Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/615

Rh guish or despondency I felt or succumbed to in the loneliness of my own room (when my frequent cry for deliverance was unheeded), no human being, save only a wife of almost superhuman devotion, ever saw me give way or bear my sufferings with less than a fortitude schooled by long and constant trial. But, on the other hand, I was always ready to listen sympathetically to a friend's half-hour toothache or headache. Hours upon hours, weeks, months, and years together, my wife read and re-read over and over again nearly all the long nights through the works of Scott and Dickens, with many others, and under this stimulus I kept at work (my sweet heaven, what a task!), and not only maintained my independence, but could give to help others.

For twenty-four years scarcely a moment have I been free from pain. I fear, however, that this portion of my experience has so little of the artistic about it that it may be regarded as a digression rather than the part most deeply engraven into my life. Some of my best work has been done when my sufferings were most acute.

There has been much controversy over the so-called "new school" of wood-engraving, W. J. Linton taking the lead in opposition. He started with a misunderstanding of the aims of the new school, confounding the erratic experiments of a few of its most promising adherents with the general progress of the main body, and they in turn attributed his gratuitous lectures to envy or other motives. Both were wrong. Linton is an artist with the graver, but he will not do similar justice to any one deviating from his methods, going so far as to deny that some of the new experimenters are wood-engravers at all. His strictures were serviceable in stirring up the art, that the faulty and meretricious might be skimmed off. He advocated pure line, and yet maintained that the proper texture should be preserved. Yet upon looking over his work I find the same kind of line on rocks, trees, clothing, water, and so forth. In consequence of his methods, it is generally believed that when he has finished an engraving it represents himself only: the artist has been cut down and out to the arbitrary requirements of the artistic laws laid down by W. J. L.

The true aim of the new school was as far as possible to reproduce the artist's intention. Mr. Linton would engrave a design in oil, ink, charcoal, or guache with lines of similar character, so that no one would be able to distinguish which of those mediums had been employed. A reproduction should bear sufficient characteristics of the original to show what material the artist had employed to convey his impressions to the public. I belong to no "school," though Mr. Linton has kindly put me before the public as having done "the lowest thing in art" (referring to my fac-simile of Whistler's etching called "Io"), while acknowledging "it is wonderfully like the original." It was only an experiment, but I accomplished what I aimed at, and it stands alone in the world as the perfection of its kind. I have done much similar work, and, whatever others may be able to do, no one in the States or on the continent has done anything of the kind to equal them. I may be pardoned the insertion of one testimonial out of the many I have received from artists at home and abroad. In regard to my fac-simile of Seymour Haden's etching,