The ninety little process blocks in Bonhoure's edition showed the knowledge of the past, combined with the brilliancy and go of the present. But after a certain page there came a blank, and the letter-press dragged on--a libretto without the music. 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.