art woodcutting was thus brought abreast of the age and takes an honourable place beside the artistic achievements of the time. And when we remember that the pen-drawing on the wood was often washed and elaborated with pencil or crayon, giving it a luminous richness of tone which could only be reproduced in the printed impression by pure black lines, it was incumbent upon the woodcutter to use his own taste and feeling in translating these qualities to the block. Only a trained artist of fine sympathy and with command of considerable executive powers could adequately do this. Yet it is constantly done in the woodcuts of the sixties, in a manner truly masterly. There are examples of textures very exquisitely transferred to the wood, and occasionally an extreme beauty of line which is evidently of the engraver's selecting.

The engravers, to whose energies much of this improvement is attributable, appear to have carried on their vocation in the old traditional manner. Most of the blocks dating from the middle of the nineteenth century bear the names of Dalziel or Swain; like the master-printers of Italy they kept a staff of artists who worked impersonally, without individual acknowledgement or credit for their pains. The brothers Dalziel were themselves engravers, and by working with their men, as nearly as possible realised the relations existing in early times between the printer and his fellowartists.

Usually the woodcuts are treated as the work of the designer only, but it must never be forgotten that they owe their completion to another's skill. Nor should we forget that the cutting of a block is more than a mechanical operation, for its excellence implies that intimate blending of expression with technique so closely related and bound up in one another, that we cannot easily understand the customary laxity which admits of their separation. The beauty of a work of art is an inherent condition of the technicalities required to evolve it, and upon them it is dependent for all that makes it ultimately valuable. Recognising this, we see that the woodcutters of the sixties had caught a reflexion of that lucid force which pervaded the art of Millais and his contemporaries; and to these anonymous workmen, unhonoured and unknown, who have laboured for our delight, our grateful thanks are due.

III.

The last phase of the pre-Raphaelite influence upon books has been the almost simultaneous appearance of the Kelmscott and Vale Presses about ten years ago. Conforming in style and aim to the works of the early master-printers, they are the outcome of the bygone scholarliness to which Rossetti gave the initial impetus. The varied talents of William Morris had been applied to many arts before he decided to become a printer of decorated books, and this his final labour may be supposed to exhibit the ripe experiences of his life. The Kelmscott Press was, doubtless, an effort towards a realisation of that noble dream of democracy which stirred Morris and the small band of English Socialists who gathered round him as their artistic leader. It was also a part of the dream of a nobler and lovelier past, wherein the workman had not yet lost his dignity and his ancient manual skill. Granting that a book is the work of many hands, Morris looked back to a time when the compositor wrought patterns with his type, which in its turn had been beautified by the founder, and the illustrator, submitting to his fellow-craftsmen, gave the crowning lustre to the pages, which were then sewn together and passed to the binder, who completed the harmony within by a corresponding beauty without.

Eager to emulate the example of the great printers in every respect, he early recognised the need for the best materials and the application of sound and honest workmanship to his books. His eye was naturally offended at the worthless articles commonly used by the modern publisher, and he at once sat about the manufacture of a hand-made paper, of fine texture, thin, pure, tough, and crisp to the touch like the sheets of an early printed book. He took the same care with the cutting and founding of his type, and for the making of his ink, and even revived the charming practice of printing upon vellum. But these, the elementary verities of true craftsmanship, though learned from the past, belong to all ages, and have nothing to do with the artificial mediævalism of his mind, which gave the pseudo-antiquity to his literature as well as to his handicraft.

It is one thing to make an idol of a visionary past, and to receive back an echo of that exaltation of spirit aroused by vehement admiration; it is another thing to lose the power of invention by imitating its cramping limitations and formalities. Mediaeval art was too robust and self

reliant to be weakened by the mere reversion to a pagan theme. The poets and artists, with the ardour characteristic of expansive natures, drew new strength from classical imagery, without being absorbed by it. And ultimately at the Renaissance, when all men succumbed to a culture which they discovered to be higher and broader than their own, they never in their most servile abasement dreamt of reviving the inferior things of the ancient world.

Having none of the inventive faculties essential to the artist, who can give fresh expression to the current forces of contemporary life, the art of William Morris leads to a cul de sac. He walked with his eyes behind him, and his books produce the same lassitude of spirit which we feel when dining in a room hung with conscientious copies of Leonardo, Raphael and Correggio. The co-operating sympathy and help of his friend Burne-Jones scarcely lessened the decadent tendency of their work. Even more than Morris, who had been largely inspired by the wholesome teaching of Ruskin, Burne-Jones drew a lifelong inspiration from Rossetti. The design for the Maids of Elfenmere,' published in Allingham's 'Music Master,' 1855, was the first revelation of that visionary land of fable and romance which became ever afterwards the theme of his art. A manner so strange as Rossetti's might have been supposed to have given it the isolation of a personal idiosyncrasy, yet it was reverently perpetuated by Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelite formula appeared in his work, narrowed and rarefied to the semblance of a dream, but faintly related to that imaginative past which the master-touch of Rossetti had contrived to humanise with the glow of reality.

The woodcuts of the Kelmscott Press, no less than the tapestry from Morris's looms, are the art of the patternmaker. Looked at from a certain distance the specimenpage from the 'Chaucer,' exhibited at South Kensington, immediately attracts by its wonderful excellence of form. But look closer; examine the picture apart from its border and you will look in vain for the qualities conspicuous in the naturalistic school of the sixties.' The technique of this stately book is inexpressibly dull, possibly from the ineptitude of the engravers; the line is dead and hard, and every woodcut, instead of being as a jewel to which the border is a fair setting, is but the part of a device, flowered or figured with well-disposed lines. Since the engravers of the sixties' had raised the technicalities of wood-engraving to a higher pitch of excellence than any of their predecessors, it was a retro

grade step to revive the ruder methods and shortcomings of an art long hampered by archaic conventions. A primitive manner, however charming and inevitable in the early years of a newly invented craft, is obviously unpardonable in the work of a mature epoch. During its childish years we can make allowances for certain awkward, conventional artifices which are offered as a substitute for real drawing. But at a time when the arts are seeking to render a more sensitive and delicate presentation of form, we cannot easily accept an archaism which stops short where the final expression of this higher art begins. The going back to antiquity is thus a sign of decadence, and was so even in the fifteenth century, for the Renaissance with all its vigour was also the waning of Italy's power.

It is curious in face of his own practice to find the originator of the Kelmscott Press, and the ardent advocate of a Gothic revival in architecture, complaining of the pedantry and artistic degradation of the Renaissance, as if it were a more culpable pedantry to revive Hellenism than Gothicism. Unless he is being led into an unconscious inconsistency, there must be a moral distinction between Greek and medieval art which would justify the revival of the latter, in preference to the former. It is difficult to justify the pedantry of reviving a past style at all, but it is much more difficult to discover that classic art is all vice, while that of the middle ages is all virtue. After a prolonged taste of all the schools in succession, an old definition of classicalism made by Michael Angelo appears to show how futile these contentions and revivals are. To him classicalism meant simply excellence, that fastidious care for perfection which is neither temporal nor local, but grows amongst men whose senses, naturally attuned to beauty, are of finer discriminating powers than others. Such were the Greeks, Romans, Italians, and the modern European schools since the Renaissance, but it is only at its best, as in its architecture, that Gothic art deserves to rank as classical. After declaring that the Dutch or German paintings, from their prettiness and sentimental emotion, appeal most to old women and young girls, ecclesiastics, nuns, and people of quality who have no feeling for the true harmony of a masterpiece, Michael Angelo continues:

The works that come from Italy can alone be called genuine works of art. Italian art, therefore, is true art. If they painted thus elsewhere, the art might equally well be denominated after the land where it is thus executed. Even Albert Dürer, a master who works

with such skill and delicacy of feeling, when he wished to paint something which should deceive us as to its having been executed in Italy, could still paint nothing in which I could not observe at once that it neither came from Italy nor from an Italian artist. . . . We feel at once the difference. Our art is that of ancient Greece; not because it is somewhat Italian, but because it is good and correct. . . . Art belongs to no land; it comes from heaven. We, however, possess it; for nowhere has the old empire left such distinct traces of its glory as with us; and with us I believe true art will set.'

Biased though it may seem to some minds, we cannot but think that this praise of the Hellenic spirit, as the abstract and everlasting manifestation of beauty, is saner, and the result of a finer taste, than that of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The whole trend of the Kelmscott craftsmanship is too much in a contrary direction, and has no part in the best aim and accomplishment of modern times. But, having been earnestly done, let us gratefully accept the work, and now that its authors are no more, let us hope that its pedantry will have no imitators to vulgarise what has been a nobly executed task.

There is no reason to consider the books which Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Shannon began to issue in 1893 from the Vale, Chelsea, as imitating the newly established Kelmscott Press. Their partial similarity is rather due to the natural confluence of ideas amongst men, when strong convictions arise, preparatory to united action. A new interest in the printer's craft was vaguely in the air about that time, and its practical outcome resulted in these two undertakings. The individual character of each is sufficiently manifest to rebut any serious charge of plagiarism against Mr. Ricketts, whose personal distinction as an artist raises him above any such imputation. The primary difference of attitude between the two printers is seen at a glance, and is nothing less than the difference in culture and temperament between Germany and Italy in the fifteenth century. Guided by a wise instinct, Mr. Ricketts chose to animate his work with the gracious and delicate epirit of the Italian Renaissance.

In size the books of the Vale Press are generally more slender and dainty volumes than those of William Morris. The Daphnis nd Chloe,' the earliest and largest of the books with woodcuts by Mr. Shannon and Mr. Ricketts, is a thin, elegantly proportioned quarto, not too heavy for the hands of those who read or scan its decorated pages. In its design and that of the Hero and Leander,' published a year later, the technicalities of the old printers