The great advantages of Art over Photography are its personal qualities. The camera is impersonal, and will ever be a scientific instrument. You can, like the ingenious Mr. H. P. Robinson, pose figures, and with a combination of negatives concoct a composition which is some sort of cousin-german to a picture; but if you can do all this, you might go a little farther and make a picture without the aid of a camera. It would be personal, and, without a signature, signed all over with the unmistakable mark of style or manner, like Constable’s paintings.
It seems unlikely that any mechanical processes, save the strictly autographic, which reproduce line, will be of permanent artistic value. No photogravure will be sought for and prized in years to come as the old etchings and mezzotints are valued. Those elaborate photogravure plates from popular or artistic pictures (the terms are not synonymous) which crowd the print-sellers’ shops to-day, at five or ten guineas, will not long hence be accounted dear at so many shillings, simply because they lack the personal note. Meanwhile, mezzotints and etchings, other than the “commercial” etching, will become inversely expensive.
In that brackish flood of “bitter cries” to which we have been subjected of late years, the wail of the wood-engraver was easily to be distinguished, and we heard that his occupation was gone. But has it? No, nor will it go. No tint nor half-tone process can ever render sufficiently well the wash drawings that the best engravers render so admirably, with an entire subjection of their own individuality unthought of twenty years ago. The wood-engraver, as one who imposes restrictions upon technique, has had his day; but as a conscientious and skilful workman, who renders faithfully the personality of the artist he engraves, he flourishes, and will continue to flourish. Otherwise, there is no hope for him, let Mr. Linton say what he will. He will remain because he can preserve the personal note.
Half-tone processes are as tricky as Puck and as inconstant. You never know the exact result you will get from any given drawing. Half a dozen blocks from the same drawing will give, each one, a different result, because so much depends upon the fraction of a second, more or less, in making the negative; but all of them agree in presenting an aspect similar to that obtained on looking through the wire blind of some Philistine window upon the street. In all cases the edge, the poignancy of the subject, is taken off, and, in the case of the process-block, several intermediate tones go as well, with, frequently, the result of an unnatural lighting “that never was on land or sea,” and it may be hoped never will be.
No doubt half-tone processes will continue to be more and more widely used, chiefly because they are several times cheaper than a good wood engraving, and because, so far as mere documentary evidence goes, they are good enough for illustrated journalism. But for bookwork, for anything that is not calculated for an ephemeral consideration, half-tone processes are only to be used with the most jealous care.
As regards the half-tone processes employed to reproduce photographs, I take leave to say that no one will, a hundred years hence, prize them for any quality. The necessary reticulation of their surface subtracts from them something of the documentary value of the photograph, and, deriving directly from photographs, they have no personal or artistic interest.
But their present use touches the professional draughtsman nearly, for in illustrated journalism half-tone is very frequently used in reproducing photographs of places and people without the aid of the artist, and it is no consolation for a man who finds his occupation going for him to consider that these direct photographic processes have no permanent interest. It is the new version of the old tale of the stage-coach versus the railway engine, to his mind, and he is apt to think that as a craftsman he is fast following the wood-engraver. But it is safe to say that although the mediocrities will suffer, or be forced, like the miniature-painter who turned daguerrotypist and then blossomed forth as a photographer, to study practical evolution, the artists of style and distinction will rather gain than lose by a further popularity of cheap photographic blocks. The illustrated papers and magazines will not be so freely open to them as before, but in the illustration of books will lie their chief field, and who knows but that by such a time the pen-drawing and the drawing in wash will have won at last to the picture-frame and the art galleries. There’s distinction for you!
So much to show the value of personality.
Still it remains that, although the personal element will always be valued, the fact—to paraphrase a sounding Ruskinian anathema—gives no reason for flinging your identity in the face of your contemporaries, or even of posterity (this last a long shot which few, with all the will in the world, will be able to achieve). You may be startlingly original and brilliant in technique, and be received with the acclaim that always awaits a novelty; but if your personality be so exaggerated that you allow it to override the due presentment of your subject, why, then, your plaudits will not be of very long continuance.