management of the most perfect of the arms of precision possessed by the
artist. For you will at once understand that a line cut by a
finely-pointed instrument upon the smooth surface of metal is
susceptible of the utmost fineness that can be given to the _definite_
work of the human hand. In drawing with pen upon paper, the surface of
the paper is slightly rough; necessarily, two points touch it instead of
one, and the liquid flows from them more or less irregularly, whatever
the draughtsman's skill. But you cut a metallic surface with one edge
only; the furrow drawn by a skater on the surface of ice is like it on a
large scale. Your surface is polished, and your line may be wholly
faultless, if your hand is.
114. And because, in such material, effects may be produced which no
penmanship could rival, most people, I fancy, think that a steel plate
half engraves itself; that the workman has no trouble with it, compared
to that of a pen draughtsman.
To test your feeling in this matter accurately, here is a manuscript
book written with pen and ink, and illustrated with flourishes and
vignettes.
You will all, I think, be disposed, on examining it, to exclaim, How
wonderful! and even to doubt the possibility of every page in the book
being completed in the same manner. Again, here are three of my own
drawings, executed with the pen, and Indian ink, when I was fifteen.
They are copies from large lithographs by Prout; and I imagine that most
of my pupils would think me very tyrannical if I requested them to do
anything of the kind themselves. And yet, when you see in the shop
windows a line engraving like this,[X] or this,[X] either of which
contains, alone, as much work as fifty pages of the manuscript book, or
fifty such drawings as mine, you look upon its effect as quite a matter
of course,--you never say 'how wonderful' _that_ is, nor consider how
you would like to have to live, by producing anything of the same kind
yourselves.
[Illustration: II.
The Star of FLORENCE.]
115. Yet you cannot suppose it is in reality easier to draw a line with
a cutting point, not seeing the effect at all, or, if any effect, seeing
a gleam of light instead of darkness, than to draw your black line at
once on the white paper? You cannot really think[Y] 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 that 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 this engraving, or
take a smaller and simpler one, Turner's Mercury and Argus,--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 etceteras 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 head of Io,
and her 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 small 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, pass your lens 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!
116. "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 aim. We shall have to
press close home this question about numbers and purpose presently;--it
is not the question now. Suppose certain results required,--atmospheric
effects, surface textures, transparencies of shade, confusions of
light,--then, 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."
Here is one just finished,--or, at least, finished to the eyes of
ordinary mortals, though its fastidious master means to retouch it;--a
quite pure line engraving, by Mr. Charles Henry Jeens; (in calling it
pure line, I mean that there are no mixtures of mezzotint or any
mechanical tooling, but all is steady hand-work,) from a picture by Mr.
Armytage, which, without possessing any of the highest claims to
admiration, is yet free from the vulgar vices which disgrace most of our
popular religious art; and is so sweet in the fancy of it as to deserve,
better than many works of higher power, the pains of the engraver to
make it a common possession. It is meant to help us to imagine the
evening of the day when the father and mother of Christ had been seeking
Him through Jerusalem: they have come to a well where women are drawing
water; St. Joseph passes on,--but the tired Madonna, leaning on the
well's margin, asks wistfully of the women if they have seen such and
such a child astray. Now will you just look for a while into the lines
by which the expression of the weary and anxious face is rendered; see
how unerring they are,--how calm and clear; and think how many questions
have to be determined in drawing the most minute portion of any
one,--its curve,--its thickness,--its distance from the next,--its own
preparation for ending, invisibly, where it ends. Think what the
precision must be in these that trace the edge of the lip, and make it
look quivering with disappointment, or in these which have made the
eyelash heavy with restrained tears.
117. Or if, as must be the case with many of my audience, it is
impossible for you to conceive the difficulties here overcome, look
merely at the draperies, and other varied substances represented in the
plate; see how silk, and linen, and stone, and pottery, and flesh, are
all separated in texture, and gradated in light, by the most subtle
artifices and appliances of line,--of which artifices, and the nature of
the mechanical labor throughout, I must endeavor to give you to-day a
more distinct conception than you are in the habit of forming. But as I
shall have to blame some of these methods in their general result, and I
do not wish any word of general blame to be associated with this most
excellent and careful plate by Mr. Jeens, I will pass, for special
examination, to one already in your reference series, which for the rest
exhibits more various treatment in its combined landscape, background,
and figures; the Belle Jardiniere of Raphael, drawn and engraved by the
Baron Desnoyers.
You see, in the first place, that the ground, stones, and other coarse
surfaces are distinguished from the flesh and draperies by broken and
wriggled lines. Those broken lines cannot be executed with the burin,
they are etched in the early states of the plate, and are a modern
artifice, never used by old engravers; partly because the older men were
not masters of the art of etching, but chiefly because even those who
were acquainted with it would not employ lines of this nature. They have
been developed by the importance of landscape in modern engraving, and
have produced some valuable results in small plates, especially of
architecture. But they are entirely erroneous in principle, for the
surface of stones and leaves is not broken or jagged in this manner, but
consists of mossy, or blooming, or otherwise organic texture, which
cannot be represented by these coarse lines; their general consequence
has therefore been to withdraw the mind of the observer from all
beautiful and tender characters in foreground, and eventually to destroy
the very school of landscape engraving which gave birth to them.
Considered, however, as a means of relieving more delicate textures,
they are in some degree legitimate, being, in fact, a kind of chasing or
jagging one part of the plate surface in order to throw out the delicate
tints from the rough field. But the same effect was produced with less
pains, and far more entertainment to the eye, by the older engravers,
who employed purely ornamental variations of line; thus in Plate IV.,
opposite Sec. 137, the drapery is sufficiently distinguished from the grass
by the treatment of the latter as an ornamental arabesque. The grain of
wood is elaborately engraved by Marc Antonio, with the same purpose, in
the plate given in your Standard Series.
118. Next, however, you observe what difference of texture and force
exists between the smooth, continuous lines themselves, which are all
really _engraved_. You must take some pains to understand the nature of
this operation.
The line is first cut lightly through its whole course, by absolute
decision and steadiness of hand, which you may endeavor to imitate if
you like, in its simplest phase, by drawing a circle with your
compass-pen; and then, grasping your penholder so that you can push the
point like a plow, describing other circles inside or outside of it, in
exact parallelism with the mathematical line, and at exactly equal
distances. To approach, or depart, with your point at finely gradated
intervals, may be your next exercise, if you find the first unexpectedly
easy.
119. When the line is thus described in its proper course, it is plowed
deeper, where depth is needed, by a second cut of the burin, first on
one side, then on the other, the cut being given with gradated force so
as to take away most steel where the line is to be darkest. Every line
of gradated depth in the plate has to be thus cut eight or ten times
over at least, with retouchings to smooth and clear all in the close.
Jason has to plow his field ten-furrow deep, with his fiery oxen well in
hand, all the while.
When the essential lines are thus produced in their several directions,
those which have been drawn across each other, so as to give depth of
shade, or richness of texture, have to be farther enriched by dots in
the interstices; else there would be a painful appearance of network
everywhere; and these dots require each four or five jags to produce
them; and each of these jags must be done with what artists and
engravers alike call 'feeling,'--the sensibility, that is, of a hand
completely under mental government. So wrought, the dots look soft, and
like touches of paint; but mechanically dug in, they are vulgar and
hard.
120. Now, observe, that, for every piece of shadow throughout the work,
the engraver has to decide with what quantity and kind of line he will
produce it. Exactly the same quantity of black, and therefore the same
depth of tint in general effect, may be given with six thick lines; or
with twelve, of half their thickness; or with eighteen, of a third of
the thickness. The second six, second twelve, or second eighteen, may
cross the first six, first twelve, or first eighteen, or go between
them; and they may cross at any angle. And then the third six may be put
between the first six, or between the second six, or across both, and at
any angle. In the network thus produced, any kind of dots may be put in
the severally shaped interstices. And for any of the series of
superadded lines, dots, of equivalent value in shade, may be
substituted. (Some engravings are wrought in dots altogether.) Choice
infinite, with multiplication of infinity, is, at all events, to be
made, for every minute space, from one side of the plate to the other.
121. The excellence of a beautiful engraving is primarily in the use of
these resources to exhibit the qualities of the original picture, with
delight to the eye in the method of translation; and the language of
engraving, when once you begin to understand it, is, in these respects,
so fertile, so ingenious, so ineffably subtle and severe in its grammar,
that you may quite easily make it the subject of your life's
investigation, as you would the scholarship of a lovely literature.
But in doing this, you would withdraw, and necessarily withdraw, your
attention from the higher qualities of art, precisely as a grammarian,
who is that, and nothing more, loses command of the matter and substance
of thought. And the exquisitely mysterious mechanisms of the engraver's
method have, in fact, thus entangled the intelligence of the careful
draughtsmen of Europe; so that since the final perfection of this
translator's power, all the men of finest patience and finest hand have
stayed content with it;--the subtlest draughtsmanship has perished from
the canvas,[Z] and sought more popular praise in this labyrinth of
disciplined language, and more or less dulled or degraded thought. And,
in sum, I know no cause more direct or fatal, in the destruction of the
great schools of European art, than the perfectness of modern line
engraving.
122. This great and profoundly to be regretted influence I will prove
and illustrate to you on another occasion. My object to-day is to
explain the perfectness of the art itself; and above all to request you,
if you will not look at pictures instead of photographs, at least not to
allow the cheap merits of the chemical operation to withdraw your
interest from the splendid human labor of the engraver. Here is a little
vignette from Stothard, for instance, in Rogers' poems, to the lines,
"Soared in the swing, half pleased and half afraid,
'Neath sister elms, that waved their summer shade."
You would think, would you not? (and rightly,) that of all difficult
things to express with crossed black lines and dots, the face of a young
girl must be the most difficult. Yet here you have the face of a bright
girl, radiant in light, transparent, mysterious, almost breathing,--her
dark hair involved in delicate wreath and shade, her eyes full of joy
and sweet playfulness,--and all this done by the exquisite order and
gradation of a very few lines, which, if you will examine them through a
lens, you find dividing and checkering the lip, and cheek, and chin, so
strongly that you would have fancied they could only produce the effect
of a grim iron mask. But the intelligences of order and form guide them
into beauty, and inflame them with delicatest life.
123. And do you see the size of this head? About as large as the bud of
a forget-me-not! Can you imagine the fineness of the little pressures of
the hand on the steel, in that space, which at the edge of the almost
invisible lip, fashioned its less or more of smile?
My chemical friends, if you wish ever to know anything rightly
concerning the arts, I very urgently advise you to throw all your vials
and washes down the gutter-trap; and if you will ascribe, as you think
it so clever to do, in your modern creeds, all virtue to the sun, use
that virtue through your own heads and fingers, and apply your solar
energies to draw a skillful line or two, for once or twice in your life.
You may learn more by trying to engrave, like Goodall, the tip of an
ear, or the curl of a lock of hair, than by photographing the entire
population of the United States of America,--black, white, and
neutral-tint.
And one word, by the way, touching the complaints I hear at my having
set you to so fine work that it hurts your eyes. You have noticed that
all great sculptors--and most of the great painters of Florence--began
by being goldsmiths. Why do you think the goldsmith's apprenticeship is
so fruitful? Primarily, because it forces the boy to do small work, and
mind what he is about. Do you suppose Michael Angelo learned his
business by dashing or hitting at it? He laid the foundation of all his
after power by doing precisely what I am requiring my own pupils to
do,--copying German engravings in facsimile! And for your eyes--you all
sit up at night till you haven't got any eyes worth speaking of. Go to
bed at half-past nine, and get up at four, and you'll see something out
of them, in time.
124. Nevertheless, whatever admiration you may be brought to feel, and
with justice, for this lovely workmanship,--the more distinctly you
comprehend its merits, the more distinctly also will the question rise
in your mind, How is it that a performance so marvelous has yet taken no
rank in the records of art of any permanent or acknowledged kind? How
is it that these vignettes from Stothard and Turner,[AA] like the
woodcuts from Tenniel, scarcely make the name of the engraver known; and
that they never are found side by side with this older and apparently
ruder art, in the cabinets of men of real judgment? The reason is
precisely the same as in the case of the Tenniel woodcut. This modern
line engraving is alloyed gold. Rich in capacity, astonishing in
attainment, it nevertheless admits willful fault, and misses what it
ought first to have attained. It is therefore, to a certain measure,
vile in its perfection; while the older work is noble even in its
failure, and classic no less in what it deliberately refuses, than in
what it rationally and rightly prefers and performs.
125. Here, for instance, I have enlarged the head of one of Duerer's
Madonnas for you out of one of his most careful plates.[AB] You think it
very ugly. Well, so it is. Don't be afraid to think so, nor to say so.
Frightfully ugly; vulgar also. It is the head, simply, of a fat Dutch
girl, with all the pleasantness left out. There is not the least doubt
about that. Don't let anybody force Albert Duerer down your throats; nor
make you expect pretty things from him. Stothard's young girl in the
swing, or Sir Joshua's Age of Innocence, is in quite angelic sphere of
another world, compared to this black domain of poor, laborious Albert.
We are not talking of female beauty, so please you, just now, gentlemen,
but of engraving. And the merit, the classical, indefeasible, immortal
merit of this head of a Dutch girl with all the beauty left out, is in
the fact that every line of it, as engraving, is as good as can
be;--good, not with the mechanical dexterity of a watch-maker, but with
the intellectual effort and sensitiveness of an artist who knows
precisely what can be done, and ought to be attempted, with his assigned
materials. He works easily, fearlessly, flexibly; the dots are not all
measured in distance; the lines not all mathematically parallel or
divergent. He has even missed his mark at the mouth in one place, and
leaves the mistake, frankly. But there are no petrified mistakes; nor is
the eye so accustomed to the look of the mechanical furrow as to accept
it for final excellence. The engraving is full of the painter's higher
power and wider perception; it is classically perfect, because duly
subordinate, and presenting for your applause only the virtues proper to
its own sphere. Among these, I must now reiterate, the first of all is
the _decorative_ arrangement of _lines_.
126. You all know what a pretty thing a damask tablecloth is, and how a
pattern is brought out by threads running one way in one space, and
across in another. So, in lace, a certain delightfulness is given by the
texture of meshed lines.
Similarly, on any surface of metal, the object of the engraver is, or
ought to be, to cover it with lovely _lines_, forming a lace-work, and
including a variety of spaces, delicious to the eye.
And this is his business, primarily; before any other matter can be
thought of, his work must be ornamental. You know I told you a
sculptor's business is first to cover a surface with pleasant _bosses_,
whether they mean anything or not; so an engraver's is to cover it with
pleasant _lines_, whether they mean anything or not. That they should
mean something, and a good deal of something, is indeed desirable
afterwards; but first we must be ornamental.
127. Now if you will compare Plate II. at the beginning of this lecture,
which is a characteristic example of good Florentine engraving, and
represents the Planet and power of Aphrodite, with the Aphrodite of
Bewick in the upper division of Plate I., you will at once understand
the difference between a primarily ornamental, and a primarily
realistic, style. The first requirement in the Florentine work, is that
it shall be a lovely arrangement of lines; a pretty thing upon a page.
Bewick _has_ a secondary notion of making his vignette a pretty thing
upon a page. But he is overpowered by his vigorous veracity, and bent
first on giving you his idea of Venus. Quite right, he would have been,
mind you, if he had been carving a statue of her on Mount Eryx; but not
when he was engraving a vignette to AEsop's fables. To engrave well is to
ornament a surface well, not to create a realistic impression. I beg
your pardon for my repetitions; but the point at issue is the root of
the whole business, and I _must_ get it well asserted, and variously.
Let me pass to a more important example.
128. Three years ago, in the rough first arrangement of the copies in
the Educational Series, I put an outline of the top of Apollo's scepter,
which, in the catalogue, was said to be probably by Baccio Bandini of
Florence, for your first real exercise; it remains so, the olive being
put first only for its mythological rank.
The series of engravings to which the plate from which that exercise is
copied belongs, are part of a number, executed chiefly, I think, from
early designs of Sandro Botticelli, and some in great part by his hand.
He and his assistant, Baccio, worked together; and in such harmony, that
Bandini probably often does what Sandro wants, better than Sandro could
have done it himself; and, on the other hand, there is no design of
Bandini's over which Sandro does not seem to have had influence.
And wishing now to show you three examples of the finest work of the
old, the renaissance, and the modern schools,--of the old, I will take
Baccio Bandini's Astrologia, Plate III., opposite. Of the renaissance,
Duerer's Adam and Eve. And of the modern, this head of the daughter of
Herodias, engraved from Luini by Beaugrand, which is as
affectionately and sincerely wrought, though in the modern manner, as
any plate of the old schools.
[Illustration: III.
"At ev'ning from the top of Fesole."]
129. Now observe the progress of the feeling for light and shade in the
three examples.
The first is nearly all white paper; you think of the outline as the
constructive element throughout.