Chapter X: Part II: Seymour Haden in America (1)

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.

From a photograph from life: taken in New York in 1882]

Sketched (unknown to him) in the Print Room of the British Museum by J. Wells Champney of New York. Sir Seymour afterward wrote on this sketch. “Excellent! S. H. 1899.”

Size of the original drawing, 9 × 8 inches]

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.

“Mytton Hall is an old Henry the Seventh house which Mr. Haden was in the habit of staying at for the purpose of his salmon fishing in the river Ribble (the Lancashire River) which runs past it.”

Seymour Haden.

Size of the original dry-point, 4¾ × 10⅜ inches]

“This plate and _A Water Meadow_ were done on the same day, one at noon, the other very late in the evening. The Test (in Hampshire) is a famous trout stream.”

Seymour Haden.

Size of the original dry-point, 6 × 8⅞ inches]

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.

This magnificent plate was etched in 1860, in the park of Viscount Hawarden. All things considered, it is the artist’s finest rendering of tree-forms

Size of the original etching, 7½ × 11¼ inches]

“This plate, and also _A By-road in Tipperary_, were done in the park of Viscount Hawarden, in the most beautiful part of Tipperary.” Seymour Haden.

Size of the original dry-point, 5½ × 8½ inches]

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.

A well-known salmon pool on the Ribble. In Sir Seymour’s opinion this is one of his very finest plates. It was awarded the Medal of Honor at the Paris Exposition of 1889.

Size of the original etching, 11 × 16 inches]

Sawley Abbey stands by a salmon river, the Ribble, which here is enlarged into a wide pool. Seymour Haden often came here for his salmon fishing.

Size of the original etching, 10 × 14⅞ inches]

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.

Perhaps, all things considered, the artist’s masterpiece. Collectors differ as to the relative merits of the various etchings by Seymour Haden, but all are agreed in ranking this as a masterpiece, Moreover, it was the first etching to be treated in this particular manner, and it has become the model for many imitators. This fine plate was etched on the Thames, at Greenwich, in 1870. Sir Seymour devoted the money obtained from the sale of the proofs to the aid of the London Hospital for Incurables.

Size of the original etching, 7¾ × 16¼ inches]

Etched by Seymour Haden after the painting by J. M. W. Turner in the National Gallery, London. This superb etching stands alone in the history of the art. The scene could not be more strongly felt nor more vividly presented had the etcher been working from nature instead of from a painting by another hand. When this etching appeared, Seymour Haden received an enthusiastic letter from John Ruskin, in which the latter exhorted him to devote the remainder of his life to etching the paintings of Turner.

Size of the original print, 23½ × 33 inches]

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.

Engraved in pure mezzotint in 1897. To this plate and Sir Seymour’s mezzotint _Grayling Fishing_ was awarded the Medal of Honor at the Paris Exposition of 1900.

Size of the original mezzotint, 8⅞ × 11⅞ inches]

In _Harlech_ the artist has first mezzotinted his composition and has then strengthened and defined the outlines with etched lines. This is the reverse of the method employed by Turner in the “Liber Studiorum.” Turner first etched the main lines of his composition and then finished the plate in mezzotint.

Size of the original engraving, 8⅞ × 12½ inches]

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.

Size of the original charcoal drawing, 14 × 20 inches]

Size of the original charcoal drawing, 14 × 20 inches]

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.

Size of the original water-color, 12½ × 19 inches]

Size of the original water-color, 10¼ × 16½ inches]

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.

Size of the original charcoal drawing, 14 × 20 inches]

Size of the original charcoal drawing, 13½ × 19½ inches]

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.

The seven plants symbolize the Seven Deadly Sins, and the outstretched arms of the skeleton will support, later, the Fruits of Evil. This romantic and remarkable frontispiece was never used. Baudelaire criticized the drawing of the skeleton severely, as well as the spirit and arrangement of the whole design.

Size of the original etching, 6¾ × 4⁵⁄₁₆ inches]

From the etching by Félix Bracquemond. Of the same size as the original etching. Evidently an excellent likeness, since it exactly renders that ecclesiastical aspect of the poet which made one of his friends compare him to a cardinal.]

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.”

From the etching by Félix Bracquemond, done in 1853

Size of the original etching, 8⁷/₁₆ × 6⅛ inches]

“In one of his great plates, he 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_.”

Charles Baudelaire in a letter to Poulet-Malassis (January 8, 1860).]

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.

“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 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_.”

Charles Baudelaire in a letter to Poulet-Malassis (January 8, 1860).

Size of the original etching, 9⅝ × 7¼ inches]

From the drawing by Léopold Flameng, made in May, 1858, in Meryon’s room in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, the night before Meryon became dangerously mad and was taken by his friends, in a cab, to Charenton for the first time. Later he was discharged, and took up his lodging in the rue Duperré, and in October, 1866, returned to Charenton, where he died in February, 1868.]

“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.