Part 11

is the Tyne at Newcastle, where he lived his working life; but at Ovingham, where he lies buried, and whence you can see the remains of his birthplace, it still flows=

`````'Clear and cool,

```By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool,'=

like the river in the 'Water-Babies,' and one can easily conceive with what an eagerness the country-bred engraver's-apprentice must have turned, in those weekly escapes from the great, gloomy manufacturing city, to the familiar sights and sounds of nature which had filled his boyhood with delight. To his love for these things we are indebted for his best work; it was his intimate acquaintance with them that has kept his memory green; and, even when he was an old man, they prompted some of the most effective passages of those remarkable recollections which, despite their _longueurs et langueurs_, present so graphic a picture of his early life. 'I liked my master,' he says; 'I liked the business; but to part from the country, and to leave all its beauties behind me, with which I had been all my life charmed in an extreme degree,--and in a way I cannot describe,--I can only say my heart was like to break.' And then he goes on to show how vivid still, at a distance of sixty years, was that first scene of separation. 'As we passed away, I inwardly bade farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley bank, to the Stob-cross hill, to the water-banks, the woods, and to particular trees and even to the large hollow old elm, which had lain perhaps for centuries past, on the haugh near the ford we were about to pass, and which had sheltered the salmon-fishers, while at work there, from many a bitter blast.'

As an artist on wood, as the reviver of the then disused art of Xylography--a subject hedged round with many delicate and hairsplitting controversies--it is not now necessary to speak of Bewick. Nor need anything be said here of his extraordinary skills--a skill still unrivalled--in delineating those 'beautiful and interesting aerial wanderers of the British Isles,' as he styles them in his old-fashioned language, the birds of his native country. In both of these respects, although he must always be accomplished, he may one day be surpassed. But as regards his vignettes or tailpieces ('tale-pieces' they might be called, since they always tell their story), it is not likely that a second Bewick will arise. They were imitated in his own day; they are imitated still--only to prove once more how rare and exceptional is the peculiarly individual combination that produced them. Some of his own pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working under his eye and in his atmosphere, have occasionally trodden hard upon his heels in landscape; others, as Robert Johnson, have caught at times a reflex of his distinctive humour; but, as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best period is a thing _per se_, unapproachable, inimitable, unique; and they have contributed far more--these labours of his play-time--to found his reputation than might be supposed. If you ask a true Bewickian about Bewick, he will begin by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, the exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared Owl, the lustrous spring coat of the Starling, the relative and competitive excellences of the Woodcock and the White Grouse; but sooner or later he will wander off unconsciously to the close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried ewe, whose poor little knock-kneed lamb looks on in trembling terror; or to the patient, melancholy shapes of the black and white horses seen vaguely through the pouring rain in the tailpiece to the Missal Thrush; or to the excellent jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's supper while he mumbles his long-winded grace. He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the brave and manly, loved these things; how they fascinated the callow imagination of Charlotte Brontë in her dreary moorland parsonage; how they stirred the delicate insight of the gentle, pure-souled Leslie; and how Ruskin (albeit nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them some of the most royal of his epithets. *

* Mr. Ruskin--it may be hinted--expounding the tailpieces solely by the light of his intuitive faculty, has sometimes neglected the well-established traditional interpretations of Bewick's work.

'No Greek work is grander than the angry dog,' he says, referring to a little picture of which an early proof, on the old rag-paper held by collectors to be the only fitting background for a Bewick, now lies before us. A tramp, with his wallet or poke at his side, his tattered trousers corded at the knees, and his head bound with a handkerchief under his shapeless hat, has shambled, in his furtive, sidelong fashion, through the open gates of a park, only to find himself confronted by a watchful and resolute mastiff. He lifts his stick, carved rudely with a bird's head, the minute eye and beak of which are perfectly clear through a magnifying glass, and holds it mechanically with both hands across his body, just as tramps have done immemorially since the days of the Dutchman Jacob Gats, in whose famous 'Emblems' there is an almost similar scene. The dog, which you may entirely cover with a shilling, is magnificent. There is not a line in its body which does not tell. The brindling of the back, the white marking of the neck and chest--to say nothing of the absolute moral superiority of the canine guardian to the cowering interloper--are all conveyed with the strictest economy of stroke. Another tailpiece, to which Ruskin gives the adjective 'superb,' shows a man crossing a river, probably the Tyne. The ice has thawed into dark pools on either side, and snow has fallen on what remains. He has strapped his bundle and stick at his back, and, with the foresight taught of necessity in those bridgeless days, is astride upon a long bough, so that if by any chance the ice gives way, or he plumps into some hidden fissure, he may still have hope of safety. From the bows of the moored ferryboat in the background his dog anxiously watches his progress. When its master is safe across, it will come bounding in his tracks. The desolate stillness of the spot, the bleak, inhospitable look of the snow-clad landscape, are admirably given. But Bewick is capable of even higher things than these. He is capable of suggesting, in these miniature compositions, moments of the keenest excitement, as, for example, in the tailpiece to the Baboon in the second edition of the 'Quadrupeds.' A vicious-looking colt is feeding in a meadow; a little tottering child of two or three plucks at its long tail. The colt's eye is turned backward; its heel is ominously raised; and over the North Country stile in the background a frightened relative comes rushing. The strain of the tiny group is intense; but as the little boy was Bewick's brother, who grew up to be a man, we know that no harm was done. Strangely enough, the incident depicted is not without a hitherto unnoticed parallel. Once, when Hartley Coleridge was a child, he came home with the mark of a horse hoof impressed unmistakably upon his pinafore. Being questioned, he admitted that he had been pulling hairs out of a horse's tail; and his father could only conclude that the animal, with intentional forbearance, had gently pushed him backward. *

* Hartley Coleridge grew up to write sympathetically, in his papers entitled 'Ignoramus on the Fine Arts,' of these very tailpieces. In them, he says, Bewick is 'a poet--the silent poet of the waysides and hedges. He unites the accuracy and shrewdness of Crabbo with the homely pathos of Bloomfield.' (Blackwood's Magazine, October, 1831.)

In describing the tailpiece to the Baboon, we omitted to mention one minor detail, significant alike of the artist and his mode of work. The presence of a strayed child in a field of flowers is not, perhaps, a matter which calls urgently for comment. But Bewick leaves nothing unexplained. In the shadow of a thicket to the left of the spectator is the negligent nurse who should have watched over her charge, but who, at this precise moment of time, is wholly engrossed by the attentions of an admirer whose arm is round her waist; Nor is it in those accessories alone which aid the story that Bewick is so careful. His local colouring is scrupulously faithful to nature, and, although not always an actual transcript of it, is invariably marked by that accuracy of invention which, as some one said of Defoe, 'lies like truth.' Nothing in his designs is meaningless. If he draws a tree, its kind is always distinguishable; he tells you the nature of the soil, the time of year, often the direction of the wind. Referring to the 'little, exquisitely finished inch-and-a-half vignette' of the suicide in the 'Birds,' Henry Kingsley (of whom, equally with his brother Charles, it may be said, in the phrase of the latter, _Il sait son Bewick_) notes that the miserable creature has hanged himself 'in the month of June, on an oak bough, stretching over a shallow trout stream, which runs through carboniferous limestone.' _Sero sed serio_ is the motto which Bewick has written under the dilapidated, desperate figure, whose dog, even as the dog of Sikes in 'Oliver Twist,' is running nervously backwards and forwards in its efforts to reach its pendent, motionless, strangely silent master. These legends and inscriptions, characteristic of the artist, are often most happily effective. Generally, like the _Justissima Tellus_ of the vignette of the ploughman, or the _Grata sume_ of the spring at which Bewick himself, on his Scotch tour, is drinking from the 'flipe' of his hat, they simply add to the restful or rural beauty of the scene; but sometimes they supply the needful key to the story. In the tailpiece to the Woodchat, for example, a man lies senseless on the ground. His eyes are closed, and his hat and wig have fallen backward. Is he dead, or in a fit, or simply, drunk? He is drunk. On a stone hard, by is the date '4 June, 1795,' and he has obviously been toasting the nativity of his Majesty George the Third.

But clearness of message, truth to nature, and skill in compressed suggestion are not Bewick's sole good qualities. He does not seem to have known much of Hogarth--perhaps the Juvenalian manner of that great graphic satirist was not entirely to his taste--but he is a humourist to some extent in Hogarth's manner, and, after the fashion of his day, he is a moralist. He delights in queer dilemmas and odd embarrassments. Now it is a miserly fellow who fords a river with his cow to save the bridge toll. The water proves deeper than he expected; the cow, to whose tail he is clinging, rather enjoys it; her master does not. Now it is an old man at a standstill on an obstinate horse. It is raining heavily, and there is a high wind.

He has lost his hat and broken his stick, but he is afraid to get down because he has a basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occasionally the humour is a little grim, after the true North Country fashion. Such is the case in the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith (or is it a tanner?) looks on pitiless at the unhappy dog with a kettle dangling at its tail; such, again, in the vignette of the mischievous youngster who leads the blind man into mid-stream. As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibiting the _lachrimo rerum_, the brevity of life, the emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat; the ruined and deserted cottage, with the grass growing at the hearthstone; the ass rubbing itself against the pillar that celebrates the 'glorious victory;' the churchyard, with its rising moon, and its tombstone legend, 'Good Times, bad Times, and all Times got over,' are illustrations of this side of his genius. But the subject is one which could not be exhausted in many papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's 'criticism of life,' and he had seventy-five years' experience. His final effort was a ferryman waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to Ovingham; and on his death-bed he was meditating his favourite work. In a lucid moment of his last wanderings he was asked of what he had been thinking, and he replied, with a faint smile, that he had been devising subjects for some new Tailpieces.

XIX. A GERMAN IN ENGLAND.

|WHEN, in 1768, the yet undistinguished the world his 'Journal of a Tour to Corsica,' Gray wrote to Horace Walpole from Pembroke College that the book had strangely pleased and moved him. Then, with the curious contempt for the author which that egregious personage seems to have inspired in so many of his contemporaries, Gray goes on: 'The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.' This is an utterance which suggests that sometimes even the excellent critic Mr. Gray, like the Sage of Gough Square, 'talked James Boswell of Auchinleck gave to laxly.' At all events this particular example scarcely illustrates his position. There was more than mere veracity in Boswell's method. Conscious or unconscious, his faculty for reproducing his impressions effectively, and his thoroughly individual treatment of his material, are far more nearly akin to genius than folly. Nor could his success be said to be a matter of chance, since on two subsequent occasions--in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' and the 'Life of Johnson'--he not only repeated that success, but carried further towards perfection those fortunate characteristics which he had exhibited at first. Walpole, if we may trust the title-page of the 'little lounging miscellany' known as 'Walpoliana,' reported his friend's dictum with greater moderation. 'Mr. Gray the poet has often observed to me, that, if any person were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself, it must, in whatever hands, prove a most useful and entertaining one.' As a generalisation, this leaves nothing to be desired. That the unaffected record of ordinary experiences, 'honestly set down,' is seldom without its distinctive charm, needs no demonstration; and when lapse of time has added its grace of remoteness, the charm is heightened. These considerations must serve as our excuse for recalling a half-forgotten 'pamphlet'--as Gray would have styled it--which points the moral of his amended aphorism far better than Boswell's 'Tour.'

The narrative of Charles P. Moritz's 'Travels, chiefly on Foot, through several Parts of England,' belongs to 1782. It was first published at Berlin in 1783, and the earliest English version is dated 1795. The second edition (now before us) came two years later, and other issues are occasionally met with in booksellers' catalogues; besides which, John Pinkerton, the compiler of the 'Walpoliana' above mentioned, included the book in the second volume of his 'Collections of Voyages,' et.c., and Mayor also reprinted it in vol. ix. of his 'British Tourist.' *

* It is also included, with some omissions, in Cassell's excellent 'National Library.'

The English translator was a 'very young lady,' said to be the daughter of an unidentified personage referred to by the author: the editor, who, in a copious preface, testifies, among other things, to the favourable reception of the work in Berlin and Germany generally, remains anonymous. Moritz himself, the writer of the volume, was a young Prussian clergyman, enthusiastic about England and things English, who came among us 'to draw Miltonic air' (in Gay's phrase), and to read his beloved 'Paradise Lost' in the very land of its conception. He stayed exactly seven weeks in this country, three of which he spent in London, the rest being occupied by visits to Oxford, Birmingham, the Peak, and elsewhere. What he sees, and what he admires (and luckily for us he admires a great deal), he describes in letters to one Frederic Gedike, a professorial friend at Berlin.

His first communication, dated 31st May, depicts his progress up the Thames, which he regards as greatly surpassing even 'the charming banks of the _Elbe_.' Then he disembarks near Hartford, whence, with two companions, he posts to London, behind a round-hatted postilion 'with a nosegay in his bosom.' He is delighted with the first view he gets of an English soldier, 'in his red uniform, his hair cut short and combed back on his forehead, so as to afford a full view of his fine broad manly face.' He is interested also to see two boys engaged in the national pastime of boxing; and he marvels at the huge gateway-like sign-posts of the village inns. Passing over Westminster Bridge, he does not, like Wordsworth, burst into a sonnet, but he is impressed (as who would not be!) by that unequalled _coup d'oil_. 'The prospect from this bridge alone,' he says, 'seems to afford one the epitome of a journey, or a voyage in miniature, as containing something of everything that most usually occurs on a journey.' Presently, a little awed by the prodigious greatness and gloom of the houses (which remind him of Leipzig), he takes lodgings in George Street, Strand, with a tailor's widow, not very far, as he is pleased to discover, from that Adelphi Terrace where once 'lived the renowned _Garrick_.' To his simple tastes his apartments, with their leather-covered chairs, carpeted floors and mahogany tables, have an air of splendour. 'I may do just as I please,' he says, 'and keep my own tea, coffee, bread and butter, for which purpose [and here comes a charming touch of guilelessness!] my landlady has given me a cupboard in my room, which locks up.' With one of his landlady's sons for guide, he makes the tour of St. James's Park (where you may buy milk warm from the cow), and he experiences for the first time 'the exquisite pleasure of mixing freely with a concourse of people, who are for the most part well dressed and handsome.' His optimism finds a further gratification in the 'sweet security' (the expression is not his, but Lamb's) which is afforded 'from the prodigious crowd of carts and coaches,' by the footways on either side of the streets; and he explains to his 'dearest Gedike' the mysteries of giving the wall. He thinks London better lighted than Berlin (which implies little short of Cimmerian darkness in that centre of civilization!), and he waxes sorrowful over the general evidence of dram-drinking and the sale of spirituous liquors. 'In the late riots [i.e. the Gordon Riots of 1780], which even yet are hardly quite subsided, and which are still the general topic of conversation, more people have been found dead near empty brandy-casks in the streets, than were killed by the musket-balls of regiments, that were called in.'

Another thing which strikes him as foreign to his experience is the insensibility of the crowd to funerals. 'The people seem to pay as little attention to such a procession, as if a hay-cart were driving past.' Among more pleasurable novelties, are the English custom of sleeping without an eiderdown, and the insular institution of 'buttered toast,' which, incredible as it may sound, appears to have been still an unknown luxury in the land of Werther. *

* Another of his remarks is of special interest in our day:--

'That same influenza, which I left at Berlin, I have had the hard fortune again to find here; and many people die of it' (the italics are ours). Elsewhere he says that the Prussian quack Katterfelto--Cowper's=

```'Katerfelto, with his hair on end.

```At his own wonders wondering for his bread,'=

whose advertisements were then in every paper, attributed the epidemic to a minute insect, against which, of course, he professed to protect his patients. Walpole's correspondence contains references to the same visitation. It was, he writes, 'universal,' but not 'dangerous or lasting.' 'The strangest part of it,' he tells Mann in June, 'is, that, though of very short duration, it has left a weakness or lassitude, of which people find it very difficult to recover.'

On the second Sunday after his arrival he preaches at the German Church on Ludgate Hill for the pastor, the Rev. Mr. Wendeborn, who resides 'in a philosophical, but not unimproving retirement' at chambers in New Inn,--and he visits the Prussian Ambassador, Count Lucy, with whom, over a 'dish of coffee,' he has a learned argument upon the pending dispute 'about the _tacismus_ or _stacismus_.' Then he pays à visit to Vauxhall. Comparing great things with small, he straightway traces certain superficial resemblances between the Surrey Paradise and the similar resort at Berlin,--resemblances' which are enforced by his speedy discovery of that chiefest glory of the English gardens, Roubiliac's statue of Handel. The Gothic orchestra, and the painted ruin's at the end of the walks (sometimes used by flippant playwrights as similes for beauty in decay) also come in for a share of his admiration; and he is particularly impressed by Hayman's pictures in the Rotunda. 'You here,' he adds, speaking of this last, 'find the busts of the best English authors, placed all round on the sides.

Thus a Briton again meets with his Shakespeare, Locke, Milton, and Dryden in the public places of his amusements; and there also reveres their memory.' He finds further confirmation of this honoured position of letters in the popularity of the native classics as compared with those of Germany, 'which in general are read only by the learned; or, at most, by the middle class of people. The English national authors are in all hands, and read by all people, of which the innumerable editions they have gone through, are a sufficient proof.' In Germany 'since Gellert [of the Fables], there has as yet been no poet's name familiar to the people.' But in England even his landlady studies her 'Paradise Lost,' and indeed by her own account won the affections of her husband (now deceased) 'because she read Milton with such proper emphasis:'

Another institution that delights him is the second-hand bookseller, at whose movable stall you may buy odd volumes 'so low as a penny; nay, even sometimes for an half-penny a piece.' Of one of these 'itinerant antiquaries' he buys the 'Vicar of Wakefield' in two volumes for sixpence.