Balzac said. The techniques of the various arts are, naturally enough,
best known to the practitioners thereof. Yet Curator Frank Weitenkampf
of our Public Library has written one of the most valuable books in the
arts graphic, How to Appreciate Prints. Its union of technical insight
and catholicity of judgment has been justly praised by all discerning
etchers. The Discourses of Sir Joshua are, take them by and large, the
best of their kind because most temperate. What wouldn’t we give for
the critical writings of Leonardo da Vinci, whose prose, what we have
of it, proves him a master. Vasari is an immortal gossip. William Blake
was narrow in his outlook. Fancy ruling out from court the pictures
of Rubens! Degas was a wit who abominated art critics more than Mr.
Pennell. He abused Huysmans, the first to make public his rare genius.
Millet, Rousseau, Constable said interesting things of their art, of
their contemporaries. “There is no isolated truth,” declared Millet. “A
good thing is never done twice,” wrote Constable; or Alfred Stevens’s
definition of art as “nature seen through the prism of an emotion,”
which epigram evidently Zola remembered in his Experimental Novel. Rodin
has also uttered much wisdom. Fromentin’s studies of Dutch masters is a
standard book, although he missed Vermeer—probably because the work of
that master of masters was attributed to other men, notably to Terburg.
Ruskin did much to muddle public opinion with his intemperate praise of
Turner and his purblind estimate of Whistler. Who shall deny that he was
a force making for good? Walter Pater painted with words, not only making
beautiful phrases but memorable criticism. Philip Gilbert Hamerton often
blundered, and Pennell impales him, also abundantly quotes from him. The
written and reported words of artists are alike precious to layman and
critic. That the artist, Mr. Pennell for example, prefers etching to
writing is natural; so might the critic if he had the pictorial gift.
Art is art, not nature; and criticism is criticism, not always art. It
professes to interpret the artist’s work, and at best it mirrors his art
unavoidably intermingled with the personal temperament of the critic.
At the worst, the critic lacks temperament, and when this is the case
Heaven help artist and public! Walter Raleigh sums up the question in a
sentence: “Criticism, after all, is not to legislate nor to classify, but
to raise the dead.” The magical art of evocation! Few critics possess the
gift, but, then, fewer are the artists who boast it.
That painters—or etchers—can get along without professional criticism we
know from history, but that they themselves play the critic successfully
is open to doubt. And are they any fairer to younger talent than official
criticism? It is an inquiry that should be fraught with significance for
professionals. Artists, great and various, have sent forth their pupils
into the world. As befits honest criticism, have they at all recognized
the pupils of other men; played fair with those whose practice and theory
were at the opposite pole to their own? The answer is a decided negative;
the examples that might be adduced, legion. Recall what Velasquez said
to Salvator Rosa, according to Carl Justi. Salvator had asked the
incomparable Spaniard whether he did not think Raphael the best of all
the painters he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: “To be plain
with you, Raphael does not please me at all.” In art criticism a Robert
Schumann is yet to appear; and notwithstanding his catholicity in taste,
Schumann missed Wagner, as did Berlioz. Perhaps Stendhal saw the weakness
in such criticisms when he remarked: “Difference engenders hatred.”
To leave historical generalities for the particulars of contemporary
criticism, let us open a book that has recently appeared, entitled De
David à Degas, by Jacques-Emile Blanche, famous portraitist, charming
causeur, brilliant penman, sympathetic and sometimes caustic critic.
M. Blanche, a painter by “the grace of God,” for his talents are many,
considers such diverse artists as Ingres, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne,
Fantin-Latour—a notably fine estimate—Degas—one of the best essays—Aubrey
Beardsley—a masterly miniature of a marvellous draftsman—and the
redoubtable Whistler. On page 35 M. Blanche writes of the etchings
and lithographs of the American artists, that they were not worthy of
their reputation; that the Paris series frankly lean on Méryon, recall
his work; others are freer, occasionally pretty, though weak, without
character in their picturesque quality of vignette, a genre wherein
later Mariano Fortuny excelled! We are here far from Pennell’s dictum
that Whistler is the greatest etcher that ever lived. What does Jacques
Blanche know about etching? probably will be his comment if he reads the
critique in question.
And we should quite agree with the etcher if he should make some
remark; such one-sided verdict, despite the fact that M. Blanche is to
be listened to with respect when he talks of art and artists deserves
rebuke! It again confirms the attitude attributed to George Saintsbury
that all discussion of contemporaries is conversation, not criticism.
Mr. Pennell, who also slaughters the reputations of the living and dead,
might put this witticism in his pipe and smoke up. The late William M.
Laffan, a practical etcher, one who etched for his bread and butter,
as he assured us, wrote in the _Sun_ newspaper, of which he was the
proprietor at the time of Whistler’s death, that the plates of the etcher
Whistler would outlive Whistler the painter. Mr. Laffan, who possessed a
_flair_ for criticism, prophesied aright. He said too that there were no
such things as replicas, which is the truth. Many Whistler canvases are
sadly deteriorating, critical enthusiasm concerning them is cooling—the
artist Whistler is now seen not to be an isolated apparition but a
synthesis of his own enthralling self, based on the art of Courbet,
Fantin, Albert Moore, the Japanese and the inevitable Velasquez; but the
etchings and lithographs of this truly versatile genius, being things of
beauty, will be a joy forever. They are his legacy to the elect. And yet,
must the “grand manner” of line-engravings irretrievably vanish to make
place for the sketchy, fussy etching?
Not only is Brother Pennell—a brother to dragons!—narrow in his
estimates of all the great etchers, but he is unjust to workers in other
black-and-white mediums. Old-fashioned line-engraving is mechanical,
and was so tedious to execute that the process was abandoned for still
more mechanical though simpler methods. Not, however, till the patient
engravers had bequeathed to art a gallery of stately portraits and
landscapes, minutely, if somewhat elaborately, recorded. Etching, be it
never so fine, so personal, cannot compete with the masters of line,
because etching lacks depth and substance. It is improvisation at the
best; at its worst it is almost feline in its scratchings. Mezzotint,
too, is a noble art. It is often smudgy, to be sure, but it has tonal
splendor, which etching has not, despite the magical suggestion of tone
in the Whistler plates. After reading Mr. Pennell’s exposition of the
pains and perils consequent upon the production of a perfect etching, the
finished plates of Marc Antonio, Richard Earlom or Masson’s gray-haired
man, do not seem a whit more mechanical. There are tricks in all trades.
Whistler’s supremacy did not alone consist in his virtuosity with
the needle, but in his personality as poet and mystic. Rembrandt was
greater artist than etcher; in his days the manipulation of material
was not so consummate as during the Whistlerian epoch, yet he is by all
odds the bigger man. A rude scratch of his and you see the glories of
heaven, the gloom of hell. There is a fulness, a richness, a solidity,
an architectural quality in Méryon missing in Whistler, Pennell to
the contrary notwithstanding. In the evocation of the intangible, the
evanescent, of the exquisite, Whistler has never had a rival, and as a
technician he is foremost; but George Moore was not far astray when he
said that if “Jemmy” had been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted
like Velasquez. In the last analysis his work lacks weight, substance,
virile power, though not imagination, and that quintessential quality is
worth a wilderness of beefy, brilliant, magisterial canvases.
All this is beside the mark, which is the superb Pennell volume. Agree
with him or not, he writes with vigor, demolishing shams and humbuggery,
and his words, if often intemperate, are prompted by burning sincerity.
He is never smug nor self-satisfied. He sees through the hole in our
national millstone of art. His ideal is the linear, and at a time when
sloppy drawing, barbarous color and grotesque composition have become
our shibboleth, his warnings are salutary. His is the cult of beauty for
beauty’s sake, the only culture in art. Etching to him is the still small
voice of an art abused by amateurs, too often tortured by artists (you
think of the big plates of Frank Brangwyn). He is fair to the Bohemian,
Wenzel Hollar, who, to be seen at his best, one must go to Prague, to
the Hollareum, there in the Rudolphinium, where his amazing work may be
studied in its entirety.
Mr. Pennell pays a rather grudging tribute to Seymour Haden, while
admitting the beauty of his plate, Sunset in Ireland, and he warmed the
cockles of our heart by his discriminating praise of the splendid etcher
that was Félicien Rops. At the conclusion he peremptorily exclaims: “I
know of no other great etchers.” Oh, yes, you do, Joseph Pennell! You
are too modest by half. Demme, sir, as old Joseph Bagstock would say, old
Joey B., begad, sir, you know a chap named Pennell who sometimes etches
like an angel. And also lithographs. We’ll eat our hat if his scraped
mezzotint, Wrens’ City, isn’t a beautiful plate!
IN PRAISE OF PRINTS
(TO JOSEPH PENNELL)
The gallery is rather narrow, but long and lofty; the light is diffused
and gentle. A tiny staircase leads to mysterious retreats where,
Piranesi-like, may be descried other galleries, though not peopled
by the prisoners of the fantastic Italian etcher. A familiar voice
welcomes the visitor who, weary of the monotonous mobs on the avenue,
finds here a haven where, surrounded by the ingratiating arts of
black-and-white—mezzotinting, etching, lithograph and line-engraving—he
may soothe his soul and rest his bones. The color-scheme is harmonious.
A dark panelling, and for the smaller galleries a more cheerful though
neutral tone, is observed. Moving slowly about he sees some black spots
on the wall; at close range they resolve themselves into ingenious
patterns. Stacked in portfolios are prints. On large tables more of them
sprawl. In the rear room there is, perhaps, an exhibition of etchings
or mezzotints, but seldom of line-engravings. A young Scotsman shows
his mettle—the Scotch take to the needle as ducks do to grass. Why are
line-engravings never hung nowadays? You are told that taste has changed
since the golden age of engraving ruled our walls. And changed for the
worse, thinks the fanatic of pure line.
Yonder, above a huge bin, in which are stored rare prints, hangs the
Moses of Philippe de Champaigne, engraved by Edelinck. It is a largely
moulded composition. The Hebrew lawgiver, on whose noble features
linger the reflections of Jehovah’s divine illumination, the horns of
light emanating from Mount Sinai, holds the rod in one hand, supporting
with the other the table of the laws. A picture in the grand manner.
Therefore, to be passed by in favor of some cryptic scratches on a small
plate, a signed proof by an artistic nobody, who designs and etches
in a mediocre fashion. Yet his work is eagerly snapped up, while the
rhythmic line of Edelinck is not even looked at, rich as it is as an
interpretation or artistic performance. “Engraving is so mechanical,
don’t you think so!” is the usual reason advanced for the neglect of this
branch of black-and-white. But, by the same token, no more mechanical
than the myriads of fussy little plates of the etchers, for the most part
without distinction in style or technique. Nevertheless, etching is a
swifter method for registering illusion, and in all the arts—George Moore
says there are nine, not seven—the chief thing is to create illusion.
Etching rules. Why? Because an artist of overwhelming genius set upon
the art his seal. Because it is a consummate medium for expressing
personality, and in all the arts personality is the slogan of the hour.
We must bare our souls in our work, cry young folk; the rest, art
included, can go hang! But the question is whether these same souls are
worth the bother of such exposure. When Rembrandt or Méryon, Whistler,
or Pennell exhibited their personalities on their plates the result
was: primo, art; secundo, personalities. In a word, not even the perky,
cantankerous side of Whistler intervened between his art and his public;
the nobler phases of his character, and there were many, shone clear and
truthfully. The massive bulk of Rembrandt’s personality is reflected
in his work with the needle; yet what magnificent art is his! Also a
dangerous beacon in a stormy sea for lesser etchers. We love etching.
It is the most concise and delicate of all artistic stenography. The
scratched line, its symbol, is less complex than the convention of the
so-called “steel” engraver, who works in a denser, richer medium, despite
the allegation that his is a chilly art. So is sculpture chilly. All
depends on the man handling the chisel, or in engraving the wielder of
the burin. The richest of the mediums is copper mezzotinted, or scraped
plate. It sometimes gives muddy results. Etching has more personal charm;
line-engraving is chaster, loftier in style, because more objective.
If a certain formal rigidity or hardness may be urged against the less
personal art of line-engraving, what cannot be said of the thin, facile,
shallow impressionism of the etched plate? Above all else, structure is
lacking, and it is too often a vehicle for piffling anecdote, or the
stamping-ground of the superficial dauber. Mezzotint is not always a
satisfactory means of expression. It too is mainly reproductive, while
its seductive, velvety surfaces may easily degenerate into monotonous
formulas. Between Valentine Green and his interpretations of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, or Richard Earlom’s evocation of an incandescent forge, and the
apocalyptic visions of a John Martin, there is the wide and ineluctable
gulf of technical mastery. Martin may have been half-mad, like William
Blake—as are most mystics viewed in the cold light of worldly reason—but
he possessed vision; while Green and Earlom, accomplished copper-scrapers
as they were, only saw the superficies of things eternal. To-day John
Martin’s crude prints may be had for a penny, and the fantastic Piranesi
is a drug in the shops. Neither this mezzotinter nor etcher reveals that
mysterious “quality” essential in the arts.
It is quality, then, that appeals in etching and mezzotint. It was
quality that appealed when the specimen plates of the master engravers
were in vogue. Well and good. But why doesn’t that quality continue to
make the same appeal now to our fastidious taste as it did a half century
ago? Naturally enough, the answer is Fashion, which has decreed that
the grand old line-engravings be hung in crepuscular hallways. To be
sure, there is a corridor in the Pitti Palace, Florence, a sun-flooded
hallway upon which sing the marvels of lyric line-engravings. Fashion
says: admire the signed etching, coddle the impertinent remarque proof;
Fashion has set top-notch figures for the English mezzotinters of English
portraiture. By leaps and bounds the prices of Green and a few of his
contemporaries have been mounting, so that to own a Gainsborough or a Sir
Joshua portrait in mezzotint is to proclaim yourself a person of means.
Nor should there be a protest against these exalted prices. Rare art can
never be high enough; besides, the domain of mezzotinting will soon be as
bare of practitioners as that of line-engraving. S. Arlent Edwards is a
name that occurs to us in mezzotinting. Joseph Pennell’s essays in that
medium reveal his mastery; while the artist that is Timothy Cole, stands
solitary as probably the last of distinguished wood-engravers, as Mandel
may be said to have been the last of famous European line-engravers.
The once haughty elder sister of the arts graphic is now become their
Cinderella. Who but an anonymous minority cares for the stately engraved
pictures of the past? How their dignified style reproaches the heedless
haste of latter-day photographic reproductions! Yet, what modern
mechanical process can match the slowly executed plates of Mantegna,
Marc Antonio Ramondi, Albrecht Dürer, or Nanteuil—who engraved after
his own designs? From the finesse of the Behams to the majestic sweep
of Bervic, or the virtuosity of Antoine Masson—consider his head of
Brisacier, the Gray-Haired Man—has not every manner, every mood, every
technique been reproduced—rather, let us say, interpreted—in the terms of
line-engraving? The engraved plate can state as succinctly as the etched
the linear fretwork and silhouette of forms. Among other resources,
the engraved plate is a method of the disposing of mass. It is more
subtle than mezzotint in the indication of character, and is seldom so
monotonous; while to the impressionism and often insignificant patterns
of etching it opposes a static quality, opposes with its synthetic
qualities of the permanent, the majestic, the gracious, and the powerful.
As a medium it is as supple as either etching or scraped copper, though
in this attribute it yields to wood-engraving.
What cannot line-engraving do in the way of interpretation? Think of
the variety of technical styles and artistic individualities. Ambushed
behind every laboriously engraved “steel” plate—steel is only in use
since 1820—there lurks a personality. Think of Mantegna, a master of
line in his painting; of Lucas, of the quaint Martin Schongauer, of
Altdorfer, Wierix—who aped Rembrandt in his version of The Three Trees—of
Sadeler and Goltzius; of Caracci, Wille, Nanteuil, Raphael Morghen,
Visscher, with his Sleeping Cat and his Rat-Catcher; of the Drevets,
of William Sharp, Robert Strange, and Woolet, the English trio; and
George Friedrich Schmidt is still a name to conjure with. A litany
of names might be recited of engravers who have made masterpieces.
To-day, when we are in such a hurry to go nowhere to see nothing, the
lenten and aristocratic art of line-engraving has lost its glamour,
its significance. Nevertheless, a beautiful art it will always remain,
beautiful notwithstanding the fluctuations of fashion. We feel that
the pendulum of popular taste will surely swing back to this method
of black-and-white, despite its slow, painful process of production.
After an optical debauch in color, line is regaining its old supremacy.
What else meant the apparition of cubism but a revolt against a too
fluid impressionism! If this be true of easel-paintings it will come
truer of line-engraving. The Sisters Five should walk abreast, not
processionally—line, mezzotint, etching, wood-cutting and lithography are
their names. And no one of this family is handsomer, more stately, more
decorative, less “spotty” on a wall than the classics of line-engraving.
NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD
A distinguished Russian diplomat, a visitor now in America, has asked
us not to judge Russia too hastily; above all, not to abandon hopes for
her future. The deposition of the Romanovs could not be accomplished
without a social cataclysm and the presence of what Nicholas Murray
Butler has so happily called “an inverted autocracy,” that is to say,
contemporary Bolshevikism. But the newcomers, after tumbling over thrones
and dynasties, cannot be expected to halt at any half-way house of
outworn political expediency. Their slogan is: All or Nothing. Everything
is permitted. Precisely the device on the victorious standards of that
strange Old Man of the Mountain, from whose followers we derive the
sinister word “Assassin.” Yet we are fain to believe that, as nothing
long endures, the tremendous Russian muddle will be straightened out
sometime. In the bad old days when the Russian moujik was not singing
songs saturated with vodka, he spun legends shot through with the
fantastic or grim with the pain of life. In the European concert his
formidable bass voice made the voices of his neighbors seem thin and
piping. Napoleon prophesied that before the end of the nineteenth century
Europe would be either republican or cossack, and a Moscow journal has
proclaimed that the “twentieth century belongs to us.” One need not be
a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of a Russian for
his country is a veritable passion. And from lips parched by the desire
of liberty, though the Russian be persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, and
murdered, this passion is ever voiced with unabated intensity. What
eloquent apostrophes have their great writers made to their native land!
The youngest among the great nations, herself a nation with genius, she
must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. How
Turgénieff praised her noble tongue: “O! mighty Russian language!”...
Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the
Parisian, and a sojourner among English ideas. Ivan Turgénieff, a
Muscovite doubled by a Greek artist, was called a cosmopolitan by
Dostoievsky—that profound and sombre soul—and it was a frequent
reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was
not sufficiently national; whereas to western ears it once smacked too
much of the Kalmuck. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered from the same
criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. The
case of Modeste Moussorgsky is altogether different. If Russian music,
the organized musical speech of the nation, owes much to Schumann,
Berlioz, and Liszt, nevertheless Michael Glinka was its father. Like
Weber, he lovingly plucked from his native soil its wild flowers of
melody, and gave them an operatic setting in his Ruslan and Life for
the Czar. In his turn and representing the elder school are Darjomisky
and Serov, while with New Russia blazoned on their banners follow César
Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balikirev, Glazounov, Stcherbatchev,
Rachmaninov, Arensky, Moussorgsky, and, last not least, Scriabin.
It might prove interesting to compare the cosmopolitanism of Tschaikovsky
with Turgénieff’s. George Moore insists with Celtic obstinacy that
Turgénieff is the greatest master of fiction, greater even than Flaubert,
because his art is effortless. Certainly, the Russian is the most
artistic among novelists. Tschaikovsky was suspiciously regarded by the
lesser native choir, while the big men, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and
Tolstoy had an army of imitators, who wore their blouses untucked in
their trousers. It was a symbol. Their watchword was: We are going to the
People! From the Intelligentsia, the students, to the peasant himself,
this ominous cry was heard. It is still sounded. Its echoes are in
Western ears. The Great White Czar would not heed the warning. Going to
the People is a phrase indicating a savage reaction against cosmopolitan
influences; Russia had successively suffered from the invasions of
English, French, and German ideas, customs, manners, costumes. The rabid
Slavophilist would have none of these. He disliked Italian pictures,
loathed German philosophy, despised French literature, and hated English
politics. Yet, from these seemingly disparate elements was born a
national consciousness, a national culture. Its eclecticism caused its
disintegration.