Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/458

Rh 438 ENGRAVING possible, and what shading there is is simple, without cross-hatching. The perfection of simple wood engraving having been attained so early as the 16th century, the art became extremely productive, and has been so ever since. During the 17th and 18th centuries it still remained a compara tively severe and conventional form of art, because the workmen shaded as much as possible either with straight lines or simple curves, so that there was never much appearance of freedom. Modern wood engraving is quite a distinct art, being based on different principles, but between the two stands the work of an original genius, Bewick. Bewick, who cannot be overlooked. He was born in 1753, and died in 1828. Although apprenticed to an engraver in 1767, he was never taught to draw, and got into ways and habits of his own which add to the originality of his work, though his defective training is always evident. His work is the more genuine from his habit of engraving his own designs, which left him perfect freedom of interpreta tion, but the genuineness of it is not only of the kind which comes from independence of spirit, it is due also to his fidelity to the technical nature of the process, a fidelity very rare in the art. The reader will remember that in wood engraving every cutting prints white, and every space left untouched prints black. Simple black lines are obtained by cutting out white lines or spaces between them, and crossed black lines have to be obtained by laboriously cutting out all the white lozenges between them. In Bewick s cuts white lines are abundant and are often crossed, but black lines are never crossed ; he is also quite willing to utilize the black space, as the Japanese wood engravers, and Diirer s master Wohlgemuth used to do. The side of the frying-pan in the vignette of the Cat and the Mouse is treated precisely on their principles, so precisely indeed that we have the line at the edge for a border. In the vignette of the Fisherman, at the end of the twentieth chapter of the Memoir, the space of dark shade under the bushes is left quite black, whilst the leaves and twigs, and the rod and line too, are all drawn in pure white lines. Bewick, indeed, was more careful in his adherence to the technical conditions of the art than any of the primitive woodcutters except those who worked in crible and who used white lines as well as their dots. Such a thing as a fishing-net is an excellent test of this disposition. In the interesting series by J. Amman illustrating the crafts and trades of the 16th century, there is a cut of a man fishing in a river, from a small punt, with a net. The net comes dark against the light surface of Amman the river, and Amman took the trouble to cut a white and lozenge for every mesh. Bewick, in one of his vignettes, Bewick, represents a fisherman mending his nets by the side of a stream. A long net is hung to dry on four upright sticks, but to avoid the trouble of cutting out the lozenges, Bewick artfully contrives his arrangement of light and shade so that the net shall be in light against a space of White black shade under some bushes. This permits him to cut lines. every string of the net in white, according to his practice of using the white line whenever he could. He used it with great ability in the scales of his fish, but this was simply from a regard to technical convenience, for when he engraved on raetal he marked the scales of his fish by black lines. These may seem very trifling considerations to persons unacquainted with the fine arts, who may think that it can matter little whether a fishing-net is drawn in black lines or in white, but the fact is that the entire destiny of wood engraving has depended on preserving or rejecting the white line. Had it been generally accepted as it was by Bewick, original artists might have followed his example in engraving their own inventions, because then wood engraving would have been a natural and com paratively rapid art ; but since the black line has been preferred the art has become a handicraft, because original artists have not time to cut out thousands of little white spaces. The reader may at once realize for himself the tediousness of the process by comparing the ease with w r hich one writes a page of manuscript with the labour which would be involved in cutting away, with perfect accuracy, every space, however minute, which the pen had not blackened with ink. The two centuries in which wood engraving has developed Mo itself most remarkably are the 16th and the 19th. We W0( have described the character of 16th century work, which ^ was easy, as the work of that time had a limited purpose and a settled character. It may not appear so easy to describe the various and unsettled work of our own time, but it is animated by a leading idea, which is universality. Wood engraving in the 19th century has no special character of its own, nothing like Bewick s work, which had a character derived from the nature of the process ; but on the other hand, the modern art is set to imitate every its kind of engraving and every kind of drawing. Thus we vav have w r oodcuts that imitate line engraving, others that copy etching and even mezzotint, whilst others try to imitate the crumbling touch of charcoal or of chalk, or the wash of water-colour, or even the wash and the pen-line together. The art is put to all sorts of purposes ; and though it is not and cannot be free, it is made to pretend to a freedom which the old masters w r ould have rejected as an affectation. Rapid sketches are made on the block with the pen, and the modern wood engraver sets himself patiently to cut out all the spaces of white, in which case the engraver is in reality less free than his predecessor in the 16th century, though the result has a false nppearnnce of liberty. The woodcut is like a polyglot who has learned to speak many other languages at the risk of forgetting his own. And, wonderful as may be its powers of imitation, it can only approximate to the arts which it imitates ; it can never rival each of them on its own ground. It can convey the idea of etching or water-colour, but not their quality ; it can imitate the manner of a line engraver on steel, but it cannot give the delicacy of his lines. What ever be the art which the wood engraver imitates, a practised eye sees at the first glance that the result is nothing but a woodcut. Therefore, although we may admire the supple ness of an art which can assume so many transformations, it is certain that these transformations give little satisfaction to severe judges. We are bound, however, to acknowledge that in manual skill and in variety of resource modern wood engravers far excel their predecessors. A Belgian wood engraver, Ste phane Pannemaker, exhibited at the Par Salon of 1876 a woodcut entitled La Baigneuse, which nja] astonished the art-w r orld by the amazing perfection of its method, all the delicate modelling of a nude figure being rendered by simple modulations of unbroken line. Both English and French publications abound in striking proofs of skill. The modern art, as exhibited in these publica tions, may be broadly divided into two sections, one depending upon line, in which case the black line of a pen sketch is carefully preserved, and the other depending upon tone, when the tones of a sketch with the bru^h are trans lated by the wood engraver into shades obtained in his own way by the burin. The first of these methods requires extreme care, skill, and patience, but makes little demand upon the intelligence of the artist ; the second leaves him more free to interpret, but he cannot do this rightly with out understanding both tons and texture. The wood-cuts in Dora s Don Quixote are done by each method alternately, many of the designs having been sketched with a pen upon the block, whilst others are shaded with a brush in Indian ink and white, the latter being engraved by interpreting