"London, June 11th, 1814.
"Received of Mr. Cooke the sum of twenty-two pounds ten shillings for three drawings, viz., Lyme, Land's End, and Poole.
"£22, 10s.
"J. M. W. Turner."
It would be a very pleasant surprise to me if any one of these three (southern coast) drawings, for which the artist received seven guineas each (the odd nine shillings being, I suppose, for the great resource of tale-tellers about Turner—"coach-hire") were now offered to me by any dealer for a hundred. The rise is somewhat greater in the instance of Turner than of any other unpopular[81] artist; but it is at least three hundred per cent. on all work by artists of established reputation, whether the public can themselves see anything in it, or not. A certain quantity of intelligent interest mixes, of course, with the mere fever of desire for novelty; and the excellent book illustrations, which are the special subjects of our inquiry, are peculiarly adapted to meet this; for there are at least twenty people who know a good engraving or wood-cut, for one who knows a good picture. The best book illustrations fall into three main classes: fine line engravings (always grave in purpose), typically represented by Goodall's illustrations to Rogers's poems;—fine wood-cuts, or etchings, grave in purpose, such as those by Dalziel, from Thomson and Gilbert;—and fine wood-cuts, or etchings, for purpose of caricature, such as Leech's and Tenniel's in Punch. Each of these have a possibly instructive power special to them, which we will endeavor severally to examine in the next chapter.
Chapter ix.[82]
103. I purpose in this chapter, as intimated in the last, to sketch briefly what I believe to be the real uses and powers of the three kinds of engraving, by black line; either for book illustration, or general public instruction by distribution of multiplied copies. After thus stating what seems to me the proper purpose of each kind of work, I may, perhaps, be able to trace some advisable limitations of its technical methods.
I. And first, of pure line engraving.
This is the only means by which entire refinement of intellectual representation can be given to the public. Photographs have an inimitable mechanical refinement, and their legal evidence is of great use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed to be "true," and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look much into book illustrations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers of well-illustrated works of which I know nothing: but the three I should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the great "Description de l'Egypte."