It is a kind of hybrid profession still in its infancy—­hardly recognised as a profession at all—­something halfway between literature and art—­yet potentially combining all that is best and most essential in both, and appealing as effectively as either to some of our strongest needs and most natural instincts.

It has no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few masters have been pretty much self-taught.  But I think that a method and a school will evolve themselves by degrees—­are perhaps evolving themselves already.

The quality of black and white illustrations of modern life is immeasurably higher than it was thirty or forty years ago—­its average and artistic quality—­and it is getting higher day by day.  The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling; one would think they had learned to draw before learning to read and write.  Why shouldn’t they?

Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of expression—­as I and others have tried to do—­but with advantages of nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!

[Illustration:  THINGS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY

HE.  “The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting—­never!”

SHE.  “Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the Winter.  It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about—­ a—­a—­I mean Wild Geese of course!”—­Punch, November 21, 1891.]

Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist than any of his successors in Punch and elsewhere.  For he was not merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.

But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original time and labour spent in painting it.  It is by these engravings, far more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.

It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger than a cut in Punch, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth’s most finished engravings.  And if this had been Hogarth’s method of work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we should have had some five or six thousand!  Almost a library!