion that Kate Greenaway must really have been an angel who would now and then visit this green earth only to leave a new picture-book for the children, and then fly away again. She has flown away for ever now; but the gift she left behind is more than the gift of a book or of a row of books. She left a pure love of childhood in many hearts that never felt it before, and the lesson of a greater kindness to be done, and a delight in simple and tender joys. And to children her gift was not only this; but she put before them pictures more beautiful in their way and quaint than had ever been seen, and she taught them, too, to look more kindly on their playmates, more wisely on their own little lives, and with better understanding on the beauties of garden and meadow and sky with which Heaven has embellished the world. It was a great deal to do, and she did it well—so well that there is no sadness in her friends’ memory of her; and their gratitude is tinged with pride that her name will be remembered with honour in her country for generations to come.

What Kate Greenaway did with her modest pencil was by her example to revolutionise one form of book-illustration—helped by Mr. Edmund Evans, the colour-printer, and his wood-blocks, as will be shown later on. And for a time she dressed the children of two continents. The smart dress with which society decks out its offspring, so little consonant with the idea of a natural and happy childhood, was repellent to Kate Greenaway. So she set about devising frocks and aprons, hats and breeches, funnily neat and prim, in the style of 1800, adding beauty and comfort to natural grace. In the first instance her Christmas cards spread abroad her dainty fancy; then her books, and finally her almanacks over a period of fifteen years, carried her designs into many countries and made converts wherever they were seen. An Englishman visiting Jules Breton, in the painter’s country-house in Normandy, found all the children in Greenaway costumes; for they alone, declared Breton, fitted children and sunshine, and they only were worthy of beautifying the chef-d’oeuvres du bon Dieu.

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SISTERS.

‘Girl with blue sash and basket of roses, with a baby.’

From a water-colour drawing in the possession of Stuart M. Samuel, Esq., M.P.

Indeed, Kate Greenaway is known on the Continent of Europe along with the very few English artists whose names are familiar to the foreign public—with those of Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Watts, and Walter Crane—being recognised as the great domestic artist who, though her subjects were infantile, her treatment often elementary, and her little faults clear to the first glance, merited respect for originality of invention and for rare creative quality. It was realised that she was a tÊte d’École, the head and founder of a school—even though that school was but a Kindergarten—the inventor of a new way of seeing and doing, quite apart from the exquisite qualities of what she did and what she expressed. It is true that her personal identity may have been somewhat vague. An English customer was once in the shop of the chief bookseller of Lyons, who was showing a considerable collection of English picture-books for children. ‘How charming they are!’ he cried; ‘we have nothing like them in France. Ah, say what you like—Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway are true artists—they are two of your greatest men!’ It was explained that Kate Greenaway was a lady. The bookseller looked up curiously. ‘I can affirm it,’ said the visitor; ‘Miss Greenaway is a friend of mine.’ ‘Ah, truly?’ replied the other, politely yet incredulous. Later on the story was duly recounted to Miss Greenaway. ‘That does not surprise me,’ she replied, with a gay little laugh. ‘Only the other day a correspondent who called himself “a foreign admirer” sent me a photograph of myself which he said he had procured, and he asked me to put my autograph to it. It was the portrait of a good-looking young man with a black moustache. And when I explained, he wrote back that he feared I was laughing at him, as Kate is a man’s name—in Holland.’

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But if her personality was a ‘mystification’ to the foreigner, there was no doubt about her art. In France, where she was a great favourite, and where her extensive contribution of drawings to the Paris Exhibition of 1889 had raised her vastly in the opinion of those who knew her only by her picture-books, she was cordially appreciated. But she had been appreciated long before that. Nearly twenty years earlier the tribute of M. Ernest Chesneau was so keen and sympathetic in its insight, and so graceful in its recognition, that Mr. Ruskin declared to the Oxford undergraduates that no expressions of his own could vie with the tactful delicacy of the French critic. But in his lecture on ‘The Art of England’ (Fairyland) Ruskin found words to declare for himself that in her drawings ‘you have the radiance and innocence of reinstated infant divinity showered again among the flowers of English meadows.’ And privately he wrote to her: ‘Holbein lives for all time with his grim and ugly “Dance of Death”; a not dissimilar and more beautiful immortality may be in store for you if you worthily apply yourself to produce a “Dance of Life.”’

The touchstone of all art in which there is an element of greatness is the appeal which it makes to the foreigner, to the high and the low alike. Kate Greenaway’s appeal was unerring. Dr. Muther has paid his tribute, on behalf of Germany, to the exquisite fusion of truth and grace in her picture-books, which he declared to be the most beautiful in the world; and, moreover, he does justice to her exquisite feeling for landscape seen in the utmost simplicity—for she was not always drawing children. But when she did, she loved the landscape setting almost, if not quite, as much as the little people whom she sent to play in it.

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From a Pencil Sketch in the possession of Lady Pontifex.

In speaking of Kate Greenaway as a ‘great’ artist, we do not, of course, mean that she was technically accomplished in the sense or degree that a great picture-painter or a sculptor may be. Her figure-drawing was by no means always impeccable; and the fact of the design and composition being generally ‘right’ arose, we imagine, as much from intuition as from the result of scholarly training. And that is the chief thing. As he grows older, even the artist who is primarily technician and purist is apt to ask, ‘What does technical excellence matter so long as the gist of the thing is there? Is not that a finer thing which convinces us from the instinct of the painter than that which satisfies us from his knowledge of it?’ Yet Kate could draw an eye or the outline of a face with unsurpassable skill: firmness and a sense of beauty were among her leading virtues. The painter with whom she had most affinity was perhaps Mr. G. D. Leslie, for her period and treatment are not unlike. Her sense of humour is allied to that of Stacy Marks; and her sentiment to that of Fred Walker. Yet she was wholly personal (as will be shown later on when the details of her art come to be discussed), and full of independence, courage, and fixity of purpose. And just as G. F. Watts in his portraits of men and women invariably sought out the finest and most noble quality in his constant search for beauty in the sitter, not only in features but in character, so did Kate Greenaway in her quiet little drawings show us all that was sweet and pleasant and charming in children’s lives of days gone by in country-side and village, and left out all that was ugly, wrong, or bad.

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Book-plate designed for Lady Victoria Herbert.

The life and progress of the fascinating artist lie here before the reader, with their quaint beginning and logical development.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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