  103. I purpose in this chapter, as intimated in the last, to sketch briefly what I believe to be the real uses and powers of the three kinds of engraving, by black line; either for book illustration, or general public instruction by distribution of multiplied copies. After thus stating what seems to me the proper purpose of each kind of work, I may, perhaps, be able to trace some advisable limitations of its technical methods. I. And first, of pure line engraving. This is the only means by which entire refinement of intellectual representation can be given to the public. Photographs have an inimitable mechanical refinement, and their legal evidence is of great use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed to be "true," and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look much into book illustrations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers of well-illustrated works of which I know nothing: but the three I should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the great "Description de l'Egypte." 104. The vignettes in the first named volumes (considering 105. The second book which I named, Heyne's Virgil, shows, though unequally and insufficiently, what might be done by line engraving to give vital image of classical design, and symbol of classical thought. It is profoundly to be regretted that none of these old and well-illustrated classics can be put frankly into the hands of youth; while all books lately published for general service, pretending to classical illustration, are, in point of Art, absolutely dead and harmful rubbish. I cannot but think that the production of well-illustrated classics would at least leave free of money-scathe, and in great honor, any publisher who undertook it; and although schoolboys in general might not care for any such help, to one, here and there, it would make all the difference between loving his work and hating it. For myself, I am quite certain that a single vignette, like that of the fountain of Arethusa in Heyne, would have set me on an eager quest, which would have saved me years of sluggish and fruitless labor. 106. It is the more strange, and the more to be regretted, that no such worthy applications of line engraving are now made, because, merely to gratify a fantastic pride, works are often undertaken in which, for want of well-educated draughtsmen, the mechanical skill of the engraver has been wholly wasted, and nothing produced useful, except for common reference. In the great work published by the Dilettanti Society, for instance, the engravers have been set to imitate, at endless cost of sickly fineness in dotted and hatched execution, drawings in which the light and shade is always forced and vulgar, if not utterly false. Constantly (as in the 37th plate of the first volume), waving hair casts a straight shadow, not only on the forehead, but even on the ripples of other curls emerging beneath it: while the publication of plate 41, as a representation of the most beautiful statue in the British Museum, may well arouse any artist's wonder what kind of "diletto" in antiquity it might be, from which the Society assumed its name. 107. The third book above named as a typical example of right work in line, the "Description de l'Egypte," is one of 108. II. Wood-cutting and etching for serious purpose. The tendency of wood-cutting in England has been to imitate the fineness and manner of engraving. This is a false tendency; and so far as the productions obtained under its influence have been successful, they are to be considered only as an inferior kind of engraving, under the last head. But the real power of wood-cutting is, with little labor, to express in clear delineation the most impressive essential qualities of form and light and shade, in objects which owe their interest not to grace, but to power and character. It can never express beauty of the subtlest kind, and is not in any way available on a large scale; but used rightly, on its own ground, it is the most purely intellectual of all Art; sculpture, even of the highest order, being slightly sensual and imitative; while fine wood-cutting is entirely abstract, thoughtful, and passionate. The best wood-cuts that I know in the whole range of Art are those of DÜrer's "Life of the Virgin;" after these come the other works of DÜrer, slightly inferior from a more complex and wiry treatment of line. I have never seen any other work in wood deserving to be named with his; but the best 109. Some very brilliant execution on an inferior system—less false, however, than the modern English one—has been exhibited by the French; and if we accept its false conditions, nothing can surpass the cleverness of our own school of Dalziel, or even of the average wood-cutting in our daily journals, which however, as aforesaid, is only to be reckoned an inferior method of engraving. These meet the demand of the imperfectly-educated public in every kind; and it would be absurd to urge any change in the method, as long as the public remain in the same state of knowledge or temper. But, allowing for the time during which these illustrated papers have now been bringing whatever information and example of Art they could to the million, it seems likely that the said million will remain in the same stage of knowledge yet for some time. Perhaps the horse is an animal as antagonistic to Art in England, as he was in harmony with it in Greece; still, allowing for the general intelligence of the London bred lower classes, I was surprised by a paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette, quoting the Star of November 6th of last year, in its report upon the use made of illustrated papers by the omnibus stablemen,—to the following effect:— "They are frequently employed in the omnibus yards from five o'clock in the morning till twelve at night, so that a fair day's work for a 'horse-keeper' is about eighteen hours. For this enormous labor they receive a guinea per week, which for them means seven, not six, days; though they do contrive to make Sunday an 'off-day' now and then. The ignorance of aught in the world save ''orses and 'buses' which prevails amongst these stablemen is almost incredible. A veteran horse-keeper, who had passed his days in an omnibus-yard, was once overheard praising the 'Lus-trated London News with much enthusiasm, as the best periodical in London, 'leastways at the coffee-shop.' When pressed for the reason of his partiality, he confessed it was the 'pickshers' which 110. But for the classes among whom there is a real demand for educational art, it is highly singular that no systematic use has yet been made of wood-cutting on its own terms; and only here and there, even in the best books, is there an example of what might be done by it. The frontispieces to the two volumes of Mr. Birch's "Ancient Pottery and Porcelain," and such simpler cuts as that at p. 273 of the first volume, show what might be cheaply done for illustration of archaic classical work; two or three volumes of such cuts chosen from the best vases of European collections and illustrated by a short and trustworthy commentary, would be to any earnest schoolboy worth a whole library of common books. But his father can give him nothing of the kind—and if the father himself wish to study Greek Art, he must spend something like a hundred pounds to put himself in possession of any sufficiently illustrative books of reference. As to any use of such means for representing objects in the round, the plate of the head of Pallas facing p. 168 in the same volume sufficiently shows the hopelessness of setting the modern engraver to such service. Again, in a book like Smith's dictionary of geography, the wood-cuts of coins are at present useful only for comparison and reference. They are absolutely valueless as representations of the art of the coin. 111. Now, supposing that an educated scholar and draughtsman had drawn each of these blocks, and that they had been cut with as much average skill as that employed in the wood-cuts of Punch, each of these vignettes of coins might have been an exquisite lesson, both of high Art treatment in the coin, and of beautiful black and white drawing in the representation; and this just as cheaply—nay, more cheaply—than the present common and useless drawing. The things necessary are indeed not small,—nothing less than well educated intellect and feeling in the draughtsmen; but intellect and feeling, as I have often said before now, are always 112. III. This relation of social character to the possible supply of good Art is still more direct when we include in our survey the mass of illustration coming under the general head of dramatic caricature—caricature, that is to say, involving right understanding of the true grotesque in human life; caricature of which the worth or harmfulness cannot be estimated, unless we can first somewhat answer the wide question, What is the meaning and worth of English laughter? I say, "of English laughter," because if you can well determine the value of that, you determine the value of the true laughter of all men—the English laugh being the purest and truest in the metal that can be minted. And indeed only Heaven can know what the country owes to it, on the lips of such men as Sydney Smith and Thomas Hood. For indeed the true wit On the other hand, the spirit of levity, and habit of mockery, are among the chief instruments of final ruin both to individual and nations. I believe no business will ever be rightly done by a laughing Parliament: and that the public perception of vice or of folly which only finds expression in caricature, neither reforms the one, nor instructs the other. No man is fit for much, we know, "who has not a good laugh in him"—but a sad wise valor is the only complexion for a leader; and if there was ever a time for laughing in this dark and hollow world, I do not think it is now. This is a wide subject, and I must follow it in another place; for our present purpose, all that needs to be noted is that, for the expression of true humor, few and imperfect lines are often sufficient, and that in this direction lies the only opening for the serviceable presentation of amateur work to public notice. 113. I have said nothing of lithography, because, with the exception of Samuel Prout's sketches, no work of standard Art-value has ever been produced by it, nor can be: its opaque and gritty texture being wholly offensive to the eye of any well trained artist. Its use in connection with color is, of course, foreign to our present subject. Nor do I take any note of the various current patents for cheap modes of drawing, though they are sometimes to be thanked for rendering possible the publication of sketches like those of the pretty little "Voyage en Zigzag" ("how we spent the summer") published by Longmans—which are full of charming humor, character, and freshness of expression; and might have lost more by the reduction to the severe terms of wood-cutting than they do by the ragged interruptions of line which are an inevitable defect in nearly all these cheap processes. It will be enough, FOOTNOTES:"My Dear Sir,—I wanted to tell you what deep respect I had for Sydney Smith; but my time has been cut to pieces ever since your note reached me. He was the first in the literary circles of London to assert the value of 'Modern Painters,' and he has always seemed to me equally keen-sighted and generous in his estimate of literary efforts. His 'Moral Philosophy' is the only book on the subject which I care that my pupils should read, and there is no man (whom I have not personally known) whose image is so vivid in my constant affection.—Ever your faithful servant, "Salve Mater Pietatis 1. "Materials for a History of Oil-Painting." By Charles Lock Eastlake, R.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., Secretary to the Royal Commission for promoting the Fine Arts in Connection with the Rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament, etc., etc. London, 1847. 2. "Theophili, qui et Rugerus, Presbyteri et Monachi, Libri III. de Diversis Artibus; seu Diversarum Artium Schedula. (An Essay upon Various Arts, in Three Books, by Theophilus, called also Rugerus, Priest and Monk, forming an EncyclopÆdia of Christian Art of the Eleventh Century." Translated, with Notes, by Robert Hendrie.) London, 1847. The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was, that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the errors of early painters. A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a picture of early Italian Masters. If they had they would have known that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of effect, as inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word, there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have opposed themselves as a body, to that kind of teaching above described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into mediÆvalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school. The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well. This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had never looked at the pictures. The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast that of the Renaissance, however brilliant. "Il y a eu pendant longtemps sur cette cime, une petite chapelle avec une image de Notre Dame qui Étoit en grande vÉnÉration dans le pays, et oÙ un grand nombre de gens alloient au mois d'aoÛt en procession, de Suze et des environs; mais le sentier qui conduit À cette chapelle est si Étroit et si scabreux qu'il n'y avoit presque pas d'annÉes qu'il n'y pÉrit du monde; la fatigue et la raretÉ de l'air saisissoient ceux qui avoient plutÔt consultÉ leur dÉvotion que leurs forces; ils tombÉrent en dÉfalliance, et de lÀ dans le prÉcipice."
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