BEWICK’S LEGACY

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25246, 26 July 1947, Page 7

BEWICK’S LEGACY

[A Leading Article in “The Times” Literary Supplement.] Nothing in the writings of Ruskin than HI 18 3Udience like him more sn“neint°r liking ’ and todeed bls springing admiration, for the art and this enthu?iasS°S a h BeWiCk - At first & tS ‘ empurpled be more or less Hved be wh^ V the a nd gener a al “waTstili word 1 favounte an d a household ?£an his £ That rnav noticed in recent years, those T/ nth because his books and trateri h. th £ r men which he illusXFh becOm Sn. less Sequent in % S nH^? d become anything like a n?nnrt gh , ‘ amo “8 Jis. If we are justly Eke Bewick Ur n lnheri S nce st is men like Bewick who are the reason Accordingly the little King Penguin ° f In Tt?r»?iT WlCk ’j which appear! with 2? u ra f bv ? , and energetic essay on John Rayner, is a publicaTh» .T hb we hasten to commend, teltrat,™ Is . a m emoir in brief, the ile a sbort selection from 1 IF nu mher of works prodJi„dv„by tb . a artist; the Bewickian who knows it all will obviously wish or more and more; but as an intro- , d Fn° j abd a this little book • u" 1. Tt . br mgs into sight the , wh ° dre , w and engraved the ?Ho I? gle a mi ’-he Chillingham Bull, i h U° ng ' eared bat anti the long-tailed nnJ^r>i. m i? USe \i. the goldfinch and the corncrake, the drunkard observing two moons over the palings, and the clamorous boys playing a troop of horse with neglected gravestones as their mounts.

Mr Rayner’s sketch of Bewick’s career and account of his great conJ°- tbe art of engraving in England brings before us also the character Bewick who perhaps, even if he had never used pen or pencil or woodblock, would have held a place in general biography.

He was a typical Englishman of his sort, a lover and grower of roses, a grumbler that beer was not what it used to be in his youth, a reader of Smollett, fond of churchyards, greedy for eels. . . . He was a marvellous whistler, a reciter ot dialect stories, accentuating his already broad Northumbrian, a singer of Scotch songs.

Many other details, and Mr Rayner has room for some of them, go to the full portrait of Thomas Bewick. Some of them attest his extraordinary gift of doing his work at any moment and under any conditions: “I have seen him,” a friend from Shropshire wrote, ‘‘picking, chipping, and finishing a block, talking, whistling, and sometimes singing, while his friends have been drinking wine at his profusely hospitable table,” Again, as he watched the visitors at Buxton from his inn window, he would “humorously relate their probable histories, and how they came by their ailings, and sketch their figures and features in one instant of time." Yet there was something in Bewick even more impressive, and it is the secret of the tail-pieces, or many of them, which have been so widely enjoyed: it was his natural piety. Ruskin, speaking of one of his little pictures, declared that it displayed “tne frogginess of the frog—the marsh temper” —and this was possible from a perfect sympathy with all animated nature. Everybody loved Bewick; all animals loved him; and frequently of mornings I found him in the inn-yard, among the dogs, ducks or pigs, throwing them pieces of biscuit, and talking to them. Those happy moods alternated with others, as the tail-pieces show, in which Bewick sometimes came almost to despair and wholly to irony over the cruelties which flourished in the land. His creed wss suggested in his own words, ‘‘This is a bonny world as God made it; but man makes a packhorse of Providence.” He set out, not the least perplexed over the relations of art and morals, to reduce the burden by his graphic inventions. He died, aged 76, on November 8, 1828; and, it is recorded, that very morning he had the satisfaction of seeing the first proof-impression of a series of large wood-engravings he had undertaken, in a superior style, for the walls of farmhouses, inns, and cottages, with a view to abate cruelty, mitigate pain, and imbue the mind and heart with tenderness and humanity; and this he called his last legacy to suffering and insulted Nature.