Few persons of taste have failed to make themselves acquainted with
the works of Bewick, the father of English wood-engraving. In them
we have everything the most truthful and poetical. Wide, wild moor,
the desolation of winter, with the solitary worn-out horse, forgotten
in the snowy waste; the falling fane, the crumbling tower; scenes on
northern shores,--rocks and sea-fowl, wrecks and tempests.[77] He
delights to show us in his famous tailpieces such pictures as the
ragged rapscallions that abound in streets, graceless and cruel;
beggars and strollers with bear, monkey, or trumpet; lame soldiers
and wounded men, real or sham; the belated traveller in the rain;
the snow-man of our childhood; the tipplers with their delightful
tall, twisted-stemmed wine-glasses, all “regardless of their doom,”
or returning with faltering steps from the tavern; the man on the
stepping-stones, bowed down with his burden, the poor mewing cat
turning round and round at sea in a tub. Among his principal engravings
Bewick gives us in his “Quadruped,” and with a delicacy and force
that no modern workman has equalled, for instance, the lion rearing
a majestic crest, and “we seem to hear his awful voice, rolling like
thunder along the ground, and cowing all nature into silence;”[78] the
tiger with his fearful glittering eye, that only Rubens or Rivière can
paint. Among birds we may recall the woodcuts of the moping thoughtful
owl; the water ouzle, with his white waistcoat, sacred to the rocks of
the Dove; and the carrion crow wheeling round the gibbet. All these
are capital examples of Bewick’s skill; they are, indeed, as fine as
they can be, and rendered with the magic touch, with that wonderful
feeling for nature which just make the difference between the plodding
draughtsman and the born artist. Many persons can “draw,” but very few
can draw even tolerably. And Bewick chose, like Hogarth, to portray
humanity in some of its degradations, and to call up our feelings
against violence and wickedness and the abuse of man’s high quality.
He shrank not from the gibbet, he saw its educational value, and, with
absolute fidelity, he gives us many examples of the time-honoured
horror, standing out stark and bare against the bleak sky.
In a late year of the last century a man was hung in chains in the
north of England,--but the particular place we have not been able to
identify. And we lift the long-forgotten crime up to notice now because
it forms the subject of a tailpiece by Bewick to the Introduction to
“Carrion Birds.”[79] The print is here roughly reproduced because it
exhibits some particular features. The head is tied up in a white
cloth, with a tender touch of feeling, and the body fastened up in
irons with Doric simplicity; the post is stuck full of thousands of
nails, like the example near Carlisle, to prevent men from coming and
climbing and stealing the body away--a precautionary measure recalling
the sentry of Roman times.[80]
[Illustration: GIBBET.
(_From a woodcut by T. Bewick, “British Birds.”_)]