To one of Blake’s few friends—to the “dear Sculptor of Eternity,” as he wrote to Flaxman from Felpham—the world is indebted for some notable book illustrations. Whether the greatest writers—the Homers, the Shakespeares, the Dantes—can ever be “illustrated” without loss may fairly be questioned. At all events, the showy dexterities of the Dorés and Gilberts prove nothing to the contrary. But now and then there comes to the graphic interpretation of a great author an artist either so reverential, or so strongly sympathetic at some given point, that, in default of any relation more narrowly intimate, we at once accept his conceptions as the best attainable. In this class are Flaxman’s outlines to Homer and Æschylus. Flaxman was not a Hellenist as men are Hellenists to-day. Nevertheless, his Roman studies had saturated him with the spirit of antique beauty, and by his grand knowledge of the nude, his calm, his restraint, he is such an illustrator of Homer as is not likely to arise again. For who—with all our added knowledge of classical antiquity—who, of our modern artists, could hope to rival such thoroughly Greek compositions as the ball-play of Nausicaa in the “Odyssey,” or that lovely group from Æschylus of the tender-hearted, womanly Oceanides, cowering like flowers beaten by the storm under the terrible anger of Zeus? In our day Flaxman’s drawings would have been reproduced by some of the modern facsimile processes, and the gain would have been great. As it is, something is lost by their transference to copper, even though the translators be Piroli and Blake. Blake, in fact, did more than he is usually credited with, for (beside the acknowledged and later “Hesiod,” 1817) he really engraved the whole of the “Odyssey,” Piroli’s plates having been lost on the voyage to England. The name of the Roman artist, nevertheless, appears on the title-page (1793). But Blake was too original to be a successful copyist of other men’s work, and to appreciate the full value of Flaxman’s drawings, they should be studied in the collections at University College, the Royal Academy, and elsewhere. [9]
Flaxman and Blake had few imitators. But a host of clever designers, such as Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Westall, Uwins, Smirke, Burney, Corbould, Dodd, and others, vied with the popular Stothard in “embellishing” the endless “Poets,” “novelists,” and “essayists” of our forefathers. Some of these, and most of the recognised artists of the period, lent their aid to that boldly-planned but unhappily-executed “Shakespeare” of Boydell,—“black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis,” as Thackeray calls it. They are certainly not enlivening—those cumbrous “atlas” folios of 1803–5, and they helped to ruin the worthy alderman. Even courtly Sir Joshua is clearly ill at ease among the pushing Hamiltons and Mortimers; and, were it not for the whimsical discovery that Westall’s “Ghost of Cæsar” strangely resembles Mr. Gladstone, there would be no resting-place for the modern student of these dismal masterpieces. The truth is, Reynolds excepted, there were no contemporary painters strong enough for the task, and the honours of the enterprise belong almost exclusively to Smirke’s “Seven Ages” and one or two plates from the lighter comedies. The great “Bible” of Macklin, a rival and even more incongruous publication, upon which some of the same designers were employed, has fallen into completer oblivion. A rather better fate attended another book of this class, which, although belonging to a later period, may be briefly referred to here. The “Milton” of John Martin has distinct individuality, and some of the needful qualities of imagination. Nevertheless, posterity has practically decided that scenic grandeur and sombre effects alone are not a sufficient pictorial equipment for the varied story of “Paradise Lost.”
It is to Boydell of the Shakespeare gallery that we owe the “Liber Veritatis” of Claude, engraved by Richard Earlom; and indirectly, since rivalry of Claude prompted the attempt, the famous “Liber Studiorum” of Turner. Neither of these, however—which, like the “Rivers of France” and the “Picturesque Views in England and Wales” of the latter artist, are collections of engravings rather than illustrated books—belongs to the present purpose. But Turner’s name may fitly serve to introduce those once familiar “Annuals” and “Keepsakes,” that, beginning in 1823 with Ackermann’s “Forget-me-Not,” enjoyed a popularity of more than thirty years. Their general characteristics have been pleasantly satirised in Thackeray’s account of the elegant miscellany of Bacon the publisher, to which Mr. Arthur Pendennis contributed his pretty poem of “The Church Porch.” His editress, it will be remembered, was the Lady Violet Lebas, and his colleagues the Honourable Percy Popjoy, Lord Dodo, and the gifted Bedwin Sands, whose “Eastern Ghazuls” lent so special a distinction to the volume in watered-silk binding. The talented authors, it is true, were in most cases under the disadvantage of having to write to the plates of the talented artists, a practice which even now is not extinct, though it is scarcely considered favourable to literary merit. And the real “Annuals” were no exception to the rule. As a matter of fact, their general literary merit was not obtrusive, although, of course, they sometimes contained work which afterwards became famous. They are now so completely forgotten and out of date, that one scarcely expects to find that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Macaulay, and Southey, were among the occasional contributors. Lamb’s beautiful “Album verses” appeared in the “Bijou,” Scott’s “Bonnie Dundee” in the “Christmas Box,” and Tennyson’s “St. Agnes’ Eve” in the “Keepsake.” But the plates were, after all, the leading attraction. These, prepared for the most part under the superintendence of the younger Heath, and executed on the steel which by this time had supplanted the old “coppers,” were supplied by, or were “after,” almost every contemporary artist of note. Stothard, now growing old and past his prime, Turner, Etty, Stanfield, Leslie, Roberts, Danby, Maclise, Lawrence, Cattermole, and numbers of others, found profitable labour in this fashionable field until 1856, when the last of the “Annuals” disappeared, driven from the market by the rapid development of wood engraving. About a million, it is roughly estimated, was squandered in producing them.
In connection with the “Annuals” must be mentioned two illustrated books which were in all probability suggested by them—the “Poems” and “Italy” of Rogers. The designs to these are chiefly by Turner and Stothard, although there are a few by Prout and others. Stothard’s have been already referred to; Turner’s are almost universally held to be the most successful of his many vignettes. It has been truly said—in a recent excellent life of this artist [10]—that it would be difficult to find in the whole of his works two really greater than the “Alps at Daybreak,” and the “Datur Hora Quieti,” in the former of these volumes. Almost equally beautiful are the “Valombré Falls” and “Tornaro’s misty brow.” Of the “Italy” set Mr. Ruskin writes:—“They are entirely exquisite; poetical in the highest and purest sense, exemplary and delightful beyond all praise.” To such words it is not possible to add much. But it is pretty clear that the poetical vitality of Rogers was secured by these well-timed illustrations, over which he is admitted by his nephew Mr. Sharpe to have spent about £7000, and far larger sums have been named by good authorities. The artist received from fifteen to twenty guineas for each of the drawings; the engravers (Goodall, Miller, Wallis, Smith, and others), sixty guineas a plate. The “Poems” and the “Italy,” in the original issues of 1830 and 1834, are still precious to collectors, and are likely to remain so. Turner also illustrated Scott, Milton, Campbell, and Byron; but this series of designs has not received equal commendation from his greatest eulogist, who declares them to be “much more laboured, and more or less artificial and unequal.” Among the numerous imitations directly induced by the Rogers books was the “Lyrics of the Heart,” by Alaric Attila Watts, a forgotten versifier and sometime editor of “Annuals,” but it did not meet with similar success.
Many illustrated works, originating in the perfection and opportunities of engraving on metal, are necessarily unnoticed in this rapid summary. As far, however, as book-illustration is concerned, copper and steel plate engraving may be held to have gone out of fashion with the “Annuals.” It is still, indeed, to be found lingering in that mine of modern art-books—the “Art Journal;” and, not so very long ago, it made a sumptuous and fugitive reappearance in Doré’s “Idylls of the King,” Birket Foster’s “Hood,” and one or two other imposing volumes. But it was badly injured by modern wood-engraving; it has since been crippled for life by photography; and it is more than probable that the present rapid rise of modern etching will give it the coup de grace. [11]
By the end of the seventeenth century the art of engraving on wood had fallen into disuse. Writing circa 1770, Horace Walpole goes so far as to say that it “never was executed in any perfection in England;” and, speaking afterwards of Papillon’s “Traité de la Gravure,” 1766, he takes occasion to doubt if that author would ever “persuade the world to return to wooden cuts.” Nevertheless, with Bewick, a few years later, wood-engraving took a fresh departure so conspicuous that it amounts to a revival. In what this consisted it is clearly impossible to show here with any sufficiency of detail; but between the method of the old wood-cutters who reproduced the drawings of Dürer, and the method of the Newcastle artist, there are two marked and well-defined differences. One of these is a difference in the preparation of the wood and the tool employed. The old wood-cutters carved their designs with knives and chisels on strips of wood sawn lengthwise—that is to say, upon the plank; Bewick used a graver, and worked upon slices of box or pear cut across the grain,—that is to say upon the end of the wood. The other difference, of which Bewick is said to have been the inventor, is less easy to describe. It consisted in the employment of what is technically known as “white line.” In all antecedent wood-cutting the cutter had simply cleared away those portions of the block left bare by the design, so that the design remained in relief to be printed from like type. Using the smooth box block as a uniform surface from which, if covered with printing ink, a uniformly black impression might be obtained, Bewick, by cutting white lines across it at greater or lesser intervals, produced gradations of shade, from the absolute black of the block to the lightest tints. The general result of this method was to give a greater depth of colouring and variety to the engraving, but its advantages may perhaps be best understood by a glance at the background of the “Woodcock” on the following page.
Bewick’s first work of any importance was the Gay’s “Fables” of 1779. In 1784 he did another series of “Select Fables.” Neither of these books, however, can be compared with the “General History of Quadrupeds,” 1790, and the “British Land and Water Birds,” 1797 and 1804. The illustrations to the “Quadrupeds” are in many instances excellent, and large additions were made to them in subsequent issues. But in this collection Bewick laboured to a great extent under the disadvantage of representing animals with which he was familiar only through the medium of stuffed specimens or incorrect drawings. In the “British Birds,” on the contrary, his facilities for study from the life were greater, and his success was consequently more complete. Indeed, it may be safely affirmed that of all the engravers of the present century, none have excelled Bewick for beauty of black and white, for skilful rendering of plumage and foliage, and for fidelity of detail and accessory. The “Woodcock” (here given), the “Partridge,” the “Owl,” the “Yellow-Hammer,” the “Yellow-Bunting,” the “Willow-Wren,” are popular examples of these qualities. But there are a hundred others nearly as good.
Among sundry conventional decorations after the old German fashion in the first edition of the “Quadrupeds,” there are a fair number of those famous tail-pieces which, to a good many people, constitute Bewick’s chief claim to immortality. That it is not easy to imitate them is plain from the failure of Branston’s attempts, and from the inferior character of those by John Thompson in Yarrell’s “Fishes.” The genius of Bewick was, in fact, entirely individual and particular. He had the humour of a Hogarth in little, as well as some of his special characteristics,—notably his faculty of telling a story by suggestive detail. An instance may be taken at random from vol. I. of the “Birds.” A man, whose wig and hat have fallen off, lies asleep with open mouth under some bushes. He is manifestly drunk, and the date “4 June,” on a neighbouring stone, gives us the reason and occasion of his catastrophe. He has been too loyally celebrating the birthday of his majesty King George III. Another of Bewick’s gifts is his wonderful skill in foreshadowing a tragedy. Take as an example, this truly appalling incident from the “Quadrupeds.” The tottering child, whose nurse is seen in the background, has strayed into the meadow, and is pulling at the tail of a vicious-looking colt, with back-turned eye and lifted heel. Down the garden-steps the mother hurries headlong; but she can hardly be in time. And of all this—sufficient, one would say, for a fairly-sized canvas—the artist has managed to give a vivid impression in a block of three inches by two! Then, again, like Hogarth once more, he rejoices in multiplications of dilemma. What, for instance, can be more comically pathetic than the head-piece to the “Contents” in vol. I. of the “Birds”? The old horse has been seized with an invincible fit of stubbornness. The day is both windy and rainy. The rider has broken his stick and lost his hat; but he is too much encumbered with his cackling and excited stock to dare to dismount. Nothing can help him but a Deus ex machinâ,—of whom there is no sign.