LAND AND WATER 
^farch 2, 1916. 
THE ART OF PENNELL. 
And the Graft of Germany at Work. 
By Haldane Macfall. 
BECAUSE of these things that Pennell's sKJlk-d 
hand has limned, I write these impressions of 
the latest phase of his art in a vast camp of 
armed men where battalions upon battalions 
lie along the ridges as a division prepares itself for battle. 
One's mind travels back some thirty years to the day 
when one was learning the craft and subtlety of battle 
oneself, little foreseeing the world tumult that lay forward ; 
and, curiously enough, out of that distant calm comes to 
me amongst many impressions the work of a young 
American —Joseph Penncll. He and his charming wife 
were cycling over the Canterbury Pilgrimage and he was 
laying the foundations of that sound reputation for 
journalistic art which he has steadily increased ever since 
— he illustrating and she writing their delightful ad- 
ventures. I use the word " journalistic " in its best sense. 
The pen line was harder and the hand more mechanical in 
those days ; but the drawings were fine stuff, and, like 
most of Pennell's work, are amongst my art treasures. 
Pennell, like several of the young American illustrators, 
must have been under the intluence of Viergo in his 
beginnings ; but as his hand's skill increased, he rapidly 
developed a free use of the pen line which led nj^ to the 
s?rics of exquisite pen-and-ink landscapes that make 
the HifiJiways and Byways series of English County 
histories one of the finest achievements of modern 
illustration. 
Poems of Masonry. 
From the best artists of the age, Pennell has taken 
and added to his technical mastery of the pen-line, until 
his large drawings of cathedrals and other buildings 
have become poems in the interpretation of masonry. 
Curiously enough, his small pen-and-ink work always 
holds something of the large vision ; his very large 
drawings lack this largeness, and, for all their charm, seem 
to be deficient in strength and breadth. This paradox 
of technique is easily accounted for, when we come to 
weigh the strength and the weakness of Pennell's vision 
and utterance, and above all his psychology and artistic 
character, with a glimpse at his intellectuality. One 
does not take the trouble to examine an artist's soul to 
this extent imless he be a tiiie artist —and Pennell is a 
true artist. Nor can these drawings of " Germany at 
Work," which appear on page 2 of this issue, be 
appreciated at their real value until we under- 
stand sometiiing of the psychology and craft of 
the man who made them ; and who, all unv.itting of 
the thing he has done, has by his very coldness of vision 
and lack of jiassion added to the damning indictment 
against the Prussian. 
Perhaps the worst inlUience under which Pennell 
came was the masterful, aggressive, and mentally un- 
scrupulous soul .of Whistler. No man ever talked more 
utter trash about art and in a more exquisite way than 
Whistler : no man when he set to work to create art 
more ruthlessly rid himself of his intellectual falsities 
and surrendered himself more to the thoroughly emotional 
achic\ement of the impression he desired to utter. 
Pennell, realising the high artistic achievement of the 
man, accepted and became missionary to the falsities of 
his intellect, and thereby limited his own powers. We 
see it again and again in the notes which he sets down 
in his catalogue to " Germany at Work." For instance, 
" all great work, like great art, is the carrying on of 
tradition." This is a half-truth which fails utterly 
to grasp the significance of art ; it's just the old 
beauty fallacy in its nightshirt. Obviously art is eternal 
but craftsmanship has evolved, and it is precisely in the 
aping of a dead tradition that all art endeavour finds its 
grave. We see Pennell's intellectual .self-deception again 
in such a passage as " the gasomet(Ms are built inside the 
great castles, and so become picturesque instead of 
eyesores," bywhich he reallymeans that the thing which 
man calls a gasometer is a hideous thing and astutely 
faked by the Germans in liiding it inside an old castle ; 
yet the greater part of his notes are given to glorifying 
factories and workshops to the disparagement of castles 
and cathedrals ! Now this dishonesty of intellect you 
will never find in Pennell's artistry : the moment, like 
Whistler, he stops talking about art and sets to work to 
create it, he reaches fine achievement. It is Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde. 
His Artistic Utterance. 
Let all Pennell's talk about art go. What are 
the limits and the heights of his artistic utterance ? The 
chief lack is absence of that passion or intensitv of feeling 
by which alone the mightiest art is created. On the other 
hand there is a serene sincerity of vision that gives a 
rare dignity to the vision of the man. Take for instance 
the drawing of " Within the Lacc-Work of Steel " in 
the Vulcan Shij)yard at Hanaburg, with its fine perspec- 
tive and cadence. Pennell confides to us that it was 
"difficult to draw" and " e.vciting " ; we realise the 
draughtsmanship but we get no hint of the excitement. 
Or take the fine lithograph of " The Hut of the Cape of 
Good Ho])e Steel Works at Oberhausen," with its beauty 
of spacing and arrangement, and compare the cold 
hard eye of this man who saw it with the eye of such a 
poet as Rrangwyn or Millet or Meunier. Think of the 
dramatic intensity of the appeal of this thing to Brangwyn, 
and imagine what he would have given us, and we see the 
vast gulf that separates what one may call in its highest 
sense " pictorial journalism " from " dramatic art." 
I am dwelling perhaps a little unduly and with 
some insistency on this point of the cold deliberate 
% ision and freedom from all temper in Pennell's display of 
"Germany at Work" in order to press its high value to-day 
from its very lack of passion. Brangwyn and Meunier 
and Millet led the way in modern art to the revelation of 
the glory and wonder of work ; but they did it with 
intensity of temper and vision. Look at one of Brang- 
wyn 's men carrying a load along a plank gangway from 
a great ship, and he gets the power of the thing with the 
joy that an old Greek sculptor got out of carving an athlete 
in marble. With Pennell, no. There is the record, 
stated with exquisite detail and balance, of a witness. 
In order to convince one of his joy in the thing he has to 
j)rint it in the catalogue ; he has subordinated his art 
to his intellect, and confined his emotional statement to 
his self-criticism of the limits of his powers 
Proof of German Intentions. 
It so happens that it is as well so. If we needed 
proof of (icrmany's vast intention to set out and over- 
whelm the world, it could be found in this cold-blooded 
evidence of Pennell's that is without bias or exaggeration 
or sentiment — evidence indeed that is rather admiration 
than condemnation. It seemed to thinking men until 
a few years ago an unthinkable thing that a whole people 
could have been organised into an ambition to one end. 
But the German did it ; his ver\' narrowness of skuli 
and that aggressive ignorance called Kultur helping 
and binding his sinews to the fantastic endeavour. 
The day the Royal House of Prussia dropped the Pilot 
in 1890, Bismarck, as he stepped from the helm of State, 
must have been filled with a strange wonder as to where 
his teachings were going to lead the realm that he had 
created with such astounding sKill and unscrupulousness. 
He shook his head at the councils of the new bloods ; he 
foretold the wreckage, be sure of it, or he had not been 
dismissed the ship. But even Bismarck must have 
stood a-wonder at the work the professors had already 
achieved— the inoculation of high and low with the 
views of Germany's destiny as the lord of the earth. 
Every schoolboj', every student, spectacled doctor and 
lawyer, grocer's boy, waiter, labourer, soldier, sailor, 
l^arson, pauper, poop, and. king, had decided that this 
slave-race of which they were, could by organisation 
create Germany into a world-empire and niler over the 
earth. To that end they bent their commerce, their 
philosophy, their religionj their thinking, their God. 
