The reader will not be deceived, the writer not misunderstood, if at the outset it is put on record that great success in art is dependent much more upon natural ability, aye, genius, than upon study, and that these chapters can only tell you how to study—they cannot guarantee you success. A man of fifty, a master printer, may study our advice thoroughly and then attempt to { 18} draw an elephant chasing an African, and the result may be conspicuously inferior to the treatment of the same subject by little eight-year-old Johnny Green who is yet in the primary school; but Johnny Green may have “an eye for drawing” and our master printer be as devoid of it as is a cow of melody in her voice.
Not only is it true that without talent you must not expect to succeed in producing important pictures, such as full-page illustrations, double-column portraits, poster designs and large work in general, but it is almost more unlikely that you will succeed in designing the most simple tailpiece or initial letter. It is quite natural that you should suppose it a very easy task to design an initial letter or a tiny silhouette of a leaf or flower, a branch or wreath or two forming a “printer’s mark”; every artist in Christendom thinks the same—until he tries it; but you would be surprised if I filled this chapter with the history of certain initial letters and devices, and tracing them to their fountain head, we found that in nine cases out of ten they were designed by the very greatest artists of the time.
You can take it as an undisputed fact that should some publishing house wish an ordinary full-page illustration for a book, and at the same time a simple “publisher’s mark,” a device about an inch square for the title-page of that book, they would find ten artists who could execute the former to one who could design the latter so that it would be up to the standard of the best “marks” in history.
Is it then, you ask, our intention at the very start to discourage you, and advise you to attempt nothing because you cannot excel in anything? Not at all. A { 19} country editor need not refrain from studying rhetoric so as to improve the style of his editorials, just because he knows that without genius he may not expect to equal the diction of Macaulay. The rhetoric may not give him wit to put in his editorials, but it at least may teach him to cast his sentences properly. So this treatise may not supply you with “art feeling,” but it will, we hope, show you how to make a design in a more workmanlike way than you would without our advice; and we most sincerely advise you to try.