I am happy to say that this state of affairs is by no means universal in England; but I regret that there seems to be a tendency in some quarters to prefer bad work because it is usually cheap. On the other hand, there are many notable exceptions: intelligent publishers, editors, artists, and process-engravers, who strive to do good work and expect to pay, or be paid, for it. But this state of things has produced three classes of artists. First, the men who loudly declare they care nothing about their work, and who may therefore be dismissed with that contempt which they court. Second, those who rush absolutely to the other extreme, saying that all modern work is bad, and that there is nothing to do but to follow in the track of the fifteenth-century craftsman, not knowing, or more probably not wanting to know, that these same illustrators and engravers of the fifteenth century were, according to their time, as modern and up-to-date and fin-de-siècle as possible. Finally, there is a saving remnant, increasing as fast as good workmen do increase—and that is very slowly—who are going on, endeavouring to perfect themselves to the best of their ability, believing rightly that it is the business of engravers and printers to follow the artist, and not the artist's duty to become a slave to a mere mechanic, no matter how intelligent. The second of these classes has always existed in almost every profession in England; the class, in short, which is convinced that society and the world generally needs reforming, and that it is their little fad which is going to bring about this reformation.
BY FREDERICK SHIELDS. FROM DEFOE’S “HISTORY OF THE PLAGUE” (LONGMANS, 1863).
Now I do not hold for a moment that the man who is generally accepted as the leader of the pre-Raphaelite movement, Rossetti, had any desire to reform anybody, or improve anything. A certain form of art interested him, and he succeeded in reviving it for himself, though he put himself and his century into his drawings. It is the same with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Walter Crane. But the praise which has been duly bestowed upon them has been unjustly lavished upon a set of people—or else, they, as they never weary of doing, have exploited themselves—who have neither the power to design nor the intelligence to appreciate a drawing when it is made, nor any technical understanding of how it was made. They will tell you, both by their work and in print, that there is nothing worth bothering about save the drawings of the Little Masters, and, to prove their appreciation of these drawings, they proceed at once not to copy the drawings, but the primitive woodcuts which were made out of them, not by the Masters at all. They will proceed to imitate painfully with pen and ink a woodcut, have it reproduced by a cheap process man, who, of course, is delighted to have work which gives him no trouble, entrust it to a printer buried in cellars into which the light of improvement has never made its way, that he may print it upon handmade paper, which the old men never would have used had they had anything better; and thus they succeed in perpetuating all the old faults and defects, adding to them absurdity of design which triumphs in the provinces, is the delight of Boston and the Western States of America, and the beloved of the Vicarage. Or, again, the young person, reeking with the School of Science and Art at South Kensington, will have none of process, and, painfully (for he usually cuts his finger), and simply (otherwise he should waste his time), endeavours, with halting execution but with perfect belief in his powers, to cut his design upon the wood-block, not knowing that the master woodcutter, whom he essays to worship, spent almost as many years in learning his trade, as this person has spent minutes in knocking off a little illustration as a change from designing a stained-glass window, or writing a sonnet. This is the sort of work that exhausts first editions, is remembered for a few months, and produces leaders in the advanced organs of opinion. It is unfortunately true that the leaders have little influence, and that, later on, the first editions may be bought as old paper.
Ignorance of printing and of the improvements in that art is really in this country too awful to contemplate. The average critic will blame a competent artist for the imperfections of a process and the ignorance of a printer. It never occurs to this critic that he knows nothing practically about the subject. No attempt is made to surmount mechanical difficulties; no attempt is made to study improvements; one is simply told to work down to the lowest level and to copy the fads of an obsolete past.
Quaintness and eccentricity, too, have their followers, and though both are dangerous games to play, still they imply, if good, such an amount of research, study, and invention, whether original or not, that from them good work may often come. Still I no longer dare to prophesy. I know not what a man will do or will not. There is possibility in every one.
BY J. MAHONEY. FROM THE “SUNDAY MAGAZINE.”
BY J. F. SULLIVAN. FROM HOOD’S “COMIC ANNUAL.”