Arts and Letters

Almost every one who is elected to an Academy such as this has some friendly casuist to inquire how he of all men happened to be chosen for academic distinction. Doubtless that inquiry was made about Joseph Pennell when he became a member of this body in 1921. He was thought to be a radical, a reformer, a progressive, a flouter of constituted authority—in short a most unacademic person. But those who did such thinking imagined vain things. All his life Pennell was a pronounced conservative. Again and again he and Whistler wrote and talked of the preeminence of tradition in art. It was their joint hobby; neither of them advocated revolt but rather a bettering of that which had been received from the past. Pennell had neither love nor respect for ultramodern art because it was not founded in craftsmanship—the tradition of the shop. It had thrown aside training and skill and had taken up with superficial effect. As for illustration and printing, with which he was directly concerned, the machine had ruined both of them. The rush and greed of modern life had spoiled everything. Neither he nor Whistler at any time criticized academic institutions but rather those members within the institutions who were nullifying principles and making sport of tradition. Pennell regarded his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as the highest of many honors he had received, and I have reason to know that Whistler up to the day of his death would have accepted eagerly an election to the Royal Academy, the members of which he had scoffed at for the better part of his life.

Pennell was born a Quaker in Philadelphia, in 1860, and by heritage was a man of peace. The actualities of war when he came to see them on the French front were so revolting that they made him ill. He could do no work there and came away empty-handed. Even in verbal warfare he was ill at ease and rather unhappy. Only those who knew him intimately could quite appreciate his caustic comment and his often bitter criticism of society, government, literature, and art. He knew what was the right thing to do and how it should be done and it was the Quaker in him that would tell the truth and shame the devil. He exaggerated, to be sure, but he needed the exaggeration to make the truth apparent. It was no waspish or bearish nature that was making itself manifest. He was the kindliest of souls and the most faithful of friends, as his long years of devotion to Whistler should bear witness. Those who knew him were not disturbed by his candor even when it was directed against themselves. They recognized under it the truth and honesty of the man.

As for his denunciation of modern life in America it was leveled against those who had thrown overboard the decencies of the eighties and nineties for the indecencies of the newer twenties, and not against America itself. Only yesterday, in writing a note for his Memorial Exhibition at Philadelphia, I had the chance to say: "He loved America best of all and scolded about her because he loved her." There is hint of this in the last chapter of his last book, The Adventures of an Illustrator. At the head of the chapter he placed a reproduction of his mezzotint of the Statue of Liberty—the great figure looming splendidly against the light of the setting sun. The title he gave it was "Hail Columbia." And in his will he left (with Mrs. Pennell's consent) all his collections, all his prints and plates, and a not inconsiderable fortune in money to the Library of Congress—to America. A superficial view of either Pennell or Whistler will not do because—well, because of its superficiality.

The Adventures of an Illustrator is autobiographical and in it more than once Pennell insists he was a born illustrator. If that be not entirely conceded it must be admitted that he was precocious beyond his years. At sixteen his drawings got him into the School of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, though they were at first rejected, together with some marines he had sent to an Academy exhibition. That is not so remarkable perhaps as the fact that at this time, through Stephen Parrish, he saw, admired, and tried to follow the etchings and drawings of Fortuny and Rico. They were the very best of pen-and-ink men and Pennell's immediate acceptance of them was almost a stroke of genius. He did not know then that Blum, Brennan, and Lungren were following the same trail, and that Alexander Drake, Art Editor of the Century Magazine, was lending them practical aid and comfort. But he was shortly to meet that group and to work with Drake whom he never after ceased to praise.

In 1880, armed with a letter of introduction (which he forgot to deliver), he bearded Drake in his den and showed him some sketches he had made for an article, "A Day in the Marsh." Drake approved of them, and took the young illustrator down to the editorial rooms where he met Robert Underwood Johnson, and got an order for the article. Pennell had already chosen a colleague to write the article and the editors even approved of that. It was a great day's work and Pennell, after a luncheon with Drake, went home with his head in the clouds. In recalling that early adventure he writes with jocose humor: "It is extraordinary how much sense I had, but then I was a born illustrator. And I think R. U. Johnson might, in his Remembered Yesterdays, have said as much of me." But he had nothing to complain of at that time. He was well started, under the best of influences, with the best of editors, and with the best of methods. Many an artist has spent the first half of his life getting back to the point where Pennell started.

Once launched he made rapid progress. The Century Magazine sent him to New Orleans to illustrate Cable's Creole Days and in 1882, when he was twenty-two, he started on his first European trip to illustrate (for the Century again) Howells's Tuscan Cities. He was at first somewhat overwhelmed by London and Paris but he kept his eyes open and his fingers busy. He worked—all his life he worked—without ceasing. The immediate goal in Europe was Italy and the work in hand the illustrations for the Howells book, but he did other and independent sketches for A Canterbury Pilgrimage and Our Sentimental Journey, books done with Mrs. Pennell writing the texts. He saw all kinds of art, and met artists, authors, publishers,—all kinds of people from Böcklin to Vernon Lee. In the summer he went up to Venice, met Duveneck, Bunce, and the group of American artists studying there, and in the autumn went on to London to meet Gosse and Lang and more artists. Returned to the United States he was married to Miss Elizabeth Robins (the "E" of the Adventures) and together they went back to Europe, he to do the illustrations for English Cathedrals for which Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer furnished the text and the Century Magazine the press.

His success with the English Cathedrals series was immediate. His drawings were not only illustrative but they were picturesque, dramatic, more than half-romantic. Infallibly he picked the right spot, the salient group, the proper light. He was working with pen-and-ink more than with wash and getting effects of brilliant light by forcing the blacks sharply against the whites. It was the Fortuny-Rico method which he had adopted. But before he had finished with this series he saw that the light effects were truer to Spain and Italy than to England and that he was not getting the subdued light, the atmosphere, the envelope of the North. A change began then and there. The next series, The French Cathedrals with Mrs. Pennell's text, shows not only a change in the light and air but also the more frequent use of the washed drawing and the etching. He was to go on with changes in method and medium to the end because he was never satisfied with his work and was always reaching out for some newer means of expression. Perhaps Whistler, whom he met in Paris at this time, had some influence in turning his attention to tone—to the envelope. But Pennell was little beholden to any one for his art. He was partly "a born illustrator," as he asserted, but perhaps more largely a self-made one.

His versatility in theme, method, and medium, as we look back upon his work, seems extraordinary. During the succeeding years he sketched palaces, temples, sky-scrapers, factories, coal breakers, canal locks; he pictured gardens, streets, waterways, canyons, mountains, and he did them in ink, pencil, charcoal, pastel, wash, etching, and lithograph. The illustrations that he made for books by Henry James, Maurice Hewlett, Marion Crawford, Philip Gilbert Hamerton, John Hay, and a dozen others were not mere repetitions of the same manner and medium. Each series was different after its kind, each an attempt to break out a new sail and run a shorter or a better course. And his Wonder of Work series, which he had in hand up to the last, was always an outlet for experiment. He made up books of his own with texts and plates of Greek temples, London streets, Panama locks, Pennsylvania coal mines. The wonder was not about his subjects but about his treatment of them—how he could picture familiar themes over and over and yet each time give a new view and lend a new interest.

And quite aside from the quality of his output, the quantity of it seems enormous. It was not merely illustrations for fifty books and two dozen magazines but huge lithographs of current happenings for newspapers, series of etchings for exhibitions, war posters for different governments. His activities reached out into many departments. He wrote six volumes of his own and collaborated with Mrs. Pennell in writing nine more. While in London he was connected with the Daily Chronicle and other newspapers, wrote art criticism, succeeding Bernard Shaw as art critic on the Star, and fought in his column for Aubrey Beardsley and Whistler. In addition he was for a time Professor in the Slade School of Fine Arts and also lectured elsewhere in London, as later in New York and Chicago. In more recent years he had an etching class in the Art Students' League, talked at the Metropolitan Museum, and wrote letters of protest to the New York Times while doing etchings from his Brooklyn window, working in watercolors and oils and writing his Adventures of an Illustrator. His energy was unabated to the last.

I suppose it is proper to admire the person of one idea who does one thing and does it supremely well, but what about the person who does a hundred things and does all of them well? A dash at fame with an early masterpiece and a succeeding silence of long years may be counted as at the least worth while, but what about the carry-on for fifty years and a growth in power with each succeeding year? Had Pennell died at thirty we should have had his brilliant clear-cut Cathedral drawings. Those would have placed him close to Rico and Vierge and his etchings would have been ranked with the early Whistlers which he so much admired, but we should have missed the sombre power of his later charcoals, the richness of his mezzotints and the loom and quality of his lithographs, the massive lift of his sky-scraper etchings. The exactness of his early work gave way gradually to a wider vision, a broader handling, and an increased mastery. His later work is the better and perhaps the more enduring.

I am disposed to make this statement even regarding his writing, because there has been here and there in the daily press some shallow criticism of the style of his Adventures of an Illustrator, and because he was a member of this Academy and something Addisonian in sentence was perhaps expected of him. I should like to say with such positiveness as I can command, that his Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen, his Etchers and Etchings, and his Lithographers and Lithography are the best and most informing books on those subjects in existence. As for their style, if one turns to the earliest volume, on Pen Drawing, he will find it written in quite calm and faultless English. In the Etchers and Etchings he became somewhat more colloquial, in the Scammon Lectures given at the Art Institute of Chicago he was conversational, and in his last book, The Adventures, he was so intent upon color that he practically sacrificed form.

Now this change of style can not be put down to ignorance of the language, for I believe it was a designed change. Pennell was an artist and the primary business of art is expression and effect. He knew very well that the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds were not the best models of style wherewith to reach the youth of today. They were written to be read, not talked at an audience. He needed the spoken rather than the written language. This he used in the Scammon Lectures. They were the most informal talks imaginable but I venture to think that the student audience got more information from those talks than from any course of lectures ever delivered from that platform. They reached the student mind and had the desired effect. Just so with The Adventures. It was written as Pennell himself talked in conversation and reveals his pronounced personality. And everyone who reads it must concede that it is most readable, interesting, and colorful. Well, what value is there in any book that is not readable, interesting, and colorful? And after all does not the end justify the means? Pennell thought so at least and who shall say he was not right?

Joseph Pennell was not only an excellent illustrator, etcher, and lithographer but he was a forceful writer. In addition he was an energetic speaker and a famous character in the art and life of his time. He was something of a crusader, if you will, but that was entirely to his credit. He spoke for the truth, and the right, and fought for common decency, common honesty, and common sense in American life. That may not be the primary aim of this Academy, but such things are surely not beside its purpose. Not one of us but honored his convictions and admired his bravery in setting them forth. And so I am returning to my initial contention that he was an Academician at heart and that all the supposed radicalism of his art and life was merely the artist's method of expression—a way of attracting and holding interest in the theme in hand.