Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December 1852

Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December 1852
Various

Various

Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December 1852

“PALE CONCLUDING WINTER.”

With howling fury Winter makes his bound
Upon us, freezing Nature at a look.
He dashes out the sweet and dreamy hues
Of Indian Summer, so that where the eye
The golden softness and the purple haze
Beheld at noon, at sunset sees the mist
Darken around the landscape, and the ear,
Nestling upon its pillow, hears the sleet
Ticking against the casement, whilst within
The silvery cracking of the kindling coal
Keeps merry chime. The morning rises up,
And lo! the dazzling picture! Every tree
Seems carved from steel, the silent hills are helm’d,
And the broad fields have breastplates. Over all
The sunshine flashes in a keen white blaze
Of splendor, searing eyesight. Go abroad!
The branches yield crisp cracklings, now and then
Sending a shower of rattling diamonds down
On the mailed earth, as freshens the light wind.
The hemlock is a stooping bower of ice,
And the oak seems as though a fairy’s wand
Had, the past night, transformed its skeleton frame
To a rich structure, trembling o’er with tints
Of rainbow beauty… A. B. Street.

A HISTORY OF THE ART OF WOOD-ENGRAVING

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BY AN AMATEUR ARTIST

—

With regard to the antiquity and origin of this most beautiful and most important of the early Christian arts – most important, because to it can be traced directly the invention of typography, as it now exists, bringing knowledge and truth within the reach of all who desire to attain them – there has been much difference and dispute among the literati. After the second restoration of letters – I mean after the dull and dreary interregnum between the era of the Stuarts and the Georgian era of literature, dating from the commencement of the present century – there seems to have arisen a strange habit of referring every thing, the origin of which was not distinctly known, to eras the most remote. Not to be able to say such a discovery was made by such a learned German or Venetian, by such a celebrated Gaul or Briton, in such a town, in such a year, of such a century, was sufficient cause for the drivelers of the time – the best scholars of whom knew, like Shakspeare, little Latin and less Greek, assuming, nevertheless, the possession of the deepest classic lore – to assert point-blank that it was made by such a wonderful Chinese philosopher during the reign of Wu-wang, emperor of China, or such a remarkable Egyptian sage, in the reign of Tathrak or Amenophis; or, that it was in common use in the days of Pericles, or perhaps even of the later Roman emperors.

The general knowledge of the classic languages was then so rare even among the authors of those days, that the dictum of any dunce who grossly misconstrued a Greek or Latin text, or of any rogue, who chose to forge one in support of his theory – in those days a matter of daily occurrence – was, so far from being questioned, detected, refuted, and exposed, as would now be the case, within a week of its publication, quoted and requoted by successive schools of dunces, until it was received as a truth, and sent down as a grave authority to future generations.

Though no author of this day, thanks to the number and acumen of the literary and critical journals – we do not mean newspapers, which promulgate, not correct falsehoods – could originate a blunder, much less a forgery, with a possibility of escaping detection; still, careless and hasty compilers following what they deem authorities, without themselves referring to the original authority cited, are constantly reproducing falsehood, promulgating it, and giving to it weight as truth, when nothing is more averse from their intention than to do so.

In nothing is this more the case than in the very class of works in which of all others accuracy and truth are most requisite – are, indeed, indispensable – we mean what are now called juvenile books, school-books for the use of the young. These works are, unfortunately, rarely or never composed by men of science, men of historical knowledge, men of high general information, or literary standing, although – embracing, as they pretend to do, the whole range of human knowledge from astronomy and the direct sciences, through universal history to political economy, physical and moral philosophy, and philology – they, above all beside, should be the work of men of unerring accuracy in the statement of facts. Since it is easier to teach three new ideas to a mind unimpressed, than to eradicate from it one preconceived opinion, false or true.

It is enough to say in this connection, that out of all the modern “histories for the young” we have ever seen – and we have seen scores, if not hundreds – we never read six successive pages which did not contain either a disgraceful blunder as to fact, or a more disgraceful perversion of facts to meet popular prejudices or popular passions. In the pseudoscientific text-books, sheer stupidity and ignorance produce the same effects.

All this class of books, as a rule, are worse than worthless; and we had far rather see the rising generation return to “Mother Goose,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Cinderella,” and thence to “Sandford and Merton,” Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, and works and writers of the like calibre, until fit to commence the real study of real history and real science, than have them stuffed with such farragoes of imbecility, reckless assertion, and plausible falsehood – under the plea of knowledge made popular – as, for instance, most of “The Histories for the Young,” which afford a perfect type of the class of works, to which we have just alluded.

To this train of thought we have been led, by observing the pertinacious and absurd folly, on the part of all the writers on the subject before us, of ascribing the art of wood-engraving and printing, to every nation which never possessed it, and the invention of it to none knows who.

It really seems that to these worthies it is quite argument enough to say, because the Chinese, Egyptians, Phœnicians, Greeks, or Romans did not possess such an art, but did possess such another, therefore they must have possessed that which they did not possess.

Thus – because the Egyptians made wooden moulds with reversed characters or figures, wherein to make fictile bricks, jars, or other implements – they possessed the art of wood-engraving and printing.

Because the Greeks and Romans used to engrave their laws and decrees on stone or metal, both in intaglio and relief, and even colored the depressed or prominent characters with various pigments, therefore the Greeks and Romans made use of printing and wood or metallic engraving – as understood in the present sense; that is to say, for the purpose of taking reversed impressions on paper, parchment, or the like, with ink or other pigments, from prepared blocks, or forms of movable types – the impressions, not the blocks or forms, being legible in the usual mode, from left to right, or the reverse, according to the nature of the character or language.

It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary now to state, not only that there is no reason for believing that any ancient nation was acquainted at all with any thing in the least degree approaching to the modern art of printing, but that there is a positive certainty that no people of antiquity was so acquainted.

In the same manner may be dismissed the Chinese claim to originality in this invention. So early as the 12th century, stamps, engraved with monograms, or fanciful figures, assumed by individuals as their signs manuals, wrought on them in relief, were in common use. They were made of wood or metal, dipped in ink or paint, and impressed on any document requiring signature; and they seem to have continued occasionally in use so late as to the reign of King Henry VIII. of England, whose warrant for the execution of the poet Surrey was signed by this method, and not by royal sign manual; the king being then in articulo mortis, and unable to sign his name.

At a much earlier period than this – so early, indeed, as the sixth century – the Emperor Justin I., in signing documents, made use of what is now called a stencil, a thin plate of wood or metal perforated with figures, characters, or other designs, which, when applied to a surface of blank paper or parchment, leaves the design on the exposed surface of the paper, all else being covered, open to the operation of a brush or pencil, which necessarily leaves the impress of the form invariably the same on all occasions.

From this practice of stenciling, perhaps, or more probably from the dipping of the signet-ring, which had been used for ages in impressing wax and the like, into ink, and impressing it on paper, was derived the idea of stamps engraved with monograms, and used as signatures – an invention of vast practical utility in an age when not one man of five hundred, even of kings and nobles, unless he were in holy orders, was capable of signing, or even reading, his own name. One of the earliest of these stamps is that of Gundisalvo Tellez, one of the Gothic invaders of Spain, affixed to a charter bearing date A. D. 840; and the same sign, after his death, was appended, by his widow, Flamula, to a grant for the good of her husband’s soul.

Now it has never been asserted or pretended that the Chinese, even at a much later period than this, had advanced beyond the use of monogram stamps impinged by hand.

In lack, therefore, of more direct evidence, this is enough to justify us in rejecting the claim put forward in behalf of the Chinese, to the invention of the art of wood-engraving or typography, and the idea of its having been imported from them into Europe.

But there is no lack of more direct evidence. For in the year of the Christian era 1271, Marco Polo, a Venetian trader, voyaged from Venice to Tartary and China, in the reign of the Emperor Rublai Khan, his uncle and father having visited the same countries some quarter of a century before. On his return, he published an account of his travels, very copious and very full of marvelous truths and marvelous errors – most of the latter having been since shown to be misconceptions of real truths, not falsehoods. In this work, Marco Polo makes no mention of the use of printing-blocks, or of cannon, or of the mariner’s compass by the Chinese. Hence it is morally certain, either that the Chinese did not at that period possess any one of these inventions – all of which have been attributed to them – at all, or that the people for whom Marco Polo wrote, the Venetians in particular, and Europeans in general, possessed them in the same degree of perfection with the Chinese, at the same or at an earlier period.

It is, indeed, probable, that the Chinese claim was only put in by favorers of the Venetian claim to the European invention or introduction of this art, in order to account reasonably for their priority.

And it would be curious, were it not almost invariably the case, that the forged legend introduced to support a false claim, when analyzed and searched by a clear head, not only confutes itself, but that which it was intended to establish.

It is very satisfactorily proved that previous to the fourteenth century, although stencils and stamps had been in use for some time, perhaps for some centuries, as means for securing the invariability of monogram signatures, and of giving the power of signing papers to those who could not write, no use whatever had been made or attempted of either, for the purpose of reproduction from a single type and indefinite multiplication of copies.

This is what we mean by printing and engraving; and until it be shown that some nation of antiquity did invent and use such instruments for such purposes, all discussion is absurd.

It were just as rational to argue, that, because the Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans possessed boilers, and boiling water, and steam, with which they might have propelled steamboats, had they known how, therefore they had steamboats – as to assert, that, because they possessed reversed moulds and stamps, in relief or intaglio, for the making of pottery, with which they might have produced colored impressions on papyrus or linen, had they conceived the idea of doing so, therefore they did reproduce works of art from plates or types.

It appears most probable that the first direct approach to this art was the practice, when playing cards were first introduced in Europe, of the German card-makers, to use stencils in order to draw, accurately and invariably, the outlines of the figures on their cards, which were then filled in with color by the hand. This, though not originally intended to facilitate multiplication so much as accuracy, would naturally suggest that idea.

The next known step, in progress, was the use of monogrammatic stamps, some of them of most elaborate and exquisite design and execution, for the impression on illuminated manuscripts, such as missals, breviaries, bibles and other religious works, of the large, beautiful and often many-colored initial letters.

And these, there is much reason to believe, were more or less in use so early as A. D. 1400.

The history of the first known wood-cut is as follows. From a convent within fifty miles of Augsburgh, where in 1418 the first mention of a kartenmacher, card-engraver, occurs, the earliest wood-cut known – the St. Christopher, now in the collection of the Earl of Spencer – was obtained. The outlines are engraved on wood, and thence taken off in dark coloring matter, resembling printer’s ink, on the paper; after which the impression appears to have been colored by means of a stencil.

This cut is extremely well-designed, as regards the principal figures, which, with the exception of the extremities, are executed in such style as would not disgrace Albert Durer himself. The perspective is – as usual, in old wood-cuts even of a later date than this, and executed by artists of high grade, such as Hans Burgmair and Hans Schaufflein, nearly a century afterward – utterly disregarded. It was, indeed, scarce understood.

The second and third cuts in existence, also in Lord Spencer’s collection, are an “Annunciation” and “St. Bridget,” both similarly printed in outline, and colored by stenciling, the last of these is curious, as showing, on examination of the back of the plate – for it is not, like the others, pasted into a book – that the impression was not taken by means of a press, but by friction on the paper superimposed to the block, by means of a burnisher or similar instrument, just as proofs are now taken by engravers.

From this period, the succession and progress of the art is clearly to be traced. First, through figure blocks, with letterings sculptured on them in relief, to solid blocks carved in wood and printing off entire pages, as is done by modern stereotypes, with or without pictures attached. At this stage of the work the idea of reproduction and multiplication had obtained as the primary objects of the art.