A Practical Hand-book of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction

Pen-drawing is the most spontaneous of the arts, and amongst the applied crafts the most modern. The professional pen-draughtsman was unknown but a few years since; fifteen years ago, or thereabouts, he was an obscure individual, working at a poorly considered craft, and handling was so seldom thought of that the illustrator who could draw passably well was rarely troubled by his publisher on the score of technique. For that which had deserved the name of technique was dead, so far as illustration was concerned, and “process,” which was presently to vivify it, was, although born already, but yet a sickly child. To-day the illustrators are numerous beyond computation, and the name of those who are impelled to the spoiling of good paper and the wasting of much ink is indeed legion.

For uncounted years before the invention of photo-mechanical methods of engraving, there had been practised a method of drawing with the pen, which formed a pretty pastime wherewith to fleet the idle hours of the gentlemanly amateur, and this was, for no discoverable reason, called “etching.”

It is needless at this time to go into the derivatives of that word, with the object of proving that the verb “to etch” means something very different from drawing in ink with a pen; it should have, long since, been demonstrated to everybody’s satisfaction that etching is the art of drawing on metal with a point, and of biting in that drawing with acids. But the manufacturers of pens long fostered the fallacy by selling so-called etching-pens: probably they do so even now.

By whom pen-drawings were first called etchings none can say. Certainly the two arts have little or nothing in common: the terms are not interchangeable. Etching has its own especial characteristics, which may, to an extent, be imitated with the pen, but the quality and direction of line produced by a rigid steel point on metal are entirely different from the lines drawn with a flexible nib upon paper. The line produced by an etching needle has a uniform thickness, but with the needle you can work in any imaginable direction upon the copper plate. With a nib upon paper, a line varying in thickness with the pressure of the hand results, but there is not that entirely free use of the hand as with the etching point: you cannot with entire freedom draw from and toward yourself.

The greatest exponents of pen-drawing have not entirely conquered the normal inability of the pen to express the infinite delightful waywardnesses of the etching-point. Again, the etched line is only less sharp than the line made by the graver upon wood; the line drawn with the pen upon the smoothest surface is ragged, viewed under a magnifying glass. This, of course, is not a plea for a clean line in pen-work—that is only the ideal of commercial draughtsmanship—but the man who can produce such a line with the pen at will, who can overcome the tendency to inflexible lines, has risen victorious over the stubbornness of a material.

The sketch-books, gilt-lettered and india-rubber banded, of the bread-and-butter miss, and what one may be allowed, perhaps, to term the “pre-process” amateur generally, give no hint of handling, no foretaste of technique. They are barren of aught save ill-registered facts, and afford no pleasure to the eye, which is the end, the sensuous end, of all art. Rather did these artless folk almost invariably seek to adventure beyond the province of the pen by strokes infinitely little and microscopic, so that they might haply deceive the eye by similarity to wood engravings or steel prints. But in those days pen-drawing was only a pursuit; to-day it is a living art. Now, an art is not merely a storehouse of facts, nor a moral influence. If it was of these things, then the photographic camera would be all-powerful, and all that would be left to do with the hands would be the production of devotional pictures; and of those who produced them the best artist would infallibly be him with a character the most noted for piety. Art, to the contrary, is entirely independent of subject or morals. It is not sociology, nor ever shall be; and those who practise an art might be the veriest pariahs, and yet their works rank technically, artistically, among the best. Art is handling in excelsis, and its results lie properly in the pride of the eye and the satisfaction of the æsthetic sense, though Mr. Ruskin would have it otherwise.