More important reasons are the developments in reproduction and printing, started, and to a great extent carried on, merely to lessen the cost of production, but capable of giving better and truer results in the hands of intelligent craftsmen, than anything previously known.
Still, cheapness in reproduction by process, cheapness in the cost of printing, has enabled numbers of absolutely ignorant people (ignorant, that is, of art), but possessed of, they think, fine commercial instincts, to start illustrated papers and publish illustrated books. The result has been that an army of out-of-works in other fields of art, of immature or even utterly untrained students, escaping from the hard labour and drudgery of an art school, ignorant even of the fact that great illustrators have always studied and worked before they have found a chance to start, have rushed into illustration. They are led blindly by the advice of the blind, they find even manuals on the subject written authoritatively by people who are either not artists, engravers, or printers, or, if they do pretend to practise any of these arts and crafts, are unknown and unheard of among the artists with whom they would rank themselves; and more wonderful still, the pupils of these blind leaders of the blind find publishers and printers ignorant enough to employ them; but not so ignorant as to pay more than the wage of an inferior servant for the worthless work supplied them.
There are many of these papers, magazines, and books being published to-day—eminent authors even contribute to their pages; but the illustrations they contain are more primitive in their depth of ignorance than the work of the cave-dwellers, and would be equally valuable to future ages if it were not that they were mainly made up of an unintelligent cribbing, and stealing from photographs and other men’s work.
Therefore, as a mass, instead of advancing, illustration is sinking lower and lower, owing to the action of those who pretend to be its patrons; at the present moment we find ourselves in a critical situation, good work crowded out by mediocrity—because mediocrity is cheaper—real artists lost sight of amid the crowd of squirming, struggling, advertising hacks. Any spark of originality is stamped out if possible. The mere attempt to say anything in one’s own fashion is a crime, and on all sides the prayer for the extinction of the artist is heard; after him will go the process man as the commercial wood engraver has vanished, and then—well, things will take a new start, good work will be done, and we may as well prepare for the time coming soon, when cheapness and nastiness, having struggled to the bitter end, will kill each other for want of something better.
Still, to-day, as good work is being done as ever there was; only cheapness has to shriek so loud, and advertise so large, to be seen at all, that people are deafened by the shrieking, and at times the best is but seen through a glass, darkly. Nevertheless, good art will as surely live as bad will perish. Let us then endeavour not only to learn what good work is, but how to do it. In the near future this will be absolutely necessary. When one sees the greatest artists in England drawing for penny papers, one realises that illustration is only apparently in a bad way, that really we are entering upon a second renaissance, that this is but the dark moment before the dawn.
As a preliminary, and also a final, word to you, I would say, you must draw, draw, draw first, last, and all the time, and until you can draw, and draw well, you cannot illustrate.
The study, therefore, of the equipment of the illustrator should be our aim—what he must do before he can make good illustrations, then, how he is to make them.
LECTURE II.
THE EQUIPMENT OF THE ILLUSTRATOR.
THREE special qualifications are absolutely indispensable to the artist who desires to become an illustrator.