") Though I have sat under an
army of critics, I have but once been accused of inelegant English, and
then it was only by a lady who wrote that my slipshod style "aggravated"
her.
Finally it will be remarked that by dispensing with illustrations I
preserve intact my egoism and the dignity of a rival art. Nothing can be
more absurd than the conventional illustration which merely attempts to
picture over again what the writer has already pictured in words. Not
only is the effort superfluous, a waste of force, but the artist's
picture is too often in flat contradiction of the text. Whom are you to
believe, the author or the artist? the man who tells you that the heroine
is ethereal, or the man who plainly demonstrates that she is podgy? How
often, too, do the people dress differently in the words and in the
picture, not to speak of the shifting backgrounds! Dickens had so much
difficulty with his illustrations because he saw his characters so much
more clearly than any other novelist; the sight of his inner eye was so
good. And one can understand, too, how Cruikshank came to fancy he had
created Oliver Twist, much as an actor imagines he "creates" a character.
The true collaboration between author and artist requires that the work
should be divided between them, not reduplicated.
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