Normandy in Black and White
The Speaker, May 12, 1900

Highways and Byways in Normandy. By Percy Dearmer, M.A. With Illustrations by Joseph Pennell. Macmillan



For the individual to whom France at this moment means the Exhibition there is not perhaps much material for that particular event to be gathered in Normandy. He may, indeed, imagine a grand international race between a local Norman train and a green Bayswater omnibus. He may dream of a competition in confidential solemnity and physical hoarseness between a French and an English church cicerone; and if the English omnibus would (most probably) win in the first contest, we have no doubt at all that the French cicerone would win in the second. But Normandy has in the matter of international enlightenment one real advantage over Paris at this time. It is possible for an Englishman to visit a French Exhibition in a temper of the most virgin arrogance. A certain type of English tourist, having decided not to "boycott" the Exhibition, may strut through Paris in a spirit that makes one wish he felt it his duty to boycott every assembly of his fellow-creatures. The heroics of M. Millerand may exhibit to him much of the real weakness and much of the misunderstood greatness of the French character. The inevitable ugliness of a modern "show" may leave his imagination free to compare it with the grander architecture of the Wheel at Earl's Court, into which eager hundreds ascend nightly- presumably because it is the only place from which it cannot be seen. Everywhere the tawdriness of that which is new, the pretentiousness of that which is official, may give food to any mind that is desirous of indulging in the contemptible pleasure of contempt. But no Englishman who travels in Normandy and takes with him any vestige of English generosity and shrewdness can fail to feel, amid sleepy towns and grass-grown ruins, the silent splendour of the enduring greatness of France. He finds himself among the monuments of a French civilisation which sowed cathedrals and council halls as thick as farms in Kent in an age when utter savagery reigned in the land of France's great modern enemy and of her great modern ally. And in the shadow of this opulent antiquity he finds a race, living and vigorous, whose faults indeed are neither few nor small, but whose virtues are those especially claimed for the Teuton- strength, prudence, fidelity and industry; none the worse for being touched with a certain democratic courtesy which is rare in London and almost undiscoverable in Paris. Mr. Percy Dearmer and Mr. Pennell are suited to each other in one respect; that they are both impressed with the necessity of avoiding the air and spirit of the guide-book. But while Mr. Pennell's scorn of the practical is airy and triumphant, Mr. Dearmer's is fitful and desperate. Now and then the guide-book conquers. A reader who opens the book incautiously may easily light on a paragraph beginning, "Proceeding up the left aisle we find ourselves...." and be forced, with a slight shudder, to turn over the pages quickly. But to dwell on these lurid examples would be to give an utterly false idea of a very interesting work. Mr. Dearmer has grasped the one great truth of the matter, that to be rambling, to be lopsided, to be unequal, are things that matter not at all, if by these processes a man may dwell on what he has to say and pass over what everybody else has said. Mr. Dearmer has certain hobbies of his own; one of them is mediaeval military architecture, a truly generous hobby which warms the heart, since it cannot under any conceivable circumstances be of any material use to anybody. By the space he devotes to the difficulty of capturing Coeurde-Lion's fortress of Chateau-Gaillard one might think he was going to storm that long-dismantled stronghold next morning. Another of his interests is coloured glass. The general impression of Norman buildings conveyed in his pages is that they consist entirely of windows, like the Crystal Palace. But words cannot convey how warmly Mr. Dearmer is to be commended for giving his work the sincerity of a specialist rather than the hypocrisy of the "cultured" tourist, with his predestined admiration of every buttress and crypt. There is snobbery and flattery enough among men; there is no need that we should fawn upon stones.

Mr. Pennell is, of course, even further from the beaten track. His work can hardly be considered by the tourist a good substitute for an album of photographs. He is one of the most brilliant of that modern school of artists in whom the desire to copy external objects is always checked by a delicate love of the materials and medium in which the work is done. If he sketches a cottage in pen-and-ink, the lines suggest the bricks; but they are not brick lines- they are deliberately and avowedly pen-and-ink lines; the soul of the pen is in them as the soul of the bow is in the flying arrow. If he draws a waterfall in charcoal, he may love the great mountains and the ruinous fall of the river, but he does not love them half as much as he loves that piece of charred stick in his hand- its filmy lines or black abrupt angles.

Mr. Pennell's illustrations are, of course, admirable, and they are reproduced in a manner that must have satisfied the artist himself— not the most roseate of optimists on such points of criticism. One rather singular thing about the illustrations is the large number of them that are set on the page crooked, making the spires reel as if Normandy were a land of earthquakes. "The Tower of St. Jacques," for example, is a splendid architectural study, but it is impossible to repress the query- which Mr. Winkle applied to his horse- "What makes him go sideways?" I note this eccentricity with some trepidation, for it may be a part of the new technique. No one acquainted with Mr. Pennell's literary personality would be surprised if the matter ended in an indignant article over his name, in which he explained that artists had long abandoned the obstinate, fatuous, clumsy process of putting a picture the right way up, had realised the great atmospheric delicacy of the oblique method, and that this enlightenment, long familiar to the great aristocracy of art, might soon work its way down, through the lunatic asylums and the criminal class, to the comprehension of the literary critics.

Any one who can appreciate the technique of sketching will find inexhaustible pleasure even in those parts of Mr. Pennell's work in which his excellences are scholarly and traditional. If he blackens a tree with barred lines, the lines grip the tree tight and give it solid shape: they do not merely stripe it like a tiger-skin rug. If he throws out a line, however long and loose, it is sent flying in great curves like a lasso at a definite place and purpose: not sent stumbling through blank spaces like a lost cow in the style of the imitators of Beardsley. But the chief interest of Mr. Pennell's art is not in the more conservative portions. The basis of the artistic as of the ethical virtues is courage, and of courage there is only one certain and splendid signal- failure. And among all the designs there are none that more definitely give its character to the series than those which are not wholly successful, which aim at an original effect and miss it. Here and there a mass of hill and cloud, left too defiantly blank, does not suggest a blaze of sunshine, but merely a square of white paper: here and there a medley of strokes does not come together quickly enough to assume the features of a familiar cathedral. But these are more especially valuable, for they are the marks of the chivalrous and ambitious spirit of Mr. Pennell's art, which is everywhere making experiments, which seeks with each sketch to found a school.

Of all the many styles which Mr. Pennell affects with success, there is one which calls for a certain notice, for it is that which has most recently modified his work. It is essentially describable as a sketchy revival of the pre-Raphaelite landscape. The heavy dogmas of pre-Raphaelite criticism have gone, the corpse that falls from every religion at its resurrection. But the spirit, the unconscious spirit of the great brotherhood, its instinct for the decorative character of the shapes of things, its instinct for the effective conventional treatment of sun and tree and river, its fresh feeling for the youth of the earth, none the less fascinated and fascinating because it was touched with a youthful asceticism and fear, its medieval sentiment of a compact cosmos in which clouds and stars were as solid as stones and mountains- all this half mystic, half-grotesque realism is gathered up into the eternal web of the world's art. And if any one wishes to see the essential truth that was in pre-Raphaelitism, he has only to look at an outline sketch of Mont Saint Michel, by Joseph Pennell- one of the greatest of the Impressionists.