Engraving may then be defined as writing or drawing in; which the marks are produced by removing a portion of I the substance on which the writing or drawing is made, instead of by simply staining or discolouring it as ink and lead pencil do, or covering it with an opaque or transparent pigment as in oil-painting.

The idea of multiplication by printing, or by casting (as in seal engraving), is a mere accidental suggestion and not an essential part of the art. Engraving preceded printing, and is still much used without any connection with printing, as in the chased ornamentation of silver plate, fire-arms, jewellery, and other objects of luxury.

It is our intention, in the present article, to confine ourselves strictly to engraving a3 one of the fine arts. Its present position is almost universally secondary to painting. The engraver, in the fine arts, is almost invariably occupied in translating the works of painters, as by his intervention they can afterwards, at least in translation, be widely disseminated by the press.

There are several different varieties of engraving, the chief of which are—(1) Line engraving on metal plates, usually of copper or steel, in which the line is always incised; (2) Etching, usually on metal, in which the lines are corroded by means of acid; (3) Mezzotint, in which there are no lines whatever, but only shades produced by roughening the surface of the metal; and (4) Woodcut, in which the lines which print black have to be left in relief, whilst the surface round them is cut away.

These primary technical conditions have an irresistible influence even upon the mental qualities exhibited in the different kinds of engraving. Each kind is favourable to certain mental states, and unfavourable to others, each being in itself an artistic as well as a technical discipline. A line engraver will not see or think like an etcher, nor an etcher like an engraver in mezzotint; and the consequence of this difference is that the manner iu which a line has to be cut has a great influence in determining the direction of artistic taste and feeling. Nor is this influence confined to the engravers themselves. The enormous multiplication of their works by printing makes engravers only second to writers in their power over public taste, which they can refine or vitiate by spreading refined or vulgar interpretations of pictures.

There is no inherent reason why engraving should be used only to translate painting. The early engravers were often original artists who worked out designs of their own, but in course of time a commercial reason prevailed over originality. It was found that a well-known picture assured the sale of an engraving from it beforehand, whereas an engraving which stood entirely on its own merits came into the world without advantages, and had its own way to make. Besides this, the engraver who copied a picture saved himself all the trouble of thinking out and composing the design, which he found ready to his hand. The same reasons have prevailed against original etching in our own day. There has been a great revival of etching during the last fifteen or twenty years, especially on the Continent, and many artists have acquired very great skill in this mode of engraving. It was hoped, at first, that they would employ their skill upon original works, but the convenience, both of publishers and etchers, soon led them to employ etching, as engraving had been employed before, almost exclusively in translating pictures. We cannot but deplore this subordination of engraving to painting; and when we recur to the great engravers of past times who composed and invented their own works, it is with a feeling of regret that they have left so very few successors.

Although we mentioned the four chief kinds of engraving in the order of what is usually considered to be their relative importance, putting line engraving in the first place and woodcut in the last, this is not the chronological order of their discovery. Woodcut is the oldest kind of engraving from which impressions were printed, and must therefore be taken first in a paper of this kind, which proposes to deal only with engraving for the press.

Wood Engraving.

It is natural that wood engraving should have occurred first to the primitive mind, because the manner in which woodcuts are printed is the most obvious of all the kinds of printing. If a block of wood is inked with a greasy ink and then pressed on a piece of paper, the ink from the block will be transferred at once to the paper, on which we shall have a black patch exactly the size and shape of the inked surface. Now, suppose that the simple Chinese who first discovered this was ingenious enough to go a step further, it would evidently occur to him that if one of the elaborate signs, each of which in his own language stood for a word, were drawn upon the block of wood, in reverse, and then the whole of the white wool sufficiently cutaway to leave the sign in relief, an image of it might be taken on the paper much more quickly than the sign could be copied with a camel-hair brush and Indian ink. No sooner had this experiment been tried and found to answer than blockprinting was discovered, and from the printing of signs to the printing of rude images of things, exactly in the same manner, the step was so easy that it must have been made insensibly. Wood engraving, then, is really nothing but that primitive block-cutting which prepared for the printer the letters in relief now replaced by movable types, and the only difference between a delicate modern woodcut and the rude letters in the first printed books is a difference of artistic skill and knowledge. In Chinese and Japanese woodcuts we can still recognize traditions of treatment which come from the designing of their written characters. The main elements of a Chinese or a Japanese woodcut, uninfluenced by European example, are dashing or delicate outlines and markings of various thickness, exactly such as a clever writer with the brush would make with his Indian ink or vermilion. Often we get a perfectly black blot, exquisitely shaped and full of careful purpose, and these broad vigorous blacks are quite in harmony with the kind of printing for which wood engraving is intended.

It has not hitherto been satisfactorily ascertained whether wood engraving came to Europe from the East or was rediscovered by some European artificer. The precise date of the first European woodcut is also a matter of doubt, but here we have certain data which at least set limits to the possibility of error. European wood engraving dates certainly from the first quarter of the 15th century. It used to be believed that a cut of St Christopher, very rudely executed, and dated 1423, was the Adam of all our woodcuts, but subsequent investigations have shaken this theory. There is a cut in the Brussels library, of the Virgin and Child surrounded by four saints, which is dated 1418, but the composition is so very elegant and the drawing so refined and beautiful, that one has a difficulty in believing the date, though it is received as authentic. The Virgin and Child of the Paris library is without date, but is supposed, apparently with reason, to be earlier than either of the two we have mentioned; and M. Delaborde has proved that two cuts were printed in 1406. The Virgin and Child at Paris may be taken as a good representative specimen of very early European wood engraving. It is simple art, but not bad art. The forms are drawn in bold thick lines and the black blot is used with much effect in the hollows and recesses of the design. Beyond this there is no shading. Rude as the work is, the artist has expressed exquisite maternal tendérness in the pressure of the Virgin’s cheek to that of the Child, whilst the attitude of the Child itself, with its foot in its hand and its arm round the mother’s neck, is most true to nature, as is the pose of the other foot against the mother’s arm, and also the baby-like bending and twisting of the legs. The Virgin is crowned, and stands against a niche-like decoration with pinnacles as often seen iu illuminated manuscripts. In the woodcut this architectural decoration is boldly but effectively draw n. Here, then, we have real art already, art in which appeared both vigour of style and tenderness of feeling.

The very earliest wood engraving consisted of outlines and white spaces with smaller black spaces, but shading is rare or absent. Before passing to shaded woodcuts we may mention a kind of wood engraving practised in the middle of the 15th century by a French engraver, often called Bernard Milnet, though his name is a matter of doubt, and by other engravers nearer the beginning of that century. This method is called the crible, a word for which there is no convenient translation in English. It means, riddled ιvith small holes, as a target may be riddled with small shot. The effect of light and dark is produced in this kind of engraving by sinking a great number of round holes of different diameters in the substance of the wood, which, of course, all come white in the printing; it is, in short, a sort of stippling in white. When a more advanced kind of wood engraving had become prevalent the crible was no longer used for general purposes, but it was retained for the grounds of decorative wood engraving, being used occasionally in borders for pages, in printers’ marks, and other designs, which were survivals in black and white of the ancient art of illuminating. Curiously enough, this kind of wood engraving, though long disused for purposes of art, has of late years been revived with excellent effect for scientific purposes. It is now the accepted method of illustration for astronomical books. The black given by the untouched wooden block represents the night sky, and the holes, smaller or larger, represent in white the stars and planets of lesser or greater magnitude. The process is so perfectly adapted to this purpose, being so cheap, rapid, and simple, that it will probably never be superseded. The objections to it for artistic purposes are, however, so obvious that they were soon perceived even by the untrained critical faculty of the earlier workmen, who turned their attention to woodcut in simple black lines, including outline and shading. In early work the outline is firm and very distinct, being thicker in line than the shading, and in the shading the lines are simple, without cross-hatchings, as the workmen found it easier and more natural to take out a white line-like space between two parallel or nearly parallel black lines than to cut out the twenty or thirty small white lozenges into which the same space would have been divided by cross-hatchings. The early work would also sometimes retain the simple black patch which we find in Japanese woodcuts, for example, in the Christmas Dancers of Wohlgemuth all the shoes are black patches, though there is no discrimination of local colour in anything else. A precise parallel to this treatment is to be found in a Japanese woodcut of the Wild Boar and Hare given by Aimé Humbert in his book on Japan, in which the boar has a cap which is a perfectly black patch though all other local colour is omitted. The similarity of method between Wohlgemuth and the Japanese artist is so close that they both take pleasure in drawing thin black lines at a little distance from the patch and following its shape like a border. In course of time, as wood engravers became more expert, they were not so careful to spare themselves trouble and pains, and then cross-hatchings were introduced, but at first more as a variety to relieve the eye than as a common method of shading. In the 16th century a simple kind of wood engraving reached such a high degree of perfection that the best work of that time has never been surpassed in its own way. We intend very shortly to render full justice to the highly developed skill of modern wood engravers; but it is undeniable that in the 16th century the art stood more on its own merits than it does now, respected itself more, and affirmed itself without imitating other arts.

Wood engraving in the 16th century was much more conventional than it is in the present day, and this very conventionalism enabled it to express what it had to express with greater decision and power. The wood engraver in those days was free from many difficult conditions which hamper his modern successor. He did not care in the least about aerial perspective, and nobody expected him to care about it; he did not trouble his mind about local colour, but generally omitted it, sometimes, however, giving it here and there, but only when it suited his fancy. As for lightand shade, he shaded only when he wanted to give relief, but never worked out anything like a studied and balanced effect of light-and-shade, nor did he feel any responsibility about the matter. What he really cared for, and generally attained, was a firm, clear, simple kind of drawing, conventional in its indifference to the mystery of nature and to the poetic sentiment which comes to us from that mystery, but by no means indifferent to fact, of a decided and tangible kind. The wood engraving of the 16th century was a singularly positive art, as positive as carving; indeed, most of the famous woodcuts of that time might be translated into carved panels without much loss of character. Their complete independence of pictorial conditions might be illustrated by many examples. In Dürer’s Salutation the dark blue of the sky above the Alpine mountains is translated by dark shading, but so far is this piece of local colour from being carried out in the rest of the composition-that the important foreground figures, with their draperies, are shaded as if they were statues in plaster of Paris. Again, the sky itself is false in its shading, for it is without gradation, but the shading upon it has a purpose, which is to prevent the upper part of the composition from looking too empty, and the conventionalism of wood engraving was so accepted in those days that the artist could have recourse to this expedient in defiance alike of pictorial harmony and of natural truth. In Holbein’s admirable series of small well-filled compositions, the Dance of Death, the firm and matter-of-fact drawing is accompanied by a sort of light-and-shade adopted simply for convenience, with as little reference to natural truth as might be expected in a stained-glass window. There is a most interesting series of little woodcuts drawn and engraved in the 16th century by J. Amman as illustrations of the different handicrafts and trades, and entitled The Baker, The Miller, The Butcher, and so on. Nothing is more striking in this valuable series than the remarkable closeness with which the artist observed everything in the nature of a hard fact, such as the shape of a hatchet or a spade; but he sees no mystery anywhere—he can draw leaves but not foliage, feathers but not plumage, locks but not hair, a. hill but not a landscape. In the Witches’ Kitchen, a woodcut by Baldung Grün of Strasburg, dated 1510, the steam rising from the pot is so hard that it has the appearance of two trunks of trees denuded of their bark, and makes a pendant in the composition to a real tree on the opposite side which does not look more substantial. The clouds of steam round about the jet are like puddings. Nor was this a personal deficiency in Baldung Grün. It was Dürer’s own way of engraving clouds and vapour, and all the engravers of that time followed it. Their conceptions were much more those of a carver than those of a painter. Dürer actually did carve in high relief, and Grün’s Witches’ Kitchen might be carved in the same manner without loss; indeed it has the appearance of an alto·rdievo with the ground tinted darker than the carvings. When the engravers were rather draughtsmen than carvers, their drawing was of a decorative character. For example, in the magnificent portrait of Christian III. of Denmark by Jacob Binck, one of the, very finest examples of old wood engraving, the face and beard are drawn with few lines and very powerfully, but the costume is treated strictly as decoration, the lines of the patterns being all given, with as little shading as possible, and what shading there is is simple, without cross-hatching.

The perfection of simple wood engraving having been attained so early as the 16th century, the art became extremely productive, and has been so ever since. During the 17th and 18th centuries it still remained a comparatively severe and conventional form of art, because the workmen shaded as much as possible either with straight lines or simple curves, so that there was never much appearance of freedom. Modern wood engraving is quite a distinct art, being based on different principles, but between the two stands the work of an original genius, Bewick, who cannot be overlooked. He was born in 1753, and died in 1828. Although apprenticed to an engraver in 1767, he was never taught to draw, and got into ways and habits of his own which add to the originality of his work, though his defective training is always evident. His work is the more genuine from his habit of engraving his own designs, which left him perfect freedom of interpretation, but the genuineness of it is not only of the kind which comes from independence of spirit, it is due also to his fidelity to the technical nature of the process, a fidelity very rare in the art. The reader will remember that in wood engraving every cutting print3 white, and every space left untouched prints black. Simple black lines are obtained by cutting out white lines or spaces between them, and crossed black lines have to be obtained by laboriously cutting out all the white lozenges between them. In Bewick’s cuts white lines are abundant and are often crossed,...