Part 4 (1/2)

The Italians devoted themselves with especial ardor to wood-engraving in chiaroscuro, and from the time when Ugo da Carpi introduced it in Venice it was practised by many artists. Nearly all of those designers who have been mentioned left works in chiaroscuro engraving as well as in the ordinary manner. Beside them, Antonio da Trento (c. 1530), Giuseppe Nicolo (c. 1525), Andrea Andreani (c. 1600), and Bartolemeo Coriolano (c. 1635) produced chiaroscuro engravings which are now much valued and sought for by collectors of prints. The Italian love of color led these artists into this application of wood-engraving, which must be regarded as a wrongly-directed and unfruitful effort of the art to obtain results beyond its powers. The Italians had been the first to discover the capacity of wood-engraving as an art of design, but they never developed it as it was developed in Germany; when they gave up the early simple manner in which they had achieved great results, and began to follow the later manner, the great age of Italy was near its close, and the arts felt the weakening influences of the rapid decline in the vigor of society. At Venice the arts remained for a while longer powerful and ill.u.s.trious, and wood-engraving shared in the excellence which characterized all the artistic work of that city; but the place which wood-engraving held in the estimation of the Venetians appears to have been far lower than its place in the North, where it was popular and living, highly valued and widely influential as it could not be in any Italian city. At last in Italy, as in France, it died out altogether, and was no longer heard of as a fine art.

In the Netherlands the art had been practised continuously from the time of the Block-books with varying success, but, excepting in the works of Lukas van Leyden (1494-1533), it had produced nothing of great value. In the sixteenth century Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) designed some woodcuts in the common manner as well as chiaroscuro engravings, and Christopher van Sichem (c. 1620) some woodcuts in the ordinary manner, which have some worth. The only work of high excellence was due to Christopher Jegher (c. 1620-1660), who engraved some large designs which Rubens (1577-1640) drew upon the block; they are inferior to Boldrini's reproductions of t.i.tian's designs, but are free, bold, and effective, and succeed in reproducing the designs characterized by the vehement energy of Rubens's style. Rembrandt (1606-1665) also gave some attention to the art which the older masters had prized, and left one small portrait in wood-engraving by his own hand. His example was followed by his pupils, Jean Livens (1607-1663) and Theodore De Bray (c. 1650), whose cuts are characterized by the style of their master.

In England, where the art had not been really practised until Holbein's day, and had not reached any degree of excellence, some improvement was made during the sixteenth century in designs for t.i.tlepages, portraits, and separate cuts, particularly in the publications of John Day. In the next century, during the civil wars, woodcuts of extreme rudeness were inserted in the pamphlets of the hour, and in the latter half of the century some interest was still felt in the art. In the eighteenth century two engravers, Edward Kirkall (c. 1690-1750) and John Baptist Jackson (1701-1754?), worked both in the ordinary manner and in chiaroscuro, but both were forced to seek support on the Continent, where, although the practice of wood-engraving as a fine art had long been extinct, the tradition of it as a mechanical process by which cheap ornaments for books were produced was still preserved. In France the engravers Pierre Le Sueur (1636-1710) and Jean Papillon (1660-1710) executed cuts of this sort which are without intrinsic value, and in the next generation their sons produced works which remained at the same low level of excellence. In Italy an artist, named Lucchesini, engraved some cuts in the latter part of the century, but they are without merit. In Germany the art was equally neglected, and the woodcuts in German books of the eighteenth century are entirely worthless.

The explanation of this rapid and universal decline of wood-engraving is to be found in general causes. The great artistic movement, which both in the North and the South had sprung out of mediaeval religious life, and had gathered force and spirit as the minds of men grew in strength and independence, and as the compa.s.s of their interests expanded, which had been so transformed by the study of antiquity that in the South it seemed to be almost wholly due to that single influence, and in the North to have suffered an essential change in its spirit and standards, had at last spent itself. The intellectual movement which had gone along with it side by side, gaining vigor from the spread of literature, the debates of the Reformation, and the exercise of the mind upon the various and novel objects of interest in that age of great discoveries and inventions, had resulted in a century of religious warfare, aggravated by the violence of dynastic quarrels which arose in consequence of the new political organization of Europe. In this conflict the arts were lost; they all became feeble, and wood-engraving under the most favorable conditions would have shared in this general degradation. But for its utter extinction as a fine art there were more special causes. The popular literature with which it had flourished had been brought into contempt by Cervantes and Ariosto; the use of wood-engraving for coa.r.s.e caricature also reflected discredit upon it; but the princ.i.p.al cause of its decadence lay in the taste of the age, which had ceased to prize art as a means of simple and beautiful design, but valued it rather as a means of complicated and delicate ornament, so that excessive attention was given to form divorced from meaning, and, as always happens in such a case, artificiality resulted. The wood-engravers attempted to satisfy this taste by seeking the refinement which copperplate-engraving obtained with greater ease and success, and they failed in the effort; in other words, wood-engraving yielded to copperplate-engraving because the taste of the age forced it to abandon its own province, and to contend with its rival on ground where its peculiar powers were ineffective.

Here the history of wood-engraving in the old manner, as a means of reproducing pen-and-ink sketches in fac-simile, came to an end. It has been seen how valuable it had proved both as an agent of civilization and as a mode of art; how serviceable it had been in the popularization of literature and of art, and what influence it had exerted in the practical questions of the day as a weapon of satire; how faithfully it had reflected the characteristics of successive periods of civilization, and how perfectly, in response to the touch of the artist, it had embodied his imagination and expressed his thought. It had run a great career; its career seemed to have closed; but, when at the end of the eighteenth century the movement toward the civilization of the people again began with vigor and spirit, a new life was opened to it, because it is essentially a democratic art--a career in which it has already reached a scope of influence that makes its usefulness far greater than in the earlier time, and has given promise of a degree of excellence which, though in design it may not equal Holbein's power, may yet result in valuable artistic work.

VIII.

_MODERN WOOD-ENGRAVING._

[Ill.u.s.tration: T FIG. 60.--From the ”Comedia di Danthe.” Venice, 1536.]

The revival of the art began in England, in the workshop of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). He is called, not without justice, the father of the true art of engraving in wood. The history of the art in the older time is concerned mainly with the designer and the ideas which he endeavored to convey, and only slightly with the engraver whom he employed for the mechanical work of cutting the block. In the modern art the engraver holds a more prominent position, because he is no longer restricted to a servile following of the designer's work, line for line, but has an opportunity to show his own artistic powers. This change was brought about by the invention of white line, as it is called, which was first used by Bewick. White line was a new mechanical mode of obtaining color.

”I could never discover,” says Bewick, ”any additional beauty or color that the cross-strokes gave to the impression beyond the effect produced by plain parallel lines. This is very apparent when to a certainty the plain surface of the wood will print as black as ink and b.a.l.l.s can make it, without any farther labor at all; and it may easily be seen that the thinnest strokes cut upon the plain surface will throw some light on the subject or design; and if these strokes again are made still wider or of equal thickness to the black lines, the color these produce will be a gray; and the more the white strokes are thickened, the nearer will they in their varied shadings approach to white; and if quite taken away, then a perfect white is obtained.” The practical difference between the two methods is this: by the old method, after the simple work in outline of the early Italian engravers had been relinquished for the style of which Durer was the great master, the block was treated as a white surface, on which the designer drew with pen and ink, and obtained grays and blacks by increasing the number of cross-strokes, as if he were drawing on paper; by the new method the block was treated as a black surface, and the color was lessened by increasing the number of white lines. The latter process was as easy for the engraver as the former was difficult, because whereas in the former he had to gouge out the diamond s.p.a.ces between the crossing lines, now he obtained white color by single strokes of the graver. Bewick may have been led into the use of white line simply by this consideration of the economy of labor, because he engraved his own designs, and was directly sensible of the waste of labor involved in the old method. In both methods color depends, of course, upon the relative quant.i.ty of black and white in the prints; the new method merely arranges color differently, so that it can be obtained by an easy mechanical process instead of by a difficult one.

The use of white line not only affected the art by making it more easy to practise, but also involved a change in the mode of drawing. Formerly the effects were given by the designers' lines, now they were given by the engravers' lines; in other words, the old workman followed the designer's drawing, the modern workman draws himself with his graver. By the old method the design was reproduced by keeping the same line-arrangement that the artist employed; by the new method the design is not thus reproduced, but is interpreted by a line-arrangement first conceived by the engraver. In the earlier period the design had to be a drawing in line for the engraver to cut out and reproduce by leaving the original lines in relief; now the design may be a washed sketch, the tints of which the engraver reproduces by cutting lines of his own in intaglio. The change required the modern engraver to understand how to arrange white lines so as to obtain artistic effects; he thus becomes an artist in proportion to his knowledge and skill in such arrangement. It is clear that, no matter how much mechanical skill, firmness, justness and delicacy of touch were requisite in the older manner of following carefully and precisely the lines already drawn upon the block, still the engraver was precluded from exercising any original artistic power he might have; he could appreciate the artistic value of the design before him, and, like Hans Lutzelburger, show his appreciation by his fidelity in rendering it, but the lines were not his own. The new method of reproducing artists' work by means of lines first conceived and arranged by the engraver requires, besides skill of hand, qualities of mind--perception and origination, and the judgment that results from cultivated taste. This is what is meant when it is said that the true art of wood-engraving is not a hundred years old, for it is only within that time that the value of a print has been due to the engraver's capacity for thought and his artistic skill in line-arrangement, as well as to the designer's genius. The use of white line as a mechanical mode of obtaining color was not unknown in the sixteenth century, and the artistic value of white line was definitely felt in early French and Italian wood-engraving; but the possibilities of development were not seen, and no such development took place. The step in advance was taken by Bewick, who thus disclosed the opportunities which wood-engraving offers its craftsmen for the exhibition of high artistic qualities. The white line revolutionized the art, and this is the essential meaning there is in calling Bewick the father of wood-engraving.

Of course the older method has not ceased to be practised; artists have drawn upon the block, and their lines have been reproduced; sometimes a part of the lines are thus drawn, particularly the leading lines, and the minor portions of the sketch have been indicated by the designer by washes and left to be rendered by the engraver in his own lines. Old or modern wood-engraving as a mode of reproducing designs in fac-simile is valuable, but none of the artistic merit they may possess is due to the engraver; while the artistic merit shown in the new style of wood-engraving, as an art of design in white line, belongs wholly to the engraver. It results from this that white line is the peculiar province of wood-engraving, considered as an art; but that does not exclude it from being practised in its old manner as a mode of copying and multiplying ordinary design which it is able to reproduce.

Thomas Bewick, the founder of the modern art, was born near Newcastle in 1753. He pa.s.sed his boyhood in rude country life and received scanty schooling. At fourteen he was bound apprentice to the Newcastle engraver, Ralph Beilby; nine years later he went to seek his fortune in London, where he impatiently endured city life for less than a year; in the summer of 1777 he returned to his old master, with whom he went into partners.h.i.+p. Some preliminary training in book-ill.u.s.tration of the rude sort then in vogue was necessary to reveal his powers to himself; he received a premium from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, which had shown some interest in wood-engraving; and after farther minor work he began, in 1785, to engrave the first block for his British Quadrupeds, which, with his British Birds, although his other cuts are numbered by thousands, is the princ.i.p.al monument of his genius. When he took the graver in his hand he found the art extinct as a fine art; at most only large coa.r.s.e prints were manufactured. Besides his great service to the art in introducing the white line he subst.i.tuted boxwood for the pear or other soft wood of the earlier blocks, and he engraved across the grain instead of with it, or ”the plank way of the wood,” as he called it; he also began the practice of lowering the surface of the block in places where less color was desired, so that less pressure would come upon those parts in printing (a device which Aldegrever is believed to have resorted to in some of his works), and he used the dabber instead of the inking-roller.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 61.--The Peac.o.c.k. From Bewick's ”British Birds.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 62.--The Frightened Mother. From Bewick's ”British Quadrupeds.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 63.--The Solitary Cormorant. From Bewick's ”British Birds.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 64.--The Snow Cottage.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 65.--Birth-place of Bewick. His last vignette, portraying his own funeral.]

By such means he was truly, as Ruskin says, ”a reformer”--Ruskin adds, ”as stout as Holbein, or Botticelli, or Luther, or Savonarola,” and this is also true within limits. But if in relation to his art, and in answer to the tests required of him, his reforming spirit proved itself vigorous, independent, persistent in conviction, and faithful in practice, his natural endowment in other ways was so far inferior to those of the great Reformers named as to place him in a different order of men. He had not a spark of the philosophic spirit of Holbein, and but a faint glimmer of Holbein's dramatic insight. He was not endowed with the romantic imagination, the deep reflective power, the broad intellectual and moral sympathy of Durer. There is no need to magnify his genius, for it was great and valuable by its own right. He was, primarily, an observer of nature, and he copied natural facts with straightforward veracity; he delineated animal life with marvellous spirit; he knew the value of the texture of a bird's feather (Fig. 61) as no one before ever realized it. He was open also to the influence which nature exerts over the emotions, and he rendered the sentiment of the landscape as few engravers have been able to do. His hearty spirit responded to country sights (Fig. 62), and he portrayed the humorous with zest and pleasure, as well as the cheerful and the melancholy with truth and feeling; his humor is sometimes indelicate, but it is faithful; usually it is the humor of a situation which strikes him, seldom the higher humor which appears in such cuts as the superst.i.tious dog. He is open to pathos, too, but here it is not the higher order of pathos far-reaching into the bases of life and emotion--in this cut (Fig. 64), for example, one fancies his heart is nearly altogether with the uncared-for animal, and takes not much thought of the deserted hearth. With this veracity, sensitiveness, heartiness, there is also an unbending virtue--a little like preaching sometimes, with its gallows in the background--but st.u.r.dy and homely; not rising into any eloquent homily, but with indignation for the boys drowning a cat or the man beating his overdriven horse.

As an artist he knows, like Holbein, the method of great art. His economy of labor, his simplicity, justness, and sureness of stroke show the master's hand. There was no waste in his work, no ineffective effort after impossible results, no meaningless lines. For these excellences of method and of character he has been often praised, especially because he developed his talents under very unfavorable conditions; but perhaps no words would have been sweeter to him than those which Charlotte Bronte wrote, sincerely out of her own experience without doubt, for he himself said he was led to his task by ”the hope of administering to the pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt of youth.” Charlotte Bronte, speaking through the lips of Jane Eyre of the pleasure she took as a child in looking through Bewick's books, writes thus:

”I returned to my book--Bewick's History of British Birds, the letterpress whereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pa.s.s quite as a blank: they were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of 'the solitary rocks and promontories' by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape--

'Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 66.--The Broken Boat. From Bewick's ”British Birds.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 67.--The Church-yard. From Bewick's ”British Birds.”]

Nor could I pa.s.s unnoticed the suggestion of the black sh.o.r.es of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland. * * * Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own--shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat (Fig. 66) stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quiet, solitary church-yard (Fig. 67), with its inscribed head-stone, its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent attesting the hour of even-tide. The two s.h.i.+ps becalmed on a torpid sea I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him I pa.s.sed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So was the black, horned thing, seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. Each picture told a story--mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting. * * * With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least in my way.”

Bewick published the first edition of the British Quadrupeds in 1790, the first edition of the first volume of the British Birds in 1797, and of the second volume in 1804; all these became popular, and were several times republished with additional cuts. His other works were very numerous, but, as a whole, they are of inferior value. Both in the volumes which have been mentioned and in his later work he received much aid from his pupils, who designed and engraved, subject to his correction and approval, many ill.u.s.trations which are ascribed to him.