Next year, amongst other good work, we have the sweet little plate of Combe Bottom, which, in a fine impression, more than holds its own against the Kensington Gardens, and gives us at least as much enjoyment by its excellence of touch as does the more intricate beauty of the Shore Mill Pond, with its foliage so varied and so rich. In the next year to which any etchings are assigned in Sir William Drake’s catalogue—a thoroughly systematic book, and done with the aid of much information from the author of the plates—we find Mr. Haden departing from his usual habit of recording his impression of nature, for the object, sometimes not a whit less worthy, of recording his impression of some chosen piece of master’s art. This is in the year 1865, and the subject is a rendering of Turner’s drawing of the Grande Chartreuse, and it is an instance of the noble and artistic translation of work to which a translator may hold himself bound to be faithful. And here is the proper place, I think, to mention the one such other instance of a subject inspired, not by nature, but by the art of Turner, which Seymour Haden’s work affords—the large plate of the Calais Pier, done in 1874. Nothing shows Mr. Haden’s sweep of hand, his masculine command of his means, better than that. Such an exhibition of spontaneous force is altogether refreshing. One or two points about it demand to be noted. In the first place, it makes no pretence, and exhibits no desire, to be a pure copy. Without throwing any imputation on the admirable craft of the pure interpreter and simple reproducer who enables us to enjoy so much of an art that might otherwise never come near to many of us, I may yet safely say that I feel sure that Mr. Haden had never the faintest intention of performing for the Calais Pier this copyist’s service. To him the Calais Pier of Turner—the sombre earlyish work of the master, now hanging in the National Gallery—was as a real scene. It was not to be scrupulously imitated; what was to be realised, or what was to be suggested, was the impression that it made. With a force of expression peculiar to him, Seymour Haden has succeeded in this aim; but, I think, he has succeeded best in the rare unpublished state which he knows as the “first biting,” and next best in the second state—the first state having some mischief of its own to bear which in the preparatory proofs had not arisen, and in the second state had ceased. The plate is arranged now with a ground for mezzotint—it lies awaiting that work—and if Mr. Haden, having now retraced to the full such steps as may have been at least partially mistaken, is but master of the new method—can but apply the mezzotint with anything of that curious facility and success with which Turner applied it to a few of his plates in Liber Studiorum, in which the professional engraver had no part—then we shall have a chef-d’œuvre of masculine suggestion which will have been worth waiting for.
To go back to the somewhat earlier plates. The Penton Hook, which is one of many wrought in 1864, is another instance—and we have had several already—of the artist’s singular power in the suggestion of tree form. Of actual leafage, leafage in detail, he is a less successful interpreter, as is indeed only natural in an etcher devoted on the whole to broad effects, looking resolutely at the ensemble. Detail is nothing to him—ensemble, balance, is all. But the features of trees, as growth of trunk and bend of bough reveal them, he gives to us as no other contemporary etcher can. And in old Art they are less varied in Claude and in Ruysdael. Mere leafage counted for more with both of these. And if it is too much to compare Mr. Haden as a draughtsman of the tree with a master of painting so approved as Crome—the painter especially of oak and willow—as an etcher of the tree he may yet be invited to occupy no second place, for Crome’s rare etchings are remarkable for draughtsmanship chiefly. Crome knew little of technical processes in etching, and so no full justice can ever be done to his etched work, which passed, imperfect, out of his own hands, and was then spoilt in the hands of others—dull, friendly people, who fancied they knew more than he did of the trick of the craft, but who knew nothing of the instinct of the art. Crome himself in etching was like a soldier unequipped. Mr. Haden has a whole armoury of weapons.
Seymour Haden has been a fisherman; I do not know whether he has been a sailor. But, at all events, purely rural life and scene, however varied in kind, are discovered to be insufficient, and the foliage of the meadow and the waters of the trout stream are often left for the great sweep of tidal river, the long banks that enclose it, the wide sky that enlivens every great flat land, and by its infinite mobility and immeasurable light gives a soul, I always think, to the scenery of the plain. Then we have Sunset on the Thames (1865), Erith Marshes (1865), and the Breaking Up of the Agamemnon (1870), the last of them striking a deep poetic note—that of our associations with an England of the past that has allowed us the England of to-day—a note struck by Turner in the Fighting Téméraire, and struck so magnificently by Browning and by Tennyson[[1]] in verse for which no Englishman can ever be too thankful.
[1]. I mean, of course, in “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” and in the “Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet.”
In the technique of these later etchings there is, perhaps, no very noticeable departure from that of the earlier but yet mature work. But in composition or disposition of form we seem to see an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness, breadth, potent effect. The work seems, in these best examples, to become more dramatic and more moving. The hand demands occasion for the large exercise of its freedom. These characteristics are very noticeable in the Sawley Abbey of 1873. Nor are they absent from our Dusty Millers.
Sawley Abbey is etched on zinc, a substance of which Mr. Haden has of late become fond. It affords “a fat line”—a line without rigidity—and so far it is good. But the practical difficulty with it is that the particles of iron it contains make it uncertain and tricky, and we may notice that an etching on zinc is apt to be full of spots and dots. It succeeds admirably, however, where it does not fail very much. Of course its frequent failure places it out of the range of the pure copyist who copies or translates as matter of business. He cannot afford its risk. In 1877—a year in which Mr. Haden made a number of somewhat undesirable etchings in Spain, and a more welcome group of sketches in Dorsetshire, on the downs and the coast—Mr. Haden worked much upon zinc. And it is in this year that a change that might before have been foreseen is clearly apparent. Dry point before this had been united with etching, but not till now have we much of what is wholly dry point; and from this date the dry-point work is almost, though not altogether, continuous, the artist having rejoiced, he tells me, in its freedom and rapidity.
The Dorsetshire etchings, Windmill Hill, Nine Barrow Down, and the like, are most of them dry points. In them, though the treatment of delicate distances is not evaded, there is especial opportunity for strong and broad effects of light and shade. Perhaps it is to these that a man travels as his work continues, and as, in continuing, it develops. At least it may be so in landscape.
Here, for the present, is arrested the etched work of an artist thoroughly individual, thoroughly vigorous, but against whom I have charged, by implication, sometimes a lack of exquisiteness, the only too frequent but not inevitable drawback of the quality of force. So much for the work of the hand. For the process of the mind—the character which sets the hand upon the labour, and pricks it on to the execution of the aim—the worst has been said also, when I said, at the beginning, that Mr. Haden lacked that power of extremely prolonged concentration which produced the epic in literature and the epic in painting. These two admissions made, there is little of just criticism of Seymour Haden’s work that must not be admiring and cordial—the record of enjoyment rather than of dissatisfaction—so much faithful and free suggestion does the work contain of the impressions that gave rise to it, so much variety is compassed, so much are we led into unbroken paths, and so much evidence is there of eager desire to enlarge the limits of our Art, whether by plunge into a new theme, or by application of a new process.