by Howard Pyle
Apart from the variety and subtlety of the illustrations, the frames themselves are wonderfully varied and suggestive. The more the illustration shows outlaw triumph, the more richly natural will the frame be; where the outlaws are in difficulty, the frame is almost lifeless, and real trouble thins the frame right down—as with the sorrowful knight (page 192) or the king striking Robin (page 355). The frame for Robin’s death (page 366), where the open window still offers a future, if only for the myth, gives a transcendent Blakean image of Azrael, the angel of the soul. To intensify the visual impact, throughout there are smaller but still rich headings and the uniquely detailed initials that begin each part, clear signs that Pyle was familiar with medieval manuscripts.
Entertaining as both text and illustrations are, The Merry Adventures is also replete with ideas and values. To enjoy the imagination is a prime recommendation: Pyle’s preface offers the reader “mirth and joyousness in the land of Fancy” (page v) and the adjective “merry” recurs throughout the book, including very strikingly at the beginning and end of the sad last chapter about the death of Robin Hood. But there is also reality. The preface admits this “merry” world is not the same as the real one: its England has no chill mists or rain, and reality and history are of real interest. In fact the preface, remarkably, does not mention Robin at all, just figures of history who can be reinterpreted through fancy. The “great, tall, merry fellow that roams the greenwood and joins in merry sports” (page v) is none other than King Richard I. He, his historical fellows, and by implication our painful modern world, can all be reread and improvingly reinterpreted through the lessons that imaginative thinking can bring. One such lesson is to appreciate the past, including the English past. Like Washington Irving, James Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, Pyle saw English and European tradition as a source of human and political values with which their own American society and culture were directly, inextricably, connected—values that had crucial importance in an increasingly materialist and competitive United States. Anne Scott Macleod has written about how many at Pyle’s time felt America had lost “intensity, spontaneity, a capacity for physical action and, above all, an eagerness to risk greatly for an idea or an ideal” (page 45).
The ideals of The Merry Adventures are embodied in a world where men enjoy life and operate together in bold action, fighting both for fun against one another and in earnest against their enemies. Both the feasting and fighting are important in realizing a sense of positive fraternity—Pyle was to create something very like that in his famous art school at Chadd’s Ford on the Brandywine River. The world Pyle created in his stories and his school was almost exclusively masculine in its interests—Marian is only once thought of by Robin, and while Little John meets girls who are obviously interested in him, nothing comes of it; similarly Pyle was not keen on teaching art to women. That “male-dominated world” was of course familiar at the time, as Jill May notes (1995, page 85), and in any case, it seems more adolescent than antiwoman—they toss Little John in a blanket, they joke and fight, they move about in self-supporting gangs. But their interaction is not unemotional. The bonds made in fighting and feasting are very strong, and after Little John rescues Will Stutely, they weep and kiss. It is a world of deep feeling, however limited, and this capacity for overt emotion is one of the elements that leads May to suggest that the stories permitted, and even still permit, women to empathize with the characters (1987, page 200).
The language of The Merry Adventures has been found too old-fashioned by some: “thou wottest not” (page 19) says the sheriff’s man to him, and “Marry come up with a murrain” is the tanner’s obscure expletive (page 107). But much of the strangeness is in the modern ear: Pyle himself addressed his mother in letters as “thee,” in Quaker style; his antique dialogue was normal in Scott and the many Victorian historical novels and refers back constantly to the cultural authority of Shakespeare. In Pyle it is meant, like the time-honoring tradition of the illustrations, to give value to the best of the past and even to criticize implicitly the meanness of the present and its restricted, bloodless language. The style meshes with the recurrent nostalgia for healthy good old times:
No sweeter inn could be found in all Nottinghamshire than that of the Blue Boar. None had such lovely trees standing around, or was so covered with trailing clematis and sweet woodbine; none has such good beer and such humming ale; nor, in winter time, when the north wind howled and snow drifted around the hedges, was there to be found, elsewhere, such a roaring fire as blazed upon the hearth of the Blue Boar. (pages 25—6)
The outlaw heroes matched their grand environment: it was in those old times “when such men grew as grew then; when sturdy quarterstaff and longbow toughened a man’s thews till they were as leather” (page 101).
The values of the past are also political. Just as Pyle’s family, like so many early Americans, emigrated as dissenting communities from an England they found oppressive, so Robin stands up for natural law and the populist wisdom of the people. Pyle imagines this communal ideal especially through proverbs: there is recurrent reference to Gaffer Swanthold and his wisdom, and while this is humorous, it is never mocking—the proverbs always work in the context. Those proverbs, as in many past cultures, represent the collective wisdom of a thoughtful, plainspoken democratic people whose sense of fun and festivity is matched by an enduring and tolerant patience:
... the serious things of this world become so mixed up with the merry things that our life is all of a jumble of black and white, as it were, like the boards of checkered black and white upon which country folk play draughts at the inn beside the blazing fire of a winter’s night. (page 140)
Equally American, and at this distance distinctly impressive, is Pyle’s rejection of Scott’s nationalism: his outlaw’s world does not depend on a basically racist Saxon-versus-Norman opposition, but Scott’s simplicities are subtly reworked. The outlaws all swear by Anglo-Saxon saints and Pyle, showing his wide learning, is aware of the special importance of Saint Dunstan. There is opposition to this moralized Saxonry—a greedy monk speaks slightingly of “a beggarly Saxon saint” (page 246), and when King Henry swears, it is by the French-named Saint Hubert (page 292). But it is clear that “Saxon” in Pyle implies not race and racial exclusion—his family were committed abolitionists. Rather it points to the Anglo-Saxon liberties that were thought to have been downtrodden by the oppressive and aristocratic “Norman yoke,” an idea widely spread in the eighteenth century by Tom Paine, the English yeoman radical so influential in both France and America. The idea of the outlaw’s connection with racial and social democracy persists, thanks partly at least to Pyle’s new American model of the hero, to the anti-Nazi implications of the 1938 Warners’ film star-ring Errol Flynn and the antiracism of the 1991 version with Kevin Costner.
The fighting and feasting and the natural beauties that readers can enjoy so much, whether in prose or in picture, realize a communal ideal of a positive, vigorous world. It is very vigorous: though Pyle seeks to avoid the bloodshed of the ballads—as a child he knew the Civil War and its wholesale slaughter—there is still much fighting and argument. Naomi Wood has commented that Pyle is a Quaker who was fascinated by violence, a wholehearted American who loved and used European sources, an admirer of realism who nevertheless ultimately favored romance in theme and form (page 591). But these are not contradictions; they are signs of the breadth and multiplicity of Pyle’s mind and work, and that dynamic richness as well as his technical mastery, especially in art, is what empowers his masterpiece, The Merry of Adventures of Robin Hood.
Pyle insisted on richness of many kinds. He asserted the value of the past in the present, combined youthful vigor and communal wisdom, trusted young readers to recognize real quality in art and literature, re-created the universal force of Robin Hood as a symbol of an energetic democracy that also knows how to celebrate. Who would refuse his invitation to his version of “the land of Fancy”?
—Stephen
Knight
References
Charles D. Abbott, Howard Pyle: A Chronicle, New York, 1925.
Lucien L. Agosta, Howard Pyle, Boston, 1987.
Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, Ithaca, 2003.
Anne Scott Macleod, “Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood: The Middle Ages for Americans,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 25 (2000), 44—48.
Jill May, “Howard Pyle’s American Interpretation of British Legend,” in Robin Hood: The Many Faces of that Celebrated English Outlaw, ed. Kevin Carpenter, Oldenburg, 1995.
—, “The Hero’s Woods: Pyle’s Robin Hood and the Female Reader,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 11 (1987), 197—200.
Henry C. Pitz, Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School, New York, 1975.
Taima M. Ranta, “Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood: The Quintessential Children’s Story,” in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature, vol. 2, ed. Perry Nodelmann, West Lafayette, 1987.
Naomi Wood, “Howard Pyle,” The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, ed. Victor Watson, Cambridge, 2001.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Childrens’ Books Written and Illustrated by Howard Pyle
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883.
Pepper and Salt or Seasoning for Young Folks. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1886.
The Wonder Clock or Four and Twenty Marvelous Tales. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888.
Otto of the Silver Hand. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888.
Men of Iron. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892.
The Garden Behind the Moon: A Real Story of the Moon AngeL New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895.
The Story of the Champions of the Round Table. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.
The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907.
The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910.
Biography and Criticism
Abbott, Charles D. Howard Pyle, A Chronicle. With an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle’s works. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1925.
Agosta, Lucien L. Howard Pyle. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.
Davis, Paul Preston. Howard Pyle: His Life—His Work: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Pictorial Record of Howard Pyle: Illustrator, Author, Teacher: Father of American Illustration, America’s Foremost Illustrator. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 2004.
Elzea, Rowland. Howard Pyle. New York: Scribner, 1975.
—Howard Pyle: Diversity in Depth. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1973.
Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Morse, Willard S., and Gertrude Brincklé. Howard Pyle: A Record of His Illustrations and Writings. Wilmington, DE: Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, 1921; Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1969.
Nesbitt, Elizabeth. Howard Pyle. New York: H. Z. Walck [1966].
Pitz, Henry C. Howard Pyle—Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School. New York: C. N. Potter; distributed by Crown Publishers [1975].
1
Adam Bell, Clym o’ the Clough, and William of Cloudesly were three noted north-country bowmen whose names have been celebrated in many ballads of the olden time.
2
Small sour apples.
3
Bond-servants.
4
Stand for selling.
5
Classes of travelling mendicants that infested England as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. Vide Dakkar’s English Villainies, etc.
6
I.e., in old beggar’s cant, “beaten a man or gallant upon the highway for the money in his purse.” Dakkar’s English Villainies.