PART II

SEYMOUR HADEN IN AMERICA

The former chapter of my article on Sir Seymour Haden referred entirely to my experiences with him in Europe; this second and concluding portion will contain nothing except an account of his sayings and doings during his visit to the United States in the year 1882. The purpose of his American visit was to expound and vindicate the importance of original etching as a fine art. This he did by delivering a series of lectures on the subject, and these lectures, in the main, were very well received.

Being a born and case-hardened controversialist he soon found out that in America no man’s unproved _ipse dixit_, however eminent he might be, was dutifully accepted as it would have been in one of the older civilizations of Europe, and so it came about that several unprofitable controversies were hotly waged on both sides. Seymour Haden was by nature pugnacious and “toplofty,” and such an attitude went down badly in America. But, all the same, the man himself was treated with distinguished consideration here, and his lectures did genuine good to the cause of true art. He lectured in all our principal cities from New York to Chicago, and although when he landed here I think he had very few personal acquaintances (except myself), yet when he sailed back to England he took with him the cordial friendship and good will of many Americans of the right sort.

His first lecture was delivered before a distinguished audience in Chickering Hall, Fifth Avenue, New York. He had plenty of voice to make his auditors hear him; but his lecture dragged considerably--for a peculiarly British reason: it is known to some of us that in an Englishman’s public oration he is not genteel or distinguished if he speaks freely and fluently. No, no; he must befog and entangle his words with all sorts of hesitations and amendments. It is the same in the British House of Commons. I do not mean such master orators as Gladstone was, but the public speech of the average British member,--let us call him Sir Huddleston Fuddleston--sounds like this: “The honorable, hum--the honorable and gallant member from--ha--hum--from Hull, has been good enough to--a--um--to _say_--etc.”

Well, Seymour Haden modeled his oratory on this preposterous but genteel British usage; and yet, in private conversation, I have never known a man who used more elegant and appropriate language than he. On the day following that of the lecture, I received a visit from my kind and valued friend the Right Reverend Monsignor Doane, who was a genuine lover of fine prints, and he said to me: “Well, I heard your English friend last evening humming and hawing through his lecture.” Soon afterward I had the opportunity of bringing these two distinguished men together, and after that, during his yearly visit to England, the monsignor used to be a welcome and honored guest of Sir Seymour and Lady Haden. The artist’s lectures in Boston were listened to with earnest attention and he was the guest of honor at a reception given at the St. Botolph Club; but even there storms and tempests arose. He quarreled with the one eminent American whom, the rest of us would think, nobody could quarrel with,--namely, Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was all about a “fool” difference of opinion on some question of medical ethics and usages in America as compared with England.

Before the evening of his reception at the St. Botolph Club, Seymour Haden procured a list of the principal personages whom he was to meet there. He brought it to me, and said: “Now, what should I _know_ about these people?” I wrote down for him as many notes as I could, and when he met the Bostonians, I was astonished to see how well he had coached himself about them. On his return to New York, he received a great number of letters. He was staying at the old Hotel Brunswick, Fifth Avenue, and every morning I had to go there and tell him “who was who” among the writers of the letters. One day he was called down to the parlor by a message that a lady wished to see him. He went down and when he came back to his room carrying a card in his hand, he said to me, “Well, I certainly am in an extraordinary country. That visitor, whom I never knew, is evidently a lady, and she has invited me to come and spend a week with her husband and herself at Yonkers.” Glancing at the card, I read the name of Mrs. James B. Colgate, and said to Seymour Haden, “I should certainly advise you to accept,” and I went on to say that it was easy enough for a stranger from England to see our public show places, big hotels, etc., but not so easy to get an entrée to the home of a really nice American family. Seymour Haden accepted the invitation and spent a week with Mr. and Mrs. Colgate. In those years, I myself lived in Yonkers, and I called on him at the Colgate house the day after his arrival there. The eminent banker showed us into his library, and leaving us alone he closed the door. The English visitor, first looking around to see that there was no other person present, said to me in a sort of whisper: “I am very comfortable here, with but one serious drawback. I have been in the habit, all my life, of taking wine with my dinner; but last evening, what do you suppose they gave me in the place of wine?--_milk!_” This was about nine o’clock at night, and when I got home I stated the case to my dear old mother. She laughed a little wickedly, and said, “I think I can help your friend in this case.” We happened to have some very good sherry. The old lady got a large flat bottle, filled it with the wine, corked it and put it into an innocent-looking pasteboard box, telling me to take it to him. Before leaving my home, I wrote a brief note to Seymour Haden saying that the package which I had to deliver to him must be opened only in the privacy of his own chamber. The Colgates were total abstainers of so pronounced a kind that when Mr. Colgate rented any house of his in Yonkers, he made a condition in the lease that no intoxicants of any kind were ever to be received in that house. Further than that, one of his principles was, not only never to drink wine or spirits, but never to touch or carry them. When I got back to Mr. Colgate’s house, it was ten o’clock at night, and all the lights in the big house were extinguished and the doors locked. I rang and rang at the bell, and at last Mr. Colgate himself, wearing trousers and slippers, opened the door. I had to manufacture a small fiction, which recalls Sir Walter Scott’s couplet:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive.

Mr. Colgate said to me rather fretfully that all the household had retired, and that Mr. Seymour Haden must wait until the morning. I said to him in reply, that he would do me a great favor, if when he was passing his guest’s chamber door, he would knock at it and deliver the package, and this Mr. Colgate consented to do. Some days later a reception was given to Seymour Haden at the Lotos Club, Fifth Avenue, and I accompanied him from Yonkers to New York on that occasion. When Mr. Haden found himself safe in the train, he said to me: “I couldn’t have slept a wink except for that excellent sherry that your mother sent me, but I took deucéd good care to carry away the empty bottle in my bag.” I remember that from the train we saw the gorgeous sight of the sun setting behind the Palisades, and mirrored in the Hudson River, and Mr. Haden said to me, with something like reproach in his voice: “Now, why have I never been told of the beauty of all this?” Later on, he said to me, looking about in the crowded train: “Now, isn’t it melancholy to think that nobody among all these people, except myself (and perhaps you), has the slightest sense of the beauty of this magnificent sunset!” I was tempted to say to him that he had no right to assume such callous insensibility on the part of the Americans, but though I thought it, I did not say it. Seymour Haden’s reception at the Lotos Club was a notable function. I remember that the President, the Hon. Whitelaw Reid, made a very graceful speech in honor of his guest, and I recall vividly the marvelous cleverness of a very young man who had been invited to entertain the company. One of this young man’s monologues represented an intimate talk between three Italian opera singers, the soprano, the tenor, and the basso; the three continually interrupting one another. The speaking of the young man was in “fake” Italian, and the three speaking voices were admirably differentiated. I inquired who this young man was, and was told that he was the son of the famous oratorio singer, Madame Rudersdorf of Boston, that his name was Richard Mansfield, and that he was studying for the stage. I then uttered a prophecy that that young man would be a great actor later on; and so he was.

After his return from Boston, the artist spent several weeks in New York, and while he was there, I arranged for him the first public exhibition of his etchings which was ever made in America. The New York press took up the subject with enthusiasm, and every important newspaper printed a long review of the artist and his work. I collected all of these very laudatory articles, and took them to Mr. Haden at the Hotel Brunswick. Next day he said to me, “Do you know that these reviews of the New York press are distinctly abler and more intelligent than if they had been written in London?” He added, “I wish you would pay my particular compliments to the gentleman who wrote the review in the New York _World_; that article in particular I found to be admirable.” He was surprised when he saw me begin to laugh, but I explained to him that the “gentleman” in question was a lady, and the article which he so greatly admired was from the pen of Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer.

One very seldom finds that the imaginative and creative artist is also endowed with a logical and judicial cast of mind. It was so with Seymour Haden. He had brought from England a large collection of excellent lantern-slides to illustrate these lectures by means of a stereopticon, and in the lecturer’s zeal to glorify original etching at the expense of prints done by any other method, he had procured one lantern slide of the beautiful little portrait which Rembrandt had etched of himself, the complete print of which is hardly bigger than a postage stamp. It was the _Rembrandt à trois moustaches_. Alongside of this, Mr. Haden had printed a morsel of the same size, taken from a crude and unimportant part of the foreground of William Sharp’s famous line-engraving of the _Holy Family_, after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Thus this special pleader, Haden, displayed an etching in its entirety, and less than one-hundredth part of a line-engraving of very large size. Wherever, during his lectures, this illustration was exhibited by a stereopticon, there was a universal outcry against the unfairness of it. People all, with one accord, declared that if the artist wanted to confront and contrast etching with line-engraving, fairness would require the lecturer to have chosen two prints of the same size; but there was no “budging” Seymour Haden, when he had formed an opinion.

While in New York, he visited the exhibition of paintings at the National Academy of Design, and was escorted through the galleries by the late James D. Smillie, N.A. When his eye fell upon a certain painting, he suddenly stopped as if he were paralyzed. “Who did that picture?” “It is the work of one of our New York artists, Miss So-and-So.” “Why do you allow such dreadful things on your walls?” “Well,” said Mr. Smillie, “we like to exemplify various phases in art.” “Hum,” rejoined Seymour Haden, while glaring at the picture; “she ought to be _disemboweled_!”

Of at least one of our well-known American artists, Seymour Haden expressed the strongest admiration. This was the late John Lafarge, N.A., and he also spoke with enthusiasm of the original American etchings of thirty years ago, the work of such men as Stephen Parrish, Charles A. Platt, Peter Moran, and Joseph Pennell. On seeing a very large, intricate plate by Mr. Parrish, Mr. Haden made the remark to me, “That young man does not know what the sense of fatigue in making a picture is.” Even at this period, Seymour Haden was known throughout Europe as being the judge _par excellence_ of a fine print, and he was also recognized as an admirable judge of paintings.

While on this subject of Haden’s learned judgment of pictures, I will record what he remarked to me after he had visited Niagara for the first time. What he said was: “No artist, except Turner, should have ever dared to attempt making a picture of the Falls of Niagara.”

One of Seymour Haden’s exceptionally good days was the Sunday which he spent in visiting that famous art collector and admirable man, James L. Claghorn, of Philadelphia. On that occasion, I myself was included as a sort of “make-weight.” The Englishman, with genuine zeal, went through Mr. Claghorn’s collection of prints, and he wrote with pencil on several of them that they were exceptionally fine.

On another side Mr. Haden excelled as a judge, and that was in the matter of first-class food and first-class cooking. At lunch, our host treated us to a delicious dish of terrapin. Seymour Haden found it wonderfully good and declared that not only had he never tasted terrapin before, but he had never heard of the dish. “Oh, yes,” said I to him; “you certainly have heard of terrapin; don’t you remember at church on Sundays, when they sing the ‘Te Deum,’ they sing, ‘Terrapin and Seraphim.’” “Oh, tut, tut,” said he, “I want to hear no irreverence.”

Seymour Haden had ranked as a very able physician. An incident occurred while we were at Mr. Claghorn’s house which shows how wise he was in this respect: Mr. Claghorn was a huge and corpulent man of about sixty, but he was full of force and energy. While we were in his library he got up and bustled out on some errand, and Seymour Haden said to me: “Your friend will not live long, and when he dies he will go off very suddenly.” I was shocked on hearing such an unexpected prophecy, and I asked Mr. Haden how long Mr. Claghorn was likely to live. In answer he said, “Just about two years.” Two years later, within ten days of the time Haden had designated, Mr. Claghorn suddenly fell dead.

Still continuing the subject of Mr. Haden’s critical judgment in dining. I may mention that wherever he went, he would never partake, at a hotel, of a _table d’hôte_ meal. He insisted on selecting particular dishes which he wished for, and he had them specially cooked for him. On his return from Cincinnati, he told me that while there he met my own dear friend, the late Herman Goepper, and he had given him, at a club, the very best, and best-served, dinner that he had ever partaken of.

Seymour Haden’s course of lectures at Chicago was a great success, and a very notable reception was tendered to him. During the course of that reception, a very influential Chicago lady marched up and said in a loud voice: “Why don’t you _educate_ your women in England?” “I know what you mean,” said the Englishman, “but we don’t like to have our English women crammed with a lot of abstruse _isms_ and _ologies_.” Another lady, who thought the English guest had been rather unfairly attacked, said to him, “Now, Mr. Haden, can’t you attack her in return?” “Well, yes,” said he: “in America, you don’t know how to make tea, and your table knives will not cut anything.” Another little dispute arose in Detroit. Haden had arrived late at night, very much fatigued, at the Russell House. At about eight o’clock in the morning he was awakened from a much-needed sleep by a sound of hammering and grinding in the wall outside his window. He got up, raised the window, and saw two men boring a hole into the front wall of the hotel, for the purpose of inserting an iron bar from which a sign was to be swung. Mr. Haden remonstrated at being disturbed. The two mechanics answered that they were “on that job” and that they were going to do it. Then, as the _Detroit Free Press_ related the incident, the elderly gentleman, dressed in night-clothes and a nightcap, had pushed out both his arms, seized the offending and disturbing crowbar, hauled it into his room and shut down the window. Very soon after, the proprietor of the hotel came, knocked at his guest’s door, and said that the crowbar which had been seized was not his property and that he would get into trouble if it were not given up at once, but Seymour Haden before giving it up stipulated that he was not to be disturbed with any more noise until such time as he was ready to leave his bed.

It will be noticed that, while in my former article I called him Sir Seymour Haden, in the present one I call him plain Mister. This was because it was after his return from America to England that Queen Victoria gave him his title, and although in London he had a large medical practice he never was even Doctor Haden. In England a surgeon, however eminent, is never addressed as Doctor.

This change to a title of nobility reminds me of a couplet in Thackeray’s fine Irish ballad, “Mr. Molony’s Account of the Ball”:

There was Lord Crowhurst, I knew him first When only Misther Pips he was.

During his stay in America he learned to like our people greatly, and it was his intention to make us a second visit and to bring his charming American wife along with him; but this purpose of his was never carried out.

Shortly before leaving our shores, he said to me: “One thing alone would render it impossible for me ever to reside permanently in the United States, and that is the intolerable and brutal insolence of the lower classes.” To this I made answer: “But, Mr. Haden, in America we have no ‘lower classes.’ What you suffered from these people was really your own fault. It is all very well in England for a fine gentleman to bully and denounce the cabman, the railway-porter, and the servants at hotels, but it will not do here, and no American, however eminent, ever does it.”

When Seymour Haden returned to England he took with him the genuine good will of many Americans, and the lasting friendship of not a few.

THE WATER-COLORS AND DRAWINGS OF SIR SEYMOUR HADEN, P.R.E.

BY H. NAZEBY HARRINGTON

Author of “The Engraved Work of Sir Francis Seymour Haden, P.R.E.”

As an etcher the work of Sir Seymour Haden is known to all lovers of art the wide world over, and not least in the United States, but his general capacity as an artist in other forms of expression is less well known, partly from lack of opportunity and partly from the very limited amount of material.

It must never be forgotten that art was not the main business of his life; it was but an occasional and fitful relaxation in a life devoted to another profession and full of other and varied interests. The wonder is, not that his artistic work was so limited, but that it was so great and so successful.

When a medical student in Paris, instead of spending his evenings in the usual frivolities of the Quartier Latin, he attended the classes of the Government School of Art, which were held in the same building as the School of Medicine. This was done, not from any positive love for art, but rather with the fixed idea that such study would train his powers of observation and make the hands more alert to obey the impulses of the will, and in this way help him in his surgical work. What he dissected he drew, what he drew he modeled, and in this way obtained a remarkable knowledge of anatomy and some facility in the technique of graphic art.

In this way he got into the habit of using drawing as a sort of shorthand, and so, when in 1844 he traveled in Italy, his diaries were filled with sketches rather than verbal descriptions--sketches that unfortunately have been too generously scattered.

While in Italy he met, and spent some time in the company of, Duval le Camus, a capable French artist who painted a good deal in water-color, and from him no doubt he picked up some knowledge of that medium. In Naples and its neighborhood they spent many happy days sketching together.

During the next fourteen or fifteen years Seymour Haden had not much time for the practice of art. His professional work took up all his time and vigor, but he always took a great interest in art and artists and counted many artists among his friends. He was appointed Surgeon to the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, and became a collector of etchings by the old masters, not merely for the sake of acquisition but rather for the purpose of study and comparison. He also became the possessor of many pictures and water-color drawings, amongst others of several by Turner; and so, when in 1858 his young brother-in-law J. M. Whistler returned from France with his recently etched plates and his inciting tales of work in the Paris studios, Haden became readily infected and took up etching again, with the result we all know. Thenceforward, whenever a rare afternoon’s holiday could be stolen, or a few moments spared between the casts of the line during the annual vacation devoted to fishing, or on the rarer occasions of a continental holiday, the copper plate or the sketching block was brought into use. And so we find sketches done on the Thames and the Ribble, the Teivy, the Test and the Spey; in Holland and in Germany, in Spain and Madeira; at Chatsworth, in the old towns of Rye and Winchelsea, and above all in the fascinating Isle of Purbeck--sketches done for his own pleasure or for his friends, with never a thought of placing them before either the critic or the purchaser.

The earliest sketch that I have seen is one dated 1841. It is in pen and sepia and represents an early morning execution outside the Old Bailey. At a first glance it might be mistaken for an etching by Cruikshank. It measures only three and one half by two and one fourth inches, but is masterly in its drawing, and marvelous in its suggestiveness of a large crowd.

The drawings done in 1844 in France and Italy vary from mere thumb-nail sketches to comparatively finished drawings. Some of them in their carefulness and decision resemble the early drawings of Turner. Two or three figure sketches, notably portraits of Duval le Camus and the Marquis de Belluno (two of his companions), are very expressive and full of character.

While in Rome, through the introduction of the Marquis de Belluno, Haden had many interviews with Pope Gregory XVI, and during two or three of them he took the opportunity of sketching, on one of his shirt cuffs, a somewhat elaborate portrait of His Holiness. The Pope very kindly professed not to notice what the artist was doing until the portrait was finished. He then quietly remarked that he “now understood why M. Haden had attended at three audiences without a change of linen.” One would give much to see this portrait (which Sir Seymour always said was an excellent one), but it has disappeared, having been lent to a friend and never returned.

The drawings done after 1858 were much broader in style than the early sketches, and vary in method, being in lead pencil, pen and ink, chalk, charcoal, and water-color. Thrown off in a moment of inspiration, as a poet would throw off a lyric, he chose the material which chanced to be at hand. Some are on sheets of writing paper, and many valuable ones are on perishable blotting paper. Here and there among these “slight” sketches are specimens that in their economy of line, their stamp of decision, and their interpretative insight, suggest the work of his great master Rembrandt. What strikes one above all is their vigor and “bigness.” There is no dainty indecision about them; they go straight for the heart of the subject, giving the vigorous impression of a vigorous mind. They do not give all that could be said on the subject, but they give all that he feels is best worth saying. They make an intellectual appeal to the mind and do not tire with unnecessary platitudes.

The water-color drawings show a good but scarcely a great colorist. They are in the “grand” manner and the best of them have a fine atmospheric quality, as in the _Dinkley Ferry_ here, which reminds one of a good De Wint. The _Course of the Ribble_ is probably one of the most finished drawings he ever did, and shows to the highest degree of what he was capable in this medium when time allowed and when loving care was exercised. It is wonderfully mellow, good in color, and true in drawing, but has less of the white heat of inspiration:--I envy the fortunate possessor! The _Lancashire River_, a drawing of the same subject as the etching with the same title, is perhaps his finest piece of color.

But it is in his large charcoal drawings of the end of the seventies that he rises to his greatest heights,--in the sketches done around Swanage in the south of Dorsetshire, and at Chatsworth, and two or three drawn from the stores of his memory. What a revelation it was to me when--I scarcely like to count how many years ago--I first passed into that peaceful little “garden room” that looked out upon the old-time bowling green at Woodcote Manor and saw around its walls some four and twenty of these large charcoal drawings! It was as though some new planet swam into my ken! I had never seen so much suggested with such simple means. Two or three hours’ work with a sheet of rough paper, a piece of charcoal, and a mezzotint scraper! Heath and woodland, sea cliff and river glen, radiant light and quivering mist, houses sleeping in the sun and mysterious shadows lurking in the corners of the quaint old kitchen or the romantic ruin, or lying full length before the giant boles of centuries-old oaks; all suggested with equal ease and magic mastery! Many and many an hour did I afterward spend in that little treasure-house, ever finding fresh beauties revealed to me, and learning through them to see in Nature much that had previously been hidden from me. Haden’s etchings had proved him to be a great master in line, these drawings proved him to be almost equally great in tone. What particularly strikes one is the variety and transparency of his shadows. They are not black patches, but receding planes of varying densities. And what atmospheric quality they have! Driving mist and slanting rain, and sun rays penetrating the moisture-laden air, as though by a magician, are fixed for us on paper.

The origin of many of these drawings has been described by Sir Seymour himself in an article written some years ago in _Harper’s Magazine_, “On the Revival of Mezzotint as a Painter’s Art.” With the idea that he could use mezzotint as he had done etching, face to face with Nature, he had taken a previously grounded plate to the bank of the River Test and attempted to scrape upon it what he saw before him. The result was the plate numbered 234 in my catalogue (_The Test at Longparish No. 3_), interesting, but not wholly satisfactory and incomplete in intention. This proved that, unlike etching, mezzotint was too slow a process with which to work from nature at a single sitting, and a return on a later day only proved that the natural effect had changed, or that the artist was in a different phase of mind or not in the humor to complete the original impression. So instead of taking a grounded plate out with him he took a sheet of rough paper which had been rubbed all over with charcoal, this black surface corresponding to the mezzotint ground upon the copper plate, and on this prepared surface he scraped away the lights. As will be readily understood, this softer material could be much more rapidly manipulated than the harder copper, and so he found that in two or three hours the desired effect could be obtained. His intention was to reproduce in the studio and at his leisure the effects of these studies upon the copper plate. And so, with modifications, in several instances he did--I say _with modifications_, for it was almost impossible for him to closely copy even his own work. The _Salmon Pool on the Spey_ provided the _motif_ for the mezzotint plate with the same title (H. 250), and more closely of the little _Salmon River_, which served as a frontispiece to Dr. Hamilton’s book on “Fly Fishing.” The _Encombe Woods_ supplied the subject for the two plates H. 218 and 219, which were intended to be a combination of etching and mezzotint, but the latter part of the project was never carried out. This too was the case with _Early Morning_ (H. 244) and _By the Waters of Babylon_ (H. 245), _Ars Longa, Vita Brevis_ (H. 210) and _A Study of Rocks_ (H. 211), all of which were etched or dry-pointed from charcoal drawings. The only important plates inspired by these drawings that were fully completed, were _Evening Fishing, Longparish_ (H. 239), _An Early Riser_ (H. 240), _Grayling Fishing_ (H. 241), and _The Pillar of Salt_ (H. 246); but they are sufficient to prove what a series of masterpieces we have lost through the dimming of the eye and the numbing of the hand by relentless Age.

However, we must be thankful for what we have, and the regret one has that these drawings should be scattered in different directions, is tempered by the hope that by one of the marvelous photographic processes of to-day this wonderful series of visions may be reproduced, and so again brought together for all of us who love beautiful things, and who reverence the master who produced them.

MERYON AND BAUDELAIRE

BY WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY

All French poets of the middle part of the nineteenth century were interested, theoretically at least, in painting and the graphic arts, which afforded them an ideal and an example of objectivity for their own verbal representations of reality. From Théophile Gautier, godfather of Parnassianism, who reserved for his prose the full resources of his superb Turneresque palate, to Verlaine, creator of decadence, with his limpid and lovely _aquarelles_, pictorial preoccupations were, on the whole, paramount. Charles Baudelaire almost alone appears, in part, an exception to this rule; but if, in his work, the purely visual element is less pronounced than in that of most of his contemporaries--if the images of sight yield there in number and in clear evocative power to those of sound and of scent, thereby preluding the way for a new poetic dispensation--he nevertheless fits into the late romantic tradition, if only by reason of his keen æsthetic appreciation of the arts of design, and of his association, as a disinterested friend or sympathetic critic, with many of the most illustrious artists of the age. Himself a rebel and an outlaw in the domain of orthodox taste, though with a distinct tinge of the traditional, he was especially drawn to the insurgent leader, like Delacroix, his championship of whom is as famous as his espousal of the cause of Wagner’s music in Paris, or to the solitary _attardé_ of romanticism who, like Constantin Guys, worked out his own salvation in his own way. It is not that he did not welcome new movements in all their collectivity of talents and temperaments; but these, to find favor with him, must be vouched for by unmistakable evidences of creative vigor and originality in the individual artists, not merely by plausible theories or pretentious dogmas professed scholastically. Intellectual distinctions counted but little with him in matters of art, and a new way of rendering what was actually seen or felt seemed to him of infinitely more importance than any merely academic discussion as to what an artist should or should not look for, deliberately, in order to put it into or leave it out of his pictures.

Thus it was that while he shrugged his shoulders at the realists who were not really observers, he turned an attentive eye to the work of the group of young painter-etchers who, about 1859, were beginning to attract attention in the salons. Baudelaire thought highly of etching because it afforded an opportunity for “the most clean-cut possible translation of the character of the artist,” and he was attracted to those who were engaged in reviving this almost obsolete medium, because they gave clear proof in their work of that personal force and distinction which he valued above all else, and which he was always on the alert to discover in the productions of the new and the unknown.

In his article, _Peintres et Aqua-fortistes_, included in the volume of his collected works entitled _L’Art Romantique_, Baudelaire mentions the following etchers as among those through whose efforts the medium was to recover its ancient vitality: Seymour Haden, Manet, Legros, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Meryon, Millet, Daubigny, Saint-Marcel, Jacquemart, and Whistler. With at least two of these, on the evidence of his published correspondence,[2] he had personal relations: Bracquemond and Meryon. The name of the former occurs frequently in the letters with reference to a device which Baudelaire wished to adopt as a frontispiece to the second edition of _Fleurs du Mal_. The idea of this device came to him, as he writes to Félix Nadar (May 16, 1859), while turning the leaves of the _Histoire des Danses Macabres_, by Hyacinthe Langlois. It was to be “an arborescent skeleton, the legs and the ribs forming the trunk, the arms extended in the form of a cross breaking into leaf and shoot, and protecting several rows of poisonous plants arranged in rising tiers of pots, as in a greenhouse.” In casting about for an artist to execute this design, Baudelaire mentions and dismisses Doré, Penguilly--whom he afterward wished he had taken--and Célestin Nanteuil. Finally, perhaps at the instance of his publisher, Poulet-Malassis, he chose Bracquemond,--a most unhappy selection as it turned out, for that artist was either unable or unwilling to grasp the poet’s conception, and the plate which he etched for this purpose was not used. A few proofs were pulled, however, and impressions in both the first and second states of the plate are now in the Samuel P. Avery collection in the New York Public Library.

[2] Charles Baudelaire: Lettres, 1841-1866. Paris, 1907.

Baudelaire’s negotiations with the “terrible Bracquemond,” as he came to call him, were carried on for the most part through Poulet-Malassis, which perhaps affords a partial explanation of the misunderstanding concerning the _macabre_ frontispiece. And, although he speaks in one letter of having met the artist and repeated verbally the instructions which he had already given, with characteristically minute attention to detail, in writing, no such special interest attaches to this meeting, by no means unique, as to that between Baudelaire and Meryon which occurred about the same time, and to which we owe one of the most vivid and fantastic presentments we possess of that mad genius. In his _Salon of 1859_, Baudelaire had written of Meryon with an enthusiasm which awoke a responsive reverberation in the breast of Victor Hugo.

“Since you know M. Meryon,” the latter wrote to Baudelaire (April 29, 1860), “tell him that his splendid etchings have dazzled me. Without color, with nothing save shadow and light, chiaroscuro pure and simple and left to itself: that is the problem of etching. M. Meryon solves it magisterially. What he does is superb. His plates live, radiate, and think. He is worthy of the profound and luminous page with which he has inspired you.”

This page, which Baudelaire afterward incorporated in his _Peintres et Aqua-fortistes_, where he speaks further of Meryon as “the true type of the accomplished _aqua-fortiste_,” and praises the famous perspective of San Francisco as his masterpiece, does, indeed, betray the subtle penetration of the poet into the very spirit of his fellow-artist: “By the severity, the delicacy, and the certitude of his design, M. Meryon recalls what is best in the old _aqua-fortistes_. I have rarely seen represented with more poetry the natural solemnity of a great capital. The majesties of accumulated stone, _the spires pointing a finger to the skies_, the obelisks of industry vomiting their thick clouds of smoke heavenward, the prodigious scaffoldings of monuments under repair, relieved against the solid mass of architecture, their tracery of a filmy and paradoxical beauty, the misty sky, charged with wrath and with rancor, the depths of the perspectives augmented by the thought of the dramas contained therein,--none of the complex elements of which the dolorous and glorious setting of civilization is composed is here forgotten.”

Grateful for such recognition on the part of a distinguished man of letters who was also accepted as one of the leading art critics of the day in Paris, Meryon evidently wrote to Baudelaire, thanking him, and asking permission to call; for in his letter of January 8, 1860, to Poulet-Malassis, the poet writes as follows:

“What I write to-night,” he begins, “is worth the trouble of writing: M. Meryon has sent me his card, and we have met. He said to me: _You live in a hotel whose name must have attracted you, because of the relation it bears, I presume, to your tastes._--Then I looked at the envelope of his letter. On it was ‘Hôtel de _Thèbes_,’ and yet his letter reached me.”

It is necessary to interrupt the letter at this point to explain what is obscure in the foregoing allusion for one not familiar with Baudelaire’s haunts and homes in Paris. He was living at this time, not in the Hôtel Pimodan where he dwelt so long, and where he held those famous meetings described by Gautier in his introductory essay to _Fleurs du Mal_, but in modest quarters in the Hotel de Dieppe, 22, rue d’Amsterdam, whose principal advantage was its proximity to the Gare de l’Ouest whence he took the train for Honfleur on his frequent visits to his mother. Thus, through a bizarre confusion between the two words, _Dieppe_ and _Thèbes_, is explained Meryon’s curious mistake in addressing his letter to Baudelaire.

The poet proceeds with the following report of their conversation: “In one of his great plates,[3] he [Meryon] has substituted for a little balloon a flight of birds of prey, and, when I remarked to him that it was lacking in verisimilitude to put so many eagles into a Parisian sky, he replied that what he had done was not devoid of foundation in fact, since _ces gens-là_ [the imperial government] had often released eagles so as to study the presages, according to the rite,--and that this had been printed in the newspapers, even in _Le Moniteur_.

[3] The _Pont-au-Change_.

“I must tell you that he makes no attempt to conceal his respect for all superstitions, but he explains them badly, and he sees cabal everywhere.

“He drew my attention to the fact, in another of his plates, that the shadows cast by one of the masonry constructions of the _Pont-Neuf_[4] on the lateral wall of the quay represented exactly the profile of a sphinx; that this had been, on his part, quite involuntary, and that he had only remarked this singularity later, on recalling that this design had been made a short time before the _coup d’état_. But the Prince is the real person who, by his acts and his visage, bears the closest resemblance to a _sphinx_.

[4] An error of Baudelaire’s. The plate is the _Petit-Pont_.

“He asked me if I had read the tales of a certain Edgar Poe. I answered that I knew them better than any one else, and for a good reason. He then asked me in a very emphatic manner, if I believed in the reality of this Edgar Poe. I naturally asked him to whom he attributed all his tales. He replied: ‘_To a society of men of letters who are very clever, very powerful, and who are in touch with everything._’ And here is one of his reasons: ‘The _Rue_ Morgue. _I have made a design of the_ Morgue.--_An_ Orang-ou-tang. _I have often been compared to_ a monkey.--_This monkey murders_ two women, a mother and her daughter. _I also have morally assassinated_ two women, a mother and her daughter.--_I have always taken the story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You would be doing me a great favor if you could find out for me the date when Edgar Poe, supposing that he was not helped by any one, composed this story, so that I could see if the date coincided with my adventures._’

“He spoke to me, with admiration, of Michelet’s book on _Jeanne d’Arc_, but he is convinced that this book is not by Michelet.

“One of his great preoccupations is cabalistical science, but he interprets it in a strange fashion that would make a cabalist laugh.

“Do not laugh at all this with _méchants bougres_. For nothing in the world would I wish to injure a man of talent....

“After he left me, I asked myself how it happened that I, who have always had, in my mind and in my nerves, all that was needed to make me mad, had not become so. Seriously, I addressed to heaven the thanksgivings of the Pharisee.”

* * * * *

It is not surprising that Baudelaire should have been somewhat disconcerted by this interview which confirmed so strikingly the reports of the mental malady of his visitor to which he had alluded in his _Salon of 1859_, and that he should soon have sought, after some brief intercourse, to avoid personal and private encounters which might have proved embarrassing. He gave notice in ways the artist could not long mistake, that he did not wish to continue the acquaintance on a footing of intimacy, though, as Crépet, in his _Charles Baudelaire_[5] points out, he by no means ceased to interest himself in the artist, several sets of whose _Eaux-Fortes sur Paris_ he was instrumental, with one or two other admirers of Meryon, in having purchased by the Ministry. Poor Meryon! With an incomplete realization of his own condition which rendered him incapable of divining the real truth, he felt he had offended Baudelaire in some way, and finally addressed him the following appeal, tragic in its note of noble and unconscious pathos:

[5] Charles Baudelaire: Étude biographique d’Eugène Crépet revue et mise au jour par Jacques Crépet. Paris, 1907.

“_Dear Sir_: I called on you yesterday evening at the Hôtel de Dieppe. I was informed that you had changed your domicile. I wished, above all, to see you, in order to learn from your own lips that you were not angry with me, for I do not think I have ever done anything to you which could serve as a motive for your change of manner toward me. Only, as the last letter which I wrote you has remained unanswered, and as three times I have left my name at your dwelling without my having had the slightest word from you, I am entitled to believe that you have some reason for breaking with me. I did not remind you of your promise to write a newspaper article about my work, because, quite frankly, I was sure that you could make much better employment of your time and of your literary skill. My etchings are known to nearly all whom they could interest and rather too much good has been said of them. As to the interruption of our relations, which have been but of brief duration and of slight importance, I agree to this without a word if such is your desire, and I shall conserve, none the less, the recollection of the eminent services you have rendered me in coming to see me, and in occupying yourself with me at a time when I was utterly destitute.

“I have forwarded to M. Lavielle, whom I had the advantage of meeting once with you, the set of my views, reworked and a trifle modified; he has, perhaps, shown them to you. I have had difficulty in procuring the ten sets of them (the printer being very busy at that time) that I have disposed of with sufficient rapidity. I have no longer any left and I have destroyed the _Petit-Pont_, which I propose to engrave anew, after I have made in it some rather important corrections.

“Adieu, dear sir, with all possible good wishes.

“I am your sincere and devoted friend,

“C. MERYON.

“20, rue Duperré.”

The letter to which Meryon refers in the opening paragraph of the foregoing as having remained unanswered by Baudelaire is doubtless that bearing the date of February 23, 1860, which is the only other one given by Crépet in the appendix to his volume. This is it:

“_Dear Sir_: I send you a set of my ‘Views of Paris.’[6] As you can see, they are well printed, on Chinese tissue mounted on laid paper, and consequently _de bonne tenue_. It is on my part a feeble means of recognizing the devotion you have shown on my behalf. However, I dare hope that they will serve sometimes to fix your imagination, curious of the things of the past. I myself, who made them at an epoch, it is true, when my naïve heart was still seized with sudden aspirations toward a happiness which I believed I could attain, look over some of these pieces with a veritable pleasure. They may, then, be able to produce nearly the same effect upon you who also love to dream.

“I have not yet terminated the notes that I promised to make in order to aid you in your work; at all events, I shall go to see you soon to discuss the matter with you further. As the publisher recoils before the steps which would still have to be taken, he says, for the placing of these prints, there is nothing pressing about the affair. Thus, do not let this disturb you.

“Adieu, monsieur; I hope that before your departure, I shall be able to profit by the kindly reception that I have received from you.

“I am your very humble and very devoted servant.

“I am going to try to place sets with those persons who have been so good, on your recommendation, as to interest themselves in this work.

“MERYON.

“20, rue Duperré.”

[6] Baudelaire had already tried to obtain a set of these prints. In writing to Charles Asselineau (February 20, 1859) he commissions his friend to get from Édouard Houssaye “all the engravings of Meryon (views of Paris), good proofs on Chinese paper. _Pour parer notre chambre_, as Dorine says.” He was not successful, however, at that time. In quoting Molière, Baudelaire refers to Toinette’s speech in _Le Malade Imaginaire_ (Act II slc· v).

This letter renders sufficiently clear the kind of service Baudelaire had rendered Meryon over and above the public praise contained in his writings. What, at the first glance, is less certain is the work on which the poet was engaged at this time and for which Meryon, on his own testimony, had promised to assist him with notes. In a foot-note to this letter, M. Jacques Crépet states that it was “doubtless _L’eau-forte est à la mode_, an anonymous article published by the _Revue anecdotique_ in the latter half of April, 1862.” Personally, I doubt the correctness of this conjecture. One has but to turn to Baudelaire’s letters of the period to see that there was then under discussion another piece of work for which Meryon would have been much more likely to give assistance in the form of notes, since it directly concerned himself. Indeed, the matter almost amounted to a project of collaboration between Meryon and Baudelaire. The publisher Delâtre had promised to bring out an album of the “Vues de Paris,” and had asked the poet to prepare some text for the plates. The first reference to this tentative undertaking occurs in Baudelaire’s letter of February 16, 1860 (just a week before Meryon’s), to Poulet-Malassis:

“And then Meryon!”--he broaches the matter abruptly, after having expressed his impatience at the attitude of two other artists, Champfleury and Duranty, friends of his, toward Constantin Guys, and at a certain note of pedantry and dogmatism that was stealing into art under the influence and sanction of “realism”--“And then Meryon! Oh, as for him, it is intolerable. Delâtre asks me to write some text for the album. Good! there is an occasion to write some reveries--ten lines, twenty or thirty lines--on beautiful engravings, the philosophical reveries of a Parisian _flaneur_. But Meryon, whose idea is different, objects. I am to say: on the right you see this; on the left you see that. I must say: here originally there were twelve windows, reduced to six by the artist, and finally I must go to the Hôtel de Ville to find out the exact epoch of the demolitions. M. Meryon talks, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and without listening to any observation.”

Thus it was historical and antiquarian notes that, in all probability, Meryon had promised to jot down to facilitate the composition of a running commentary on the etchings. Meryon’s reference to the reluctance of the publisher in the very same paragraph in which he speaks of these notes, serves to remove the least doubt as to what is meant. When he tells Baudelaire not to be disturbed, it is clearly as to the time at his disposal for the preparation of his text. Baudelaire, however, seems to have been less concerned about his own share in the work than about the fate of the project as a whole. Evidently he was not satisfied at the prospects of the work with Delâtre, for, on March 9, 1860, he wrote in a postscript to Poulet-Malassis:

“I turn my letter, to ask you, very seriously, if it would not be advisable for you to be the publisher of Meryon’s album (which will be augmented) and for which I am to write the text. You know that, unfortunately, this text will not be in accordance with my wishes.

“I warn you that I have made overtures to the house of Gide....

“This Meryon does not know how to go about things; he knows nothing of life. He does not know how to sell; he does not know how to find a publisher. His work is readily salable.”

And again, on March 13, he writes, in response to some proposition from his friend:

“Relative to Meryon, do you mean by _buying the plates_ to buy the metal plates, or rather the right of selling an indefinite number of proofs from them? I can conceive that you fear the conversations with Meryon. You should carry on the negotiations by letter (20, rue Duperré). I warn you that Meryon’s great fear is lest the publisher should change the format and the paper.... What you say to me of Meryon does not affect what I write to you concerning him.”

The excellent business sense, the note of prudence and painstaking, that comes out in all this correspondence on the part of Baudelaire, and which is scarcely less notable than his unwearied devotion to the interests of his friends, ought to go far toward discountenancing the theory that a poet cannot be a good man of affairs. Still again he writes on the same subject, with recapitulations of what he had said before, to the same correspondent:

“I am very much embarrassed, _mon cher_, to reply to you relatively to the Meryon affair. I have no rights in the matter whatsoever; M. Meryon has repulsed, with a species of horror, the idea of a text composed of a dozen little poems or sonnets; he has refused the idea of poetic meditations in prose. So as not to wound him, I have promised to write for him, in return for three copies with the good proofs, a text in the style of a guide or manual, unsigned. It is, therefore, with him alone that you will have to treat.... The thing has presented itself to my mind very simply. On one side, an unfortunate madman, who does not know how to conduct his affairs, and who has executed a beautiful work; on the other, you, on whose list I want to see the best books possible. As the journalists say, I have considered for you the double pleasure of a good bit of business and of a good act.” And he compares Meryon’s case with that of Daumier, then without a publisher, to wind whom up, “like a clock,” would also, he tells Poulet-Malassis, be “a great and good bit of business.”

This is the last reference in any of the letters to Meryon, or to the album, for which Baudelaire never wrote his text, since no publisher was willing to publish the work. Had Poulet-Malassis not failed in 1861, it might have appeared, and then, in spite of the restrictions imposed upon the restive spirit of the poet, we might have had in Baudelaire’s text some literary equivalent of Meryon’s etchings. How sympathetic this would have been, is shown by the descriptive and interpretative passage from the _Salon de 1859_ already quoted, which, in a few sentences, completely defines the form of Meryon’s imaginative genius, and reveals the inmost source of its power to stir the emotions.

There was, indeed, much that was common to the genius of Meryon and of Baudelaire. The work of both was profoundly personal, and in both a powerful and somber imagination was tinged with a subtle fantasy supplied by a morbid exaggeration in the senses, which did not, however, preclude an intense and ardent preoccupation with formal perfection.

On the contrary, these two modern _détraqués_ present in their work a solidity of construction and an absolute rectitude in the rendering of their moods and dreams, that is scarcely to be found in the work of even their best-balanced and sanest contemporaries. The art of Baudelaire has been compared to that of Racine, and, in the same way, Meryon’s design has the complete economy and control of Robert Nanteuil or of Callot. Men like these make us doubt and reconsider our stock distinctions of “romantic” and “classic.” The work of Meryon and of Baudelaire answers equally to both descriptions, and assures them a place apart in their generation. Thus, while their paths crossed but for a moment, and while they never shared with each other their secret thoughts and aspirations, there is, nevertheless, no small interest for the student in these slight and fragmentary records of what, had it not been for a cruel freak of fate, might have proved an enduring and fruitful friendship.

FÉLIX BRACQUEMOND: AN ETCHER OF BIRDS

BY FRANK WEITENKAMPF

Chief of the Department of Prints, New York Public Library

Even the artist of various interests actively expressed,--the versatile artist, if that adjective be used without the suspicion of superficiality which is often its aftertaste--is very apt to become associated in the public mind with some one specialty.

Félix Bracquemond is known particularly well as an etcher of birds. Yet he has done many things, more than one well enough to have established a reputation. At twenty he painted, and exhibited at the Salon of 1853, a portrait of himself, in a manner that carries you back to Holbein, that even faintly suggests the spirit of Van Eyck in its precise and detailed utterance. The portrait clearly indicates his future activity, for he holds in his hand a bottle of acid, while etching tools lie on a table near him. His etched portraits are numerous, and include such comparatively free productions as the ones of Legros and of Meryon, and the large, minutely finished one of Edmond de Goncourt. The last named is a characteristic and typical example of Bracquemond’s art, which, even when most painstaking, somehow or other never seems labored. Bracquemond appears as a peculiar and interesting mingling of Teutonic thoroughness and Gallic _esprit_.

The characteristic elements in his portraits--“robustness, versatility and a resourceful mastery of technique”--are peculiar to all his work. The same artist who carefully and with honest and sympathetic adaptation translated such different products of painter’s personality as Millet’s _Man with the Hoe_ and Meissonier’s _La Rixe_, as well as canvases and drawings by Holbein (the magisterial portrait of Erasmus), Corot, Gustave Moreau, Gavarni and Delacroix, also, under Japanese influence, etched numerous designs for ceramic ware (he was for a time a sort of artist director at the Haviland factory at Limoges), fishes and birds in swirling, decorative outline. In contrast to these last named are his numerous well-finished pictures of birds and mammals. His hares, moles and mice done with loving emphasis on the texture of their furry pelts. (The vision of happy days, seen by poor bunny suspended by one leg, was reproduced as far afield as Poland, in _Tygódnik Illustrowány_.) The birds, with the delightful and strong modeling of their bodies felt under the sleek surface of their feathery coverings.

A master craftsman, he has found delight, like Buhot, Guérard and Mielatz, in technical experiments, and his interest and skill in reproductive methods are illustrated in etchings, dry-points, aquatints, lithographs, photogravures retouched with etching, engravings in color, and plates showing combinations of processes. Burty once wrote: “He contrives by repeated use of the acid on certain parts of the plate to get a black which for depth and intensity has never been equaled.” And Meryon avowed of him: “I cannot etch. That one, there, he is the true etcher.”

His active interests, and his all-embracing outlook on the life about him, found expression in such occasional productions as the etchings of figures modeled in snow by French sculptors in Paris during the Commune; the symbolical lithograph of France defending himself against the Prussian eagle, while strangling his own imperial bird; the ceramic compliment to Uncle Sam: _The Old World and Young America_, or the very large plate done as a memorial tablet for Meryon’s coffin. His hand recorded the placid, rural beauties of Bas Meudon and the quick impression of a steamboat, amusingly described by Beraldi (see No. 185). And a bit of woodland, possibly in the Bois de Boulogne, in winter snows, in combination with a gaunt wolf probably studied at the Jardin d’Acclimatation (the Paris “Zoo”), gave him opportunity for his effective _Wolf in the Snow_, also known as _Winter_ (Beraldi No. 180), which in its spirit of desolation might be many hundred miles from Paris.

And with all this, his etchings only have been spoken of here,--and they are about 800 in number. But the catalogue (issued in an edition of 220 copies) of his work exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (Salon) in 1907, includes not only etchings, but paintings, water-colors, pastels and designs executed in embroidered silk, ceramics, iron, cloisonné enamel, jade, wood and bookbindings.

Yet the late Walter S. Carter of Brooklyn, a most catholic print-collector, ventured fearlessly on the inviting but not always safe sliding pond of analogy, and proclaimed Bracquemond the “Michelangelo of ducks.” Without regard to the manner of the statement, we may accept the classification. For had Bracquemond never etched anything but his bird plates, he would have won his place in the annals of the fascinating art of needle and acid. Perhaps he realized that when he furnished a title-page design for the third volume, devoted to himself, of Beraldi’s “Graveurs du XIXᵉ Siècle,” consisting solely of a duck and a portfolio of prints. Much slighter in execution, but more significantly allegorical, was his frontispiece (Beraldi No. 480) for the catalogue of the second portion of the Burty collection. It represented a stand holding an open portfolio from which prints flying upward are gradually evolved into cranes. Ducks, however, have apparently been his special delight. He has pictured them in action, as in the delightful oblong picture of two ducks swimming (Beraldi No. 185) and in the equally, and amusingly, lifelike one of five ducks swimming hurriedly to a central point of common interest. Or in allegorical attitude, as in the _Canard_ (Beraldi No. 116), the herald of “fake” news. He has observed the teal along the riverside and the _Gambols_ of ducks (Beraldi No. 221), done with a simple and sympathetic delight in the doings of these water-fowl. Hardly ever, perhaps, has he better characterized the useful bird whose call, onomatopoetically imitated, has long served to characterize medical charlatanry, than in the plate known as _The Bather_ or _Canards surpris_. The three birds, who have come down to their accustomed swimming hole only to find it already occupied by a comely young woman, are alive and moving. The beholder can fairly see and hear their wonder at the unwarranted intrusion on their rights, and regards their wagging tails with much of the fascination that Septimus and Wiggleswick (in W. J. Locke’s “Septimus”) felt in the same diversion.

While the duck apparently appealed most to him, Bracquemond was attracted also by other members of the family of _Aves_. The goose, cousin to the _Anas_, he showed collectively in _Geese in a Storm_ (_The Storm Cloud._ Beraldi No. 219), which may be studied in the Avery collection at the New York Public Library, in a series of touched proofs in which the fortuitous effect of gradually added work in the sky gives somewhat the impression of a storm rising as you look at the consecutive proofs. _Ducks in a Marsh_ also move under a lowering sky, and in _It’s Raining Pitchforks_ (Beraldi No. 212) the flood-gates of heaven are fully opened, so that the water-fowl appear to find themselves doubly in their element.

Bracquemond sometimes labored through a number of states on a plate. The large portrait of Edmond de Goncourt was patiently carried through a number of progressive proofs. And in the process of thus searching for ultimate satisfactoriness he may give us such pleasant surprises as the fourth state of _Morning Mists_ (Beraldi No. 779), a pheasant piece, with its delightful background addition of trees--an airy, light impression of early morning. He has done several landscapes of a lightness which approaches a Legros-like delicacy, so that it is perplexing to compare them with such a faithfully studied but somewhat hard plate as that of the duck perplexed at sight of a turtle (_L’Inconnu_, Beraldi No. 174), and to realize that the same hand did both. Venturing still farther into the field of ornithology, he depicted golden pheasants, partridges, swallows, with sympathy for his subject and an open eye for its artistic possibilities. The human element enters into these pictures very rarely, and then only when absolutely in place. So in _At the Jardin d’Acclimatation_ (Beraldi No. 214), in which two stylishly dressed young ladies are looking at golden pheasants in an inclosure. Once, at least, in _Sea-gulls_ (Beraldi No. 782), he felt and rendered the beautiful effect of a circling, gliding flight of gulls over rolling waves, in a graceful swirl of lines combining into a harmonious pattern.

The peculiar effect of this last named plate, with its mingling of Japanese and other influences, is in striking contrast to his early and most remarkable _Haut d’un battant de Porte_ (Beraldi No. 110, done at the age of nineteen), in which the dead bodies of three birds of prey and a bat are shown nailed to a barn door, held up as a warning example in a not too smoothly flowing quatrain. To his plates of moralizing or emblematic intention, such as the one just referred to, or the _Canard_ (Beraldi No. 116), he delighted in adding such inscriptions, generally in rhyme. His verses in such cases partake a little of the halting metre of those which poor Meryon attached to certain of his plates. Such etched letterpress additions appear also in _Margot la Critique_ (Beraldi No. 113) and in _Le Corbeau_. The last named delineation of an old bow-legged crow presents a creature so weird, so uncanny, that without adventitious effects it appears as a symbol of some sinister power, felt though not realized. But a still more famous plate, because most strongly characteristic, is _The Old Cock_ (the original drawing for which is owned by Samuel P. Avery), a masterly portrait of chanticleer, in all the dignity and pomp of his mature vigor and serene self-sufficiency. Here is the poem for this:

Hé, vieux coq, Vieux Don Juan, Vieille voix, tu t’érailles, Toi-même tu seras La pierre du festin fait à tes funerailles Et les convives, las De livrer à ta chair de trop rudes batailles Se reposeront des dents et des bras Racontant à l’envie, tes amours, tes combats.

He japonized this magnificent fowl in a purely decorative spirit, without the psychological element. And on the occasion of the visit of the Russian fleet to Toulon in 1893, he repeated and emphasized the theme to the verge almost of the grotesque, in a representation of the Gallic cock, a Hercules of his kind, with the aggressiveness of conscious strength, trumpeting forth his _Vive le Tsar!_ with triumphant enthusiasm. This emblematic use of ornithological specimens has been already referred to in the case of the _Canard_. It appears notably also in _Margot la Critique_. The critic may note that _Margot_ happens to be particularly unctuous in the state before the verses, but will not be otherwise adversely influenced by this etched philippic against his brethren.

But besides these many realistic studies of bird life there are just about as many of purely decorative interest, showing strong Japanese influence, and mostly executed for ceramic decoration. There are also decorative combinations of _Reeds and Teal_, _Swallows_ flying in graceful curves and swirls, _Lapwing and Teal_ swimming and flying. Here again we have an entirely different point of view. The loving study of nature, sometimes expressed in an uncompromising hardness in the reproduction of form or detail, or elsewhere in an almost playful lightness of touch in obedience to a passing mood, appears here with quite different results. Seemingly endless changes on the same theme of swirling, undulating curves of flying, running, strutting, swimming bodies of birds and fishes delight the eye with the rhythmic flow of ever recurrent accent on the pure beauty of line.

And at the end, when you have gone through the many portfolios of Bracquemond’s work, there occurs to you his own statement quoted by Clement Janin. It is to the effect that a work of graphic art must bear on its face, undisguised, the characteristics of the technique by which it was produced. A lithograph must be a lithograph; a wood-engraving a wood-engraving and not the imitation of an engraving on copper or of a photograph. A review of the arts of reproduction proves that this is not the truism it may seem. It is a basic principle in all art, and will bear earnest and repeated emphasis. And the notable recognition of this fact by Bracquemond is a prime factor in his success in the art that has meant so much to him.

AUGUSTE LEPÈRE

BY ELISABETH LUTHER CARY

Art Editor of the New York Times

IT is the fashion of the moment to specialize in art as in other professions, and we no longer expect to find the multiple tendencies and ambitions of a Leonardo or a Dürer, or even of the self-contained Rembrandt, in the modern artist. He is a painter or a sculptor or a wood-engraver or an etcher. He is even more closely classified as a portrait- or a landscape-painter, an animalier or a decorator, a dry-point engraver or a disciple of pure etching. If, as sometimes happens, he escapes from the threads of the Lilliputians and swings his arms in a wider sweep, it is in the mood of deprecation or excuse, as a writer may choose to whittle wood or hammer metal in order to clear his word-fogged brain.

There is, however, a wholesome and growing impression among thoughtful observers that extreme limitation and restriction produce weakness rather than strength, and when we find an artist who has something of the ancient flexibility of mind and hand it is worth our while to acclaim him.

Auguste Lepère has pursued a free course of development, rounding his capacities, and forming himself with balanced and reasonable attention to diversified interests. He was born in Paris in 1849. His father was the talented sculptor François Lepère, and he got, no doubt, from his father something of the latter’s taste for suggesting passion, even frenzy, in small but monumental figures. While quite young he studied with the English engraver Smeeon, and spent his first professional years in the service of illustration for _Le Monde Illustré_, _L’Illustration_, _Le Magasin Pittoresque_, and _La Revue Illustrée_ in Paris, the _Graphic_ and _Black and White_ in London, and _Scribner’s_ and _Harper’s_ in America.

Tiring of this field, he tried all things. He became in turn a metal-chaser, a decorator of leathers, a ceramist, an etcher, a wood-engraver and a painter. If we consider him chiefly as an etcher, it must be with the full appreciation that any craft mastered by him is made subsidiary to the larger principles upon which all works of art are based, whatever the medium or process. He has consistently declined to fritter away his admirable technique upon technicalities undertaken for their own sake, and his work in etching as in painting is the work of an intellect concerned with the problems of rhythm and harmony, color, tone and form, which assail artists in every field.

As an etcher he received his initiation from Bracquemond, the most robust of temperaments and at the same time the most fastidious of technicians. Lepère has been worthy of his teaching. From the first he has sought to render his impression, recorded by a vision singularly prompt and synthetic, with precise care, patiently assembling all the complex virtues of his method to the task. To his slightest plate he has brought conscience and sincerity, and also a quality without which all the moral gifts with which human nature may be endowed would have availed him nothing as an artist: the rare capacity, that is, for retaining the freshness of his vision throughout a slow process of translation.

Before examining a few of his plates to discern their significant qualities, it will be interesting to consider his own words on the aim of the engraver: notes written with reference to the change in methods of reproduction from interpretation by means of the engraver’s art to the use of photography and the resultant processes. Even his notes on engraving for the purpose of reproduction, though less closely allied to the work of his riper years than the notes on engraving from nature as an original art, are excellent reading, since they throw a clear light upon his ideals and definite convictions:

“Formerly,” he says, “when an engraver had a work to reproduce, it was _absolutely necessary for him to see it_. He could then study it, comprehend it, and consequently extract its essential principle, simplify it, adapt it to his mode of expression, engrave it.

“If he had not the gift of composition, that of design was necessary in order to make his transposition; that of interpretation, in order to gather the idea of the creator of his model. His work was almost the equal of the work of an original engraver who usually interprets a composition or a model given by nature.

“His art was that of transposition. He took color or mass and made a song in a different key, keeping only the relative values of the shadows and lights and the contours of the objects.

“Photography has come to change all that. It has facilitated the task of the engraver, who, for the most part, has not even seen the works he reproduces. The science of design is almost reduced to knowing how to trace; as for simplifying a photograph, it can only make matters worse. Such as it is, a photograph forms a perfect gamut in which nothing can be changed without losing everything; to extract a line from it is impossible, so indiscernible is the passage from one object to another, a figure in the background, etc., etc.

“Photography is a reproduction; it becomes a betrayal. What is the copy interpreted by this betrayal? How can one extract the character of anything if the true model is not there?

“Here, then, is our engraver obliged to copy with his precise art from something quite vague. Photography sees the globs of color, the accidents of a picture, with as much interest as the most beautiful design. What will he put in the place of these accidents? He traces, he copies; and as the photograph is stupid, he copies a stupidity.

“He does this so thoroughly that he can be dispensed with, the means of printing a photograph having been discovered. What imitates a photograph most completely if not a photogravure? This attains to a degree of impersonality so great that the poor engraver can no longer battle against it.

“For the engraver who possesses no faculty of composition to do artistic work it is necessary that he be an interpreter, a simplifier, with a very well-defined idea of the necessities of his craft, and that he know how to draw directly! He must renounce all attempts to overstep the boundaries of his craft; he must not try to express colors. One may, in an engraving, express cold and heat; that is, indeed, the main thing. But it is impossible to engrave red, yellow, or green. These are researches that encroach upon the domain of the painter and spoil everything.”

Of the original engraver more is exacted. As a true artist he must respect both his craft and the quality of his vision. He must synthetize, simplify, express, avoid photographic vision and trivialities of style; he must employ only the means forbidden to photography: those well-affirmed indications of the movements of the point which are the very foundation of the beautiful technique of engraving.

And in one phrase is summed up the essential aim of the engraver who treats his art with respect, whether he uses it for purposes of reproduction or for original work: “Not to imitate. To express.”

Lepère has followed his own doctrine to its logical conclusion. Never servile, even in his most faithful portraiture of a nature that enchants him, he works with a plenitude of science, but also with unwearied freshness of inspiration and a sympathetic feeling for the character of his subject, whether it is a curve of the river near Nôtre Dame where horses come down to drink, or a poor man’s hut with climbing vines in bloom, or the wide marshes of the Vendée. With the passage of time his vision has grown larger and calmer, his interpretations magisterial; but in his most classic moments he does not forget to infuse into his composition a strong feeling for this intimate characterization. He is a true creator, living not only above but in his conception. He is at once serene and moved, in command of his intellectual instrument and impelled by his personal interest.

The _Journée d’Inventaire_ is a plate that shows clearly this double action of the artist’s mind. The composition is stately in both line and mass. In the background rises the lofty architecture of the Amiens Cathedral; in the foreground, in deep shadow, is a group of figures diversely occupied. The upraised arms of these figures lead naturally to the pointed arches and ascending spires. In a similar fashion, the strong darks of the foreground mount in diminishing quantity through the heavy shadows in the recesses of the doorways to the luminous blacks that mark the slender openings in the towers. It is a beautiful upward movement that repeats the song of the Gothic spirit.

These wonderful darks have also another function. Echoed as they are, in the small, sharp shadows of the multitudinous detail, they send the light quivering all through the picture. It pours down from a sky empty of clouds, and causes the web of decorative imagery with which the structure is draped to shimmer like a fabric set with precious stones. Only a true master of the subtleties possible to interwoven dark and light could thus command his atmospheric effect, and evoke from his slight and restricted materials the grandeur of the immense pile of stone raised by the hands of man, and the contrasting evanescence of the passing sunshine caressing every boss and hollow in the richly manipulated surfaces. It is perhaps not too much to say that nothing more remarkable in its kind has been done in the present century. The element of drama is added by the turmoil of little figures in shadow at the base of the cathedral, seen in minute detail through the translucent darkness and agitated by their human accidents and emotions. The whole spirit of France, its imperishable monuments, its sparkle of sunshine, its reasonable architecture, its vivid life, may be inferred from this remarkable plate.

Very different in sentiment and less close to perfection in the relation of the parts of the design to the whole, is _La Chûte de Ballon_; yet this also is a beautiful plate. As in the _Journée d’Inventaire_, the eye is led upward by the gestures of the crowd in the foreground to the point of interest, the balloon hung poised above the trees and houses. There is the same contrast of movement, too, in the agitated figures of the foreground with the calm lines and clear light of the distance. In this plate, however, is greater piquancy of light and shade. The abrupt lines and minor episodes are carried so far into the composition as to dominate the general impression, leaving the open distance to play a secondary instead of primary part. Figures are hurrying in excitement toward the scene of the aërial drama; tree branches are tossing, there are little restless clouds passing rapidly across the sky; the air is brisk, it is a bright day, there is much to see and do, and interest is keen--that is the story one carries away from the handsome, stirring print, and also a subtle poetic suggestion that beyond the town, as one follows the slow length of a white cliff, to where it meets the horizon, is a very great world that turns from night to day, from day to night, interminably, unchecked and unspeeded by the passing storms of human glee and human woe.

_La Seine à l’Embouchure du Canal Saint-Martin_ is more commonplace in subject, the river and its barges having entered into the artistic life of nearly all French etchers; but how few could pass with such sureness of plan, such precision of execution, from the dark bulk of the vessel in the lower left corner to the snapping black of the tree-top in the upper right corner, along a perfect diagonal, without a suspicion of stiffness or formalism in the fluent arrangement of innumerable details of pattern! This strong sense of appropriate and austere design, supported by such an easy grace of handling, is unusual in any age, and especially in our own, when grace and austerity find it almost impossible to live together in one man’s work.

Turning away from these subjects, in which nature presents a wide range to the artist and inspires him to breadth and dignity of treatment, to the quaint and touching subjects drawn from peasant life in the Vendean homes, we find beneath the admirable form of Lepère’s expression thoughts tender and merry and filled with sympathy for common experience. His work becomes picturesque and living, the mood of the observer changes in response, and the pleasure given is that inspired by simple things, although the treatment of the given scene is often far from simple.

While all these plates are admirably expressive, one in particular, _Le Nid_, seems to me filled with melody, color and charm as well as with the efficient intelligence always to be found in Lepère’s work. A little solid house with thick walls stands in greenery. Children, natural, happy, unconcerned, are playing in the foreground. Beyond is a curve of low hill and a glimpse of flat plain; and still beyond, a little town with its spire. It is all very naïve and fresh; the outdoor setting has much beauty; the types of the children are unhackneyed; the gestures and positions unconventional and spontaneous. A mere glance reveals the felicity of the subject-matter, but longer acquaintance is necessary before all the resources of the design are appreciated. Even in this playful note of pleasant summer pastime we get something of the gravity and serious purpose indispensable to great etchers as to great painters. It was this characteristic that led Lepère to pull down all the detail of the middle distance below the noble swinging line of the hillock, in order to keep the severity of that magnificent curve. It was this which led him to follow a repeating curve in the arrangement and environment of the children, apparently so carelessly disposed among their shrubs and flowers. “Let all things play and bloom and make holiday,” he seems to exclaim in this rare plate, “so long as the power of my design is not weakened by them.” The artist whose work says that to us is sure of long life in our memories.

There are several of these subjects in which children at play near their homes are the principal feature, and it would be easy to find in each some special note of gaiety and charm and quick Gallic wit. In _Les deux Bourrines_, for example, the groups of little ugly creatures, who form again a curved line of beauty, are characterized with a frank acceptance of their unclassic physiognomies that would have delighted the heart of Daumier. _Le Nid de Pauvres_ is not less romantic in its Gothic avoidance of the ideal type.

Classic Lepère can be, however, with a curiously vital appreciation of what the living classic must have been. He has an etching of a swineherd entering the yard in which the beasts are penned. They move, grunting, toward him. Outside is a cluster of great trees with bushy foliage. The light is clear and warm. The folds of the swineherd’s mantle and his gesture are Greek. His figure might have passed across the Athenian stage, one fancies, at the time of Sophoclean drama. And the landscape has the deep repose immortalized in classic verse--such songs as in his extreme old age Sophocles made to do honor to his native village:

Our home, Colonus, gleaming fair and white: The nightingale still haunteth all our woods, Green with the flush of spring; And sweet, melodious floods Of softest song through grove and thicket ring.

Lepère is not often found in this mood, however, and the swineherd plate cannot be considered wholly characteristic of his temper of mind. It seems to have been one of those rare happenings when the mind is lifted above its habitual plane, occasion serves, and the trained hand obediently records a moment of peculiar exaltation. He is perhaps most of all his daily self in the little plate called _Le Moulin des Chapelles_. Here he shows us the machinery of the mill and the round white column of the structure as others have done, but he also shows us what others seldom do--the use of the mill. A patient horse is standing near, a man is shifting the bags of flour to his back. It is not a mere accident of landscape; it has a social and utilitarian function; it is connected with human life.

This is the most characteristic attitude of mind for an artist so alert to the significance of visible things; and it is immensely to his credit as an artist that he almost never permits this keen and throbbing interest in the world about him to trespass upon his logical use of his great instrument.

If organization of line and space, ability to establish in each of his compositions a decorative scheme adequate to support easily all the delightful episodes and figures which he chooses to introduce, is the most important element in Lepère’s artistic equipment, the next in significance is the clarity and precision of his utterance. There is no vapor in his imagination; he is a poet as well as an artist, with a poet’s sensitiveness to definition of form. All that he lacks is the intensity of emotion that sweeps away interest in everything but the personal feeling. We suspect that the world for him will always be “full of a number of things,” and that he will not be able to forget any of them in the exaltation of profound self-absorption. But he has a genius for infusing a rich suggestiveness into all that he observes, and for giving his narrative an epic character.

HERMAN A. WEBSTER

BY MARTIN HARDIE

“Did you ever see a barber sharpen his razor? That’s what it wants--the decision and the smacks.” That is one of the many quaint remarks that old John Varley used to hurl at the pupils who came to him for lessons in the complete art of painting in water-color. It is a remark very appropriate to the vast quantity of etchings, mechanically correct, but unimpassioned and uninteresting, which are produced to-day. There are wonderfully few etchers whose work strikes a note of imagination and individuality, and appeals by its force and directness, its decisions and its smacks. One of that small company is Mr. Herman A. Webster.

An artist’s life is written in his work, and the cold facts of his biography are of little real importance. To some extent, however, they act as a commentary upon his productions, and at the worst they serve to satisfy the not unpardonable curiosity which impels all of us to inquire into the age and life-history of any man whose pictures or prints awaken our instant sympathy. So I put here a few outlines of Mr. Webster’s career, merely the mile-stones that mark the route along which he has proceeded. It has been a career of strenuous activity, for the artist who now prints his finely-wrought plates in his studio in the Rue de Furstenberg at Paris (the street of which Whistler made a lithograph in 1894) has graduated at a famous university, traveled round the world, spent two years in commercial life, toiled as general reporter to a big daily paper, worked in a coal-mine, and acted as assistant cashier in a bank. And the tale of his years is only just over thirty, for he was born in 1878. Need I add--for an English reader it would be quite superfluous--that Mr. Webster is an American, with New York as his native city?

Mr. Webster came into the world with an innate love of art. In his school-days, before he had received any instruction in drawing, he made posters, that were perhaps crude but not ineffective, for the school games; and at Yale he was one of the editors and a valued illustrator of the _Yale Record_. This love of art was fostered by a visit to the 1900 Exposition at Paris, where the _genius loci_ has a stronger spell for the young artist than anywhere else upon earth. Studios and restaurants of the Quartier Latin are fragrant with great memories, still haunted by the mighty spirits of the past: Louvre and Luxembourg are filled with the living realities that abide. Amid the enchantment of this artistic atmosphere, with all its traditions and associations, Mr. Webster lingered for some months, and then set out on a trans-Siberian tour to the Orient, staying long enough in Japan and China for his natural instinct to be quickened by the marvelous art which has exerted so strong an influence on the Western world. On returning home his desire to adopt art as his life-calling was checked by family opposition. Here in England--for I write as one of Mr. Webster’s English admirers--many a boy artist has been thwarted by a foolish antipathy in the home circle to art in the abstract, but for a parent in the New World the conviction must be even more sincere that business is the only lucrative profession, while art is at least something precarious, if not a downward road to poverty and starvation. And so, at his father’s wish, Mr. Webster, in the office of the _Chicago Record-Herald_ and elsewhere, served two years of bondage to commerce. Determination, however, won its way at last, and in February, 1904, he set out to Paris with the family consent to “try it for a year.” That year is still continuing.

Seven months during 1904 were spent at the Académie Julien under Jean Paul Laurens, in study from the nude; and that is the only academic instruction which Mr. Webster has received. A few months after his arrival in Paris, chance led him to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he saw some of Meryon’s etchings, and fell instantly under the spell of the great artist whose sinister needle first revealed the mysterious and somber poetry of Paris and the Seine. From Meryon and from books he forthwith taught himself to etch, receiving no outside instruction, but evolving his own methods till he attained mastery of the “teasing, temper-trying, yet fascinating art”--a mastery the more valuable and complete in that it was based on his own experience. A first attempt was made from his studio window in the Rue de Furstenberg, and some copperplates went with him on his autumn holiday at Grez, that “pretty and very melancholy village” in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Robert Louis Stevenson met the romance of his life. As the first-fruits of this holiday three little etchings won their way into the next summer’s Salon--the _Rue de l’Abbaye_, _The Loing at Grez_, and _The Court, Bourron_, the last being the forerunner of several subjects of similar type. At the Salon also was hung a large oil-painting of still life, a study of fabrics and porcelain; but though color will no doubt claim allegiance again, Mr. Webster has been too closely held in thrall by etching to essay further experiments in the painter’s craft.

A pilgrimage to Spain in the spring of 1905 was the source of several spontaneous and effective plates, among them _St. Martin’s Bridge, Toledo_, and _Mirada de las Reinas, Alhambra_. Up to this point Mr. Webster’s work may be considered, in a large measure, tentative and experimental, but from 1906 onward he has found in Normandy--at Pont de l’Arche and Rouen--at Bruges, and above all in Paris, the inspiration for a series of plates noteworthy for their fine craftsmanship and their expression of individuality. They have won him the recognition of connoisseurs and public without his passing through any period of undeserved obscurity. At the Paris Salon, at the Royal Academy, and in his native land, his etchings have constantly been exhibited and admired. Nor must I forget to add that in 1908 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, which, under the presidency of its veteran founder, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, has done so much to foster the revived art of etching.

It is of some of the chief works produced and exhibited during the last three years that I have now to speak, and in doing so may perhaps indicate a few leading characteristics of the etcher’s work. His chief delight is in the nooks and corners of old-world thoroughfares and culs-de-sac, where deep shadows lurk in the angles of time-worn buildings, and sunlight ripples over crumbling walls, seamy gables, and irregular tiled roofs. Of such is a series of subjects found in old Rouen--the _St. Ouen_; the _Rue du Hallage_, where the cathedral spire towers high above old timbered houses; and that charming plate with the title _Old Houses, Rouen_, a quaint corner of tenements whose high-pitched roofs stand propped against one another for all the world like a castle of cards. The etcher of this and of the _St. Ouen_ was welcomed with warm sympathy by the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, which said that “never before has there been so fervent and skilled an interpreter of the bowed timber and crumbling plaster of the old houses of Rouen, which line the street ending in the cathedral with its pointed spire against the open sky.” And so we pass to two courtyard scenes--belonging, like the Rouen subjects, to the year 1906--the _Cour, Normandie_, and _Les Blanchisseuses_. In both we find the artist becoming more adept in using broad and balanced disposition of light and shade to give not merely chiaroscuro but the suggestion of actual color, and more skilled in adding exquisiteness of detail to refined truth of visual impression. _Les Blanchisseuses_, in particular, with its rich mystery of shadow, with its sunshine falling on white walls and lighting the seamed interstices of plaster and timber, has an indefinable charm that, for myself at any rate, makes it a high-water mark in Mr. Webster’s art. Of similar type is the _Old Butter Market, Bruges_, where a cobbled street curves beneath a shadowed archway; and then for variety you step from _Bruges la Morte_, from the silent cobbles that centuries ago were a busy thoroughfare for ringing feet, to the Bruges of to-day. It is Bruges in a very different aspect, this free and spirited study made on July 27, 1907, on the day of the Fête de l’Arbre d’Or, giving a quick impression of gay holiday crowds, of banners fluttering against the open sky, and of the “belfry old and brown” whose carillon inspired America’s poet, as its tall form and fretted outline have inspired the American etcher of whom I write. This _Bruges en Fête_, and _Paysanne_, a clever and direct figure-study of an old peasant at Marlotte, come as an episode of pleasing variety in Mr. Webster’s work, and tend to show that, though he has his preferences, he is not really fettered by any limitation of subject or treatment.

It is but natural that an artist of Mr. Webster’s temperament, a devoted admirer of Meryon, should become absorbed in Paris herself and endeavor to put upon copperplate the “poésie profonde et compliqué d’une vaste capitale.” The Bruges and Rouen plates showed Mr. Webster to be keenly susceptible to the magnetism and charm of medieval tradition, but Paris, steeped in sentiment even more than Rouen or Bruges, was to rouse a still greater warmth and feeling. He began by searching out those picturesque streets in the old quarters that have survived the wholesale demolishment of Baron Haussmann, a name hated by artists as that of Granger by lovers of books. The _Rue Brise Miche_ found its way to the Royal Academy, and was also honored by publication in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ (July, 1907). Closely akin to it in restful balance of composition and in fine shadow effect is the _Rue de la Parcheminerie_--of special value now, for the old street has disappeared largely since the making of the plate. _La Rue Cardinale_ has affinity of general treatment, and is not the less interesting for an amazing _tour de force_ in the rendering of color and texture in the striped blind over a shop-front. A fourth plate, perhaps even finer than any of these in its force, directness, and concentrated simplicity, is the _Rue Grenier sur l’Eau_. There is much of Meryon in its clear, crisp line-work. Some day perhaps these loving studies of the old Paris of Balzac may be gathered in a series illustrating the “Quartier Marais,” and published in an _édition de luxe_ with descriptive text by the etcher. Let us hope that this may come to pass, for the buildings that Mr. Webster depicts are far more than a prosaic record of architectural features. There is a spiritual and human suggestiveness behind the mortar and bricks of his pictures: as a poet of his own nation has it, they are “latent with unseen existences.” He has appreciated the fact that etching--an art hedged in by limitations and depending upon power of suggestion--is the one art that can give at once those delicate lines, those broad shadows, those crumbling bits of texture. The lover of etching can regard his subject with indifference, and take full joy in the soft play of sunlight, the fine choice of line, the effective massing of light and shade.

Another plate of this “Quartier Marais” series is a noble representation of Notre Dame seen from an unusual aspect. It is a drawing from near the Hôtel de Ville and shows the splendid mass of the cathedral rising above the irregular houses that face the Quartier Marais and the Quai aux Fleurs. There is freedom and charm in the treatment of the foreground, where a little tug puffs along the river and the big barges move cumbrously under the lee of the near bank, and in the middle distance where the light plays pleasantly over the old houses; but the roof of the cathedral itself, put in with unpleasing rigidity of line, comes like cold fact in the middle of romance. It is as though Meryon here had imposed his weakness as well as his strength upon Mr. Webster, for in the _Morgue_, for instance, the one small blemish is the ruled precision of the lines upon a roof. A fitting companion to this vision of Notre Dame is _Le Pont Neuf_, another of the etcher’s largest and most distinguished plates. The stern solidity of the bridge, with its massive masonry, its corbeled turrets, and its deeply shadowed arches, makes pleasing contrast with the irregular sky-line of the sunlit houses that rise beyond.

It may be said of all Mr. Webster’s etchings--and perhaps there could be no higher praise--that each possesses the faculty of provoking fresh interest. That is certainly the case with four of his most recent plates. One is an interior of _St. Saturnin, Toulouse_, majestic and stately, full of suggestive mystery in the religious light that falls with soft touch upon the pillars, throws into relief the dark masses of the choir-stalls, and strives to penetrate the dim recesses of the vaulted roof. _St. Saturnin_ will be among the rariora of the collector, for the plate unfortunately broke when twelve proofs only had been printed.

The artist’s subtle perception of light and his refined draughtsmanship have been used to singular advantage in the _Ancienne Faculté de Médecine, 1608_. One is grateful to him for his fine record of this domed building that was a little gem of Renaissance art, though there is a note of sadness in the substructure of balks and struts set at its base by the ruthless hand of the destroyer.

Gothic canopies and tracery are drawn with loving care in the _Porte des Marmousets, St. Ouen, Rouen_, but here again it is the mystery of shadow in the deep porch that supplies the true theme. A church porch has also supplied the subject of one of Mr. Webster’s latest works, _Notre Dame des Andelys_. The ordinary observer will delight in the print for its beautiful rendering of a noble fragment of architecture. Those who have real knowledge of etching will appreciate it still more for its clever biting and for its subtle delicacy of line so cunningly used for the indication of stone, glass, and woodwork with their different surfaces and textures.

That plate of _Notre Dame des Andelys_, though not the most instantly engaging, is perhaps the most accomplished which the artist has produced. It is in this accomplishment that from the coldly critical point of view I see an indication--a hint only--of possible danger. Here, and to some extent in the _Pont Neuf_ and the _Rue Grenier_, the careful, tense, concentrated work shows almost too disciplined a self-control. Close study of these prints gives just a touch of the irritation that comes from watching the monotonous perfection of a first-class game-shot or golfer, bringing a malicious desire for some mistake or piece of recklessness. The true etching always appeals in some degree by its spice of adventure, by some happiness of accident, and so while the _Pont Neuf_ and the _Notre Dame des Andelys_ rouse full admiration and respect for their splendid artistry, the more haphazard methods of the _Rue Brise Miche_ and _Les Blanchisseuses_ touch a far deeper note of sympathy. They have in them the breezy, natural oratory that is often so much more stirring than the fluent, polished periods of the accomplished speaker. But even where Mr. Webster is most precise in his articulation, most resolute in his adherence to familiar truths, he always combines with this a personal aspect and a power of selection that, disregarding the commonplace and petty, lends poetry to the interpretation. His “careful” work is very far removed from the cold and careful work of the ordinary uninspired craftsman.

In studying the work of a young etcher--and Mr. Webster is still young as an etcher--it is almost always possible to trace certain influences which, quite legitimately, have acted upon his choice of subject and his technique. In one of his first etchings, _The Court, Bourron_, the Whistler influence is frankly apparent. _Les Blanchisseuses_ is in no sense an imitative plate, but I should have said it was the work of a man who knew Whistler’s _Unsafe Tenement_ by heart. And there comes in the critic’s danger of leaping to rash conclusions, for Mr. Webster tells me he never saw that print by Whistler till long after his etching was made. For the Meryon influence, which is clearly apparent in much of his work, Mr. Webster makes no apology. Nor need he do so; for if he reminds us, here a little of Whistler, there a little of Meryon, there is always a large measure of himself besides. The true artist lights his torch from that of his predecessors: it is his business to carry on great traditions. “I have done my best simply to learn from him, not to steal”--that is Mr. Webster’s own expressive way of putting it.

Mr. Webster has not learned from Meryon at the cost of his own individuality, and one reason for the freshness that characterizes his work is that he is one of those who like to transfer their first impressions of nature direct to the plate in the open air. With very few exceptions, that is how his etchings have been made. A certain amount of work is necessarily done afterward in the retirement of the studio, but the straightforward method of rendering nature gives a vividness and spontaneity that careful work from intermediate studies in pencil or color can rarely produce. This spontaneity is the very essence of good etching, for with etching, as with water-color, its highest charm is inevitably troubled by mechanical labor; it is essentially a method of which one feels that “if ’twere done, ’twere well done quickly.” The etcher should no more be able to stay the quick gliding of his needle in the middle of a line than the skater to stand still upon the outside edge. And I think that the etcher who works straight from nature is more apt to search out the notes and accents of character and to seize upon those structural lines which are a fundamental necessity to his work.

Another chief excellence in Mr. Webster’s work lies in the fact that from the first he has been his own printer. He is no believer in the principle followed by many other etchers of biting their plate and leaving it to some one “with the palm of a duchess” to do the rest. Patient acquisition of craftsmanship is bound to tell, for the paid printer, be he never so skilled, cannot hope to understand an artist’s intentions quite so well as the artist himself. Mr. Webster, however, has no need of any artifice; there is no trace in his etchings of the meretricious printing which Whistler condemned as “treacly.” Light and shade enter into charming alliance in his prints, but line is always of the confederacy, and it is to purity of line that the shadows which tell so strongly owe their strength. In the very depths of them there is always a luminous gloom, never a trace of the harshness and opacity that come from slurred workmanship and reliance upon printer’s ink.

Perhaps I have said too much already, for Mr. Webster’s work is well able to speak for itself. But there is one noteworthy feature, common to all his plates, that claims attention, and that is his power of rendering sunlight. If he loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, it is for the sake of those quaint shadows that peep from their recesses and climb the high walls, and still more for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value. He seems to hear, like Corot, the actual crash of the sun upon the wall--“l’éclat du soleil qui frappe.”