53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?
By the way—my friends of the field of steel,—you need fear nothing of the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and thoughtless, of vulgar or servile—for that, indeed, the time has come; the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand, though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I tell you—(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)—a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying much)—only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You have founded a school on patience and labor—only. That school must soon be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phœnician in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes from the sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr; and leave the photographers to their Phœbus of Magnesium wire.
54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had mixed in the make of them,—and that one day—one night, I mean—his blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his own mountains!
Light out of limestone—color out of coal—and white wings out of hot water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!
55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any good workshop—the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate being of course responsible only for the general method, for the sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]
56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is something complacent, sympathetic, and helpful in the nature of steel; so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close at that engraving—imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be. You must feel what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you have got to do; how deep—how broad—how far apart—your lines must be, etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply all you must know). But suppose the plate were only a pen drawing: take your pen—your finest—and just try to copy the leaves that entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying glass to this—count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then—I humbly ask of you—try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher—you young lady or gentleman of genius—you eye-glassed dilettante—you current writer of criticism royally plural,—I beseech you—do it yourself; do the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,—you hold your etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,—you scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too difficult, take an easier piece;—take either of the light sprays of foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over them—look how their fine outline is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and—again, I pray you, do it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows of the distant rock—traverse its thickets—number its towers—count how many lines there are in a laurel bush—in an arch—in a casement: some hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will find, in every square quarter of an inch;—say three thousand to the inch,—each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been trained to this!
57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have to press close home this question about numbers and purpose presently;—it is not the question now. Supposing certain results required,—atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of shade, confusions of light,—more could not be done with less. There are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "cannot be better done."
58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim—let us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,—that the same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute act—is needed to do anything in Art that is worthy. And why is it, you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of which you have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering? Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do you stoop to us as you mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,—if, in that incommunicant contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of glory that your art would expire?—that those plates in the annuals, and black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental character,—"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours, low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas would have to be sung again;—"pulveris exigui—munera." Suppose you were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in noble impatience, for there is such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.
"Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."
Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when the May mornings come?