[Patrick Branwell Brontë]. “Thomas Bewick”. Halifax Guardian, 1 October 1842. Reprinted in The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë. Volume 3, 1837-1848, ed. by Victor A. Neufeldt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 397-400.

THOMAS BEWICK.
“Flumina amem sylvasque inglorius.”1

At a time like the present, when in every work of art, picturesque character, brilliant effects, and imposing masses of light and shade are so much studied and so generally appreciated, the productions of two men, of whom both belong to times past, and one has already gained his mead of fame, seem to me worthy of being analyzed; from their total want of so many qualities now considered indispensable by artists, and their possession of other qualities which too many artists overlook.

These two men, alike in their isolation from modern art, were yet placed so far asunder in ideas and feelings that it would be absurd indeed to attempt, in one paper, an inquiry into the merits of the deep thinker, the rough artist, the thoroughly town-minded HOGARTH; and the homely, country-loving, and nature-worshiping BEWICK. So leaving the follies and vices of mankind under the unpolished but weighty hand of the first, it will give me pleasure, in which I wish I could make the readers participate, to follow the latter in his strolls among the hazel-bordered burns and over the naked shores of Northumberland, striving meanwhile to discover the reason why his unobtrusive sketches of every day scenes can have any charm not possessed by the magnificent engravings that flash from the pages of those hundred “Books of Beauty”—“of Flowers”—“of Affections,” &c. &c. blazing forth every season, with a glitter as fair as it is fleeting.

Bewick was the restorer—almost creator of the modern style of wood engraving; but his productions are locked up in books of little mark or likelihood, and—though in his day unrivalled—there are few now who would not at first glance, turn from his quaint elaborated little cuts, to admire as possessing far higher character, the bold artist like productions of Jackson or Branston,2 whose free lines, difficult cross hatching, and rich black inking so copiously adorn the productions which daily administer to the public instruction or amusement. The careless observer would say, “see how these men can sport with what Bewick would have thought impossibilities—emulate the most dashing effects of etching, or even transfer to wood the delicacies of a Heath or a Finden.”3 But somehow you find, after a half hour’s wonder, that the imposing effort of modern skill has left only a vague feeling of admiration; while the unpretending vignette has become almost as much a part and parcel of your recollection as if it were one of the old hawthorns or green lanes of childhood.

What is the cause of such an anomaly in feeling? for taste tells us that it is far better to group in bold generalized masses of light and shade, all the details of herbage, gravel, wall-stones, &c., than to elaborate them in the pains taking style of Bewick; that it is ridiculous—as he often does—to confuse the speckled plumage of a woodcock with the background of equally speckled leaves and branches; that it is wholly unreasonable to select for illustration the insignificant brooks and monotonous coasts of Northumberland, in preference to the mighty torrents and magnificent rocks of Switzerland. And yet, why will these misplaced and mismanaged woodcuts produce the same effect as would the divine old air of “Auld lang syne,” after being bewildered for an hour with the hurry of an overture from Rossini?

I will turn for an illustration of the effect which I mention, to “British Birds vol. ii. p 2.6, Ed. 1816,” where you see a road leading from a barren foreground towards a range of dull swelling moors, facing which a traveller with his little dog walks forward, holding fast his hat in the bleak wind which meets him from their dreary summits and cloudy skies. No other object meets the view, except a thorn tree bending beneath the blast over a ruined wall; and the vignette is altogether a literal transcript from many an approach to such moors as those which divide Yorkshire from Lancashire; but the eye rests upon it as if you saw the bent grass waving; as if you heard the cold wind whistling; as if you felt with the traveller, the length and loneliness of his road. It is the feeling for its quiet truths to nature that allures you; and, always when the meretricious glare of art has faded, the true and natural will endure.

On another page the waning moon gleams through a misty sky over a neglected church-yard, the few trees in which are “a la Bewick” depicted so faithfully that you could swear to their species, and within its battered gate one tomb stone leans; worn out as if death would not even spare the monuments of his triumphs; but its simple legend, “Good times and bad times and all times get over!” tells us that there is one last rest both for ourselves, the waning moon, the withering trees, and the falling stone.

Again: on a wet rock, lashed by the waters of roe subsiding sea, a sailor kneels in prayer. He is a castaway; for the horizon shows the masts of his foundered ship, and no hope shines from the dull heaven beyond it. Here Bewick has not introduced flashes of lightning or piles of tempestuous clouds, but such are not needed to show that hope is buried as deep as those swollen waves can drown.

It cannot be the simplicity and fidelity of these little designs which alone give them their charm. The designer must have been imbued with a feeling in unison with nature, and far removed from the Chinese exactness of a mere copyist; for though the Dutch masters, with all the aid of brilliant colour and knowledge of the resources of art, of which he was destitute, have even more minute exactness; they have nothing of the quiet poetry of Thomas Bewick. To seek for his peculiar power we must go into the odd nooks and by-paths of Old England, where we shall find many a fount from whence he drew his skill, and oftenest perhaps, in spots where people will generally say there is nothing to see. I recollect after wandering through a summer day till bewildered with the luxuriance of Windermere, and the grandeur of Langdale, I dropped down upon the quiet vale of Duddon, and while resting on a tomb-stone in the “wave washed church-yard” of Ulpha.4 and looking up at its little whitened tower shining in the clear blue sky, and down at the grass waving golden in afternoon sunlight, I felt something of its unpretending simplicity and remoteness from the empty “Oh how pretty’s” and “Dear! how charming’s” of the crowds of lake tourists, which when time has dimmed the recollection of far statelier scenes, still makes in the words of Wordsworth—

The kirk of Ulpha to the poet’s eye
Seems shining like a star.5

and in that view I thought I saw the secret of Bewick’s style; which combined with the English desire for realities, had produced what I so much admire.

This desire, and the power which it gives of extracting from every day life scenes and situations of the greatest power or pathos; this knowledge that to possess controul over the mind it is not necessary to carry it beyond the world we live in, I believe to be a late discovery, and one almost wholly English; for the gods and demigods and epics of classic literature,—the servilely imitated epics of Tasso, Camoens, and Voltaire,—the cold but stilted tragedies of Comeille or Racine,—down to the bombast of Ossian,—have as little to do with feelings or sympathies as with the moving world which hates and loves and laughs and weeps around us; and it was left for the only land that knows what nature means, to find that “the country” was productive of something more than pastoral shepherds and shepherdesses; that mighty ideas did not need for their elucidation sounding words; that a mouthing hero or whining heroine could not show more nobleness of heart, or better bear distress, than humble Ephraim Macbriar, or Jeanie Deans.6 A storm is not now merely “horrida tempestas.”—a desert merely “frightful,”—a pleasant land merely a hot-bed of “vines and flowers,”—nor are the breathing masses of humanity round us merely the “vain ignoble crowd;” we can now find something to muse on in the humble daisy, and something to see on a desolate moor.

Let us then give honour to those who have so far extended the range of our sympathies, and compelled us to understand both what our feelings are, and in what manner to express them; and while we bow to the names of Cowper or Scott, or Wordsworth, or Burns, sometimes think of a kindred spirit who humbly and toilsomely, with graver instead of pen, has laboured in the cause of nature, and striven to extend her power. The ears of thousands have drank in their immortal words; the eyes of few have seen his unpretending sketches; but all can behold to what they would point—the wide and varied world; where every changing cloud, or opening leaf, or mossy stone, or fleeting wave, may yield something of pleasure to a mind not wholly absorbed in frivolous vanity or lust of gain.

NORTHANGERLAND.

Virgil, The Georgics, II, 486, translated by C. Day Lewis as “Then may I love its forest and stream, and let fame go hang.” 
John Jackson, 1801-1848; born in Ovingham, Northumberland, the same village as Bewick, and apprenticed to him; one of the first engravers of illustrations for popular literature; co-author with Chatto of The History of Wood Engraving, 1839. Robert Alien Branston, 1778-1827; founder of the “London School” of wood engraving; successor to and rival of Bewick. 
For the Brontës’ interest in the illustrations of Charles Heath and Edward and William Finden, see Alexander & Sellars, pp. 18, 55, 177, 214, 217, 222, 227-28, 233-37, 240, 386-87. 
All places Branwell visited while he was employed as tutor in Broughton-in-Furness in 1840. 
Compare the opening lines of Sonnet XXXI in the River Duddon series:
THE KIRK OF ULPHA to the pilgim’s eye
Is welcome as a star.

The sonnet is also the source of the reference to the “wave-washed church-yard.”