|BETWEEN the years 1767 and 1785, travellers going southward to
Newcastle along the right bank of the Tyne must frequently have
encountered a springy, well-set lad walking, or oftener running, rapidly
in the opposite direction. During the whole of that period, which begins
with Thomas Bewick's apprenticeship and closes with the deaths of his
father and mother, he never ceased to visit regularly the little farm at
Cherryburn where he was born.=
````'Dank and foul, dank and foul,
````By the smoky town in its murky cowl,'=
is the Tyne at Newcastle, where he lived his working life; but at
Ovingham, where he lies buried, and whence you can see the remains of
his birthplace, it still flows=
`````'Clear and cool,
```By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool,'=
like the river in the 'Water-Babies,' and one can easily conceive with
what an eagerness the country-bred engraver's-apprentice must have
turned, in those weekly escapes from the great, gloomy manufacturing
city, to the familiar sights and sounds of nature which had filled his
boyhood with delight. To his love for these things we are indebted for
his best work; it was his intimate acquaintance with them that has kept
his memory green; and, even when he was an old man, they prompted some
of the most effective passages of those remarkable recollections which,
despite their _longueurs et langueurs_, present so graphic a picture of
his early life. 'I liked my master,' he says; 'I liked the business; but
to part from the country, and to leave all its beauties behind me, with
which I had been all my life charmed in an extreme degree,--and in a way
I cannot describe,--I can only say my heart was like to break.' And then
he goes on to show how vivid still, at a distance of sixty years, was
that first scene of separation. 'As we passed away, I inwardly bade
farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley bank, to the Stob-cross hill,
to the water-banks, the woods, and to particular trees and even to the
large hollow old elm, which had lain perhaps for centuries past, on the
haugh near the ford we were about to pass, and which had sheltered the
salmon-fishers, while at work there, from many a bitter blast.'
As an artist on wood, as the reviver of the then disused art of
Xylography--a subject hedged round with many delicate and hairsplitting
controversies--it is not now necessary to speak of Bewick. Nor need
anything be said here of his extraordinary skills--a skill still
unrivalled--in delineating those 'beautiful and interesting aerial
wanderers of the British Isles,' as he styles them in his old-fashioned
language, the birds of his native country. In both of these respects,
although he must always be accomplished, he may one day be surpassed.
But as regards his vignettes or tailpieces ('tale-pieces' they might
be called, since they always tell their story), it is not likely that
a second Bewick will arise. They were imitated in his own day; they are
imitated still--only to prove once more how rare and exceptional is the
peculiarly individual combination that produced them. Some of his own
pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working under his eye and in his
atmosphere, have occasionally trodden hard upon his heels in landscape;
others, as Robert Johnson, have caught at times a reflex of his
distinctive humour; but, as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best
period is a thing _per se_, unapproachable, inimitable, unique; and they
have contributed far more--these labours of his play-time--to found his
reputation than might be supposed. If you ask a true Bewickian about
Bewick, he will begin by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, the
exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared Owl, the lustrous spring
coat of the Starling, the relative and competitive excellences of the
Woodcock and the White Grouse; but sooner or later he will wander off
unconsciously to the close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette
where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried ewe, whose poor little
knock-kneed lamb looks on in trembling terror; or to the patient,
melancholy shapes of the black and white horses seen vaguely through the
pouring rain in the tailpiece to the Missal Thrush; or to the excellent
jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's supper while he mumbles his
long-winded grace. He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the brave and
manly, loved these things; how they fascinated the callow imagination of
Charlotte Brontë in her dreary moorland parsonage; how they stirred
the delicate insight of the gentle, pure-souled Leslie; and how Ruskin
(albeit nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them some of the most
royal of his epithets. *
* Mr. Ruskin--it may be hinted--expounding the tailpieces
solely by the light of his intuitive faculty, has sometimes
neglected the well-established traditional interpretations
of Bewick's work.
'No Greek work is grander than the angry dog,' he says, referring to
a little picture of which an early proof, on the old rag-paper held
by collectors to be the only fitting background for a Bewick, now lies
before us. A tramp, with his wallet or poke at his side, his tattered
trousers corded at the knees, and his head bound with a handkerchief
under his shapeless hat, has shambled, in his furtive, sidelong fashion,
through the open gates of a park, only to find himself confronted by a
watchful and resolute mastiff. He lifts his stick, carved rudely with
a bird's head, the minute eye and beak of which are perfectly clear
through a magnifying glass, and holds it mechanically with both hands
across his body, just as tramps have done immemorially since the days
of the Dutchman Jacob Gats, in whose famous 'Emblems' there is an almost
similar scene. The dog, which you may entirely cover with a shilling,
is magnificent. There is not a line in its body which does not tell. The
brindling of the back, the white marking of the neck and chest--to say
nothing of the absolute moral superiority of the canine guardian to
the cowering interloper--are all conveyed with the strictest economy of
stroke. Another tailpiece, to which Ruskin gives the adjective 'superb,'
shows a man crossing a river, probably the Tyne. The ice has thawed into
dark pools on either side, and snow has fallen on what remains. He
has strapped his bundle and stick at his back, and, with the foresight
taught of necessity in those bridgeless days, is astride upon a long
bough, so that if by any chance the ice gives way, or he plumps into
some hidden fissure, he may still have hope of safety. From the bows
of the moored ferryboat in the background his dog anxiously watches his
progress. When its master is safe across, it will come bounding in his
tracks. The desolate stillness of the spot, the bleak, inhospitable look
of the snow-clad landscape, are admirably given. But Bewick is capable
of even higher things than these. He is capable of suggesting, in these
miniature compositions, moments of the keenest excitement, as, for
example, in the tailpiece to the Baboon in the second edition of the
'Quadrupeds.' A vicious-looking colt is feeding in a meadow; a little
tottering child of two or three plucks at its long tail. The colt's eye
is turned backward; its heel is ominously raised; and over the North
Country stile in the background a frightened relative comes rushing. The
strain of the tiny group is intense; but as the little boy was Bewick's
brother, who grew up to be a man, we know that no harm was done.
Strangely enough, the incident depicted is not without a hitherto
unnoticed parallel. Once, when Hartley Coleridge was a child, he came
home with the mark of a horse hoof impressed unmistakably upon his
pinafore. Being questioned, he admitted that he had been pulling hairs
out of a horse's tail; and his father could only conclude that the
animal, with intentional forbearance, had gently pushed him backward. *
* Hartley Coleridge grew up to write sympathetically, in his
papers entitled 'Ignoramus on the Fine Arts,' of these very
tailpieces. In them, he says, Bewick is 'a poet--the silent
poet of the waysides and hedges. He unites the accuracy and
shrewdness of Crabbo with the homely pathos of Bloomfield.'
(Blackwood's Magazine, October, 1831.)
In describing the tailpiece to the Baboon, we omitted to mention one
minor detail, significant alike of the artist and his mode of work. The
presence of a strayed child in a field of flowers is not, perhaps,
a matter which calls urgently for comment. But Bewick leaves nothing
unexplained. In the shadow of a thicket to the left of the spectator is
the negligent nurse who should have watched over her charge, but who, at
this precise moment of time, is wholly engrossed by the attentions of
an admirer whose arm is round her waist; Nor is it in those accessories
alone which aid the story that Bewick is so careful. His local colouring
is scrupulously faithful to nature, and, although not always an actual
transcript of it, is invariably marked by that accuracy of invention
which, as some one said of Defoe, 'lies like truth.' Nothing in
his designs is meaningless. If he draws a tree, its kind is always
distinguishable; he tells you the nature of the soil, the time of year,
often the direction of the wind. Referring to the 'little, exquisitely
finished inch-and-a-half vignette' of the suicide in the 'Birds,' Henry
Kingsley (of whom, equally with his brother Charles, it may be said, in
the phrase of the latter, _Il sait son Bewick_) notes that the miserable
creature has hanged himself 'in the month of June, on an oak bough,
stretching over a shallow trout stream, which runs through carboniferous
limestone.' _Sero sed serio_ is the motto which Bewick has written under
the dilapidated, desperate figure, whose dog, even as the dog of Sikes
in 'Oliver Twist,' is running nervously backwards and forwards in its
efforts to reach its pendent, motionless, strangely silent master. These
legends and inscriptions, characteristic of the artist, are often
most happily effective. Generally, like the _Justissima Tellus_ of the
vignette of the ploughman, or the _Grata sume_ of the spring at which
Bewick himself, on his Scotch tour, is drinking from the 'flipe' of his
hat, they simply add to the restful or rural beauty of the scene; but
sometimes they supply the needful key to the story. In the tailpiece to
the Woodchat, for example, a man lies senseless on the ground. His eyes
are closed, and his hat and wig have fallen backward. Is he dead, or in
a fit, or simply, drunk? He is drunk. On a stone hard, by is the date
'4 June, 1795,' and he has obviously been toasting the nativity of his
Majesty George the Third.
But clearness of message, truth to nature, and skill in compressed
suggestion are not Bewick's sole good qualities. He does not seem to
have known much of Hogarth--perhaps the Juvenalian manner of that great
graphic satirist was not entirely to his taste--but he is a humourist to
some extent in Hogarth's manner, and, after the fashion of his day, he
is a moralist. He delights in queer dilemmas and odd embarrassments. Now
it is a miserly fellow who fords a river with his cow to save the bridge
toll. The water proves deeper than he expected; the cow, to whose tail
he is clinging, rather enjoys it; her master does not. Now it is an old
man at a standstill on an obstinate horse. It is raining heavily, and
there is a high wind.
He has lost his hat and broken his stick, but he is afraid to get down
because he has a basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occasionally
the humour is a little grim, after the true North Country fashion. Such
is the case in the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith (or is it
a tanner?) looks on pitiless at the unhappy dog with a kettle dangling
at its tail; such, again, in the vignette of the mischievous youngster
who leads the blind man into mid-stream. As a moralist, Bewick is never
tired of exhibiting the _lachrimo rerum_, the brevity of life, the
emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat; the ruined and deserted
cottage, with the grass growing at the hearthstone; the ass rubbing
itself against the pillar that celebrates the 'glorious victory;' the
churchyard, with its rising moon, and its tombstone legend, 'Good Times,
bad Times, and all Times got over,' are illustrations of this side of
his genius. But the subject is one which could not be exhausted in many
papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's 'criticism of life,' and
he had seventy-five years' experience. His final effort was a ferryman
waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to Ovingham; and on his
death-bed he was meditating his favourite work. In a lucid moment of
his last wanderings he was asked of what he had been thinking, and he
replied, with a faint smile, that he had been devising subjects for some
new Tailpieces.