Although it would be retraversing beaten paths to trace the illustrator
of the sixties back to Bewick, or to still earlier progenitors in Dürer
or the Florentines, there can be little doubt that the pre-Raphaelites
gave the first direct impulse to the newer school. That their work,
scanty as it is, so far as book-illustration is concerned, set going
the impulse which in Kelmscott Press Editions, the Birmingham School,
the Vale Press, Beardsley, Bradley, and a host of others on both sides
of the Atlantic, is 'the movement' of the moment is too obvious to
need stating. But for 'the sixties' proper, the paramount influence
was Millais--the Millais after the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had
disbanded. Despite a very ingenious attempt to trace the influence
of Menzel upon the earlier men, many still doubt whether the true
pre-Raphaelites were not quite ignorant of the great German. Later
men--Fred Walker especially, and Charles Keene many years after--knew
their Menzel, and appreciated him as a few artists do to-day, and the
man in the street may at no distant future. But some of the survivors
of the pre-Raphaelites, both formal and associated, deny all knowledge
of Menzel at this date; others, however, have told Mr. Joseph Pennell
that they did know his work, and that it had a distinct influence.
Some who did not know him then regret keenly that they were unaware of
his very existence until they had abandoned illustration for painting.
All agree, of course, in recognising the enormous personality of one
who might be called, without exaggeration, the greatest illustrator
of the century; so that, having stated the evidence as it stands, no
more need be added, except a suggestion that the theory of Menzel's
influence, even upon those who declare they knew not the man, may
be sound. An edition of _Frederick the Great_, by Kügler, with five
hundred illustrations by Menzel, was published in England (according to
the British Museum Catalogue, the book itself is undated) in 1844.[7]
It is quite possible that any one of the men of the time might have
seen it by chance, and turned over its pages ignorant of its artist's
name. A few minutes is enough to influence a young artist, and the
one who in all honesty declares he never heard of Menzel may have been
thus unconsciously influenced. But, if a foreign source must be found,
so far as the pre-Raphaelites are concerned, Rethel seems a far more
possible agent. His famous prints, _Death the Friend_ and _Death the
Avenger_, had they met his eye, would doubtless have influenced Mr.
Sandys, and many others who worked on similar lines.
[Illustration: FORD MADOX BROWN
DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880
ELIJAH AND THE
WIDOW'S SON]
Whether Lasinio's 'execrable engravings,' as Ruskin calls them, or
others, will be found to have exerted any influence, I have no evidence
to bring forward. In fact the theory is advanced only as a working
hypothesis, not as an argument capable of proof. It is possible that
France at that time was an important factor as regards technique, as
it has been since, and is still. But, without leaving our own shores,
the logical sequence of development from Bewick, through Harvey,
Mulready and others, does not leave very many terrible gaps. It is true
that this development is always erratic--now towards the good, now to
meretricious qualities.
The more one studies the matter, the more one fancies that certain
drawings not intended for engraving by Mulready, and others by Maclise,
must have had a large share in the movement which culminated about 1865
and died out entirely about 1870. But whatever the influence which set
it going, the ultimate result was British; and, for good or evil, one
cannot avoid a feeling of pride that in the sixties there was art in
England, not where it was officially expected perhaps, but in popular
journals.
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.