CHAPTER I.
SEYMOUR HADEN.
Perhaps the two qualities which, as one gets a little blasé about the productions of Art, continue the most to stir and stimulate, and to quicken the sense of enjoyment, are the quality of vigour and the quality of exquisiteness. If an artist is so fortunate as to possess both these virtues in any fulness, he is sure not only to please a chosen public during several generations, but to please the individual student—if he be a capable student—at all times and in all moods, and, of the two, perhaps, that is really the severer test. But to have these qualities in any fulness, and in equal measure, is given to a man only here and there over the range of centuries. It is given to a Titian, it is given to a Rembrandt, and of course to a Turner; it is given in the days of the Grand Monarch to a Watteau, and in the days of the Second Empire to a Méryon. But so notable and rare a union is denied—is it not?—even to a Velasquez; while what we praise most in Moreau le Jeune is by no means a facility of vigour, and what is characteristic of David Cox is certainly no charm of exquisiteness. To unite the two qualities—I mean always, of course, in the fulness and equality first spoken of—demands not a rich temperament alone. The full display of either by itself demands that. It demands a temperament of quite exceptional variety: the presence, it sometimes seems, almost of two personalities—so unlike are the two phases of the gift which we call genius.
With the artists of energy and vigour I class Mr. Seymour Haden. Theirs is the race to which, indeed, quite obviously, he belongs. Alive, undoubtedly, to grace of form, fire and vehemence of expression are yet his dominant qualities. With him, as the artistic problem is first conceived, so must it be executed, and it must be executed immediately. His energy is not to be exhausted, but of patience there is a smaller stock. For him, as a rule, no second thought is the wisest; there is no fruitful revision, no going back to-day upon yesterday’s effort; little of careful piecing and patching, to put slowly right what was wrong to begin with. He is the artist of the first impression. Probably it was just and justly conveyed; but if not, there the failure stands, such as it is, to be either remembered or forgotten, but hardly to be retrieved. Such as it is, it is done with, no more to be recalled than the player’s last night’s performance of Hamlet or Macbeth. Other things will be in the future: the player is looking forward to to-night; but last night—that is altogether in the past.
There is no understanding Seymour Haden’s work, its virtues and deficiencies, unless this note of his temperament, this characteristic of his productions, is continually borne in mind. It is the secret of his especial delight in the art of etching; the secret of the particular uses to which he has so resolutely applied that art. With the admission of the characteristic, comes necessarily the admission of the limitation it suggests. Accustomed to labour and patience, not only in the preparation for the practice of an art, but in the actual practice of it, one may possibly be suspicious of the art which substantially demands that its work shall be done in a day if it is to be done at all. Such art, one says, forfeits, at all events, its claim to the rank that is accorded to the œuvre de longue haleine, when that is carried to a successful issue and not to an impotent conclusion. To flicker bravely for an hour; to burn continuously at a white heat—they are very different matters. The mental powers which the two acts typify must be differently valued. And the art that asks, as one of its conditions, that it shall be swift, not only because swiftness is sometimes effective, but because the steadiness of sustained effort has a difficulty of its own—that art, to use an illustration from poetry and from music, takes up its place, voluntarily, with the lyrists, and with Schubert, as we knew him of old—foregoes voluntarily all comparison with the epic, and with Beethoven.
Well, this remark—a remonstrance we can hardly call it—has undoubtedly to be accepted. Only it must be laid to Mr. Seymour Haden’s credit that he has shown a rare sagacity in the choice of his method of expression. The conditions of the art of etching—a special branch of the engraver’s art, and not to be considered wholly alone—are fitted precisely to his temperament, and suit his means to perfection. Etching is qualified especially to give the fullest effect to the mental impression with the least possible expenditure of merely tedious work. Etching is for the vigorous sketch—and it is for the exquisite sketch likewise. It is for the work in which suggestion may be ample and unstinted, but in which realisation may, if the artist chooses, hardly be pursued at all. To say that, has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. We are not all of us so gifted, however, that commonplaces are to be dispensed with for the remainder of time.
Of the great bygone masters of the art, some have pursued it in Mr. Haden’s way, and others have made it approach more nearly to the work of the deliberate engraver. Vandyke etched as a speedy and decisive sketcher; the later and elaborate work added to his plates was added by other hands, and produced only a monotonous completeness destructive of the first charm, the charm of the vivid impression. Méryon, whose noble work Mr. Haden has rightly felt and pronounced to be “not impulsive and spontaneous, but reflective and constructive, slow and laborious,” used etching evidently in a different method and for different ends. With something of the patience of a deliberate line-engraver, he built up his work, piece by piece and stroke by stroke: touching here, and tinkering there—he says so himself—and the wonder of it is, that for all his slowness and delay, the work itself remains simple and broad, and the poetical motive is held fast to. This Mr. Haden has expressly recognised. Nothing eluded Méryon. The impressions that with some men come and go, he pertinaciously retained. Through all mechanical difficulties, his own quality of concentrativeness preserved to his work the quality of unity. Then, again, it must be said that the greatest etcher of old time, Rembrandt, and one of the greatest, Claude, employed the two methods, and found the art equal to the expression both of the first fancy and of the realised fact. To see which, one may compare the first state of Rembrandt’s Clément de Jonghe—with its rapid seizure of the features of a character of extraordinary subtlety—and the Ephraim Bonus, with its deliberate record of face and gesture, dress and environment; and in Claude the exquisite free sketching in the first state of Shepherd and Shepherdess with the quite final work of the second state of Le Bouvier. Mr. Haden, then, has full justification for his view of etching; yet Mr. Haden’s view of etching is not the only one that can be held with fairness.
For all but forty years now Seymour Haden has been an etcher, so that we may naturally see in his work the characteristics of youth and those of an advanced maturity, in which, nevertheless, the eye is not dimmed nor the natural fire abated. That is to say, the mass of his labour—over a hundred and eighty etchings—already affords the opportunity of comparison between subjects essayed with the careful and delicate timidity of a student of twenty, and subjects disposed of with the command and assurance that come of years, of experience, and—may I add?—of recognition. But in his early time Mr. Haden did but little on the copper, and then he would have had no reason to resent the title of “amateur,” now somewhat unreasonably bestowed on a workman who has given us the Agamemnon, the Sunset on the Thames, the Sawley, and the Calais Pier. Somewhere, perhaps, knocking about the world are the six little plates, chiefly of Roman subjects, which Mr. Haden painfully and delicately engraved in the years 1843 and 1844. All that remains of them, known to the curious in such matters, is a tiny group of impressions cherished in the upper chambers of a house in Hertford Street—a scanty barrier, indeed, between these first tentative efforts and oblivion.
But in 1858 and 1859 Mr. Haden began to etch seriously; he began to give up to the practice of this particular way of draughtsmanship a measure of time that permitted well-addressed efforts and serious accomplishments. Fine conceptions in all the Arts ask, as their most essential condition, some leisure of mind, some power of acquisition of the happy mood in which one sees the world best, and in which one can labour joyously at passing on the vision. The best Art may be produced with trouble, but it must be with the “joyful trouble” of Macduff. Nothing is more marked in the long array of Mr. Haden’s mature work than the sense of pleasure he has had in doing it. How much, generally, has it been the result of pleasant impressions! How much the most satisfactory and sufficient has it been when it has been the most spontaneous! Compare the absolute unity, the clearly apparent motive, of such an etching as Sunset on the Thames with the more obscure aim and more limited achievement of the Windsor. The plates of the fruitful years 1859, 1860, 1863, 1864, and so onward, were done, it seems, under happy conditions.
Any one who turns over Seymour Haden’s plates in chronological order, will find that though, as it chanced, a good many years had passed, yet very little work in etching had been done before the artist had found his own method and was wholly himself. There were first the six dainty little efforts of 1843 and 1844; then, when etching was resumed in 1858—or, rather, when it was for the first time taken to seriously—there were the plates of Arthur, Dasha, A Lady Reading, and Amalfi. In these he was finding his way; and then, with the first plates of the following year, his way was found; we have the Mytton Hall, the Egham, and the Water Meadow, perfectly vigorous, perfectly suggestive sketches, still unsurpassed. In later years we find a later manner, a different phase of his talent, a different result of his experience; but in 1859 he was already, I repeat, entirely himself, and doing work that is neither strikingly better nor strikingly worse than the work which has followed it a score of years after. In the work of 1859, and in the work of the last period, there will be found about an equal measure of beautiful production. In each there will be something to admire warmly, and something that will leave us indifferent. And in the etchings of 1859, in the very plates that I have mentioned, there is already enough to attest the range of the artist’s sympathy with nature and with picturesque effect. Mytton Hall, seen or guessed at through the gloom of its weird trees, is remarkable for a certain garden stateliness—a disorder that began in order, a certain dignity of nature in accord with the curious dignity and quietude of Art. The Egham subject has the silence of the open country; the Water Meadow is an artist’s subject quite as peculiarly, for “the eye that sees” is required most of all when the question is how to find the beautiful in the apparently commonplace.