Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/151

Rh, 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 coarse caricature also reflected discredit upon it; but the principal 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 facsimile, 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