bushes. This permits him to cut every string of the net by a simple
white line, according to his practice of using the white line whenever
he could. He used it with great ability in the scales of his fish, but
this was simply from a regard to technical convenience, for when he
engraved on metal he marked the scales of his fish by black lines.
These may seem very trifling considerations to persons unacquainted
with the fine arts, who may think that it can matter little whether a
fishing-net is drawn in black lines or in white, but the fact is that the
entire destiny of wood engraving depended on preserving or rejecting
the white line. Had it been generally accepted as it was by Bewick,
original artists might have followed his example in engraving their
own inventions, because then wood engraving would have been a
natural and comparatively rapid art; but when the black line was
preferred the art became a handicraft, because original artists have
not time to cut out thousands of little white spaces. The reader may
at once realize for himself the tediousness of the process by comparing
the ease with which one writes a page of manuscript with the
labour which would be involved in cutting away, with perfect
accuracy, every space, however minute, which the pen had not
blackened with ink.
Wood engraving in the first three quarters of the 19th century had no special character of its own, nothing like Bewick's work, which had a character derived from the nature of the process; but on the other hand, the modern art is set to imitate every kind of engraving and every kind of drawing. Thus we have woodcuts that imitate line engraving, others that copy etching and even mezzotint, whilst others try to imitate the crumbling touch of charcoal or of chalk, or the wash of water-colour, the grcyness of pencil, or even the wash and the pen-line together. The art has been put to all sorts of purposes; and though it is not and cannot be free, it is made to pretend to a freedom which the old masters would have rejected as an affectation. Rapid sketches are made on the block with the pen, and the modern wood-engraver set himself patiently to cut out all the spaces of white, in which case the engraver is in reality less free than his predecessor in the 16th century, though the result has a false appearance of liberty. The woodcut is like a polyglot who has learned to speak many other languages at the risk of forgetting his own. And, wonderful as may be its powers of imitation, it can only approximate to the arts which it imitates; it can never rival each of them on its own ground. It can convey the idea of etching or water-colour, but not their quality; it can imitate the manner of a line engraver on steel, but it cannot give the delicacy of his lines. In its most modern development it has practically succeeded in imitating the grey tonalities of the photograph. Whatever be the art which the wood engraver imitates, a practised eye sees at the first glance that the result is nothing but a woodcut. Therefore, although we may admire the suppleness of an art which can assume so many transformations, it is certain that these transformations give little satisfaction to severe judges. At the same time, as the ultimate object was not only reproduction, but reduplication by the printing-press, the drawbacks mentioned are far outweighed by the practical advantages. In manual skill and in variety of resource modern wood engravers far excel their predecessors. A Belgian wood engraver, Stéphane Pannemaker, exhibited at the Salon of 1876 a woodcut entitled “La Baigneuse,” which astonished the art-world by the amazing perfection of its method, all the delicate modelling of a nude figure being rendered by simple modulations of unbroken line. Both English and French publications have abounded in striking proofs of skill. The modern art, as exhibited in these publications, may be broadly divided into two sections, one depending upon line, in which case the black line of a pen or pencil sketch is carefully preserved, and the other depending upon tone, when the tones of a sketch with the brush are translated by the wood engraver into shades obtained in his own way by the burin. The first of these methods requires extreme care, skill and patience, but makes little demand upon the intelligence of the artist; the second leaves him more free to interpret, but he cannot do this rightly without understanding both tone and texture.
The woodcuts in Doré's Don Quixote are done by each method alternately, many of the designs having been sketched with a pen upon the block, whilst others are shaded with a brush in Indian ink and white, the latter being engraved by interpreting the shades of the brush. In the pen drawings the lines are Doré's, in the brush drawings the lines are the engraver's. In the night scenes Pisan usually adopted Bewick's system of white lines, the block being left untouched in its blackness wherever the effect permitted. English wood engraving showed to great advantage in such newspapers as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic of that day, and also in vignettes for book illustration. A certain standard of vignette engraving was reached by Edmund Evans in Birket Foster's edition of Cowper's Task, not likely to be surpassed in its own way, either for delicacy of tone or for careful preservation of the drawing.
An important extension of wood engraving was due to the invention of compound blocks by Charles Wells about the year 1860. Formerly a woodcut was limited in size to the dimensions of a block of boxwood cut across the grain, except in the primitive condition of the art, when commoner woods were used in the direction of the grain; but by this invention many small blocks were fitted together so as to form a single large one, sometimes of great size. They could be separated or joined together again at will, and it was this facility which rendered possible the rapid production of large cuts for the newspapers, many cutters working on the same subject at once, each taking his own section.
The process employed for wood engraving may be briefly described as follows. The surface of the block is lightly whitened with Chinese white so as to produce a light yellowish-grey tint, and on this the artist draws, either with a pen if the work is intended to be in line, or with a hard-pointed pencil and a brush if it is intended to be in shade. If it is to be a line woodcut the cutter simply digs out the whites with a sharp graver or scalpel (he has these tools of various shapes and sizes), and that is all he has to do; but if the drawing on the wood is shaded with a brush, then the cutter has to work upon the tones in such a manner that they will come relatively true in the printing. This is by no means easy, and the result is often a disappointment, besides which the artist's drawing is destroyed in the process. It therefore became customary to have the block photographed before the engraver touches it, when the drawing is specially worth preserving. This was done for Leighton's illustrations to Romola. By a later development the drawing, made upon paper, was by photography printed on the block, and the drawing remained untouched as a witness for or against the engraver.
In recent years the position of wood engraving in Great Britain has wholly changed. Up to 1880 and for a little while longer it was the chief means of book and newspaper illustration, and a frequent method of fine-art reproduction; but by the beginning of the 20th century it had been all but driven out of the field by “process” work of various kinds. It still flourishes in its commoner style for commercial and mechanical work; it is still occasionally maintained in its finest form by a sympathetic publisher here and there, who deplores and would arrest its decay. But the photograph and its facsimile reproduction have captivated the public, who want “illustration” and who do not want “art.” The great body of the wood engravers have therefore found their occupation entirely gone, while the minority have found themselves forced to devote their skill to “retouching” the process-block—sometimes carrying their work so far that the print from the finished block is a close imitation of a wood engraving. This system has been carried farthest in America; it is rarely seen elsewhere.
It is not only to considerations of economy that is due the super session of engraving by “process.” The apparent superiority of truthfulness claimed by the photograph over the artist's drawing is a factor in the case—the public forgetting that a photographic print shows us what a thing or a scene looks like to the undiscriminating lens, rather than what it looks like to the two eyes of the spectator, who unconsciously selects that part of the scene which he specially wishes to see. The rank and file of the engravers—even those who can “engrave” after a picture as well as “cut” a “special artist's” sketch—succumbed not only to the public, but to the artists themselves, who frequently insisted upon the process-block for the translation of their work. They preferred the greater truth of outline (though not necessarily of tone) which is yielded by “process,” to all the inherent charm of the beautiful (and expensive) art of xylography.
