"Breaking up of the Old Agamemnon," that artist wrote me, "Your reproduction is a more wonderful performance than the original etching." He was scarcely one day making the etching on the copper, but I was about three weeks putting it on wood.
Any one might tell Mr. Linton that it is hardly worth his while to characterize efforts he could never equal himself as "the lowest things in art," so long as he is guilty of publishing such work as his portraits of "Some French Republicans" in the Century Magazine, of which it is charitable to say they are outside the pale of art altogether. As I heard an engraver remark, "I could fasten a block against the wall and throw tools at it in the dark and do better than that." He uses the fewest lines possible, so that much of his work looks coarse and cheap, such as would never be accepted from my hands, though the errors of his tool often show the master-hand, and the critical eye can detect how skilfully he ruins most of his blocks.
I am an advocate of pure line, believing it has great use and power in assisting color, form, technique, and perspective, but. I cannot see that any devotee of pure line has the right to seize by the collar as counterfeiter any faculty that inclines to the reproduction of watercolor, etching, or charcoal effects. I know the latter is not art per se, but they may be combined with very good art for all that. There may be much art talent exhibited in engraving a picture that has originally no artistic merit at all. There may not be much beauty in the eccentricities of a bashful old bachelor trying to win the affections of a smart widow, but an actor might infuse great artistic beauty in the reproduction of such a character. The engraver is a translator, conveying to the public in his own manner a correct interpretation of the original. Why should an engraver give to the public the effect of a wash drawing when the original is pen or charcoal? Let us be honest and give everything after its kind.
My parting words may be that my ambition to possess fifty beautiful tools in rows has vanished, and that all my work is now done with one very homely-looking square tool.
A SUMMER'S RECKONING.
LOOKING back on what to me was dearest
In the year which now is taking flight,
Once again I fancy you are with me
In the splendor of that August night,
With the gray rocks rising up around us
Stretching giant arms on either side,
And the starry silence of the heavens
Sweeping downward to the restless tide.
