in metal; complete drawing on wood;
sketches, if we choose, on metal.

81. But why, in wood, lines at all? Why not cut out white _spaces_, and
use the chisel as if its incisions were so much white paint? Many fine
pieces of wood-cutting are indeed executed on this principle. Bewick
does nearly all his foliage so; and continually paints the light plumes
of his birds with single touches of his chisel, as if he were laying on
white.

But this is not the finest method of wood-cutting. It implies the idea
of a system of light and shade in which the shadow is totally black.
Now, no light and shade can be good, much less pleasant, in which all
the shade is stark black. Therefore the finest wood-cutting ignores
light and shade, and expresses only form, and _dark local color_. And it
is convenient, for simplicity's sake, to anticipate what I should
otherwise defer telling you until next lecture, that fine metal
engraving, like fine wood-cutting, ignores light and shade; and that, in
a word, all good engraving whatsoever does so.

82. I hope that my saying so will make you eager to interrupt me. 'What!
Rembrandt's etchings, and Lupton's mezzotints, and Le Keux's
line-work,--do you mean to tell us that these ignore light and shade?'

I never said that _mezzotint_ ignored light and shade, or ought to do
so. Mezzotint is properly to be considered as chiaroscuro drawing on
metal. But I do mean to tell you that both Rembrandt's etchings, and Le
Keux's finished line-work, are misapplied labor, in so far as they
regard chiaroscuro; and that consummate engraving never uses it as a
primal element of pleasure.

[Illustration: THE LAST FURROW.

(Fig. 2) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.]

83. We have now got our principles so far defined that I can proceed to
illustration of them by example.

Here are facsimiles, very marvelous ones,[Q] of two of the best wood
engravings ever produced by art,--two subjects in Holbein's Dance of
Death. You will probably like best that I should at once proceed to
verify my last and most startling statement, that fine engraving
disdained chiaroscuro.

This vignette (Fig. 2) represents a sunset in the open mountainous
fields of southern Germany. And Holbein is so entirely careless about
the light and shade, which a Dutchman would first have thought of, as
resulting from the sunset, that, as he works, he forgets altogether
where his light comes from. Here, actually, the shadow of the figure is
cast