it of
abstraction; that is to say, of deciding what are the essential points
in the things you see, and seizing these; a habit entirely necessary to
strong humanity; and so natural to all humanity, that it leads, in its
indolent and undisciplined states, to all the vulgar amateur's liking of
sketches better than pictures. The sketch seems to put the thing for him
into a concentrated and exciting form.

104. Observe, therefore, to guard you from this error, that a bad sketch
is good for nothing; and that nobody can make a good sketch unless they
generally are trying to finish with extreme care. But the abstraction of
the essential particulars in his subject by a line-master, has a
peculiar didactic value. For painting, when it is complete, leaves it
much to your own judgment what to look at; and, if you are a fool, you
look at the wrong thing;--but in a fine woodcut, the master says to you,
"You _shall_ look at this, or at nothing."

105. For example, here is a little tailpiece of Bewick's, to the fable
of the Frogs and the Stork.[V] He is, as I told you, as stout a reformer
as Holbein,[W] or Botticelli, or Luther, or Savonarola; and, as an
impartial reformer, hits right and left, at lower or upper classes, if
he sees them wrong. Most frequently, he strikes at vice, without
reference to class; but in this vignette he strikes definitely at the
degradation of the viler popular mind which is incapable of being
governed, because it cannot understand the nobleness of kingship. He
has written--better than written, engraved, sure to suffer no slip of
type--his legend under the drawing; so that we know his meaning:

"Set them up with a king, indeed!"

106. There is an audience of seven frogs, listening to a speaker, or
croaker, in the middle; and Bewick has set himself to show in all, but
especially in the speaker, essential frogginess of mind--the marsh
temper. He could not have done it half so well in painting as he has
done by the abstraction of wood-outline. The characteristic of a manly
mind, or body, is to be gentle in temper, and firm in constitution; the
contrary essence of a froggy mind and body is to be angular in temper,
and flabby in constitution. I have enlarged Bewick's orator-frog for
you, Plate I. c., and I think you will feel that he is entirely
expressed in those essential particulars.

This being perfectly good wood-cutting, notice especially its
deliberation. No scrawling or scratching, or cross-hatching