PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING

When an etcher of Joseph Pennell’s caliber talks about his art it behooves both critic and public to sit up and listen. Mr. Pennell is endowed with a special gift for making people sit up. He loves to startle. He is occasionally choleric, he indulges in righteous indignation over the blindness of critics and fumes betimes because of the indifference of the world at large concerning the finer shades of art. Nevertheless, he always says something pertinent, even when it runs contrary to popular opinion, or sneers at critical canons. He is well within his rights as an artist to attack professional critics, for critics and their criticism are a perpetual nuisance—an incontrovertible statement that will, we are sure, be smilingly indorsed by the majority of the pesky critters. In his newly published and magnificently illustrated Etchers and Etching, Mr. Pennell has rendered a genuine service to students and amateurs, for not only does he reveal the secrets of his prison house, but he also reveals with a frankness that is fascinating his opinions of other etchers as compared with his god, Whistler, and incidentally tells his readers that if they do not agree with him they are unvarnished damphools!

Bully old Joe! He is the joy of honest reviewers and the terror of them that are not firmly grounded in their artistic technique. Herein he puts himself through all his familiar paces. Of all the graphic arts, etching is the most superior! Of all etchers, living or dead, James McNeill Whistler is the greatest! From this supreme judgment there is no appeal. And the curious part is that Mr. Pennell gives you chapter and verse to back up his argument. In all that pertained to the delicate and difficult art of etching, Whistler was the master. Not Rembrandt, who was careless as to the printing of his plates, careless as to finesse, and not given to slicking up his work; not Méryon, who was, according to Pennell, an indifferent etcher, and no artist—should be mentioned in company with the peerless Whistler. There is but one Allah in etching, and Pennell is his prophet. Salaam alaiekum! Rembrandt and Whistler? The Apocalypse and the Butterfly!

There is no denying the enthusiasm of an expert. And there is no denial of the proposition that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in etching as in criticism. Yet there is something to be said for the much-abused critics. Artists who discuss their art are sometimes biassed, to put it mildly. The principal critical pronouncements that have endured were not made by professionals; on the contrary, such writers as Winckelmann, Goethe, Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire—especially Baudelaire—Zola (rather negligible), Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geoffroy, Huysmans, Mauclair, Charles Morice, Octave Mirbeau, R. A. M. Stevenson, George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Sturge Moore, Bernhard Berenson, John Van Dyke, W. C. Brownell, Royal Cortissoz, and others, have contributed more to the right understanding of the plastic arts than any opposing list of painters, sculptors and engravers you may assemble. Sift names and opinions, and for one Fromentin, one Whistler, one Reynolds, you will find a hundred writers who, non-professional as they were and are, have considerably added to our enlightenment in matters artistic.

Not all critics are “men who have failed in literature and art,” as 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!