It is quite possible that the revival of etching as a fine art, which took place early in the second half of this century, had no little direct influence on the illustration of the period. Many artists, who are foremost as draughtsmen upon wood, experimented with the etcher's needle. The Germ, 1850, was illustrated by etchings; but, with every desire to develop this suggestion, it would be folly to regard the much discussed periodical as the true ancestor of Once a Week and the rest; even the etching which Millais prepared for it, but never issued, would not suffice to establish such claim. Two societies, the Etching Club and the Junior Etching Club, are responsible for the illustration of several volumes, wherein the etched line is used in a way almost identical with the same artists' manner when drawing for the engraver. Indeed, the majority of these etchings would suffer little if reproduced by direct process to-day, as the finesse of rebroussage and the more subtle qualities of biting and printing are not present conspicuously in the majority of the plates.
The Poems by Tom Hood, illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, include two delightful Millais', The Bridge of Sighs and Ruth, a Lee Shore by Charles Keene, and two illustrations to the Ode to the Moon, and The Elm-tree by Henry Moore.
Passages from Modern English Poets, illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, was issued (undated), by Day and Son, in 1862, in a large octavo. In 1876 another edition in larger quarto, with the etchings transferred to stone, and printed as lithographs, was published by William Tegg. In this notable volume Millais is represented by Summer Indolence (p. 10), a most graceful study of a girl lying on her back in a meadow with a small child, who is wearing a daisy chain, seated at her side. Mr. J. McNeill Whistler contributes two delightful landscapes, The Angler (p. 7) and A River Scene (p. 45). In these the master-hand is recognisable at a glance, although the authorship of many of the rest can only be discovered by the index. They would alone suffice to make the book a treasure to light upon. To praise them would be absurd, for one can conceive no more unnecessary verbiage than a eulogy of Mr. Whistler's etchings—one might as well praise the beauty of June sunshine. There are many other good things in the book—a Tenniel, War and Glory (p. 3), four capital studies by Henry Moore (pp. 1, 16, 27, 28), which come as a revelation to those who only know him as a sea-painter. Four others by M. J. Lawless, an artist who has been neglected too long, The Drummer (p. 2), Sisters of Mercy (p. 12), The Bivouac (p. 30), and The Little Shipwrights (p. 36), are all interesting, if not quite so fascinating, as his drawings upon wood. H. S. Marks has a genre subject, A Study in the Egyptian Antiquity Department of the British Museum. This portentous title describes an etching of a country lad in smock-frock, who, with dazed surprise, is staring into vacancy amid the gigantic scarabs, the great goddess Pasht, and other familiar objects of the corridor leading to the Refreshment-room in the great Bloomsbury building, which people of Grub Street hurry through daily, with downcast eyes, to enjoy the frugal dainties that a beneficent institution permits them to take by way of sustenance during the intervals of study in the Reading-room. Another plate, Scene of the Plague in London, 1665, by Charles Keene, would hardly tempt one to linger before it, but for its signature. It is a powerful bit of work, but does not show the hand of the great Punch artist at its best. The rest of the contributions to this volume are by C. Rossiter, F. Smallfield, Viscount Bury, Lord G. Fitzgerald, J. W. Oakes, A. J. Lewis, F. Powell, J. Sleigh, H. C. Whaite, Walter Severn, and W. Gale. Two by J. Clark deserve mention. To find the painter of cottage-life, with all his Dutch realistic detail, in company with Mr. Whistler, is a curious instance of extremes meeting.
Without wishing to press the argument unduly, it is evident that etching which afterwards developed so bravely, and left so many fine examples, exerted also a secondary influence on the illustration of the sixties. Hence the somewhat extended reference to the few books which employed it largely for illustrations.
Those who would have you believe that the great English masters of illustration failed to obtain contemporary appreciation should note the three editions of this work as one fact, among a score of others, which fails to support their theory. Whether from a desire to extol the past or not, it is certain that those publishers who have been established more than a quarter of a century claim to have sold far larger editions of their high-priced illustrated volumes then than any moderately truthful publisher or editor would dare to claim for similar ventures to-day. Of course there were fewer books of the sort issued, and the rivalry of illustrated journalism was infinitely less; still the people of the fifties, sixties, and seventies paid their tribute in gold freely and lavishly, and if they offered the last insult of the populace—popularity—to these undoubted works of art, it prevents one placing artists of the period among the noble army of martyrs. Their payment was quite equal to that which is the average to-day, as a file-copy of one of the important magazines shows. They were reproduced as well as the means available permitted; the printing and the general 'get-up' of the books, allowing for the different ideals which obtained then, was not inferior to the average to-day, and, as a rule, the authorship of the drawings was duly acknowledged in the table of contents, and the artists 'starred' in contemporary advertisements. It is painful to own that even the new appreciation is not absolutely without precedent. One notable instance of depreciation cannot be forgotten. Mr. Ruskin, who never expressed admiration of the illustrations of the sixties, in Ariadne Florentina, chose the current number of the Cornhill Magazine for the text of a diatribe in which the following passages occur:—
'The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or honesty; but every species of distorted folly and vice—the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the paltry fool, the degraded woman—are pictured for your honourable pleasure in every page, with clumsy caricature, struggling to render its dulness tolerable by insisting on defect—if, perchance, a penny or two may be coined out of the cockneys' itch for loathsomeness.... These ... are favourably representative of the entire art industry of the modern press—industry enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob—railroad born and bred, which drags itself about the black world it has withered under its breath. In the miserable competitive labour of finding new stimulus for the appetite—daily more gross, of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough to submit to its demands. And for total result of our English engraving industry for the last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at this moment [1876] I cannot get a single piece of true, sweet, and comprehensible art to place for instruction in any children's school.'
But ignoring Mr. Ruskin—if it be possible to ignore the absolute leader of taste in the sixties—we find little but praise. Yet the popularity of 1860–1870 naturally incurred the inevitable law of reaction, and was at its lowest ebb in the eighties; but now late in the nineties our revived applause is but an echo of that which was awarded to the work when it appealed not only by all its art, but with novelty and an air of being 'up to date' that cannot, in the course of things, be ever again its portion. We are not so much better than our fathers, after all, in recognising the good things of the sixties, or in trying to do our best in our way. Which is just what they tried to do in theirs.