Think of it—a collection of little wood-cuts or etchings, with each its appropriate legend—a series of small pictures equal in volume and in value to the whole of Thackeray's literary work! Think of the laughter and the tears from old and young, rich and poor, and from the thousands who have not the intelligence or the culture to appreciate great books, or lack time or inclination to read them.
All there was in the heart and mind of Thackeray, expressed through a medium so simple and direct that even a child could be made to feel it, or a chimney-sweep! For where need we draw the line? We are only pretending.
Now I am quite content with Thackeray as he is—a writer of books, whose loss to literature could not be compensated by any gain to the gentle art of drawing little figures in black and white—"thousands of funny women and droll men." All I wish to point out—in these days when drawing is pressed into the service of daily journalism, and with such success that there will soon be as many journalists with the pencil as with the pen—is this, that the career of the future social pictorial satirist is full of splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.
It is a kind of hybrid profession still in its infancy—hardly recognised as a profession at all—something halfway between literature and art—yet potentially combining all that is best and most essential in both, and appealing as effectively as either to some of our strongest needs and most natural instincts.
It has no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method and a school will evolve themselves by degrees—are perhaps evolving themselves already.
The quality of black and white illustrations of modern life is immeasurably higher than it was thirty or forty years ago—its average and artistic quality—and it is getting higher day by day. The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling; one would think they had learned to draw before learning to read and write. Why shouldn't they?
Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of expression—as I and others have tried to do—but with advantages of nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!
[Illustration: THINGS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY
HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting—never!"
SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about— a—a—I mean Wild Geese of course!"—Punch, November 21, 1891.]