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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Picture and Text, by Henry James
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Picture and Text
1893
Author: Henry James
Release Date: June 12, 2008 [EBook #25767]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURE AND TEXT ***
Produced by David Widger
PICTURE AND TEXT
By Henry James
Harper And Brothers - MDCCCXCIII
NOTE
Two of the following papers were originally published, with
illustrations, in Harper's Magazine and the title of one of them--the
first of titles has been altered from "Our Artists in Europe." The
other, the article on Mr. Sargent, was accompanied by reproductions
of several of his portraits. The notice of Mr. Abbey and that of Mr.
Reinhart appeared in Harper's Weekly. That of Mr. Alfred Parsons figured
as an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his pictures.
The sketch of Daumier was first contributed to _The Century_, and "After
the Play" to _The New Review_.
BLACK AND WHITE
[Illustration: Black and White Page Image]
If there be nothing new under the sun there are some things a good
deal less old than others. The illustration of books, and even more of
magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as
variety and abundance are the signs of it; or born, at any rate, the
comprehensive, ingenious, sympathetic spirit in which we conceive and
practise it.
If the centuries are ever arraigned at some bar of justice to answer
in regard to what they have given, of good or of bad, to humanity, our
interesting age (which certainly is not open to the charge of having
stood with its hands in its pockets) might perhaps do worse than put
forth the plea of having contributed a fresh interest in "black and
white." The claim may now be made with the more confidence from the very
evident circumstance that this interest is far from exhausted. These
pages are an excellent place for such an assumption. In Harper they have
again and again, as it were, illustrated the illustration, and they
constitute for the artist a series of invitations, provocations and
opportunities. They may be referred to without arrogance in support of
the contention that the limits of this large movement, with all its new
and rare refinement, are not yet in sight.
I
It is on the contrary the constant extension that is visible, with
the attendant circumstances of multiplied experiment and intensified
research--circumstances that lately pressed once more on the attention
of the writer of these remarks on his finding himself in the particular
spot which history will perhaps associate most with the charming
revival. A very old English village, lying among its meadows and hedges,
in the very heart of the country, in a hollow of the green hills of
Worcestershire, is responsible directly and indirectly for some of the
most beautiful work in black and white with which I am at liberty to
concern myself here; in other words, for much of the work of Mr. Abbey
and Mr. Alfred Parsons. I do not mean that Broadway has told these
gentlemen all they know (the name, from which the American reader has to
brush away an incongruous association, may as well be written first as
last); for Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows everything that can be
known about English fields and flowers, would have good reason to insist
that the measure of his large landscape art is a large experience. I
only suggest that if one loves Broadway and is familiar with it, and
if a part of that predilection is that one has seen Mr. Abbey and Mr.
Parsons at work there, the pleasant confusion takes place of itself;
one's affection for the wide, long, grass-bordered vista of brownish
gray cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied, immemorial,
grows with the sense of its having ministered to other minds and
transferred itself to other recipients; just as the beauty of many a
bit in many a drawing of the artists I have mentioned is enhanced by the
sense, or at any rate by the desire, of recognition. Broadway and much
of the land about it are in short the perfection of the old English
rural tradition, and if they do not underlie all the combinations by
which (in their pictorial accompaniments to rediscovered ballads, their
vignettes to story or sonnet) these particular talents touch us almost
to tears, we feel at least that they _would_ have sufficed: they cover
the scale.
[Illustration: Priory]
In regard, however, to the implications and explications of this
perfection of a village, primarily and to be just, Broadway is, more
than any one else. Mr. Frank Millet. Mr. Laurence Hutton discovered but
Mr. Millet appropriated it: its sweetness was wasted until he began to
distil and bottle it. He disinterred the treasure, and with impetuous
liberality made us sharers in his fortune. His own work, moreover,
betrays him, as well as the gratitude of participants, as I could easily
prove if it did not perversely happen that he has commemorated most of
his impressions in color. That excludes them from the small space here
at my command; otherwise I could testify to the identity of old nooks
and old objects, those that constitute both out-of-door and in-door
furniture.
[Illustration: The village-green, Broadway]
In such places as Broadway, and it is part of the charm of them to
American eyes, the sky looks down on almost as many "things" as
the ceiling, and "things" are the joy of the illustrator. Furnished
apartments are useful to the artist, but a furnished country is still
more to his purpose. A ripe midland English region is a museum of
accessories and specimens, and is sure, under any circumstances,
to contain the article wanted. This is the great recommendation of
Broadway; everything in it is convertible. Even the passing visitor
finds himself becoming so; the place has so much character that it rubs
off on him, and if in an old garden--an old garden with old gates and
old walls and old summer-houses--he lies down on the old grass (on
an immemorial rug, no doubt), it is ten to one but that he will be
converted. The little oblong sheaves of blank paper with elastic straps
are fluttering all over the place. There is portraiture in the air and
composition in the very accidents. Everything is a subject or an effect,
a "bit" or a good thing. It is always some kind of day; if it be not one
kind it is another. The garden walls, the mossy roofs, the open doorways
and brown interiors, the old-fashioned flowers, the bushes in figures,
the geese on the green, the patches, the jumbles, the glimpses, the
color, the surface, the general complexion of things, have all a value,
a reference and an application. If they are a matter of appreciation,
that is why the gray-brown houses are perhaps more brown than gray, and
more yellow than either. They are various things in turn, according to
lights and days and needs. It is a question of color (all consciousness
at Broadway is that), but the irresponsible profane are not called upon
to settle the tint.
It is delicious to be at Broadway and to _be_ one of the irresponsible
profane--not to have to draw. The single street is in the grand style,
sloping slowly upward to the base of the hills for a mile, but you may
enjoy it without a carking care as to how to "render" the perspective.
Everything is stone except the general greenness--a charming smooth
local stone, which looks as if it had been meant for great constructions
and appears even in dry weather to have been washed and varnished by the
rain. Half-way up the road, in the widest place, where the coaches used
to turn (there were many of old, but the traffic of Broadway was blown
to pieces by steam, though the destroyer has not come nearer than half a
dozen miles), a great gabled mansion, which was once a manor or a
house of state, and is now a rambling inn, stands looking at a detached
swinging sign which is almost as big as itself--a very grand sign, the
"arms" of an old family, on the top of a very tall post. You will find
something very like the place among Mr. Abbey's delightful illustrations
to, "She Stoops to Conquer." When the September day grows dim and some
of the windows glow, you may look out, if you like, for Tony Lumpkin's
red coat in the doorway or imagine Miss Hardcastle's quilted petticoat
on the stair.
II
[Illustration: Millet]
It is characteristic of Mr. Frank Millet's checkered career, with
opposites so much mingled in it, that such work as he has done for
Harper should have had as little in common as possible with midland
English scenery. He has been less a producer in black and white than a
promoter and, as I may say, a protector of such production in others;
but none the less the back volumes of Harper testify to the activity of
his pencil as well as to the variety of his interests. There was a time
when he drew little else but Cossacks and Orientals, and drew them as
one who had good cause to be vivid. Of the young generation he was the
first to know the Russian plastically, especially the Russian soldier,
and he had paid heavily for his acquaintance. During the Russo-Turkish
war he was correspondent in the field (with the victors) of the New York
_Herald_ and the London _Daily News_--a capacity in which he made many
out-of-the-way, many precious, observations. He has seen strange
countries--the East and the South and the West and the North--and
practised many arts. To the London _Graphic_, in 1877 he sent striking
sketches from the East, as well as capital prose to the journals I have
mentioned. He has always been as capable of writing a text for his own
sketches as of making sketches for the text of others. He has made
pictures without words and words without pictures. He has written some
very clever ghost-stories, and drawn and painted some very immediate
realities. He has lately given himself up to these latter objects, and
discovered that they have mysteries more absorbing than any others. I
find in Harper, in 1885. "A Wild-goose Chase" through North Germany and
Denmark, in which both pencil and pen are Mr. Millet's, and both show
the natural and the trained observer.
He knows the art-schools of the Continent, the studios of Paris, the
"dodges" of Antwerp, the subjects, the models of Venice, and has had
much aesthetic as well as much personal experience. He has draped and
distributed Greek plays at Harvard, as well as ridden over Balkans to
post pressing letters, and given publicity to English villages in which
susceptible Americans may get the strongest sensations with the least
trouble to themselves. If the trouble in each case will have been
largely his, this is but congruous with the fact that he has not only
found time to have a great deal of history himself, but has suffered
himself to be converted by others into an element--beneficent I should
call it if discretion did not forbid me--of _their_ history. Springing
from a very old New England stock, he has found the practice of art a
wonderful antidote, in his own language, "for belated Puritanism." He is
very modern, in the sense of having tried many things and availed
himself of all of the facilities of his time; but especially on this
ground of having fought out for himself the battle of the Puritan habit
and the aesthetic experiment. His experiment was admirably successful
from the moment that the Puritan levity was forced to consent to its
becoming a serious one. In other words, if Mr. Millet is artistically
interesting to-day (and to the author of these remarks he is highly so),
it is because he is a striking example of what the typical American
quality can achieve.
He began by having an excellent pencil, because as a thoroughly
practical man he could not possibly have had a weak one. But nothing
is more remunerative to follow than the stages by which "faculty" in
general (which is what I mean by the characteristic American quality)
has become the particular faculty; so that if in the artist's present
work one recognizes--recognizes even fondly--the national handiness, it
is as handiness regenerate and transfigured. The American adaptiveness
has become a Dutch finish. The only criticism I have to make is of the
preordained paucity of Mr. Millet's drawings; for my mission is not to
speak of his work in oils, every year more important (as was indicated
by the brilliant interior with figures that greeted the spectator in so
friendly a fashion on the threshold of the Royal Academy exhibition
of 1888), nor to say that it is illustration too--illustration of
any old-fashioned song or story that hums in the brain or haunts the
memory--nor even to hint that the admirable rendering of the charming
old objects with which it deals (among which I include the human face
and figure in dresses unfolded from the lavender of the past), the old
surfaces and tones, the stuffs and textures, the old mahogany and silver
and brass--the old sentiment too, and the old picture-making vision--are
in the direct tradition of Terburg and De Hoogh and Metzu.
III
There is no paucity about Mr. Abbey as a virtuoso in black and white,
and if one thing more than another sets the seal upon the quality of
his work, it is the rare abundance in which it is produced. It is not a
frequent thing to find combinations infinite as well as exquisite. Mr.
Abbey has so many ideas, and the gates of composition have been
opened so wide to him, that we cultivate his company with a mixture of
confidence and excitement. The readers of Harper have had for years a
great deal of it, and they will easily recognize the feeling I allude
to--the expectation of familiarity in variety. The beautiful art and
taste, the admirable execution, strike the hour with the same note; but
the figure, the scene, is ever a fresh conception. Never was ripe skill
less mechanical, and never was the faculty of perpetual evocation less
addicted to prudent economies. Mr. Abbey never saves for the next
picture, yet the next picture will be as expensive as the last. His
whole career has been open to the readers of Harper, so that what they
may enjoy on any particular occasion is not only the talent, but a kind
of affectionate sense of the history of the talent, That history is,
from the beginning, in these pages, and it is one of the most
interesting and instructive, just as the talent is one of the richest
and the most sympathetic in the art-annals of our generation. I may as
well frankly declare that I have such a taste for Mr. Abbey's work that
I cannot affect a judicial tone about it. Criticism is appreciation or
it is nothing, and an intelligence of the matter in hand is recorded
more substantially in a single positive sign of such appreciation than
in a volume of sapient objections for objection's sake--the cheapest of
all literary commodities. Silence is the perfection of disapproval, and
it has the great merit of leaving the value of speech, when the moment
comes for it, unimpaired.
Accordingly it is important to translate as adequately as possible the
positive side of Mr. Abbey's activity. None to-day is more charming, and
none helps us more to take the large, joyous, observant, various view
of the business of art. He has enlarged the idea of illustration, and
he plays with it in a hundred spontaneous, ingenious ways. "Truth and
poetry" is the motto legibly stamped upon his pencil-case, for if he has
on the one side a singular sense of the familiar, salient, importunate
facts of life, on the other they reproduce themselves in his mind in a
delightfully qualifying medium. It is this medium that the fond observer
must especially envy Mr. Abbey, and that a literary observer will envy
him most of all.
Such a hapless personage, who may have spent hours in trying to produce
something of the same result by sadly different means, will measure
the difference between the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of
respectable prose and the immediate projection of the figure by the
pencil. A charming story-teller indeed he would be who should write as
Mr. Abbey draws. However, what is style for one art is style for other,
so blessed is the fraternity that binds them together, and the worker
in words may take a lesson from the picture-maker of "She Stoops to
Conquer." It is true that what the verbal artist would like to do
would be to find out the secret of the pictorial, to drink at the same
fountain. Mr. Abbey is essentially one of those who would tell us if he
could, and conduct us to the magic spring; but here he is in the nature
of the case helpless, for the happy _ambiente_ as the Italians call it,
in which his creations move is exactly the thing, as I take it, that
he can least give an account of. It is a matter of genius and
imagination--one of those things that a man determines for himself as
little as he determines the color of his eyes. How, for instance, can
Mr. Abbey explain the manner in which he directly _observes_ figures,
scenes, places, that exist only in the fairy-land of his fancy? For the
peculiar sign of his talent is surely this observation in the remote. It
brings the remote near to us, but such a complicated journey as it must
first have had to make! Remote in time (in differing degrees), remote
in place, remote in feeling, in habit, and in their ambient air, are the
images that spring from his pencil, and yet all so vividly, so minutely,
so consistently seen! Where does he see them, where does he find them,
how does he catch them, and in what language does he delightfully
converse with them? In what mystic recesses of space does the revelation
descend upon him?
The questions flow from the beguiled but puzzled admirer, and their
tenor sufficiently expresses the claim I make for the admirable artist
when I say that his truth is interfused with poetry. He spurns the
literal and yet superabounds in the characteristic, and if he makes
the strange familiar he makes the familiar just strange enough to be
distinguished. Everything is so human, so humorous and so caught in the
act, so buttoned and petticoated and gartered, that it might be round
the corner; and so it is--but the corner is the corner of another world.
In that other world Mr. Abbey went forth to dwell in extreme youth, as I
need scarcely be at pains to remind those who have followed him in
Harper. It is not important here to give a catalogue of his
contributions to that journal: turn to the back volumes and you will
meet him at every step. Every one remembers his young, tentative,
prelusive illustrations to Herrick, in which there are the prettiest
glimpses, guesses and foreknowledge of the effects he was to make
completely his own. The Herrick was done mainly, if I mistake not,
before he had been to England, and it remains, in the light of this
fact, a singularly touching as well as a singularly promising
performance. The eye of sense in such a case had to be to a rare extent
the mind's eye, and this convertibility of the two organs has persisted.
From the first and always that other world and that qualifying medium
in which I have said that the human spectacle goes on for Mr. Abbey have
been a county of old England which is not to be found in any geography,
though it borders, as I have hinted, on the Worcestershire Broadway. Few
artistic phenomena are more curious than the congenital acquaintance of
this perverse young Philadelphian with that mysterious locality. It is
there that he finds them all--the nooks, the corners, the people, the
clothes, the arbors and gardens and teahouses, the queer courts of old
inns, the sun-warmed angles of old parapets. I ought to have mentioned
for completeness, in addition to his pictures to Goldsmith and to the
scraps of homely British song (this latter class has contained some of
his most exquisite work), his delicate drawing's for Mr. William Black's
_Judith Shakespeare_. And in relation to that distinguished name--I
don't mean Mr. Black's--it is a comfort, if I may be allowed the
expression, to know that (as, to the best of my belief, I violate
no confidence in saying) he is even now engaged in the great work of
illustrating the comedies. He is busy with "The Merchant of Venice;"
he is up to his neck in studies, in rehearsals. Here again, while in
prevision I admire the result, what I can least refrain from expressing
is a sort of envy of the process, knowing what it is with Mr. Abbey and
what explorations of the delightful it entails--arduous, indefatigable,
till the end seems almost smothered in the means (such material
complications they engender), but making one's daily task a thing of
beauty and honor and beneficence.
IV
[Illustration: Alfred Parsons]
Even if Mr. Alfred Parsons were not a masterly contributor to the pages
of Harper, it would still be almost inevitable to speak of him after
speaking of Mr. Abbey, for the definite reason (I hope that in giving it
I may not appear to invade too grossly the domain of private life)
that these gentlemen are united in domestic circumstance as well as
associated in the nature of their work. In London, in the relatively
lucid air of Campden Hill, they dwell together, and their beautiful
studios are side by side. However, there is a reason for commemorating
Mr. Parsons' work which has nothing to do with the accidental--the
simple fact that that work forms the richest illustration of the English
landscape that is offered us to-day. Harper has for a long time past
been full of Mr. Alfred Parsons, who has made the dense, fine detail
of his native land familiar in far countries, amid scenery of a very
different type. This is what the modern illustration can do when the
ripeness of the modern sense is brought to it and the wood-cutter plays
with difficulties as the brilliant Americans do to-day, following his
original at a breakneck pace. An illusion is produced which, in its very
completeness, makes one cast an uneasy eye over the dwindling fields
that are still left to conquer. Such art as Alfred Parsons'--such an
accomplished translation of local aspects, translated in its turn by
cunning hands and diffused by a wonderful system of periodicity through
vast and remote communities, has, I confess, in a peculiar degree, the
effect that so many things have in this age of multiplication--that
of suppressing intervals and differences and making the globe seem
alarmingly small. Vivid and repeated evocations of English rural
things--the meadows and lanes, the sedgy streams, the old orchards and
timbered houses, the stout, individual, insular trees, the flowers under
the hedge and in it and over it, the sweet rich country seen from the
slope, the bend of the unformidable river, the actual romance of the
castle against the sky, the place on the hill-side where the gray church
begins to peep (a peaceful little grassy path leads up to it over
a stile)--all this brings about a terrible displacement of the very
objects that make pilgrimage a passion, and hurries forward that
ambiguous advantage which I don't envy our grandchildren, that of
knowing all about everything in advance, having trotted round the globe
annually in the magazines and lost the bloom of personal experience. It
is a part of the general abolition of mystery with which we are all so
complacently busy today. One would like to retire to another planet with
a box of Mr. Parsons' drawings, and be homesick there for the pleasant
places they commemorate.
There are many things to be said about his talent, some of which are
not the easiest in the world to express. I shall not, however, make them
more difficult by attempting to catalogue his contributions in these
pages. A turning of the leaves of Harper brings one constantly face to
face with him, and a systematic search speedily makes one intimate.
The reader will remember the beautiful Illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's
novel of _Springhaven_, which were interspersed with striking
figure-pieces from the pencil of that very peculiar pictorial humorist
Mr. Frederick Barnard, who, allowing for the fact that he always seems
a little too much to be drawing for Dickens and that the footlights
are the illumination of his scenic world, has so remarkable a sense of
English types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may be
called the great-coat-and-gaiters period--the period when people
were stiff with riding and wicked conspiracies went forward in sanded
provincial inn-parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons, who is still conveniently
young, waked to his first vision of pleasant material in the
comprehensive county of Somerset--a capital centre of impression for a
painter of the bucolic. He has been to America; he has even reproduced
with remarkable discrimination and truth some of the way-side objects
of that country, not making them look in the least like their English
equivalents, if equivalents they may be said to have. Was it there that
Mr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear?
I ask this idle question simply because the England of his pencil, and
not less of his brush (of his eminent brush there would be much to say),
is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted
to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the
delightful testimony it inherits. It was scarcely to have been supposed
possible that the native point of view would embrace and observe so
many of the things that the more or less famished outsider is, in vulgar
parlance, "after." In other words (though I appear to utter a foolish
paradox), the danger might have been that Mr. Parsons knew his subject
too well to feel it--to feel it, I mean, _a l'Americaine_. He is as
tender of it as if he were vague about it, and as certain of it as if he
were _blase_.
But after having wished that his country should be just so, we proceed
to discover that it is in fact not a bit different. Between these phases
of our consciousness he is an unfailing messenger. The reader will
remember how often he has accompanied with pictures the text of some
amiable paper describing a pastoral region--Warwickshire or Surrey.
Devonshire or the Thames. He will remember his exquisite designs for
certain of Wordsworth's sonnets. A sonnet of Wordsworth is a difficult
thing to illustrate, but Mr. Parsons' ripe taste has shown him the way.
Then there are lovely morsels from his hand associated with the drawings
of his friend Mr. Abbey--head-pieces, tailpieces, vignettes, charming
combinations of flower and foliage, decorative clusters of all sorts
of pleasant rural emblems. If he has an inexhaustible feeling for the
country in general, his love of the myriad English flowers is perhaps
the fondest part of it. He draws them with a rare perfection, and
always--little definite, delicate, tremulous things as they are--with
a certain nobleness. This latter quality, indeed. I am prone to find in
all his work, and I should insist on it still more if I might refer
to his important paintings. So composite are the parts of which any
distinguished talent is made up that we have to feel our way as we
enumerate them; and yet that very ambiguity is a challenge to analysis
and to characterization. This "nobleness" on Mr. Parsons' part is the
element of style--something large and manly, expressive of the total
character of his facts. His landscape is the landscape of the male
vision, and yet his touch is full of sentiment, of curiosity and
endearment. These things, and others besides, make him the most
interesting, the most living, of the new workers in his line. And what
shall I say of the other things besides? How can I take precautions
enough to say that among the new workers, deeply English as he is, there
is comparatively something French in his manner? Many people will like
him because they see in him--or they think they do--a certain happy
mean. Will they not fancy they catch him taking the middle way between
the unsociable French _etude_ and the old-fashioned English "picture"?
If one of these extremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is an oasis
still more vain. I have a recollection of productions of Mr. Alfred
Parsons' which might have come from a Frenchman who was in love with
English river-sides. I call to mind no studies--if he has made any--of
French scenery; but if I did they would doubtless appear English enough.
It is the fashion among sundry to maintain that the English landscape
is of no use for _la peinture serieuse_, that it is wanting in technical
accent and is in general too storytelling, too self-conscious
and dramatic also too lumpish and stodgy, of a green--_d'un vert
bete_--which, when reproduced, looks like that of the chromo. Certain
it is that there are many hands which are not to be trusted with it,
and taste and integrity have been known to go down before it. But Alfred
Parsons may be pointed to as one who has made the luxuriant and
lovable things of his own country almost as "serious" as those familiar
objects--the pasture and the poplar--which, even when infinitely
repeated by the great school across the Channel, strike us as but meagre
morsels of France.
V
[Illustration: Mr. George H. Boughton]
In speaking of Mr. George H. Boughton, A.R.A., I encounter the same
difficulty as with Mr. Millet: I find the window closed through which
alone almost it is just to take a view of his talent. Mr. Boughton is
a painter about whom there is little that is new to tell to-day, so
conspicuous and incontestable is his achievement, the fruit of a career
of which the beginning was not yesterday. He is a draughtsman and an
illustrator only on occasion and by accident. These accidents have
mostly occurred, however, in the pages of Harper, and the happiest of
them will still be fresh in the memory of its readers. In the _Sketching
Rambles in Holland_ Mr. Abbey was a participant (as witness, among many
things, the admirable drawing of the old Frisian woman bent over her
Bible in church, with the heads of the burghers just visible above the
rough archaic pew-tops--a drawing opposite to page 112 in the handsome
volume into which these contributions were eventually gathered
together); but most of the sketches were Mr. Boughton's, and the
charming, amusing text is altogether his, save in the sense that
it commemorates his companion's impressions as well as his own--the
delightful, irresponsible, visual, sensual, pictorial, capricious
impressions of a painter in a strange land, the person surely whom
at particular moments one would give most to be. If there be anything
happier than the impressions of a painter, it is the impressions of two,
and the combination is set forth with uncommon spirit and humor in this
frank record of the innocent lust of the eyes. Mr. Boughton scruples
little, in general, to write as well as to draw, when the fancy takes
him; to write in the manner of painters, with the bold, irreverent,
unconventional, successful brush. If I were not afraid of the
patronizing tone I would say that there is little doubt that if as a
painter he had not had to try to write in character, he would certainly
have made a characteristic writer. He has the most enviable "finds," not
dreamed of in timid literature, yet making capital descriptive prose.
Other specimens of them may be encountered in two or three Christmas
tales, signed with the name whose usual place is the corner of a
valuable canvas.
If Mr. Boughton is in this manner not a simple talent, further
complications and reversions may be observed in him, as, for instance,
that having reverted from America, where he spent his early years, back
to England, the land of his origin, he has now in a sense oscillated
again from the latter to the former country. He came to London one day
years ago (from Paris, where he had been eating nutritively of the tree
of artistic knowledge), in order to re-embark on the morrow for the
United States; but that morrow never came--it has never come yet.
Certainly now it never _can_ come, for the country that Mr. Boughton
left behind him in his youth is no longer there; the "old New York" is
no longer a port to sail to, unless for phantom ships. In imagination,
however, the author of "The Return of the _Mayflower_" has several times
taken his way back; he has painted with conspicuous charm and success
various episodes of the early Puritan story. He was able on occasion
to remember vividly enough the low New England coast and the thin New
England air. He has been perceptibly an inventor, calling into being
certain types of face and dress, certain tones and associations of color
(all in the line of what I should call subdued harmonies if I were not
afraid of appearing to talk a jargon), which people are hungry for when
they acquire "a Boughton," and which they can obtain on no other terms.
This pictorial element in which he moves is made up of divers delicate
things, and there would be a roughness in attempting to unravel the
tapestry. There is old English, and old American, and old Dutch in
it, and a friendly, unexpected new Dutch too--an ingredient of New
Amsterdam--a strain of Knickerbocker and of Washington Irving. There is
an admirable infusion of landscape in it, from which some people regret
that Mr. Boughton should ever have allowed himself to be distracted by
his importunate love of sad-faced, pretty women in close-fitting coifs
and old silver-clasped cloaks. And indeed, though his figures are very
"tender," his landscape is to my sense tenderer still. Moreover, Mr.
Boughton bristles, not aggressively, but in the degree of a certain
conciliatory pertinacity, with contradictious properties. He lives in
one of the prettiest and most hospitable houses in London, but the note
of his work is the melancholy of rural things, of lonely people and of
quaint, far-off legend and refrain. There is a delightful ambiguity of
period and even of clime in him, and he rejoices in that inability to
depict the modern which is the most convincing sign of the contemporary.
He has a genius for landscape, yet he abounds in knowledge of every sort
of ancient fashion of garment; the buckles and button-holes, the very
shoe-ties, of the past are dear to him. It is almost always autumn or
winter in his pictures. His horizons are cold, his trees are bare (he
does the bare tree beautifully), and his draperies lined with fur; but
when he exhibits himself directly, as in the fantastic "Rambles" before
mentioned, contagious high spirits are the clearest of his showing.
Here he appears as an irrepressible felicitous sketcher, and I know no
pleasanter record of the joys of sketching, or even of those of simply
looking. Theophile Gautier himself was not more inveterately addicted to
this latter wanton exercise. There ought to be a pocket edition of Mr.
Boughton's book, which would serve for travellers in other countries
too, give them the point of view and put them in the mood. Such
a blessing, and such a distinction too, is it to have an eye. Mr.
Boughton's, in his good-humored Dutch wanderings, holds from morning
till night a sociable, graceful revel. From the moment it opens till the
moment it closes, its day is a round of adventures. His jolly pictorial
narrative, reflecting every glint of October sunshine and patch of
russet shade, tends to confirm us afresh in the faith that the painter's
life is the best life, the life that misses fewest impressions.
VI
[Illustration: Du Maurier]
Mr. Du Maurier has a brilliant history, but it must be candidly
recognized that it is written or drawn mainly in an English periodical.
It is only during the last two or three years that the most ironical of
the artists of _Punch_ has exerted himself for the entertainment of the
readers of Harper; but I seem to come too late with any commentary on
the nature of his satire or the charm of his execution. When he began to
appear in Harper he was already an old friend, and for myself I confess
I have to go through rather a complicated mental operation to put into
words what I think of him. What does a man think of the language he
has learned to speak? He judges it only while he is learning. Mr. Du
Maurier's work, in regard to the life it embodies, is not so much a
thing we see as one of the conditions of seeing. He has interpreted for
us for so many years the social life of England that the interpretation
has become the text itself. We have accepted his types, his categories,
his conclusions, his sympathies and his ironies, It is not given to all
the world to thread the mazes of London society, and for the great body
of the disinherited, the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon public. Mr. Du
Maurier's representation is the thing represented. Is the effect of it
to nip in the bud any remote yearning for personal participation? I feel
tempted to say yes, when I think of the follies, the flatnesses, the
affectations and stupidities that his teeming pencil has made vivid. But
that vision immediately merges itself in another--a panorama of tall,
pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming
gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the
more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic.
This I take to be a sign that Mr. Du Maurier knows how to be general
and has a conception of completeness. The world amuses him, such queer
things go on in it; but the part that amuses him most is certain lines
of our personal structure. That amusement is the brightest; the other
is often sad enough. A sharp critic might accuse Mr. Du Maurier of
lingering too complacently on the lines in question; of having a
certain ideal of "lissome" elongation to which the promiscuous truth is
sometimes sacrificed. But in fact this artist's P truth never pretends
to be promiscuous; it is avowedly select and specific. What he depicts
is so preponderantly the "tapering" people that the remainder of the
picture, in a notice as brief as the present, may be neglected. If his
_dramatis personae_ are not all the tenants of drawing-rooms, they are
represented at least in some relation to these. 'Arry and his friends
at the fancy fair are in society for the time; the point of introducing
them is to show how the contrast intensifies them. Of late years Mr. Du
Maurier has perhaps been a little too docile to the muse of elegance;
the idiosyncrasies of the "masher" and the high girl with elbows have
beguiled him into occasional inattention to the doings of the short and
shabby. But his career has been long and rich, and I allude, in such
words, but to a moment of it.
The moral of it--I refer to the artistic one--seen altogether, is
striking and edifying enough. What Mr. Du Maurier has attempted to do is
to give, in a thousand interrelated drawings, a general satiric picture
of the social life of his time and country. It is easy to see that
through them "an increasing purpose runs;" they all hang together and
refer to each other--complete, confirm, correct, illuminate each other.
Sometimes they are not satiric: satire is not pure charm, and the artist
has allowed himself to "go in" for pure charm. Sometimes he has allowed
himself to go in for pure fantasy, so that satire (which should hold on
to the mane of the real) slides off the other side of the runaway horse.
But he remains, on the whole, pencil in hand, a wonderfully copious and
veracious historian of his age and his civilization.
VII
I have left Mr. Reinhart to the last because of his importance, and now
this very importance operates as a restriction and even as a sort of
reproach to me. To go well round him at a deliberate pace would take
a whole book. With Mr. Abbey, Mr. Reinhart is the artist who has
contributed most abundantly to Harper; his work, indeed, in quantity,
considerably exceeds Mr. Abbey's. He is the observer of the immediate,
as Mr. Abbey is that of the considerably removed, and the conditions he
asks us to accept are less expensive to the imagination than those of
his colleague. He is, in short, the vigorous, racy _prosateur_ of that
human comedy of which Mr. Abbey is the poet. He illustrates the
modern sketch of travel, the modern tale--the poor little "quiet,"
psychological, conversational modern tale, which I often think the
artist invited to represent it to the eye must hate, unless he be a very
intelligent master, little, on a superficial view, would there appear to
be in it to represent. The superficial view is, after all, the natural
one for the picture-maker. A talent of the first order, however, only
wants to be set thinking, as a single word will often make it. Mr.
Reinhart at any rate, triumphs; whether there be life or not in the
little tale itself, there is unmistakable life in his version of it.
Mr. Reinhart deals in that element purely with admirable frankness
and vigor. He is not so much suggestive as positively and sharply
representative. His facility, his agility, his universality are a truly
stimulating sight. He asks not too many questions of his subject, but to
those he does ask he insists upon a thoroughly intelligible answer. By
his universality I mean perhaps as much as anything else his admirable
drawing; not precious, as the aesthetic say, nor pottering, as the
vulgar, but free, strong and secure, which enables him to do with the
human figure at a moment's notice anything that any occasion may demand.
It gives him an immense range, and I know not how to express (it is
not easy) my sense of a certain capable indifference that is in him
otherwise than by saying that he would quite as soon do one thing as
another.
For it is true that the admirer of his work rather misses in him that
intimation of a secret preference which many strong draughtsmen show,
and which is not absent, for instance (I don't mean the secret, but the
intimation), from the beautiful doings of Mr. Abbey. It is extremely
present in Mr. Du Maurier's work, just as it was visible, less
elusively, in that of John Leech, his predecessor in _Punch_. Mr. Abbey
has a haunting type; Du Maurier has a haunting type. There was little
perhaps of the haunted about Leech, but we know very well how he wanted
his pretty girls, his British swell, and his "hunting men" to look. He
betrayed a predilection; he had his little ideal. That an artist may be
a great force and not have a little ideal, the scarcely too much to be
praised Charles Keene is there (I mean he is in _Punch_) to show us.
He has not a haunting type--not he--and I think that no one has yet
discovered how he would have liked his pretty girls to look. He has kept
the soft conception too much to himself--he has not trifled with the
common truth by letting it appear. This common truth, in its innumerable
combinations, is what Mr. Rein-hart also shows us (with of course
infinitely less of a _parti pris_ of laughing at it), though, as I must
hasten to add, the female face and form in his hands always happen to
take on a much lovelier cast than in Mr. Keene's. These things with him,
however, are not a private predilection, an artist's dream. Mr. Reinhart
is solidly an artist, but I doubt whether as yet he dreams, and the
absence of private predilections makes him seem a little hard. He is
sometimes rough with our average humanity, and especially rough with the
feminine portion of it. He usually represents American life, in which
that portion is often spoken of as showing to peculiar advantage. But
Mr. Reinhart sees it generally, as very _bourgeois_. His good ladies are
apt to be rather thick and short, rather huddled and plain. I
shouldn't mind it so much if they didn't look so much alive. They are
incontestably possible. The long, brilliant series of drawings he
made to accompany Mr. Charles Dudley Warner's papers on the American
watering-places form a rich _bourgeois_ epic, which imaginations haunted
by a type must accept with philosophy, for the sketches in question will
have carried the tale, and all sorts of irresistible illusion with it,
to the four corners of the earth. Full of observation and reality,
of happy impressionism, taking all things as they come, with many a
charming picture of youthful juxtaposition, they give us a sense, to
which nothing need be added, of the energy of Mr. Reinhart's pencil.
They are a final collection of pictorial notes on the manners and
customs, the aspects and habitats, in July and August, of the great
American democracy; of which, certainly, taking one thing with another,
they give a very comfortable, cheerful account. But they confirm that
analytic view of which I have ventured to give a hint--the view of Mr.
Reinhart as an artist of immense capacity who yet somehow doesn't care.
I must add that this aspect of him is modified, in the one case very
gracefully, in the other by the operation of a sort of constructive
humor, remarkably strong, in his illustrations of Spanish life and his
sketches of the Berlin political world.
His fashion of remaining outside, as it were, makes him (to the analyst)
only the more interesting, for the analyst, if he have any critical
life in him, will be prone to wonder _why_ he doesn't care, and whether
matters may not be turned about in such a way as that he should, with
the consequence that his large capacity would become more fruitful
still. Mr. Reinhart is open to the large appeal of Paris, where he
lives--as is evident from much of his work--where he paints, and where,
in crowded exhibitions, reputation and honors have descended upon him.
And yet Paris, for all she may have taught him, has not given him the
mystic sentiment--about which I am perhaps writing nonsense. Is it
nonsense to say that, being very much an incarnation of the modern
international spirit (he might be a Frenchman in New York were he not
an American in Paris), the moral of his work is possibly the inevitable
want of finality, of intrinsic character, in that sweet freedom?
Does the cosmopolite necessarily pay for his freedom by a want of
function--the impersonality of not being representative? Must one be a
little narrow to have a sentiment, and very local to have a quality, or
at least a style; and would the missing type, if I may mention it
yet again, haunt our artist--who is somehow, in his rare instrumental
facility, outside of quality and style--a good deal more if he were not,
amid the mixture of associations and the confusion of races, liable to
fall into vagueness as to what types are? He can do anything he likes;
by which I mean he can do wonderfully even the things he doesn't like.
But he strikes me as a force not yet fully used.
EDWIN A. ABBE
Nothing is more interesting in the history of an artistic talent than
the moment at which its "elective affinity" declares itself, and the
interest is great in proportion as the declaration is unmistakable.
I mean by the elective affinity of a talent its climate and period of
preference, the spot on the globe or in the annals of mankind to which
it most fondly attaches itself, to which it reverts incorrigibly, round
which it revolves with a curiosity that is insatiable, from which in
short it draws its strongest inspiration. A man may personally inhabit
a certain place at a certain time, but in imagination he may be a
perpetual absentee, and to a degree worse than the worst Irish landlord,
separating himself from his legal inheritance not only by mountains
and seas, but by centuries as well. When he is a man of genius these
perverse predilections become fruitful and constitute a new and
independent life, and they are indeed to a certain extent the sign and
concomitant of genius. I do not mean by this that high ability would
always rather have been born in another country and another age, but
certainly it likes to choose, it seldom fails to react against imposed
conditions. If it accepts them it does so because it likes them for
themselves; and if they fail to commend themselves it rarely scruples
to fly away in search of others. We have witnessed this flight in many
a case; I admit that if we have sometimes applauded it we have felt at
other moments that the discontented, undomiciled spirit had better have
stayed at home.
Mr. Abbey has gone afield, and there could be no better instance of a
successful fugitive and a genuine affinity, no more interesting example
of selection--selection of field and subject--operating by that insight
which has the precocity and certainty of an instinct. The domicile of
Mr. Abbey's genius is the England of the eighteenth century; I should
add that the palace of art which he has erected there commands--from the
rear, as it were--various charming glimpses of the preceding age.
The finest work he has yet done is in his admirable illustrations, in
Harper's Magazine, to "She Stoops to Conquer," but the promise that he
would one day do it was given some years ago in his delightful volume
of designs to accompany Herrick's poems; to which we may add, as
supplementary evidence, his drawings for Mr. William Black's novel of
_Judith Shakespeare_.
Mr. Abbey was born in Philadelphia in 1852, and manifesting his
brilliant but un-encouraged aptitudes at a very early age, came in 1872
to New York to draw for Harper's WEEKLY. Other views than this, if I
have been correctly Informed, had been entertained for his future--a
fact that provokes a smile now that his manifest destiny has been, or
is in course of being, so very neatly accomplished. The spirit of modern
aesthetics did not, at any rate, as I understand the matter, smile upon
his cradle, and the circumstance only increases the interest of his
having had from the earliest moment the clearest artistic vision.
It has sometimes happened that the distinguished draughtsman or painter
has been born in the studio and fed, as it were, from the palette, but
in the great majority of cases he has been nursed by the profane, and
certainly, on the doctrine of mathematical chances, a Philadelphia
genius would scarcely be an exception. Mr. Abbey was fortunate, however,
in not being obliged to lose time; he learned how to swim by jumping
into deep water. Even if he had not known by instinct how to draw, he
would have had to perform the feat from the moment that he found himself
attached to the "art department" of a remarkably punctual periodical.
In such a periodical the events of the day are promptly reproduced; and
with the morrow so near the day is necessarily a short one--too short
for gradual education. Such a school is not, no doubt, the ideal one,
but in fact it may have a very happy influence. If a youth is to give an
account of a scene with his pencil at a certain hour--to give it, as it
were, or perish--he will have become conscious, in the first place, of
a remarkable incentive to observe it. so that the roughness of the
foster-mother who imparts the precious faculty of quick, complete
observation is really a blessing in disguise. To say that it was simply
under this kind of pressure that Mr. Abbey acquired the extraordinary
refinement which distinguishes his work in black and white is doubtless
to say too much; but his admirers may be excused, in view of the
beautiful result, for almost wishing, on grounds of patriotism, to make
the training, or the absence of training, responsible for as much as
possible. For as no artistic genius that our country has produced is
more delightful than Mr. Abbey's, so, surely, nothing could be more
characteristically American than that it should have formed itself in
the conditions that happened to be nearest at hand, with the crowds,
streets and squares, the railway stations and telegraph poles, the
wondrous sign-boards and triumphant bunting, of New York for the source
of its inspiration, and with a big hurrying printing-house for its
studio. If to begin the practice of art in these conditions was to incur
the danger of being crude, Mr. Abbey braved it with remarkable success.
At all events, if he went neither I through the mill of Paris nor
through that of Munich, the writer of these lines more than consoles
himself for the accident. His talent is unsurpassably fine, and yet we
reflect with complacency that he picked it up altogether at home.
If he is highly distinguished he is irremediably native, and (premising
always that I speak mainly of his work in black and white) it is
difficult to see, as we look, for instance, at the admirable series of
his drawings for "She Stoops to Conquer," what more Paris or Munich
could have done for him. There is a certain refreshment in meeting an
American artist of the first order who is not a pupil of Gerome or of
Cabanel.
Of course, I hasten to add, we must make our account with the fact that,
as I began with remarking, the great development of Mr. Abbey's powers
has taken place amid the brown old accessories of a country where
that eighteenth century which he presently marked for his own are more
profusely represented than they have the good-fortune to be in America,
and consequently limit our contention to the point that his talent
itself was already formed when this happy initiation was opened to it.
He went to England for the first time in 1878. but it was not all at
once that he fell into the trick, so irresistible for an artist doing
his special work, of living there, I must forbid myself every
impertinent conjecture, but it may be respectfully assumed that Mr.
Abbey rather drifted into exile than committed himself to it with malice
prepense. The habit, at any rate, to-day appears to be confirmed, and,
to express it roughly, he is surrounded by the utensils and conveniences
that he requires. During these years, until the recent period when he
began to exhibit at the water-color exhibitions, his work has been done
principally for Harper's Magazine, and the record of it is to be found
in the recent back volumes. I shall not take space to tell it over piece
by piece, for the reader who turns to the Magazine will have no
difficulty in recognizing it. It has a distinction altogether its own;
there is always poetry, humor, charm, in the idea, and always infinite
grace and security in the execution.
As I have intimated, Mr. Abbey never deals with the things and figures
of to-day; his imagination must perform a wide backward journey before
it can take the air. But beyond this modern radius it breathes with
singular freedom and naturalness. At a distance of fifty years it begins
to be at home; it expands and takes possession; it recognizes its own.
With all his ability, with all his tact, it would be impossible to him,
we conceive, to illustrate a novel of contemporary manners; he would
inevitably throw it back to the age of hair-powder and post-chaises.
The coats and trousers, the feminine gear, the chairs and tables of the
current year, the general aspect of things immediate and familiar, say
nothing to his mind, and there are other interpreters to whom he is
quite content to leave them. He shows no great interest even in the
modern face, if there be a modern face apart from a modern setting; I
am not sure what he thinks of its complications and refinements of
expression, but he has certainly little relish for its _banal_, vulgar
mustache, its prosaic, mercantile whisker, surmounting the last new
thing in shirt-collars. Dear to him is the physiognomy of clean-shaven
periods, when cheek and lip and chin, abounding in line and surface,
had the air of soliciting the pencil. Impeccable as he is in drawing,
he likes a whole face, with reason, and likes a whole figure; the
latter not to the exclusion of clothes, in which he delights, but as the
clothes of our great-grandfathers helped it to be seen. No one has ever
understood breeches and stockings better than he, or the human leg, that
delight of the draughtsman, as the costume of the last century permitted
it to be known. The petticoat and bodice of the same period have as
little mystery for him, and his women and girls have altogether the
poetry of a by-gone manner and fashion. They are not modern heroines,
with modern nerves and accomplishments, but figures of remembered song
and story, calling up visions of spinet and harpsichord that have
lost their music today, high-walled gardens that have ceased to
bloom, flowered stuffs that are faded, locks of hair that are lost,
love-letters that are pale. By which I don't mean that they are vague
and spectral, for Mr. Abbey has in the highest degree the art of
imparting life, and he gives it in particular to his well-made, blooming
maidens. They live in a world in which there is no question of their
passing Harvard or other examinations, but they stand very firmly on
their quaintly-shod feet. They are exhaustively "felt," and eminently
qualified to attract the opposite sex, which is not the case with
ghosts, who, moreover, do not wear the most palpable petticoats of
quilted satin, nor sport the most delicate fans, nor take generally the
most ingratiating attitudes.
[Illustration: The old house]
The best work that Mr. Abbey has done is to be found in the succession
of illustrations to "She Stoops to Conquer;" here we see his happiest
characteristics and--till he does something still more brilliant--may
take his full measure. No work in black and white in our time has been
more truly artistic, and certainly no success more unqualified. The
artist has given us an evocation of a social state to its smallest
details, and done it with an unsurpassable lightness of touch. The
problem was in itself delightful--the accidents and incidents (granted a
situation _de comedie_) of an old, rambling, wainscoted, out-of-the-way
English country-house, in the age of Goldsmith. Here Mr. Abbey is in
his element--given up equally to unerring observation and still more
infallible divination. The whole place, and the figures that come and
go in it, live again, with their individual look, their peculiarities,
their special signs and oddities. The spirit of the dramatist has passed
completely into the artist's sense, but the spirit of the historian has
done so almost as much. Tony Lumpkin is, as we say nowadays, a document,
and Miss Hardcastle embodies the results of research. Delightful are the
humor and quaintness and grace of all this, delightful the variety and
the richness of personal characterization, and delightful, above all,
the drawing. It is impossible to represent with such vividness unless,
to begin with, one sees; and it is impossible to see unless one wants
to very much, or unless, in other words, one has a great love. Mr. Abbey
has evidently the tenderest affection for just the old houses and the
old things, the old faces and voices, the whole irrevocable human scene
which the genial hand of Goldsmith has passed over to him, and there
is no inquiry about them that he is not in a position to answer. He is
intimate with the buttons of coats and the buckles of shoes: he knows
not only exactly what his people wore, but exactly how they wore it,
and how they felt when they had it on. He has sat on the old chairs and
sofas, and rubbed against the old wainscots, and leaned over the old
balusters. He knows every mended place in Tony Lumpkin's stockings, and
exactly how that ingenuous youth leaned back on the spinet, with his
thick, familiar thumb out, when he presented his inimitable countenance,
with a grin, to Mr. Hastings, after he had set his fond mother
a-whimpering. (There is nothing in the whole series, by-the-way,
better indicated than the exquisitely simple, half-bumpkin, half-vulgar
expression of Tony's countenance and smile in this scene, unless it be
the charming arch yet modest face of Miss Hardcastle, lighted by the
candle she carries, as, still holding the door by which she comes in,
she is challenged by young Mar-low to relieve his bewilderment as to
where he really is and what _she_ really is.) In short, if we have all
seen "She Stoops to Conquer" acted, Mr. Abbey has had the better fortune
of seeing it off the stage; and it is noticeable how happily he has
steered clear of the danger of making his people theatrical types--mere
masqueraders and wearers of properties. This is especially the case with
his women, who have not a hint of the conventional paint and patches,