International studio (48.1913)

The Wonder of Work on the Panama Canal

much character in mills and mines as in puddlers
and miners. And unless one cares enough to study
the anatomy, the construction of these huge works,
as one studies the anatomy of the figure, it is useless
to try to draw them. On the other hand, study
them too much, or show too much, and the result
is a mechanical rendering. Mills and harbours and
docks are, as Rembrandt and Claude showed, as
much governed by the laws of composition as any-
thing else. And it is these two great facts, know-
ledge and composition, that have got to be kept
in mind when drawing the Wonder of Work.
But the average painter, or etcher, or illustrator
simply does, without thought or observation, save of
the man he is prigging from, the subject he has to
do, or thinks it is the fashion to do. Every gallery
now, every exhibition—there are even decorations
which are not decorative on public walls—reeks
with the attempts of all those who have nothing to
say for themselves or have or have not turned Post-
Impressionists, to render work and workers, for work
has become the subject of their thieving. But to
those few who care and have proved by their work
that they care, this is the day and the time of the
Wonder of Work, because within a few years,
even sooner, with the coming of electricity, the
mystery of work, the smoke revealing, concealing
mystery will have rolled away for ever. And also
because to-day the greatest works that man has ever
undertaken are in progress.
There are the dams in Egypt and Arizona;
there are the sky-scrapers of New York. The
wonderful railway stations are all disappearing ; the
coal and iron mines becoming spick and span and
unpaintable. Even the costume of work is vanish-
ing and the workman’s character along with it.
But at the present moment the most stupendous
work the world has ever seen is in progress; and it
was to find out if it was pictorial—in the hope it
was—that I went to the Panama Canal. There
was no one to give me a hint—it was not till I got
to the Isthmus that I found some one had been
there before me. I had never heard of him or his
work and have only seen one of his drawings.
Still I started on a trip of r 5,000 miles in search of
the Wonder of Work.
The day I got ashore in Colon, I found it. I
had seen great cranes at Pittsburg and Duisberg,
but nothing like that which stretched its great arm,
with great claws at the end, over the sad silent
swamp at Mount Hope—the graveyard of de
Lesseps’s ambitions. I had seen in NewYork,as I sat
on the thirtieth story of the Metropolitan Building,
a chain come up from below with a man clinging to

it. But I had never imagined anything like the
group of figures which rose out of Gatun Lock just
as I reached it at dinner-time. I had looked into
natural chasms and gulfs—though nothing like
those I was to see later—but I never imagined
anything so impressive as the gates at Pedro Miguel
Lock. I have seen the greatest walls of the oldest
cities, but I have never imagined anything so im-
posing as the walls of Miraflores Lock. I have
seen the great aqueducts and great arches of the
world, but I never imagined anything like the
magnificent approaches to Gatun and superb spring
of Pedro Miguel—made so by army officers and
civil engineers mainly to save material. For there
are no architects, no designers, no decorators
employed on the Panama Canal—just ordinary
engineers—and it might have been a good thing at
the Victoria and Albert Museum if an architect
had not taken over the work of an engineer. But
the engineers at Panama are great designers, and
great work makes great decoration.
Almost before I left the Canal artists and
decorators were on their way there. I hope it
may interest them half as much as it interested me.
I have tried in these lithographs of the Canal to
show some of the things I saw as they were this
spring, but even in the few weeks I was on the
Isthmus many of them changed completely, or
disappeared for ever. What I did is, at any rate,
a record of what I saw. Not that I came any-
where near exhausting any sort of subject—from
every part of the lock new compositions may be
evolved. I merely tried to draw the things I saw
when I saw them—squatting on my sketching
stool where I could, or when I could, or on an iron
girder, in the cab of an engine, a telephone box,
or on the top of a crane. I only remember refusing
to be suspended in a bucket a hundred feet or so
in the air over one of the locks, as I was invited.
Had I not had my previous experience in trying
to draw work, I could not have done even what I
did, but the study of great architecture is a
great aid, for these huge locks are architectural.
The life of the Canal, the workmen, I hardly
touched; they are but details in the Wonder of
Work they have created. Where often the work is
fiercest, there the fewest workers are to be seen.
It is only when the men knock off that you see the
thousands who are at it.
The landscape, the mountains crowned with
strange trees, the long level lines of cloud—I
always believed this to be an invention, or a con-
vention, of the Japanese—that hang motionless
before the hills, the impenetrable jungle, the native
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