Part II
It is difficult to clothe one’s speech in the detached terms of a catalogue when writing of an artist whose work always kindles fresh enthusiasm. And so I may perhaps be pardoned if, in adding something to a previous essay upon the etchings of Herman A. Webster, I venture to strike a more personal note.
There can be few men to whom art is more of a religion than to Webster. On two occasions when I saw him during his hurried visits to London in the spring of 1910, he spoke of his art with all the zeal of a missionary and the fervor of a convert. He seemed to be laboring in a slough of despond, beset with a feeling that his past work was something worthless, to be thrown aside like Christian’s bundle. He appeared to be torn in sunder by divers doctrines, telling me of the constant ebb and flow of argument in the Paris cafés and studios between the parti métier and the parti âme—those who maintained that finished technique, the “cuisine” of the French student, was the final aim, and those who held that the artist’s own emotion, howsoever it might find expression, was the greatest thing of all. Webster felt—and it was a fact, indeed, at which I hinted in writing of his work before—that he was sacrificing something of the âme to the métier; and his own realization of that is already becoming apparent in his outlook and his style. Then, too, his talk was all of the attainment and suggestion of light as the supreme quality in an etching; and here I could reassure him, for few have ever preached the gospel of light with more truth and earnestness than Webster himself in the Quai Montebello and many other plates.
Still, there matters stood more than a year ago, and the plates that Webster had etched at Marseilles and elsewhere lay rejected and unbitten in his studio. Then he set out to America, where he spent the summer of 1910, and, like Mr. Pennell, fell a victim to the sky-scrapers of New York. “They are the most marvelous things,” he wrote, “on the face of Mother Earth to-day. It took me two months to begin to see them, but then they began to glow, to take shape, and to grow. Perhaps no work of human hands in all the world offers such a stupendous picture as New York seen from almost anywhere within the down-town district, or from the river or the bay. There are cliffs and cañons where sun and shadow work the weirdest miracles, and soaring above them, between forty and fifty stories from the ground, rise arched roofs and pointed ones, gray and gold and brown, that one must see with one’s own eyes to have the faintest conception of. From across the Hudson in the afternoon when the sun goes down you can watch the shadows creep up the sides of these mountains of brick and stone until you’d swear you were looking out on some gigantic fairyland.”
His admiration of those sky-scrapers found expression in a series of drawings made on behalf of The Century Magazine, and in, at any rate, one etching—the Cortlandt Street, New York. The subject will appeal most, perhaps, to those who live beneath the familiar shade of these monstrous habitations, with their hundreds of staring eyes; but the ordinary man, though he may find it strangely uninspiring and unromantic, will at any rate admire the firm decision of the drawing and welcome the slender filaments and trembling gray spirals of smoke—so difficult to express in line with a point of steel—that cast a veil over the sordid reality of the scene. Though Webster carried that one plate to a finish, he was still obsessed by all sorts of doubts. Many drawings were torn up, and many plates that he etched were wilfully destroyed. Just as the golfer falls victim to too much reading of theoretical works, so for Webster his eager indulgence in theory and science put him “off his game.” I say all this to account for what must seem a small output during two years for a man whose sole work is etching. It is all to the artist’s credit; but, none the less, we have suffered, nous autres, for his convictions. Now, however, Richard is himself again. A month or more spent in Frankfort this summer has produced a series of pencil-drawings and etchings which should bring satisfaction and content both to the artist and to all who admire his work.
Before speaking of the Frankfort series of etchings, a word may be said about Webster’s pencil-drawings. I know of no other artist, save perhaps Mr. Muirhead Bone, who can use the pencil-point with such exquisite fineness and precision in the production of an architectural drawing that, with all its accuracy, still retains the freshness of a sketch. Finding in a portfolio a drawing of Cortlandt Street and several others that repeated the subjects of the Frankfort etchings, I felt curious as to the exact relationship between these drawings and the work on the copperplate. This interest was largely, perhaps, that of a fellow-etcher, keen to see “how the wheels go round,” but Webster’s reply to a question on this subject may interest others as well. “I determine my composition,” he wrote, “in outline first. This outline I transfer to the plate. Then I go out and carefully study in pencil, on the original outline sketch, the subject I want to do, so as to ’get acquainted’ with it before beginning the more exacting work upon the copperplate. I never use a drawing to work from except sometimes as an extra guide in the biting, where a careful study can be very useful.” They are beautiful things, these pencil-drawings of New York and Frankfort, but there can be only one of each. The etchings, fortunately, can be shared and enjoyed by many possessors.
Frankfort has grown to be a large and very modern town with broad thoroughfares and palatial buildings; but it has its old quarter as well, and among the houses that nestle in narrow streets round the cathedral, Webster has found the same kind of subject that fascinated him before in Bruges and Marseilles and Paris. A brilliant draughtsman, he never seems to hesitate or lose his way among the manifold intricacies of the old-world buildings that he depicts. He aims always at knitting his subjects into fine unity of composition by broad massing of light and shade. “In the last few months,” he writes, “I have grown never to make an etching for etching’s sake, but for the means it gives of studying closely the play of light across my subject.” That is his main theme: the light that travels now with cold curiosity as it did centuries ago, glancing into open windows, throwing into relief a corbel or a crocket, casting a shadow under eave or window ledge, revealing, like a patch in some tattered garment, the cracks and seams in moldering plaster or time-worn timber. In depicting these storehouses of human joys and aspirations, hopes and despairs, he has none of Meryon’s gloom and morbidness. It is true that behind many of the windows in these poor homes of his pictures some Marie Claire may be toiling in sad-eyed poverty; yet for Webster the outside shall be sunny, little white curtains shall veil the gloom, and flowers shall blossom on the window ledge, though the sad worker may have watered them with her tears. And if sunshine is still potent in these new plates, there is also a fresh and joyous note of life and movement in the streets. The introduction of figures, well placed and full of character, is a new development in Webster’s art. Bustling workers, or happy groups of gossiping women, or the dark mass of a distant crowd, are introduced with consummate skill, and the picturesqueness of the old streets gains new value from the suggestion of this living stream of human traffic. The presence of modern life enhances the gray and wrinkled age of the buildings which have watched so many generations come and go.
Among the new plates are four that deal with street scenes in the Alt Stadt of Frankfort. Der Langer Franz, a view of the Rathaus tower that took its nickname from a tall burgomaster of the town, is the smallest of all, but a little gem, brilliant with light and rich in the mystery of shadow. Then there are the Street of the Three Kings, the Bendergasse, and Sixteenth-century Houses, all of them felicitous in charm of theme, in play of light and shade, and in the suggestion of life given by the animated figures. There are admirable figures again in An Old Court, one of the plates that the collector of future days will most desire to possess. There is less in it of obvious labor than in the street scenes; the etcher has overcome a natural fear of blank spaces; and his reticence and more summary execution have lent to this plate much of the unconscious and unpremeditated charm that is one of the finest qualities which an etching can possess.
Two etchings of old bridges over the Main at Frankfort must rank among the best work that Webster has yet produced. One is a small and spirited plate showing the tower of the cathedral and a row of houses, most delicately drawn, rising with a beautiful sky-line above the solid mass of the shadowed bridge with its heavy buttresses. The other shows the old bridge that spans the Main between Frankfort and Sachsenhausen. Legend tells that in compensation for finishing the building within a certain time the architect made a vow to sacrifice to the devil the first living being that crossed the bridge. Then, when the fatal day arrived, he drove a cock across, and so cheated the devil of his due. Much the same story of outwitting the devil is told about the building of the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle. Whether Webster ventured upon any compact I do not know; but this plate, in its building, in its well-constructed composition, in its splendid effect of brilliant sunshine, is one of the most successful tasks he has ever accomplished. The group of figures on the near bank, happily placed like those in Vermeer’s famous View of Delft, adds no little to the charm of the scene. I would set this plate beside Les Blanchisseuses and the Quai Montebello, which Mr. Wedmore has found “modestly perfect,” as representing the very summit of Webster’s art.
While he has surrendered for the time being to the charm of Frankfort, Webster has not been unfaithful to the Paris of his early love. Of Paris he might say, like Montaigne, “That city has ever had my heart; and it has fallen out to me, as of excellent things, that the more of other fine cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this gains on my affections. I love it tenderly, even with all its warts and blemishes.” All the more for the warts and blemishes of its old buildings Webster loves it, too; and while working on his Frankfort plates he has completed another of La Rue St. Jacques, Paris, which, I think, is one of the best etchings he has ever made. At times, even in his Frankfort plates, one still feels that his superb draughtsmanship and his love of detail—ce superflu, si nécessaire—have led him to a uniformity of finish that is almost too “icily regular.” I do not mean that Webster’s elaboration is the cold, almost meaningless, elaboration of the line-engraver; nor do I forget that the technique of Meryon, one of the greatest masters of etchings, was, in Mr. Wedmore’s happy phrasing, “one of unfaltering firmness and regularity, one of undeterred deliberation.” All the same, one wishes that Meryon had done a few more things like the Rue des Mauvais Garçons, and wishes that Webster also, in a similar way, were now and then less sure of himself, were held sometimes by a trembling hesitancy, or driven sometimes by the passion of the moment to allow room for fortunate accident and rapid suggestion. For that reason I welcome his Rue St. Jacques. It is not merely fine in its pattern of light and shade, but it has a direct force and simplification that are rich with promise for the future.
Since writing the above, I have seen working-proofs of two new etchings of landscape. And here, too, there is high promise. They show, at least, that Webster is not going to remain a man of one subject; that he is opening his heart to the beauty and romance of simple nature. He has sought his first themes in that pleasant countryside where, between tall poplars, you get peeps of Château Gaillard, nobly set upon its hill. In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship. These two plates, Château Gaillard and La Route de Louviers, are exhilarating in their feeling of sunshine, and they please by their absolute simplicity of statement. They are honest, and without artifice. Printed “as clean as a whistle,” without any of the doubtful expedients that give a meretricious attractiveness to so much modern etching, they appeal by their rightness of pattern and precision of line. Those who see high promise as well as present fulfilment in Webster’s art, will not regret that he has left the town and set out where
thro’ the green land,
Vistas of change and adventure,
The gray roads go beckoning and winding.