Whether it be the triumph of a master or a pot-boiling illustrator, the real artist never takes his art lightly. Life, even reputation, he may play with, but his craft is a serious thing. In short, the study of the thousands of designs--some obviously burlesqued by the engraver, others admirably rendered--will not leave an unprejudiced spectator with a cut and dried opinion. That, as it happened, a number of really distinguished men enlisted themselves as illustrators may be granted, but each one did his own work in his own way; and to summarise the complex record in a sentence to prove that any method, or any manner, is a royal road to greatness is impossible. Yet no one familiar with the period can avoid a certain pride in the permanent evidence it has left, that English art in illustration, (no less than English music in the part-songs of the Elizabethan period), has produced work worthy to be entered on the cosmopolitan roll of fame. This is unquestionable; and being granted, no more need be said, for an attempt to appraise the relative value of totally distinct things is always a foolish effort. CHAPTER XI: CERTAIN INFLUENCES UPON THE ARTISTS OF THE SIXTIES 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.