Joseph Pennell

“ There it stood, solitary—beyond, behind, below—climbing up the endless hills silhouetting the horizon, revealed and hidden by showers, smoke, clouds, chimneys and chimneys and chimneys—the endless landmarks of industrial England.
This etching illustrates, too, the necessity of doing the Wonder of Work when you find a subject, and not saying, "I will come again and do it later"—and you must find your subjects for yourself: no one can tell you where there is a fine smoke effect or a stunning steam jet. ”

“ In the morning the mountains of buildings hide themselves, to reveal themselves in the rosy steam clouds that chase each other across their flanks; when evening fades, they are mighty cliffs glimmering with glistening lights in the magic and mystery of the night. As the steamer moves up the bay on the left the Great Goddess greets you, a composition in colour and form, with the city beyond, finer than any in any world that ever existed, finer than Claude ever imagined, or Turner ever dreamed. Why did not Whistler see it? Piling up higher and higher right before you is New York ”

“ Dead and gray and bare are the nearby hills, glorious the snow-covered peaks far off, but incredible is this endless rolling, changing pillar of cloud, always there, yet always different—and that country covered with great lakes, waterless, glittering, great lava beds of refuse stretching away in every direction down the mountain sides into the valleys, swallowing up every vestige of life, yet beautiful with the beauty of death—a death, a plague which day by day spreads farther and farther over the land—silently overwhelming, all-devouring—a silent place of smoke and fire. ”

“ But, though he will disappear, and Post Impressionism will be swallowed up in shopkeeping, and war has engulfed that, and work is stopped—save for war—and though the mustard pot has gone with the soulful doggie, and the tearful baby rival of the Dresden Madonna, the artist who has something to say in his own way about his own time, and can say it, will live, and his work will live, with Rembrandt, Velasquez, Franz Hals, Meunier, and Whistler—artists who painted and drew the work and life about them, who carried on tradition, and never regretted the past. ”

“ THE WONDER OF WORK INTRODUCTION
Work to-day is the greatest thing in the world, and the artist who best records it will be best remembered. Work has always been an inspiration to artists, from the time when we were told to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, till now, when most of us are trying to forget the command, and act like "ladies and gentlemen."
Under the Church, work—the building of the Tower of Babel and the Temple—was the subject of endless imaginings by painters, sculptors and gravers who never assisted at the functions they illustrated. ”

“ Or the slag and dirt are dumped directly on the growing mountain, and this refuse falls in the most beautiful lines and the most lovely grays and browns, like velvet or the fur of some huge beast, which grows and grows, towering over the chimneys, the furnaces looming up through the smoke, always growing and growing, fed by the travellers which carry to it an endless chain of creaking buckets high in air, sometimes for a kilometre, over ploughed fields and slow-moving rivers, to these work mountains. ”

“ If you have the luck to reach the town early in the morning you will find it half revealed, half concealed in smoke and mist and steam, through which the strange shafts struggle up to the light, while all round the horizon the snow peaks silently shimmer above the noisy, hidden town. If you have the still better fortune to reach it late in the evening you will see an Alpine glow that the Alps have never seen. In the middle of the day the mountains disappear and there is nothing but glare and glitter, union men and loafers about. ”

“ They group themselves under their canopy of smoke as finely as any in the world, and every works in the Wonder of Work has character—just as a tree has—but how much more impressive is a row of blast furnaces, oil wells, and coal breakers, than trees! Yet these are the subjects of our age—naturally, scarcely any one ever looks at them, especially artists—though I hear the "young artists" of America have with money prizes been encouraged to take up "Labor" as a change from painting "murals"—but you can't help people to be artists or to see things, they must do it for themselves. ”

“ I am always being criticised for lacking interest in such matters, but my critics do not realize I am simply an artist searching for the Wonder of Work—not for morals—political economy—stories of sweating—the crime of ugliness. ”

“ Meunier showed without sentiment the workman at work, not with any idea of preaching about his wrongs, his trials, his struggles, his misery, but to show the Wonder of Work for its own sake, and the pictorial possibilities of workmen and workwomen in Belgium. Meunier showed that the workman was worthy of the artist's chisel, chalk, needle, and paint. There is no sentiment about Meunier; there is grandeur, dignity, and power, and from him we have learned that modern work is wonderful. Meunier was an old man when a few years ago I first heard of him and saw his work. ”

“ A fact most critics have never realised. But Whistler was a many-sided—a so many-sided—genius that his many essays in many fields are only just becoming known, and this study of work—the most difficult study in the world, under the most trying conditions—was never abandoned by him till he said what he wanted, in the ways he wanted, not till he had made a series of masterpieces which live and will live forever. ”

“ But it is to America we must turn, to White's etching of Brooklyn Bridge, Cooper's skyscrapers, Alden Weir's New York at night, Bellow's docks, Childe Hassam's high buildings, Thornton Oakley's coal breakers—to these one must look for the modern rendering of work. There are others, too, who have seen the opportunity to prig and steal—but this is evident, just as it is evident that they will give up painting or drawing work for the next new thing. And there is another artist who really cares for the Wonder of Work. ”

“ There are hundreds of these inclines—ascenseurs, finiculari, in the world—all fascinating from above or below—but I know of none so fascinating as this even among the numbers at Cincinnati—none in which the pitch is steeper, the stop so sudden—none where the streets lead direct to the heart of the city; no city so dominated, concentrated, at its heart, by its lone white skyscraper, as Cincinnati. ”

“ The Unbelievable City, the city that has been built since I grew up, the city beautiful, built by men I know, built for people I know. The city that inspires me, that I love. And all America is like this and—all—or nearly all unseen, unknown, untouched. ”

“ But when the shadows begin to creep up from below, the place becomes a theatre for the gods, a theatre where there are no spectators, and the actors are the steam shovels with their white plumes and the engines with their black clouds. But they are finer far than any poor mummer's makeshifts. And every now and then comes a burst of applause as a blast is fired more thrilling than ever heard in a play theatre. ”

“ I do not mean to say there have not been, there are not, artists who have cared for the work and workers of the fields for their own sake: there are some; but I wish to speak only of industrial work. Millet has, I believe, honestly done the life around his home, the life of the fields, but, though he has endless imitators, there are scarcely any painters to-day who see through their own eyes the real life of the fields and farms and the fisherman—they are blinded by the Frenchman and debauched with sentiment. ”

“ Low black villages of miners' houses straggle toward the foot of the mountain. The barren plain is covered with gray, slimy masses of refuse which crawl down to it—glaciers of work—from the hills. The plain is seared and scored and cracked with tiny canyons, all their lines leading to the mountain. ”

“ The lines of the winding waterways, each leading to a furnace, a mill, an elevator, are simply beautiful and the color absolutely lovely. This is the modern landscape—a landscape that Claude would have loved. All his composition is in it—only the mills have replaced the palaces, the trestle the aqueduct ”

“ We may believe we are and prove ourselves ignorant or cubists, but the cubists are so ignorant—or think the public are—that they only prig from archaic art. We can carry on tradition with difficulty; we can easily turn backward or stand still. Those who have created the Wonder of Work do not turn back—artists do not—duffers do. ”

“ The only artists who see things in the world are engineers and a few architects, for the mill has taken the place of the cathedral—and the great craftsmen who once worked for Popes now work for captains of industry—for art follows money. ”

“ It is a fashion of the art critic to praise Japanese arrangement and construction. No Japanese ever designed so pictorial and so powerful a bridge as this, yet, on the whole, it looks like a Japanese bridge and has the feeling of one, but it is doubtful if the engineer who designed it ever saw Hiroshigi's prints. ”

“ In America we have imaginings of Holy Grails, Pied Pipers, Religious Liberties, when one fact in "murals" about steel works, skyscrapers, or the Brooklyn Bridge would be worth the lot in the future, when these factless fancies are whitewashed out, or made a good ground to paint on. ”

“ I have forgotten the good dinner and the doubtless good talk, but I shall never forget the towering buildings, in the coming night, grouped round the low houses, and the dark hole from which the steel skeleton was emerging, soon to become higher and mightier than the grim masses amid which it was growing. ”

“ It is only in America that immigrants live like hogs—as they like—no government in Europe would permit it. I have seen both hemispheres and know most social reformers have not—and would not know if they had. We are trying to clean up the world before we can clean our back yards. But I only looked at the coal breaker as making, perfecting, carrying out a composition in a glorious landscape, and for that reason I sat down and drew it. ”

“ Painters, who sat in their studios hundreds of years after the towers and temples were designed and destroyed, have showed what they imagined the towers and the temples looked like. This—this sort of creation or invention—we art students in America called "genius work" because it was "done out of our heads." In Europe it is called "scholarly," and is concocted from a classical dictionary; a trip for a few weeks to Greece or Italy is useful but not necessary, and adds to the expense ”

“ Where is the building of the Tower Bridge, the Power Houses, the Docks, the Blackwall Tunnel, the Trams, the Tube, or any of the other works by which this age, this workaday age, has distinguished itself, all of which are worth painting? ”

“ Mighty, terrifying are these monsters—filled chock-full with ore, which, when the empty steamers come alongside, vomit roaring red and gold and brown streams of ore that load them in half an hour, or less, and then are ready for more. ”

“ But there was a man—all the great have gone from us in the last few years, which accounts for the momentary popularity of the little—there was a man who gave his later life to the Wonder of Work—Constantin Meunier. ”

“ There, and not in Philadelphia, are the new Americans—but most Americans do not know it—for their ways are not Philadelphia ways, and their thoughts not those of Spruce Street. And there is not a man among them who speaks English hardly—and they are too ignorant to know that England is their "Mother Land." ”

“ There are the same great terraces, the same steam shovels, digging and loading the dirt, the same engines and trains, and in some of the pits the forms are even fine—amphitheatres,—only the seats and steps are gigantic. ”

“ Now educated people, cultured people, take such painters seriously—and pay to sit in darkened chambers and brood. These are carefully but sadly illuminated, and the spectators pursue with diligence, scarce looking at the exhibits, the remarks of critics who prove conclusively that these painters show exactly what the world was like, what buildings were like and how they were built, and how the builders worked according to the bookman and archæologist, and the critic. ”

“ The Rhine is wonderful from the sea to the source—but fine as one finds the old castles and the combinations of old castles and new mills, the new mills, new Rhine castles, have made a new river, and they are the most interesting things on it.
XLV BUILDING THE RAILROAD STATION LEIPZIG, GERMANY
It is difficult to tell whether an American railroad station is a Greek temple, a Christian Science church, a free library, a bank, a museum, or a millionaire's residence or his tomb. A German railroad station looks like a railroad station and nothing else. ”

“ In Italy alone can the wonder of the old and new work be found. This subject must have been sketched by Claude—for these two lighthouses appear—or others like them—possibly at Civita Vecchia, again and again in his paintings. ”

“ High in the air the iron gate hangs—the entrance to the great works. When there is a strike it comes down, and not only is it topped with sharp spikes, but, I was told, it could be charged with electricity and is pierced with holes through which to shoot. ”