As an artist he knows, like Holbein, the method of great art. His economy of labor, his simplicity, justness, and sureness of stroke show the master’s hand. There was no waste in his work, no ineffective effort after impossible results, no meaningless lines. For these excellences of method and of character he has been often praised, especially because he developed his talents under very unfavorable conditions; but perhaps no words would have been sweeter to him than those which Charlotte Brontë wrote, sincerely out of her own experience without doubt, for he himself said he was led to his task by “the hope of administering to the pleasure and amusement of youth.” Charlotte Brontë, speaking through the lips of Jane Eyre of the pleasure she took as a child in looking through Bewick’s books, writes thus:
“I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds, the letterpress whereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank: they were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—
‘Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.’
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the black shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland. * * * Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own—shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat (Fig. 66) stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking. I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quiet, solitary church-yard (Fig. 67), with its inscribed head-stone, its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent attesting the hour of even-tide. The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So was the black, horned thing, seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. Each picture told a story—mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting. * * * With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least in my way.”
Bewick published the first edition of the British Quadrupeds in 1790, the first edition of the first volume of the British Birds in 1797, and of the second volume in 1804; all these became popular, and were several times republished with additional cuts. His other works were very numerous, but, as a whole, they are of inferior value. Both in the volumes which have been mentioned and in his later work he received much aid from his pupils, who designed and engraved, subject to his correction and approval, many illustrations which are ascribed to him. In his own work, notwithstanding his great excellence, he was by no means perfect. In delineating rocks and the bark of trees, especially, he fails; in drawing he sometimes makes errors, particularly when what he represents was not subject to direct and frequent observation; in the knowledge of line-arrangement, too, he is less masterly than some of his successors, and, in this respect, his work is characterized by effectiveness and spirit rather than by finish. Yet, when these deductions have been made from his merit, so much remains as to render him, without doubt, the most distinguished modern engraver in wood.