Bewick was an artist, not a reproductive craftsman. His blocks were conceived as original engravings, not as imitations of tones and textures created in another medium. If wood engraving advanced in the direction of commercialism to fill an overwhelming mass need, it was only because he had given it a technical basis. But it had greater artistic potentialities, as proved by Blake, Calvert, and Lepére, among others, and has found new life in the engravers of the 20th-century revival.
The reasons for Bewick's remarkable effectiveness can now be summed up. He succeeded, first, because he was the natural inheritor of a specifically English graphic arts process, burin-engraving on the end grain of wood. This had been practiced almost solely in England, which lacked a woodcut tradition, for about 75 years before the date he finished his apprenticeship. We know from Jackson's contemporary account that end-grain wood engraving was standard practice in England from about 1700. Bewick merely continued and refined a medium that came down to him as a national tradition.
Secondly, his country isolation and lack of academic training saved him from the inanity of repeating the old decorative devices—trophies, cartouches, classical figures, Roman ruins, and other international conventions that had lost their significance by the 1780's, although a spurious classicism was still kept alive for genteel consumption and the romantic picturesque still persisted in interior decoration.
Thirdly, he looked at life and nature with a fresh eye, without preconceptions. While his lack of larger vision held him down as an artist, it contributed to his feeling for natural textures and story-telling detail. His approach to illustration, therefore, was the spontaneous expression of an observant but unimaginative nature, coated with a bitter-sweet sentiment. It was this quality, so homely and common and yet so charged with integrity, that delivered the shock of recognition to a mass audience.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly in the long run, he was fortunate enough to live at a time when a necessary prerequisite for the physical appearance of his work, wove paper, was coming into use. Without it he would soon have had to simplify his line system, returning to older and less detailed methods, or his work would have remained unprintable. It was the new paper that allowed him to extract unprecedented subtleties from the wood block, that made his cuts print clearly and evenly, and that encouraged the expansion of the wood engraving process. These factors, taken together, make up the phenomenon of Thomas Bewick.
Figure 15.—Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick, from History of British birds, vol. 2, 1804. (Actual size.)
U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1959