Unmeaning glitter, unprecedented1 softness, unprincipled novelty, shall sometimes set aside for awhile the truth and simplicity2 of nature, and the approbation3 of ages.—Life of Ryland.
From what has been said in the last chapter, it is obvious that had Bewick been but one of a series of wood-engravers during the established period of the art, his merit would have been eminent4 and peculiar5; but when it is recollected6 that, at one stride, he brought it to comparative perfection, our obligations to him are wonderfully increased.
The direct consequence of his revival7 of the art is, that we have now tens of thousands of volumes embellished9 with wood-cuts, and upwards10 of two hundred engravers in this department. The Penny Magazine alone is said to pay for its wood-cutting 2000l. per annum. This magazine and some of its cheap cotemporaries have made a peculiar application of this art, which is, in itself, a great national blessing11. By stereotyping12 wood-engravings, they are enabled to strike off any number of copies of them with their letter-press, and by this means, prints of a large size, and of great strength of effect, are made to circulate amongst the people, even to an extent to which the only limits must be those of education. Thus are many pictorial13 subjects placed before the eyes of tens of thousands who could otherwise never have seen them. Subjects[342] from the paintings of the old masters; landscapes from every country on the globe, with their peculiar characteristics; prints of ancient and modern buildings; of ancient and modern sculpture; of animals, plants; in fact, every subject of natural or human history, all brought livingly to the sight, and at such an amazingly trivial expense, that the desire of knowledge is, at once, quickened and gratified in a degree of which our fathers had not the most distant idea; nor of the effect of which have we, perhaps, any adequate conception. We feel, however, that it must be full of virtue14 and happiness. Throughout thousands and tens of thousands of cottages shall the eyes which, without these blessed facilities, would never have glanced on anything beyond the objects surrounding their daily life, now gaze in living delight on the magnificent scenes, the beautiful productions of every land and climate; on the stern or fantastic splendour of foreign towns and cities, domes15 and minarets16; on the forms and costumes, the dwellings17 and implements18 of the most distant nations; on the animal natures of air, earth, and ocean; on the faces of men who have been the lights, or terrors of the world; of those who have fought for, and thought for, sung for, and died for man and his cause; the spread of knowledge and religion; in fact, for that social and illimitable happiness of which these things are the precursors19; a happiness that shall be brought to every house, in city or in desert, to every fireside, however humble20.
This is a great and beneficent result, from the union of two noble arts: for whatever tends to embellish8 human life; to give to toiling21 men a refining pleasure; to bring them from base excitements and public haunts to the pure and peaceful enjoyments22 of home; to draw them to their own ingles; to induce them to sit among their children, and delight their eyes with objects of beauty, and feed their growing spirits with those natural facts, in which the wisdom and goodness of God are made so sensible to young minds; whatever does this, does the work of love; the work of human happiness and national greatness. To enlighten the general mass, and at the same time to kindle23 the noblest feelings of the soul of man, are the sure means to build up the state with true citizens; to protect the people from despotism, and government from popular caprice.
[343]
This, I say, is one great result; yet even this does not seem to me the highest legitimate24 province of the art. It is obvious that prints of the kind described—of buildings, portraits, or historic scenes, must after all come from metal with greater perfection than from wood. To most subjects metal gives a richness and delicacy25 that wood can never equal. Wood can give great strength and boldness, but accompanied nevertheless with something of hardness and constraint26. It is only the power of striking off prints with the letter-press which gives wood that admirable advantage over metal of which I have been speaking. It becomes, in that case, a substitute for metal, where metal could not be used without defeating the ultimate object by its expense. There it is merely a good substitute for metal. But there is one department in which it is superior even to metal; and that is in such vignette representations of rural life and scenery as Bewick has used it in. Here it triumphs over metal; for it does not here require so much brilliance27, or richness, or extreme delicacy, as a certain homely28 beauty belonging to rustic29 objects. The beauty of nature does not consist in showiness and dazzling lustre30, so much as in pleasing colours, a simple grace of form, and a certain roughness and opacity31 of surface, on which the eye can rest longer without fatigue32 than on more polished substances. Now it is in these qualities that Bewick’s engravings abound33. He is sacredly faithful to Nature. He catches at once the spirit of the country and of its wild denizens34. He is simple, beautiful, but not glaring;—Nature is never so.
Yet amongst all our wood-engravers,—and many of them are continually employed on rural subjects,—it is as true as it may seem astonishing, that there is not one of them who can bear a moment’s comparison with Bewick as a delineator of rural life. This is owing to no deficiency of talent—we have many artists of the highest talent—it is owing to other causes. If it seem surprising that no one, from the time of Bewick’s restoration of the art to the present moment, should have equalled him in the representation of nature, it is not more surprising than that from the time of Milton to that of Cowper no one wrote good blank verse; that with Milton’s free and natural majesty35 as a model before them, we should have had nothing better than the stilted[344] stiffness of Akenside, and the pompous36 inflations and ungrammatical distortions of Thomson. The same causes in both cases have produced the same effect. Our artists, like the poets, have forsaken37 nature herself, to study and imitate one another. While our artists are employed to depict38 nature, they are living in our mighty39 capital, cut off from the very face of nature. They have full employ; for the eyes of those for whom they labour are not more familiar with the country than their own. Dash and meretricious40 show captivate the multitude, and therefore dash and show are given in abundance; the wondering lover of nature looks for her in vain. The ambitious and frippery taste of the age is stamped on all the most excellent productions of what should be the rustic burin. We now and then see a better spirit; things overflowing41 with talent; and on the very verge42 of nature. Such are some of the beautiful recent illustrations of Gray’s Elegy43, Chevy-Chace, Aiken’s Calendar of the Year, Knight’s Pictorial Shakspeare, the bold sketches44 in Hone’s Table-Book, and the elegant ones in some of their books for the young published by Darton and Clark, Tegg, and others: but, in general, our most skilful45 artists are not contented46 with the simplicity of nature; they want better bread than can be made of wheat. Hence while they are admired in cities, Bewick reigns47 sole and triumphant48 all through the country.
But how is this to be remedied? As I have said, we have talent and manual skill equal to any thing; what we want are purer designs,—designs, in fact, from Nature! We want subjects drawn49 from the same source that Bewick drew them. I do not mean that our artists should imitate Bewick; no, that they should imitate Nature,—the true, the beautiful, the unambitious. Had Bewick lived a thousand years, he would every day have seen some new subject, some new features, in the everlasting50 changes and combinations that surround the fixed51 spirit of the universe. We have pupils of his—Harvey and Nesbit in particular, and why do not they, with their high talent, produce the same genuine nature? The answer is obvious. They are citizens. They have abandoned the daily cognizance of Nature; they have taken a directly opposite course to Bewick. He was an inseparable companion of Nature from his boyhood. All his life long he was[345] watching after, and pursuing her into her most hidden retirements52. To him
High mountains were a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.
He had tried the life of London, but he could not bear it. His soul was robbed of its nourishment53. He was shut up, blinded, famished54 in that huge wilderness55 of stone; dinned56 by that eternal chaos57 of confused sounds. He gasped58 for the free air; he pined for the dews; for the solemn roar of the ocean; for the glories of rising and setting suns. His father when he sent him from his country home at Cherryburn, to be apprenticed59 to Mr. Bielby at Newcastle, said to him at parting—“Now Thomas, thou art going to lead a different life to what thou hast led here: thou art going from constant fresh air and activity, to the closeness of a town and a sedentary occupation: thou must be up in a morning, and get a run.” And Thomas followed faithfully, for it chimed exactly with his own bent60, his father’s injunction. Every morning, rain or shine, often without his hat, and his bushy head of black hair ruffling61 in the wind, he would be seen scampering62 up the street towards the country; and the opposite neighbours would cry—“There goes Bielby’s fond boy.” These morning excursions he kept up during his life; and they did not suffice him. After the expiration63 of his apprenticeship64, he roamed far and wide through the glorious and soul-embuing scenery of Scotland. Year after year, and day after day, it was his delight to stroll over heaths and moors65, by sedgy pools and running waters. He saw bird, beast, and fish, from his hidden places, in all the freedom of their wild life. He saw the angler casting his line; the fowler setting his net and his springes; the farmer’s boy amusing his solitude66, when
He strolled, the lonely Crusoe of the fields—
prowling after water-fowl amid the reedy haunts; watching the flight of birds with greedy eyes; lighting67 fires under the screening hedge, and collecting sticks for fuel, and blowing them on hands and knees into a flame. Such were his loves, his studies, his perpetual occupations; and to have similar results, we must have persons of a similar passion and pursuit. We must have[346] designers; for we have plenty of manual dexterity68, capable of executing any design to the minutest shade,—we must have designers in whom Nature is, at once, an appetite, a perpetual study, and quenchless69 delight. Landscape painters we have of this character. Turner, with his gorgeous creations; Copley Fielding, with his heaths and downs, in which miles of space are put upon a few feet of canvass70, and that soul of solitude poured upon you in a gallery, which you before encountered only in the heart of living nature; Collins, with his exquisite71 sea-sides and rustic pieces; Hunt, with his really rustic characters; Barrett, with his sunsets; Stanfield, Cattermole, and others. We want a designer of wood-cuts of a similar character. What scenes of peerless beauty and infinite variety might an individual give us, who would devote himself, heart and soul, to this object; who would ramble72 all through the varied73 and beautiful scenery of these glorious islands at successive intervals74; who would pedestrianize in simple style; who would stroll along our wild shores; amongst our magnificent hills; prowl in fens75 and forests with fowlers and keepers; and seek refreshment76 by the fireside of the wayside inn; and take up his temporary abode77 in obscure and old-fashioned villages. Such a man might send into our metropolis78, and thence, through the aid of the engravers, to every part of the kingdom, such snatches of natural loveliness, such portions of rural scenery and rural life, as should make themselves felt to be the genuine product of nature—for nature will be felt, and kindle a purer taste and a stronger affection for the country.
I am not insensible to all the difficulties which lie in the way of such a devotion; nor that such a scheme will be pronounced chimerical79 by those who, at a far slighter cost, can please a less informed taste: but till we have such a man, we shall not have a second Bewick; and till such a mode of study is, more or less, adopted, we shall never have that love of the genuine country gratified, which assuredly and extensively exists.
Since writing the foregoing remarks, it is with great pleasure that I have seen the arts of designing and wood-engraving beginning to separate themselves, and that of designing for the wood-engravers taking its place as a distinct profession.[15] Harvey,[347] Browne, Sargent, Lambert, Gilbert, and Melville, have for some time been designers of this description. This important step has only to be followed up by designers in the manner pointed80 out in this chapter, to insure that complete return to nature which is so much to be desired, and where such an exhaustless field of beauty and life awaits the observant artist, as would place the present pre-eminent manual skill of our wood-engravers in its true and well-merited position.
[15] The London and Westminster Review, August, 1838, in an article on wood-engraving, very judiciously81 suggested that it was an art well calculated for the pursuit of ladies, and one which they might convert not only into a source of profit to themselves, but of public advantage. No doubt of it. It is an art simple and of easy acquisition. But why not ladies who are good sketchers become designers for wood-cuts at once? They have all the requisite82 qualifications already in their hands; and what fresh and original treasures of taste and fancy are now slumbering83, lost to the world, which they might embellish, in the minds and portfolios84 of ladies. So vastly is the demand for wood-engravings every day growing, that nothing is more difficult than to obtain designs, or when obtained to get them cut. Ladies, therefore, who have a genius for design, would soon find their value amongst the publishers; and while the profession of a designer is both elegant and feminine, how much more independent, and much less laborious85, it would be than needlework, or the duties and position of a governess.
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1
unprecedented
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| adj.无前例的，新奇的 | |
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simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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approbation
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| n.称赞；认可 | |
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eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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recollected
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| adj.冷静的；镇定的；被回忆起的；沉思默想的v.记起，想起( recollect的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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embellish
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| v.装饰，布置；给…添加细节，润饰 | |
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embellished
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| v.美化( embellish的过去式和过去分词 )；装饰；修饰；润色 | |
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upwards
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| adv.向上，在更高处...以上 | |
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blessing
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| n.祈神赐福；祷告；祝福，祝愿 | |
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stereotyping
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| v.把…模式化，使成陈规( stereotype的现在分词 ) | |
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pictorial
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| adj.绘画的；图片的；n．画报 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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domes
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| n.圆屋顶( dome的名词复数 )；像圆屋顶一样的东西；圆顶体育场 | |
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minarets
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| n.（清真寺旁由报告祈祷时刻的人使用的）光塔( minaret的名词复数 ) | |
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dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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implements
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| n.工具( implement的名词复数 )；家具；手段；[法律]履行（契约等）v.实现( implement的第三人称单数 )；执行；贯彻；使生效 | |
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precursors
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| n.先驱( precursor的名词复数 )；先行者；先兆；初期形式 | |
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humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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toiling
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| 长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的现在分词 )； 艰难缓慢地移动，跋涉 | |
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enjoyments
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| 愉快( enjoyment的名词复数 )； 令人愉快的事物； 享有； 享受 | |
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kindle
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| v.点燃，着火 | |
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legitimate
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| adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法 | |
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delicacy
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| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
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constraint
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| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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brilliance
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| n.光辉，辉煌，壮丽，（卓越的）才华，才智 | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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rustic
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| adj.乡村的，有乡村特色的；n.乡下人，乡巴佬 | |
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lustre
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| n.光亮，光泽；荣誉 | |
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opacity
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| n.不透明；难懂 | |
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fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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33
abound
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| vi.大量存在；(in，with)充满，富于 | |
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denizens
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| n.居民，住户( denizen的名词复数 ) | |
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majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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pompous
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的；夸大的；豪华的 | |
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Forsaken
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| adj. 被遗忘的, 被抛弃的 动词forsake的过去分词 | |
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depict
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| vt.描画，描绘；描写，描述 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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40
meretricious
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| adj.华而不实的，俗艳的 | |
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41
overflowing
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| n. 溢出物,溢流 adj. 充沛的，充满的 动词overflow的现在分词形式 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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elegy
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| n.哀歌，挽歌 | |
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sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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reigns
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| n.君主的统治( reign的名词复数 )；君主统治时期；任期；当政期 | |
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triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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50
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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51
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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retirements
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| 退休( retirement的名词复数 )； 退职； 退役； 退休的实例 | |
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53
nourishment
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| n.食物，营养品；营养情况 | |
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famished
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| adj.饥饿的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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56
dinned
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| vt.喧闹（din的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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57
chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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gasped
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| v.喘气( gasp的过去式和过去分词 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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apprenticed
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| 学徒，徒弟( apprentice的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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61
ruffling
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| 弄皱( ruffle的现在分词 )； 弄乱； 激怒； 扰乱 | |
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scampering
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| v.蹦蹦跳跳地跑，惊惶奔跑( scamper的现在分词 ) | |
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expiration
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| n.终结，期满，呼气，呼出物 | |
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64
apprenticeship
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| n.学徒身份；学徒期 | |
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65
moors
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| v.停泊，系泊（船只）( moor的第三人称单数 ) | |
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66
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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dexterity
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| n.(手的)灵巧，灵活 | |
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quenchless
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| 不可熄灭的 | |
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canvass
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| v.招徕顾客，兜售；游说；详细检查，讨论 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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ramble
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| v.漫步，漫谈，漫游；n.漫步，闲谈，蔓延 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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75
fens
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| n.（尤指英格兰东部的）沼泽地带( fen的名词复数 ) | |
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76
refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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abode
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| n.住处，住所 | |
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metropolis
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| n.首府；大城市 | |
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chimerical
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| adj.荒诞不经的，梦幻的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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81
judiciously
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| adv.明断地，明智而审慎地 | |
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82
requisite
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| adj.需要的，必不可少的；n.必需品 | |
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83
slumbering
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| 微睡，睡眠（slumber的现在分词形式） | |
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84
portfolios
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| n.投资组合( portfolio的名词复数 )；（保险）业务量；（公司或机构提供的）系列产品；纸夹 | |
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laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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