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The Oldest Woodcut

BY BURTON EMMETT

VEN now, twenty-odd years ahead of time, the five-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing is getting itself talked about, which is quite all right. Meantime, however, the fact that this is the five hundredth year since the beginning of wood-engraving is being utterly ignored, which is quite all wrong.

The claims on behalf of 1923 as the woodcut's quincentenary year rest technically, but not sentimentally, on our acceptance of the priority of the famous and beloved old Buxheim St. Christopher of 1423 as the earliest dated woodcut. These claims, as fascinating in their pros and cons as the unraveling of a mystery story, are debatable. Before reviewing them, however, a word should be said against to-day's neglect of the ancient glories of the wood-engraving art. In common gratitude we should be less for getful of the woodcut's early triumphs.

The first and greatest of these was the art of printing itself. Without wood-engraving, this never would have, nor could have, been developed. A second blessing which we owe to the woodcut has to do with book illustration. Copper-plate was only for the wealthy. Until the advent of photoengraving, therefore, some thirty years ago, wood-engraving provided the only means whereby common people could have pictures in their books..

of knowledge would have been retarded for centuries. Instead of learning by a glance at the picture that "This is a zeb-ra," poor, bored children several years past the primer class would have had to struggle through whole pages of dreary description. Without the aid of pictures, the acquiring of even a rudimentary education would have been so stupid, cumbersome, and hopeless a task that only the rising young high-brow could ever have achieved it. Tom, Dick, and Harry might almost as well have had no books at all.

Apart from our gratitude for these and other benefits, there is still one more kind word to be said for these old prints. This is with reference to the magic spell they can weave about the affections of those who come within range of their charm. The woodcuts will get you if you don't watch out! They exert very strongly the same friendly appeal that was in the mind of Alonzo of Aragon, who said:

old friends to trust, old authors to read." "Old wood to burn, old wine to drink,

And for the man of a bookish turn who, along towards middle-age, hungers for some sort of specialized fascination for his leisure time, or, in other words, for a hobby, woodcuts offer almost the ideal possibility.

And now, since they are the cause of Without such pictures, the spread these remarks, let us look into the

claims of St. Christopher as the oldest woodcut. There are many, many woodcuts of this old saint, for the legend of his carrying the Christ-child across the stream was a popular one in medieval times, and nearly every engraver of the fifteenth century has left us at least one print of the subject. But the particular print in which we are now interested is the one which a noted antiquarian named Heinecken discovered one afternoon in 1769, pasted down on the inside back cover of a dusty, musty, old illuminated manuscript-book which for two hundred years or more had years or more had lain unopened in the ancient monastery of Buxheim in a little village of Swabia.

A century and a half, since then, of ransacking every little old dark corner of Europe has failed to disclose a single additional impression of the print; and this one, which for a long time was in the collection of Lord Spencer, is now in the museum of the John Rylands Library. Those of us, therefore, who wish to see it must take a trip to Manchester, England, or content ourselves with a facsimile.

Men who are lucky enough to fall in love with woodcuts are almost sure to have a particularly warm place in their hearts for this noble, rugged, quaint old print. This is not because of its priceless rarity, nor yet because of its beauty, for, although it has very real beauty, this is quite likely to remain unseen until after that often over-emphasized virtue has long since ceased to be worried about. The charm of the Buxheim St. Christopher is chiefly due to the romance and adventure in its story and to the fact that, in spite of nearly 150 years of the most astonishingly clever attacks

against its priority, it still retains in the minds of many authorities its proud distinction of being the earliestdated woodcut.

No other print has so frequently been honored by being reproduced as the frontispiece in books on engraving or printing, and it is doubtful if any other print or any other copy of a rare book has occasioned the shedding of nearly so much printers' ink in bitter battles of wits.

Most of these fierce intellectual onslaughts, many of them more subtle than anything ever attempted by Sherlock Holmes himself, were directed against the seemingly harmless and innocent-looking legend in the lower right corner. During the first forty years after the print was discovered this was deciphered as "millesimo CCCC XX° tercio," translated as "1423" and generally accepted as the date of the engraving.

But there were doubts. Certain experts, pointing to the skilful drawing of the draperies about the shoulders, the effective suggestion of shading made by the thickening of certain lines and other sophisticated details, said that the work was far too good to have been possible of production at so early a date. After exhausting, however, every clue furnished by the paper, the water-mark, the ink, the hand-coloring, and the history of the Buxheim monastery, these doubters were still devoid of a scintilla of real evidence with which to upset the date's authenticity; and it was not until 1819, when a shrewd Austrian print curator named Konig took a hand in the controversy, that the real excitement started.

Konig claimed that the date itself had been tampered with. He de

clared that it should be 1473, that an L following the four C's (CCCC°L) had been erased.

This surmise having disclosed a fresh scent, all the doubters in Europe of the validity of St. Christopher's claim to the old-age championship were hot on the trail in no time. To discuss all the conflicting theories which resulted would require not an article, but a book. But mere mention of a few of the more interesting of these provides a fascinating glimpse of the methods whereby students of ancient prints and books grope and feel their way back through the darkness of past centuries in their search for dates, facts, and motives, not often, fortunately, with results so baffling and uncertain as in this uncertain as in this instance.

The first theory following Konig's was an attempt to show that the last word in the date was not "tercio," meaning "three," but "terno," meaning "three times." Thus "xx terno" would mean "three times twenty" or "60"; and the date would read 1460 instead of 1423. Even more ingenious was the assertion that originally the "xx" had been an "xc" and that by mere touch of the pen seventy years had thus been subtracted from the date, which, if untouched, would have been 1493. Another surmise was that, even if the date 1423 were genuine, it indicated not the date of the engraving, but an event of that date which the print had been issued years later to celebrate; and still another was that the "copy" for the Latin legend at the bottom of the print had happened to include this meaningless date and that the German engraver, not understanding Latin, had merely copied it date and all,

the date having no relation of any kind to the year the engraving was executed.

But interest in these researches ceased suddenly with the dramatic discovery of another woodcut, pasted inside the lid of an ancient coffer in an old tavern just outside of Brussels-a woodcut which has since been called the "Brussels Virgin" and which, after being detached in fragments, cleaned, and patched together, was found to have on it, "clearly expressed," the date of 1418!

This find occurred in 1844, and at once the doubts and attacks on the St. Christopher date were forgotten in the new and even more complex question as to which of these two prints was in truth the earlier. The 1418 date seemed even more open to suspicion than that of 1423; and in the seventynine years since the "Brussels Virgin" was found the trend of expert opinion has veered back and forth between the two. But more and more good old St. Christopher seems forced to rely not so much on actual evidence, as on loyalty to his traditional claims of priority.

The last great authority who reluctantly has reversed his belief in St. Christopher's claims and sided with the "Brussels Virgin" is Mr. Campbell Dodgson, keeper of prints and drawings in the British Museum. But the sentimental feeling for St. Christopher, like that for Gutenberg as against Coster, is very strong; and it is not unlikely that, if only some one had thought in time of a five-hundredth anniversary of wood-engraving, Mr. Dodgson and most of the other experts would have voted for 1923 as against 1918 as the year to be so gloriously honored.

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A Shortage of Scapegoats

Does the South Need More Trouble?

BY FRANK TANNENBAUM

T

HE range of discussion on the negro problem has been wide and varied. The literature on the subject is voluminous, and rich in many things: passion, hate, love, remorse, bitterness, and despair. There is strangely little that is calm and deliberate, little that is written in judicious temper and less written with a frank recognition of all the elements involved. There is an emotional bias in the discussion, there is a point of positive dogmatism, which, in the face of the facts, is both disconcerting and futile. Neither dogmatism nor emotion is very helpful in a difficult situation, and above all the negro problem is a difficult problem. In fact, it is not one problem, but a thousand and one, and there is no clear-cut formula and no magic rule. There is no solution. That is something that people have not been willing to face. A solution must be had, they say. It must be had immediately, without delay, and it must be efficacious, final, and utopian. But solutions are not available for real problems; all that may be had is attenuation, relief, a resetting of the strains, a removal of some of the friction. All that may be asked for is a change in the relative position of some of the factors, but the problem, as a problem, remains in a new form, possibly under a new name; but it re

mains, and taxes the ingenuity of man to a greater subtlety and more finesse.

How much more evenly the world would go if honest men could but learn to know that there are really two kinds of solutions, the possible and the impossible, and that the impossible ones are no solution at all! An impossible formula is a kind of emotional substitute for a facing of the facts. It is an escape from the problem. The real reason so much energy is expended in behalf of the impossible is because the possible is difficult and inconvenient. The impossible plan is a kind of magic formula. It is a promise of relief from a difficulty by some simple process, generally an emotion, a peculiar belief, or the hope of some cataclysmic occurrence. Generally, too, it may be achieved by wishing to achieve it, by believing that it will occur, by prayers and sacrifices of some special kind. It partakes of the form of magic. Like all magical things, it is sufficient. It will arrive suddenly, it will give no pain, it will relieve the difficulty forever. It has all virtues excepting one: it does not bring any perceptible change in the situation, and it leaves the difficulty where it was. It stands in the way of any real effort by diverting interest and attention from the facts in the situation and raises

emotional tangents that block honest That, again, is a kind of excuse for

effort to face the problems.

When one reflects upon the literature of the race problem in the United States, one is astounded at the amount of writing, talking, agitating, and dreaming that has centered about these impossible suggestions. There are good-natured, naïve, and simpleminded people who keep on saying to the South that what is needed and, of course, is possible, is that the South should forget its memories. That is all. It is not said in words like these, but it means the same thing. People repeat day in and day out that all that is required is for the people in the South to go to bed one night and wake next morning loving their neighbors as themselves. Now, that is not a hard thing to do. If you believe it can be done, it can be done. The fact that it has never occurred, that there are no real grounds for assuming that it will happen within any immediate future, is no reason why you should not both believe in its possibility and talk about it also. In fact, it helps to keep you from doing anything real about the problem, and it thus serves its purpose to him who prefers to wish himself out of a difficulty rather than to work himself out of one.

If you do not recommend to the South that it forget its memories, you may suggest, as some people do, that the thing to do is to go color-blind. Of course people do not say that, either, in so many words. They do, however, say that there is no race problem if you don't think there is one. If you don't think there is a race problem, if you do not see differences in color, if you do not recognize certain patent facts, these facts don't exist.

avoiding responsibility. If there is no race problem, then I have no real responsibility. And seeing that I do not wish any real responsibility, I simply solve the problem by denying its existence. That is all.

Another type of refuge from facing actualities in the South is the suggestion that the South has to begin all over again. What is needed is for the slate to be wiped clean, for a resolution to be made that a new beginning shall be publicly registered. That, of course, seems easy. But it is impossible. If only-but there are no ifs except in the realm of wishes. There can be no new start at all. One might as well suggest to a person that he cannot be saved unless he be physically born again. If the South is to do anything, it must be done with the fact in mind that there are prejudices, memories, hates, fears, doubts, misgivings, passions, hopes, dreams, and gnawings of the heart; that those are there, that in a measure they constitute the raw materials which must be drawn upon in the adjustment of the problem.

I use the word "adjustment" deliberately. The race problem cannot be solved. There is no solution which can be devised that will do all the things that a solution would have to do, remove not only the difficulties, but all the traces of it. There is no solution for the race problem. One might add that that is true for all fundamental social problems. There are new realinements possible. Attenuations, adjustments, removal of the accumulated strains, the development of a technic for further improvement, but sudden magical solution there is none at all.

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