PICTURE AND TEXT

By Henry James

Harper And Brothers - MDCCCXCIII

NOTE

Two of the following papers were originally published, withillustrations, in Harper's Magazine and the title of one of them--thefirst of titles has been altered from "Our Artists in Europe. " Theother, the article on Mr. Sargent, was accompanied by reproductionsof several of his portraits. The notice of Mr. Abbey and that of Mr. Reinhart appeared in Harper's Weekly. That of Mr. Alfred Parsons figuredas an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his pictures. The sketch of Daumier was first contributed to _The Century_, and "Afterthe 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 gooddeal less old than others. The illustration of books, and even more ofmagazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far asvariety and abundance are the signs of it; or born, at any rate, thecomprehensive, ingenious, sympathetic spirit in which we conceive andpractise it. 

If the centuries are ever arraigned at some bar of justice to answerin regard to what they have given, of good or of bad, to humanity, ourinteresting age (which certainly is not open to the charge of havingstood with its hands in its pockets) might perhaps do worse than putforth the plea of having contributed a fresh interest in "black andwhite. " The claim may now be made with the more confidence from the veryevident circumstance that this interest is far from exhausted. Thesepages are an excellent place for such an assumption. In Harper they haveagain and again, as it were, illustrated the illustration, and theyconstitute for the artist a series of invitations, provocations andopportunities. They may be referred to without arrogance in support ofthe contention that the limits of this large movement, with all its newand rare refinement, are not yet in sight. 

I

It is on the contrary the constant extension that is visible, withthe attendant circumstances of multiplied experiment and intensifiedresearch--circumstances that lately pressed once more on the attentionof the writer of these remarks on his finding himself in the particularspot which history will perhaps associate most with the charmingrevival. 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 ofWorcestershire, is responsible directly and indirectly for some of themost beautiful work in black and white with which I am at liberty toconcern myself here; in other words, for much of the work of Mr. Abbeyand Mr. Alfred Parsons. I do not mean that Broadway has told thesegentlemen all they know (the name, from which the American reader has tobrush away an incongruous association, may as well be written first aslast); for Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows everything that can beknown about English fields and flowers, would have good reason to insistthat the measure of his large landscape art is a large experience. Ionly suggest that if one loves Broadway and is familiar with it, andif 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 brownishgray cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied, immemorial, grows with the sense of its having ministered to other minds andtransferred itself to other recipients; just as the beauty of many abit in many a drawing of the artists I have mentioned is enhanced by thesense, or at any rate by the desire, of recognition. Broadway and muchof the land about it are in short the perfection of the old Englishrural tradition, and if they do not underlie all the combinations bywhich (in their pictorial accompaniments to rediscovered ballads, theirvignettes to story or sonnet) these particular talents touch us almostto tears, we feel at least that they _would_ have sufficed: they coverthe scale. 

[Illustration: Priory]

In regard, however, to the implications and explications of thisperfection of a village, primarily and to be just, Broadway is, morethan any one else. Mr. Frank Millet. Mr. Laurence Hutton discovered butMr. Millet appropriated it: its sweetness was wasted until he began todistil and bottle it. He disinterred the treasure, and with impetuousliberality made us sharers in his fortune. His own work, moreover, betrays him, as well as the gratitude of participants, as I could easilyprove if it did not perversely happen that he has commemorated most ofhis impressions in color. That excludes them from the small space hereat my command; otherwise I could testify to the identity of old nooksand old objects, those that constitute both out-of-door and in-doorfurniture. 

[Illustration: The village-green, Broadway]

In such places as Broadway, and it is part of the charm of them toAmerican eyes, the sky looks down on almost as many "things" asthe ceiling, and "things" are the joy of the illustrator. Furnishedapartments are useful to the artist, but a furnished country is stillmore to his purpose. A ripe midland English region is a museum ofaccessories and specimens, and is sure, under any circumstances, to contain the article wanted. This is the great recommendation ofBroadway; everything in it is convertible. Even the passing visitorfinds himself becoming so; the place has so much character that it rubsoff on him, and if in an old garden--an old garden with old gates andold walls and old summer-houses--he lies down on the old grass (onan immemorial rug, no doubt), it is ten to one but that he will beconverted. The little oblong sheaves of blank paper with elastic strapsare fluttering all over the place. There is portraiture in the air andcomposition 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 onekind it is another. The garden walls, the mossy roofs, the open doorwaysand brown interiors, the old-fashioned flowers, the bushes in figures, the geese on the green, the patches, the jumbles, the glimpses, thecolor, 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, andmore yellow than either. They are various things in turn, according tolights and days and needs. It is a question of color (all consciousnessat Broadway is that), but the irresponsible profane are not called uponto settle the tint. 

It is delicious to be at Broadway and to _be_ one of the irresponsibleprofane--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 mayenjoy it without a carking care as to how to "render" the perspective. Everything is stone except the general greenness--a charming smoothlocal stone, which looks as if it had been meant for great constructionsand appears even in dry weather to have been washed and varnished by therain. Half-way up the road, in the widest place, where the coaches usedto turn (there were many of old, but the traffic of Broadway was blownto pieces by steam, though the destroyer has not come nearer than half adozen miles), a great gabled mansion, which was once a manor or ahouse of state, and is now a rambling inn, stands looking at a detachedswinging 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 findsomething very like the place among Mr. Abbey's delightful illustrationsto, "She Stoops to Conquer. " When the September day grows dim and someof the windows glow, you may look out, if you like, for Tony Lumpkin'sred coat in the doorway or imagine Miss Hardcastle's quilted petticoaton the stair. 

II

[Illustration: Millet]

It is characteristic of Mr. Frank Millet's checkered career, withopposites so much mingled in it, that such work as he has done forHarper should have had as little in common as possible with midlandEnglish scenery. He has been less a producer in black and white than apromoter 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 ofhis pencil as well as to the variety of his interests. There was a timewhen he drew little else but Cossacks and Orientals, and drew them asone who had good cause to be vivid. Of the young generation he was thefirst to know the Russian plastically, especially the Russian soldier, and he had paid heavily for his acquaintance. During the Russo-Turkishwar 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 manyout-of-the-way, many precious, observations. He has seen strangecountries--the East and the South and the West and the North--andpractised many arts. To the London _Graphic_, in 1877 he sent strikingsketches from the East, as well as capital prose to the journals I havementioned. He has always been as capable of writing a text for his ownsketches as of making sketches for the text of others. He has madepictures without words and words without pictures. He has written somevery clever ghost-stories, and drawn and painted some very immediaterealities. He has lately given himself up to these latter objects, anddiscovered that they have mysteries more absorbing than any others. Ifind in Harper, in 1885. "A Wild-goose Chase" through North Germany andDenmark, in which both pencil and pen are Mr. Millet's, and both showthe 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 hadmuch æsthetic as well as much personal experience. He has draped anddistributed Greek plays at Harvard, as well as ridden over Balkans topost pressing letters, and given publicity to English villages in whichsusceptible Americans may get the strongest sensations with the leasttrouble to themselves. If the trouble in each case will have beenlargely his, this is but congruous with the fact that he has not onlyfound time to have a great deal of history himself, but has sufferedhimself to be converted by others into an element--beneficent I shouldcall it if discretion did not forbid me--of _their_ history. Springingfrom a very old New England stock, he has found the practice of art awonderful antidote, in his own language, "for belated Puritanism. " He isvery modern, in the sense of having tried many things and availedhimself of all of the facilities of his time; but especially on thisground of having fought out for himself the battle of the Puritan habitand the æsthetic experiment. His experiment was admirably successfulfrom the moment that the Puritan levity was forced to consent to itsbecoming a serious one. In other words, if Mr. Millet is artisticallyinteresting 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 Americanquality can achieve. 

He began by having an excellent pencil, because as a thoroughlypractical man he could not possibly have had a weak one. But nothingis more remunerative to follow than the stages by which "faculty" ingeneral (which is what I mean by the characteristic American quality)has become the particular faculty; so that if in the artist's presentwork one recognizes--recognizes even fondly--the national handiness, itis as handiness regenerate and transfigured. The American adaptivenesshas become a Dutch finish. The only criticism I have to make is of thepreordained paucity of Mr. Millet's drawings; for my mission is not tospeak of his work in oils, every year more important (as was indicatedby the brilliant interior with figures that greeted the spectator in sofriendly a fashion on the threshold of the Royal Academy exhibitionof 1888), nor to say that it is illustration too--illustration ofany old-fashioned song or story that hums in the brain or haunts thememory--nor even to hint that the admirable rendering of the charmingold objects with which it deals (among which I include the human faceand figure in dresses unfolded from the lavender of the past), the oldsurfaces and tones, the stuffs and textures, the old mahogany and silverand brass--the old sentiment too, and the old picture-making vision--arein 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 ofhis work, it is the rare abundance in which it is produced. It is not afrequent thing to find combinations infinite as well as exquisite. Mr. Abbey has so many ideas, and the gates of composition have beenopened so wide to him, that we cultivate his company with a mixture ofconfidence and excitement. The readers of Harper have had for years agreat deal of it, and they will easily recognize the feeling I alludeto--the expectation of familiarity in variety. The beautiful art andtaste, the admirable execution, strike the hour with the same note; butthe figure, the scene, is ever a fresh conception. Never was ripe skillless mechanical, and never was the faculty of perpetual evocation lessaddicted to prudent economies. Mr. Abbey never saves for the nextpicture, yet the next picture will be as expensive as the last. Hiswhole career has been open to the readers of Harper, so that what theymay enjoy on any particular occasion is not only the talent, but a kindof affectionate sense of the history of the talent, That history is, from the beginning, in these pages, and it is one of the mostinteresting and instructive, just as the talent is one of the richestand the most sympathetic in the art-annals of our generation. I may aswell frankly declare that I have such a taste for Mr. Abbey's work thatI cannot affect a judicial tone about it. Criticism is appreciation orit is nothing, and an intelligence of the matter in hand is recordedmore substantially in a single positive sign of such appreciation thanin a volume of sapient objections for objection's sake--the cheapest ofall literary commodities. Silence is the perfection of disapproval, andit has the great merit of leaving the value of speech, when the momentcomes for it, unimpaired. 

Accordingly it is important to translate as adequately as possible thepositive side of Mr. Abbey's activity. None to-day is more charming, andnone helps us more to take the large, joyous, observant, various viewof the business of art. He has enlarged the idea of illustration, andhe plays with it in a hundred spontaneous, ingenious ways. "Truth andpoetry" is the motto legibly stamped upon his pencil-case, for if he hason the one side a singular sense of the familiar, salient, importunatefacts of life, on the other they reproduce themselves in his mind in adelightfully qualifying medium. It is this medium that the fond observermust especially envy Mr. Abbey, and that a literary observer will envyhim most of all. 

Such a hapless personage, who may have spent hours in trying to producesomething of the same result by sadly different means, will measurethe difference between the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens ofrespectable prose and the immediate projection of the figure by thepencil. A charming story-teller indeed he would be who should write asMr. Abbey draws. However, what is style for one art is style for other, so blessed is the fraternity that binds them together, and the workerin words may take a lesson from the picture-maker of "She Stoops toConquer. " It is true that what the verbal artist would like to dowould be to find out the secret of the pictorial, to drink at the samefountain. Mr. Abbey is essentially one of those who would tell us if hecould, and conduct us to the magic spring; but here he is in the natureof 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, thathe can least give an account of. It is a matter of genius andimagination--one of those things that a man determines for himself aslittle as he determines the color of his eyes. How, for instance, canMr. Abbey explain the manner in which he directly _observes_ figures, scenes, places, that exist only in the fairy-land of his fancy? For thepeculiar sign of his talent is surely this observation in the remote. Itbrings the remote near to us, but such a complicated journey as it mustfirst have had to make! Remote in time (in differing degrees), remotein place, remote in feeling, in habit, and in their ambient air, are theimages 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 delightfullyconverse with them? In what mystic recesses of space does the revelationdescend upon him?

The questions flow from the beguiled but puzzled admirer, and theirtenor sufficiently expresses the claim I make for the admirable artistwhen I say that his truth is interfused with poetry. He spurns theliteral and yet superabounds in the characteristic, and if he makesthe strange familiar he makes the familiar just strange enough to bedistinguished. Everything is so human, so humorous and so caught in theact, so buttoned and petticoated and gartered, that it might be roundthe 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 Ineed scarcely be at pains to remind those who have followed him inHarper. It is not important here to give a catalogue of hiscontributions to that journal: turn to the back volumes and you willmeet him at every step. Every one remembers his young, tentative, prelusive illustrations to Herrick, in which there are the prettiestglimpses, guesses and foreknowledge of the effects he was to makecompletely his own. The Herrick was done mainly, if I mistake not, before he had been to England, and it remains, in the light of thisfact, a singularly touching as well as a singularly promisingperformance. The eye of sense in such a case had to be to a rare extentthe mind's eye, and this convertibility of the two organs has persisted. 

From the first and always that other world and that qualifying mediumin which I have said that the human spectacle goes on for Mr. Abbey havebeen 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. Fewartistic phenomena are more curious than the congenital acquaintance ofthis perverse young Philadelphian with that mysterious locality. It isthere that he finds them all--the nooks, the corners, the people, theclothes, the arbors and gardens and teahouses, the queer courts of oldinns, the sun-warmed angles of old parapets. I ought to have mentionedfor completeness, in addition to his pictures to Goldsmith and to thescraps of homely British song (this latter class has contained some ofhis most exquisite work), his delicate drawing's for Mr. William Black's_Judith Shakespeare_. And in relation to that distinguished name--Idon't mean Mr. Black's--it is a comfort, if I may be allowed theexpression, to know that (as, to the best of my belief, I violateno confidence in saying) he is even now engaged in the great work ofillustrating the comedies. He is busy with "The Merchant of Venice;"he is up to his neck in studies, in rehearsals. Here again, while inprevision I admire the result, what I can least refrain from expressingis a sort of envy of the process, knowing what it is with Mr. Abbey andwhat explorations of the delightful it entails--arduous, indefatigable, till the end seems almost smothered in the means (such materialcomplications they engender), but making one's daily task a thing ofbeauty and honor and beneficence. 

IV

[Illustration: Alfred Parsons]

Even if Mr. Alfred Parsons were not a masterly contributor to the pagesof Harper, it would still be almost inevitable to speak of him afterspeaking of Mr. Abbey, for the definite reason (I hope that in giving itI may not appear to invade too grossly the domain of private life)that these gentlemen are united in domestic circumstance as well asassociated in the nature of their work. In London, in the relativelylucid air of Campden Hill, they dwell together, and their beautifulstudios are side by side. However, there is a reason for commemoratingMr. Parsons' work which has nothing to do with the accidental--thesimple fact that that work forms the richest illustration of the Englishlandscape that is offered us to-day. Harper has for a long time pastbeen full of Mr. Alfred Parsons, who has made the dense, fine detailof his native land familiar in far countries, amid scenery of a verydifferent type. This is what the modern illustration can do when theripeness of the modern sense is brought to it and the wood-cutter playswith difficulties as the brilliant Americans do to-day, following hisoriginal at a breakneck pace. An illusion is produced which, in its verycompleteness, makes one cast an uneasy eye over the dwindling fieldsthat are still left to conquer. Such art as Alfred Parsons'--such anaccomplished translation of local aspects, translated in its turn bycunning hands and diffused by a wonderful system of periodicity throughvast and remote communities, has, I confess, in a peculiar degree, theeffect that so many things have in this age of multiplication--thatof suppressing intervals and differences and making the globe seemalarmingly small. Vivid and repeated evocations of English ruralthings--the meadows and lanes, the sedgy streams, the old orchards andtimbered houses, the stout, individual, insular trees, the flowers underthe hedge and in it and over it, the sweet rich country seen from theslope, the bend of the unformidable river, the actual romance of thecastle against the sky, the place on the hill-side where the gray churchbegins to peep (a peaceful little grassy path leads up to it overa stile)--all this brings about a terrible displacement of the veryobjects that make pilgrimage a passion, and hurries forward thatambiguous advantage which I don't envy our grandchildren, that ofknowing all about everything in advance, having trotted round the globeannually in the magazines and lost the bloom of personal experience. Itis a part of the general abolition of mystery with which we are all socomplacently busy today. One would like to retire to another planet witha box of Mr. Parsons' drawings, and be homesick there for the pleasantplaces they commemorate. 

There are many things to be said about his talent, some of which arenot the easiest in the world to express. I shall not, however, make themmore difficult by attempting to catalogue his contributions in thesepages. A turning of the leaves of Harper brings one constantly face toface with him, and a systematic search speedily makes one intimate. The reader will remember the beautiful Illustrations to Mr. Blackmore'snovel of _Springhaven_, which were interspersed with strikingfigure-pieces from the pencil of that very peculiar pictorial humoristMr. Frederick Barnard, who, allowing for the fact that he always seemsa little too much to be drawing for Dickens and that the footlightsare the illumination of his scenic world, has so remarkable a sense ofEnglish types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may becalled the great-coat-and-gaiters period--the period when peoplewere stiff with riding and wicked conspiracies went forward in sandedprovincial inn-parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons, who is still convenientlyyoung, waked to his first vision of pleasant material in thecomprehensive county of Somerset--a capital centre of impression for apainter of the bucolic. He has been to America; he has even reproducedwith remarkable discrimination and truth some of the way-side objectsof that country, not making them look in the least like their Englishequivalents, if equivalents they may be said to have. Was it there thatMr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear?I ask this idle question simply because the England of his pencil, andnot less of his brush (of his eminent brush there would be much to say), is exactly the England that the American imagination, restrictedto itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all thedelightful testimony it inherits. It was scarcely to have been supposedpossible that the native point of view would embrace and observe somany of the things that the more or less famished outsider is, in vulgarparlance, "after. " In other words (though I appear to utter a foolishparadox), the danger might have been that Mr. Parsons knew his subjecttoo well to feel it--to feel it, I mean, _à l'Américaine_. He is astender of it as if he were vague about it, and as certain of it as if hewere _blasé_. 

But after having wished that his country should be just so, we proceedto discover that it is in fact not a bit different. Between these phasesof our consciousness he is an unfailing messenger. The reader willremember how often he has accompanied with pictures the text of someamiable paper describing a pastoral region--Warwickshire or Surrey. Devonshire or the Thames. He will remember his exquisite designs forcertain of Wordsworth's sonnets. A sonnet of Wordsworth is a difficultthing to illustrate, but Mr. Parsons' ripe taste has shown him the way. Then there are lovely morsels from his hand associated with the drawingsof his friend Mr. Abbey--head-pieces, tailpieces, vignettes, charmingcombinations of flower and foliage, decorative clusters of all sortsof pleasant rural emblems. If he has an inexhaustible feeling for thecountry in general, his love of the myriad English flowers is perhapsthe fondest part of it. He draws them with a rare perfection, andalways--little definite, delicate, tremulous things as they are--witha certain nobleness. This latter quality, indeed. I am prone to find inall his work, and I should insist on it still more if I might referto his important paintings. So composite are the parts of which anydistinguished talent is made up that we have to feel our way as weenumerate them; and yet that very ambiguity is a challenge to analysisand to characterization. This "nobleness" on Mr. Parsons' part is theelement of style--something large and manly, expressive of the totalcharacter of his facts. His landscape is the landscape of the malevision, and yet his touch is full of sentiment, of curiosity andendearment. These things, and others besides, make him the mostinteresting, the most living, of the new workers in his line. And whatshall I say of the other things besides? How can I take precautionsenough to say that among the new workers, deeply English as he is, thereis comparatively something French in his manner? Many people will likehim because they see in him--or they think they do--a certain happymean. Will they not fancy they catch him taking the middle way betweenthe unsociable French _étude_ and the old-fashioned English "picture"?If one of these extremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is an oasisstill more vain. I have a recollection of productions of Mr. AlfredParsons' which might have come from a Frenchman who was in love withEnglish river-sides. I call to mind no studies--if he has made any--ofFrench scenery; but if I did they would doubtless appear English enough. It is the fashion among sundry to maintain that the English landscapeis of no use for _la peinture sérieuse_, that it is wanting in technicalaccent and is in general too storytelling, too self-consciousand dramatic also too lumpish and stodgy, of a green--_d'un vertbête_--which, when reproduced, looks like that of the chromo. Certainit 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 AlfredParsons may be pointed to as one who has made the luxuriant andlovable things of his own country almost as "serious" as those familiarobjects--the pasture and the poplar--which, even when infinitelyrepeated by the great school across the Channel, strike us as but meagremorsels of France. 

V

[Illustration: Mr. George H. Boughton]

In speaking of Mr. George H. Boughton, A. R. A. , I encounter the samedifficulty as with Mr. Millet: I find the window closed through whichalone almost it is just to take a view of his talent. Mr. Boughton isa painter about whom there is little that is new to tell to-day, soconspicuous and incontestable is his achievement, the fruit of a careerof which the beginning was not yesterday. He is a draughtsman and anillustrator only on occasion and by accident. These accidents havemostly occurred, however, in the pages of Harper, and the happiest ofthem will still be fresh in the memory of its readers. In the _SketchingRambles in Holland_ Mr. Abbey was a participant (as witness, among manythings, the admirable drawing of the old Frisian woman bent over herBible in church, with the heads of the burghers just visible above therough archaic pew-tops--a drawing opposite to page 112 in the handsomevolume into which these contributions were eventually gatheredtogether); but most of the sketches were Mr. Boughton's, and thecharming, amusing text is altogether his, save in the sense thatit commemorates his companion's impressions as well as his own--thedelightful, irresponsible, visual, sensual, pictorial, capriciousimpressions of a painter in a strange land, the person surely whomat particular moments one would give most to be. If there be anythinghappier than the impressions of a painter, it is the impressions of two, and the combination is set forth with uncommon spirit and humor in thisfrank record of the innocent lust of the eyes. Mr. Boughton scrupleslittle, in general, to write as well as to draw, when the fancy takeshim; to write in the manner of painters, with the bold, irreverent, unconventional, successful brush. If I were not afraid of thepatronizing tone I would say that there is little doubt that if as apainter he had not had to try to write in character, he would certainlyhave made a characteristic writer. He has the most enviable "finds, " notdreamed of in timid literature, yet making capital descriptive prose. Other specimens of them may be encountered in two or three Christmastales, signed with the name whose usual place is the corner of avaluable canvas. 

If Mr. Boughton is in this manner not a simple talent, furthercomplications and reversions may be observed in him, as, for instance, that having reverted from America, where he spent his early years, backto England, the land of his origin, he has now in a sense oscillatedagain from the latter to the former country. He came to London one dayyears ago (from Paris, where he had been eating nutritively of the treeof artistic knowledge), in order to re-embark on the morrow for theUnited States; but that morrow never came--it has never come yet. Certainly now it never _can_ come, for the country that Mr. Boughtonleft behind him in his youth is no longer there; the "old New York" isno longer a port to sail to, unless for phantom ships. In imagination, however, the author of "The Return of the _Mayflower_" has several timestaken his way back; he has painted with conspicuous charm and successvarious episodes of the early Puritan story. He was able on occasionto remember vividly enough the low New England coast and the thin NewEngland air. He has been perceptibly an inventor, calling into beingcertain 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 notafraid of appearing to talk a jargon), which people are hungry for whenthey acquire "a Boughton, " and which they can obtain on no other terms. This pictorial element in which he moves is made up of divers delicatethings, and there would be a roughness in attempting to unravel thetapestry. There is old English, and old American, and old Dutch init, and a friendly, unexpected new Dutch too--an ingredient of NewAmsterdam--a strain of Knickerbocker and of Washington Irving. There isan admirable infusion of landscape in it, from which some people regretthat Mr. Boughton should ever have allowed himself to be distracted byhis importunate love of sad-faced, pretty women in close-fitting coifsand 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 certainconciliatory pertinacity, with contradictious properties. He lives inone of the prettiest and most hospitable houses in London, but the noteof his work is the melancholy of rural things, of lonely people and ofquaint, far-off legend and refrain. There is a delightful ambiguity ofperiod and even of clime in him, and he rejoices in that inability todepict the modern which is the most convincing sign of the contemporary. He has a genius for landscape, yet he abounds in knowledge of every sortof ancient fashion of garment; the buckles and button-holes, the veryshoe-ties, of the past are dear to him. It is almost always autumn orwinter in his pictures. His horizons are cold, his trees are bare (hedoes the bare tree beautifully), and his draperies lined with fur; butwhen he exhibits himself directly, as in the fantastic "Rambles" beforementioned, contagious high spirits are the clearest of his showing. Here he appears as an irrepressible felicitous sketcher, and I know nopleasanter record of the joys of sketching, or even of those of simplylooking. Théophile Gautier himself was not more inveterately addicted tothis latter wanton exercise. There ought to be a pocket edition of Mr. Boughton's book, which would serve for travellers in other countriestoo, give them the point of view and put them in the mood. Sucha blessing, and such a distinction too, is it to have an eye. Mr. Boughton's, in his good-humored Dutch wanderings, holds from morningtill night a sociable, graceful revel. From the moment it opens till themoment it closes, its day is a round of adventures. His jolly pictorialnarrative, reflecting every glint of October sunshine and patch ofrusset shade, tends to confirm us afresh in the faith that the painter'slife 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 candidlyrecognized 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 ofthe artists of _Punch_ has exerted himself for the entertainment of thereaders of Harper; but I seem to come too late with any commentary onthe nature of his satire or the charm of his execution. When he began toappear in Harper he was already an old friend, and for myself I confessI have to go through rather a complicated mental operation to put intowords what I think of him. What does a man think of the language hehas learned to speak? He judges it only while he is learning. Mr. DuMaurier's work, in regard to the life it embodies, is not so much athing we see as one of the conditions of seeing. He has interpreted forus for so many years the social life of England that the interpretationhas become the text itself. We have accepted his types, his categories, his conclusions, his sympathies and his ironies, It is not given to allthe world to thread the mazes of London society, and for the great bodyof the disinherited, the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon public. Mr. DuMaurier's representation is the thing represented. Is the effect of itto nip in the bud any remote yearning for personal participation? I feeltempted to say yes, when I think of the follies, the flatnesses, theaffectations and stupidities that his teeming pencil has made vivid. Butthat vision immediately merges itself in another--a panorama of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charminggardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is themore definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic. 

This I take to be a sign that Mr. Du Maurier knows how to be generaland has a conception of completeness. The world amuses him, such queerthings go on in it; but the part that amuses him most is certain linesof our personal structure. That amusement is the brightest; the otheris often sad enough. A sharp critic might accuse Mr. Du Maurier oflingering too complacently on the lines in question; of having acertain ideal of "lissome" elongation to which the promiscuous truth issometimes sacrificed. But in fact this artist's P truth never pretendsto be promiscuous; it is avowedly select and specific. What he depictsis so preponderantly the "tapering" people that the remainder of thepicture, in a notice as brief as the present, may be neglected. If his_dramatis personæ_ are not all the tenants of drawing-rooms, they arerepresented at least in some relation to these. 'Arry and his friendsat the fancy fair are in society for the time; the point of introducingthem is to show how the contrast intensifies them. Of late years Mr. DuMaurier has perhaps been a little too docile to the muse of elegance;the idiosyncrasies of the "masher" and the high girl with elbows havebeguiled him into occasional inattention to the doings of the short andshabby. But his career has been long and rich, and I allude, in suchwords, but to a moment of it. 

The moral of it--I refer to the artistic one--seen altogether, isstriking and edifying enough. What Mr. Du Maurier has attempted to do isto give, in a thousand interrelated drawings, a general satiric pictureof the social life of his time and country. It is easy to see thatthrough them "an increasing purpose runs;" they all hang together andrefer to each other--complete, confirm, correct, illuminate each other. Sometimes they are not satiric: satire is not pure charm, and the artisthas allowed himself to "go in" for pure charm. Sometimes he has allowedhimself to go in for pure fantasy, so that satire (which should hold onto 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 andveracious historian of his age and his civilization. 

VII

I have left Mr. Reinhart to the last because of his importance, and nowthis very importance operates as a restriction and even as a sort ofreproach to me. To go well round him at a deliberate pace would takea whole book. With Mr. Abbey, Mr. Reinhart is the artist who hascontributed 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 heasks us to accept are less expensive to the imagination than those ofhis colleague. He is, in short, the vigorous, racy _prosateur_ of thathuman comedy of which Mr. Abbey is the poet. He illustrates themodern sketch of travel, the modern tale--the poor little "quiet, "psychological, conversational modern tale, which I often think theartist invited to represent it to the eye must hate, unless he be a veryintelligent master, little, on a superficial view, would there appear tobe in it to represent. The superficial view is, after all, the naturalone for the picture-maker. A talent of the first order, however, onlywants 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 thelittle tale itself, there is unmistakable life in his version of it. Mr. Reinhart deals in that element purely with admirable franknessand vigor. He is not so much suggestive as positively and sharplyrepresentative. His facility, his agility, his universality are a trulystimulating sight. He asks not too many questions of his subject, but tothose he does ask he insists upon a thoroughly intelligible answer. Byhis universality I mean perhaps as much as anything else his admirabledrawing; not precious, as the æsthetic say, nor pottering, as thevulgar, but free, strong and secure, which enables him to do with thehuman 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 isnot easy) my sense of a certain capable indifference that is in himotherwise than by saying that he would quite as soon do one thing asanother. 

For it is true that the admirer of his work rather misses in him thatintimation of a secret preference which many strong draughtsmen show, and which is not absent, for instance (I don't mean the secret, but theintimation), from the beautiful doings of Mr. Abbey. It is extremelypresent in Mr. Du Maurier's work, just as it was visible, lesselusively, in that of John Leech, his predecessor in _Punch_. Mr. Abbeyhas a haunting type; Du Maurier has a haunting type. There was littleperhaps of the haunted about Leech, but we know very well how he wantedhis pretty girls, his British swell, and his "hunting men" to look. Hebetrayed a predilection; he had his little ideal. That an artist may bea great force and not have a little ideal, the scarcely too much to bepraised 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 yetdiscovered how he would have liked his pretty girls to look. He has keptthe soft conception too much to himself--he has not trifled with thecommon truth by letting it appear. This common truth, in its innumerablecombinations, is what Mr. Rein-hart also shows us (with of courseinfinitely less of a _parti pris_ of laughing at it), though, as I musthasten to add, the female face and form in his hands always happen totake 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. Reinhartis solidly an artist, but I doubt whether as yet he dreams, and theabsence of private predilections makes him seem a little hard. He issometimes rough with our average humanity, and especially rough with thefeminine portion of it. He usually represents American life, in whichthat portion is often spoken of as showing to peculiar advantage. ButMr. Reinhart sees it generally, as very _bourgeois_. His good ladies areapt to be rather thick and short, rather huddled and plain. Ishouldn't mind it so much if they didn't look so much alive. They areincontestably possible. The long, brilliant series of drawings hemade to accompany Mr. Charles Dudley Warner's papers on the Americanwatering-places form a rich _bourgeois_ epic, which imaginations hauntedby a type must accept with philosophy, for the sketches in question willhave 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 acharming picture of youthful juxtaposition, they give us a sense, towhich nothing need be added, of the energy of Mr. Reinhart's pencil. They are a final collection of pictorial notes on the manners andcustoms, the aspects and habitats, in July and August, of the greatAmerican democracy; of which, certainly, taking one thing with another, they give a very comfortable, cheerful account. But they confirm thatanalytic 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 verygracefully, in the other by the operation of a sort of constructivehumor, remarkably strong, in his illustrations of Spanish life and hissketches 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 criticallife in him, will be prone to wonder _why_ he doesn't care, and whethermatters may not be turned about in such a way as that he should, withthe consequence that his large capacity would become more fruitfulstill. Mr. Reinhart is open to the large appeal of Paris, where helives--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 themystic sentiment--about which I am perhaps writing nonsense. Is itnonsense to say that, being very much an incarnation of the moderninternational spirit (he might be a Frenchman in New York were he notan American in Paris), the moral of his work is possibly the inevitablewant of finality, of intrinsic character, in that sweet freedom?Does the cosmopolite necessarily pay for his freedom by a want offunction--the impersonality of not being representative? Must one be alittle narrow to have a sentiment, and very local to have a quality, orat least a style; and would the missing type, if I may mention ityet again, haunt our artist--who is somehow, in his rare instrumentalfacility, outside of quality and style--a good deal more if he were not, amid the mixture of associations and the confusion of races, liable tofall 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 thanthe moment at which its "elective affinity" declares itself, and theinterest is great in proportion as the declaration is unmistakable. I mean by the elective affinity of a talent its climate and period ofpreference, the spot on the globe or in the annals of mankind to whichit most fondly attaches itself, to which it reverts incorrigibly, roundwhich it revolves with a curiosity that is insatiable, from which inshort it draws its strongest inspiration. A man may personally inhabita certain place at a certain time, but in imagination he may be aperpetual absentee, and to a degree worse than the worst Irish landlord, separating himself from his legal inheritance not only by mountainsand seas, but by centuries as well. When he is a man of genius theseperverse predilections become fruitful and constitute a new andindependent life, and they are indeed to a certain extent the sign andconcomitant of genius. I do not mean by this that high ability wouldalways rather have been born in another country and another age, butcertainly it likes to choose, it seldom fails to react against imposedconditions. If it accepts them it does so because it likes them forthemselves; and if they fail to commend themselves it rarely scruplesto fly away in search of others. We have witnessed this flight in manya case; I admit that if we have sometimes applauded it we have felt atother moments that the discontented, undomiciled spirit had better havestayed at home. 

Mr. Abbey has gone afield, and there could be no better instance of asuccessful fugitive and a genuine affinity, no more interesting exampleof selection--selection of field and subject--operating by that insightwhich has the precocity and certainty of an instinct. The domicile ofMr. Abbey's genius is the England of the eighteenth century; I shouldadd that the palace of art which he has erected there commands--from therear, as it were--various charming glimpses of the preceding age. The finest work he has yet done is in his admirable illustrations, inHarper's Magazine, to "She Stoops to Conquer, " but the promise that hewould one day do it was given some years ago in his delightful volumeof designs to accompany Herrick's poems; to which we may add, assupplementary evidence, his drawings for Mr. William Black's novel of_Judith Shakespeare_. 

Mr. Abbey was born in Philadelphia in 1852, and manifesting hisbrilliant but un-encouraged aptitudes at a very early age, came in 1872to New York to draw for Harper's WEEKLY. Other views than this, if Ihave been correctly Informed, had been entertained for his future--afact that provokes a smile now that his manifest destiny has been, oris in course of being, so very neatly accomplished. The spirit of modernaesthetics did not, at any rate, as I understand the matter, smile uponhis cradle, and the circumstance only increases the interest of hishaving had from the earliest moment the clearest artistic vision. 

It has sometimes happened that the distinguished draughtsman or painterhas been born in the studio and fed, as it were, from the palette, butin the great majority of cases he has been nursed by the profane, andcertainly, on the doctrine of mathematical chances, a Philadelphiagenius would scarcely be an exception. Mr. Abbey was fortunate, however, in not being obliged to lose time; he learned how to swim by jumpinginto deep water. Even if he had not known by instinct how to draw, hewould have had to perform the feat from the moment that he found himselfattached to the "art department" of a remarkably punctual periodical. In such a periodical the events of the day are promptly reproduced; andwith the morrow so near the day is necessarily a short one--too shortfor 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 anaccount of a scene with his pencil at a certain hour--to give it, as itwere, or perish--he will have become conscious, in the first place, ofa remarkable incentive to observe it. So that the roughness of thefoster-mother who imparts the precious faculty of quick, completeobservation is really a blessing in disguise. To say that it was simplyunder this kind of pressure that Mr. Abbey acquired the extraordinaryrefinement which distinguishes his work in black and white is doubtlessto say too much; but his admirers may be excused, in view of thebeautiful result, for almost wishing, on grounds of patriotism, to makethe training, or the absence of training, responsible for as much aspossible. For as no artistic genius that our country has produced ismore delightful than Mr. Abbey's, so, surely, nothing could be morecharacteristically American than that it should have formed itself inthe conditions that happened to be nearest at hand, with the crowds, streets and squares, the railway stations and telegraph poles, thewondrous sign-boards and triumphant bunting, of New York for the sourceof its inspiration, and with a big hurrying printing-house for itsstudio. If to begin the practice of art in these conditions was to incurthe danger of being crude, Mr. Abbey braved it with remarkable success. At all events, if he went neither I through the mill of Paris northrough that of Munich, the writer of these lines more than consoleshimself for the accident. His talent is unsurpassably fine, and yet wereflect with complacency that he picked it up altogether at home. If he is highly distinguished he is irremediably native, and (premisingalways that I speak mainly of his work in black and white) it isdifficult to see, as we look, for instance, at the admirable series ofhis drawings for "She Stoops to Conquer, " what more Paris or Munichcould have done for him. There is a certain refreshment in meeting anAmerican artist of the first order who is not a pupil of Gérôme or ofCabanel. 

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 powershas taken place amid the brown old accessories of a country wherethat eighteenth century which he presently marked for his own are moreprofusely represented than they have the good-fortune to be in America, and consequently limit our contention to the point that his talentitself 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 atonce that he fell into the trick, so irresistible for an artist doinghis special work, of living there, I must forbid myself everyimpertinent conjecture, but it may be respectfully assumed that Mr. Abbey rather drifted into exile than committed himself to it with maliceprepense. The habit, at any rate, to-day appears to be confirmed, and, to express it roughly, he is surrounded by the utensils and conveniencesthat he requires. During these years, until the recent period when hebegan to exhibit at the water-color exhibitions, his work has been doneprincipally for Harper's Magazine, and the record of it is to be foundin the recent back volumes. I shall not take space to tell it over pieceby piece, for the reader who turns to the Magazine will have nodifficulty in recognizing it. It has a distinction altogether its own;there is always poetry, humor, charm, in the idea, and always infinitegrace and security in the execution. 

As I have intimated, Mr. Abbey never deals with the things and figuresof to-day; his imagination must perform a wide backward journey beforeit can take the air. But beyond this modern radius it breathes withsingular freedom and naturalness. At a distance of fifty years it beginsto 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 wouldinevitably throw it back to the age of hair-powder and post-chaises. The coats and trousers, the feminine gear, the chairs and tables of thecurrent year, the general aspect of things immediate and familiar, saynothing to his mind, and there are other interpreters to whom he isquite content to leave them. He shows no great interest even in themodern face, if there be a modern face apart from a modern setting; Iam not sure what he thinks of its complications and refinements ofexpression, but he has certainly little relish for its _banal_, vulgarmustache, its prosaic, mercantile whisker, surmounting the last newthing in shirt-collars. Dear to him is the physiognomy of clean-shavenperiods, 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; thelatter not to the exclusion of clothes, in which he delights, but as theclothes of our great-grandfathers helped it to be seen. No one has everunderstood breeches and stockings better than he, or the human leg, thatdelight of the draughtsman, as the costume of the last century permittedit to be known. The petticoat and bodice of the same period have aslittle mystery for him, and his women and girls have altogether thepoetry of a by-gone manner and fashion. They are not modern heroines, with modern nerves and accomplishments, but figures of remembered songand story, calling up visions of spinet and harpsichord that havelost their music today, high-walled gardens that have ceased tobloom, 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 vagueand spectral, for Mr. Abbey has in the highest degree the art ofimparting life, and he gives it in particular to his well-made, bloomingmaidens. They live in a world in which there is no question of theirpassing Harvard or other examinations, but they stand very firmly ontheir quaintly-shod feet. They are exhaustively "felt, " and eminentlyqualified to attract the opposite sex, which is not the case withghosts, who, moreover, do not wear the most palpable petticoats ofquilted satin, nor sport the most delicate fans, nor take generally themost ingratiating attitudes. 

[Illustration: The old house]

The best work that Mr. Abbey has done is to be found in the successionof illustrations to "She Stoops to Conquer;" here we see his happiestcharacteristics and--till he does something still more brilliant--maytake his full measure. No work in black and white in our time has beenmore truly artistic, and certainly no success more unqualified. Theartist has given us an evocation of a social state to its smallestdetails, and done it with an unsurpassable lightness of touch. Theproblem was in itself delightful--the accidents and incidents (granted asituation _de comédie_) of an old, rambling, wainscoted, out-of-the-wayEnglish country-house, in the age of Goldsmith. Here Mr. Abbey is inhis element--given up equally to unerring observation and still moreinfallible divination. The whole place, and the figures that come andgo in it, live again, with their individual look, their peculiarities, their special signs and oddities. The spirit of the dramatist has passedcompletely into the artist's sense, but the spirit of the historian hasdone so almost as much. Tony Lumpkin is, as we say nowadays, a document, and Miss Hardcastle embodies the results of research. Delightful are thehumor and quaintness and grace of all this, delightful the variety andthe 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 wantsto very much, or unless, in other words, one has a great love. Mr. Abbeyhas evidently the tenderest affection for just the old houses and theold things, the old faces and voices, the whole irrevocable human scenewhich the genial hand of Goldsmith has passed over to him, and thereis no inquiry about them that he is not in a position to answer. He isintimate with the buttons of coats and the buckles of shoes: he knowsnot 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 andsofas, and rubbed against the old wainscots, and leaned over the oldbalusters. He knows every mended place in Tony Lumpkin's stockings, andexactly how that ingenuous youth leaned back on the spinet, with histhick, familiar thumb out, when he presented his inimitable countenance, with a grin, to Mr. Hastings, after he had set his fond mothera-whimpering. (There is nothing in the whole series, by-the-way, better indicated than the exquisitely simple, half-bumpkin, half-vulgarexpression of Tony's countenance and smile in this scene, unless it bethe charming arch yet modest face of Miss Hardcastle, lighted by thecandle she carries, as, still holding the door by which she comes in, she is challenged by young Mar-low to relieve his bewilderment as towhere he really is and what _she_ really is. ) In short, if we have allseen "She Stoops to Conquer" acted, Mr. Abbey has had the better fortuneof seeing it off the stage; and it is noticeable how happily he hassteered clear of the danger of making his people theatrical types--meremasqueraders and wearers of properties. This is especially the case withhis women, who have not a hint of the conventional paint and patches, simpering with their hands in the pockets of aprons, but are taken fromthe same originals from which Goldsmith took them. 

If it be asked on the occasion of this limited sketch of Mr. Abbey'spowers where, after all, he did learn to draw so perfectly, I know noanswer but to say that he learned it in the school in which he learnedalso to paint (as he has been doing in these latest years, rathertentatively at first, but with greater and greater success)--the schoolof his own personal observation. His drawing is the drawing of direct, immediate, solicitous study of the particular case, without tricks oraffectations or any sort of cheap subterfuge, and nothing can exceed thecharm of its delicacy, accuracy and elegance, its variety and freedom, its clear, frank solution of difficulties. If for the artist it be thefoundation of every joy to know exactly what he wants (as I hold itis indeed), Mr. Abbey is, to all appearance, to be constantlycongratulated. And I apprehend that he would not deny that it is agood-fortune for him to have been able to arrange his life so that hiseye encounters in abundance the particular cases of which I speak. Twoor three years ago, at the Institute of Painters in Water-colors, inLondon, he exhibited an exquisite picture of a peaceful old couplesitting in the corner of a low, quiet, ancient room, in the waningafternoon, and listening to their daughter as she stands up in themiddle and plays the harp to them. They are Darby and Joan, with all thepoetry preserved; they sit hand in hand, with bent, approving heads, andthe deep recess of the window looking into the garden (where we may besure there are yew-trees clipped into the shape of birds and beasts), the panelled room, the quaintness of the fireside, the old-timeprovincial expression of the scene, all belong to the class of effectswhich Mr. Abbey understands supremely well. So does the great russetwall and high-pitched mottled roof of the rural almshouse which figuresin the admirable water-color picture that he exhibited last spring. Agroup of remarkably pretty countrywomen have been arrested in front ofit by the passage of a young soldier--a raw recruit in scarlet tunic andwhite ducks, somewhat prematurely conscious of military glory. He givesthem the benefit of the goose-step as he goes; he throws back his headand distends his fingers, presenting to the ladies a back expressive ofmore consciousness of his fine figure than of the lovely mirth that theartist has depicted in their faces. Lovely is their mirth indeed, andlovely are they altogether. Mr. Abbey has produced nothing more charmingthan this bright knot of handsome, tittering daughters of burghers, in their primeval pelisses and sprigged frocks. I have, however, leftmyself no space to go into the question of his prospective honors as apainter, to which everything now appears to point, and I have mentionedthe two pictures last exhibited mainly because they illustrate the happyopportunities with which he has been able to surround himself. The sweetold corners he appreciates, the russet walls of moss-grown charities, the lowbrowed nooks of manor, cottage and parsonage, the freshcomplexions that flourish in green, pastoral countries where it rainsnot a little--every item in this line that seems conscious of itspictorial use appeals to Mr. Abbey not in vain. He might have been agrandson of Washington Irving, which is a proof of what I have alreadysaid, that none of the young American workers in the same field have solittle as he of that imperfectly assimilated foreignness of suggestionwhich is sometimes regarded as the strength, but which is also in somedegree the weakness, of the pictorial effort of the United States. Hisexecution is as sure of itself as if it rested upon infinite Parisianinitiation, but his feeling can best be described by saying that it isthat of our own dear mother-tongue. If the writer speaks when he writes, and the draughtsman speaks when he draws. Mr. Abbey, in expressinghimself with his pencil, certainly speaks pure English, He reminds usto a certain extent of Meissonier, especially the Meissonier of theillustrations to that charming little volume of the _Conies Rémois_, and the comparison is highly to his advantage in the matter of freedom, variety, ability to represent movement (Meissonier's figures arestock-still), and facial expression--above all, in the handling ofthe female personage, so rarely attempted by the French artist. But hediffers from the latter signally in the fact that though he shares hissympathy as to period and costume, his people are of another race andtradition, and move in a world locally altogether different. Mr. Abbeyis still young, he is full of ideas and intentions, and the work hehas done may, in view of his time of life, of his opportunities and thesingular completeness of his talent, be regarded really as a kind offoretaste and prelude. It can hardly fail that he will do better thingsstill, when everything is so favorable. Life itself is his subject, andthat is always at his door. The only obstacle, therefore, that can beimagined in Mr. Abbey's future career is a possible embarrassment asto what to choose. He has hitherto chosen so well, however, that thisobstacle will probably not be insuperable. 

CHARLES S. REINHART

We Americans are accused of making too much ado about our celebrities, of being demonstratively conscious of each step that we take in the pathof progress; and the accusation has its ground doubtless in thissense, that it is possible among us to-day to become a celebrity onunprecedentedly easy terms. This, however, at the present hour is thecase all the world over, and it is difficult to see where the standardof just renown remains so high that the first stone may be cast. It ismore and more striking that the machinery of publicity is so enormous, so constantly growing and so obviously destined to make the globe small, in relation of the objects, famous or obscure, which cover it, thatit procures for the smallest facts and the most casual figures areverberation to be expected only in the case of a world-conqueror. Thenewspaper and the telegram constitute a huge sounding-board, which has, every day and every hour, to be made to vibrate, to be fed with items, and the diffusion of the items takes place on a scale out of any sort ofproportion to their intrinsic importance. The crackle of common thingsis transmuted into thunder--a thunder perhaps more resounding in Americathan elsewhere for the reason that the sheet of tin shaken by theJupiter of the Press has been cut larger. But the difference is only ofdegree, not of kind; and if the system we in particular have broughtto perfection would seem to be properly applied only to Alexandersand Napoleons, it is not striking that these adequate subjects presentthemselves even in other countries. The end of it all surely no man cansee, unless it be that collective humanity is destined to perish from arupture of its tympanum. That is a theme for a later hour, and meanwhileperhaps it is well not to be too frightened. Some of the items I justspoke of are, after all, larger than others; and if, as a general thing, it is a mistake to pull up our reputations to see how they are growing, there are some so well grown that they will bear it, and others ofa hardy stock even while they are tender. We may feel, for instance, comparatively little hesitation in extending an importunate hand towardsthe fine young sapling of which Mr. Reinhart is one of the branches. It is a plant of promise, which has already flowered profusely and thefragrance of which it would be affectation not to to notice. Let usnotice it, then, with candor, for it has all the air of being destinedto make the future sweeter. The plant in question is of course simplythe art of illustration in black and white, to which American periodicalliterature has, lately given such an impetus and which has returnedthe good office by conferring a great distinction on our magazines. Inits new phase the undertaking has succeeded; and it is not always thatfortune descends upon so deserving a head. Two or three fine talents inparticular have helped it to succeed, and Mr. Reinhart is not the leastconspicuous of these. It would be idle for a writer in Harper topretend to any diffidence of appreciation of his work: for the pagesare studded, from many years back, with the record of his ability. Mr. Rein-hart took his first steps and made his first hits in Harper, whichowes him properly a portrait in return for so much portraiture. I mayexaggerate the charm and the importance of the modern illustrative form, may see in it a capacity of which it is not yet itself wholly conscious, but if I do so Mr. Reinhart is partly responsible for the aberration. Abundant, intelligent, interpretative work in black and white is, to thesense of the writer of these lines, one of the pleasantest things of thetime, having only to rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future. This idea, I confess, is such as to lead one to write not onlysympathetically but pleadingly about the artists to whom one looks forconfirmation of it. If at the same time as we commemorate what they havedone we succeed in enlarging a little the conception of what theymay yet do, we shall be repaid even for having exposed ourselves asfanatics--fanatics of the general manner, I mean, not of particularrepresentatives of it. 

May not this fanaticism, in a particular case, rest upon a sense ofthe resemblance between the general chance, as it may be called, of thedraughtsman in black and white, with contemporary life for his theme, and the opportunity upon which the literary artist brings another formto bear? The forms are different, though with analogies; but the fieldis the same--the immense field of contemporary life observed for anartistic purpose. There is nothing so interesting as that, because it isourselves; and no artistic problem is so charming as to arrive, eitherin a literary or a plastic form, at a close and direct notation of whatwe observe. If one has attempted some such exploit in a literary form, one cannot help having a sense of union and comradeship with those whohave approached the question with the other instrument. This will beespecially the case if we happen to have appreciated that instrumenteven to envy. We may as well say it outright, we envy it quiteunspeakably in the hands of Mr. Reinhart and in those of Mr. Abbey. There is almost no limit to the service to which we can imagine it to beapplied, and we find ourselves wishing that these gentlemen may be madeadequately conscious of all the advantages it represents. We wonderwhether they really _are_ so; we are disposed even to assume that theyare not, in order to join the moral, to insist on the lesson. The masterwhom we have mentally in view Mr. Reinhart is a near approach to himmay be, if he will only completely know it, so prompt, so copious, so universal--so "all there, " as we say nowadays, and indeed so alleverywhere. There is only too much to see, too much to do, and hisprocess is the one that comes nearest to minimizing the quantity. He cantouch so many things, he can go from one scene to another, he can sounda whole concert of notes while the painter is setting up his easel. Thepainter is majestic, dignified, academic, important, superior, anythingyou will; but he is, in the very nature of the case, only occasional. He is "serious, " but he is comparatively clumsy: he is a terrible timegetting under way, and he has to sacrifice so many subjects while he isdoing one. The illustrator makes one immense sacrifice, of course--thatof color; but with it he purchases a freedom which enables him to attackever so many ideas. It is by variety and numerosity that he commendshimself to his age, and it is for these qualities that his age commendshim to the next. The twentieth century, the latter half of it, will, nodoubt, have its troubles, but it will have a great compensatory luxury, that of seeing the life of a hundred years before much more vividly thanwe--even happy we--see the life of a hundred years ago. But for thisour illustrators must do their best, appreciate the endless capacityof their form. It is to the big picture what the short story is to thenovel. 

It is doubtless too much, I hasten to add, to ask Mr. Reinhart, forinstance, to work to please the twentieth century. The end will notmatter if he pursues his present very prosperous course of activity, for it is assuredly the fruitful vein, the one I express the hope tosee predominant, the portrayal of the manners, types and aspects thatsurround us. Mr. Reinhart has reached that happy period of life whena worker is in full possession of his means, when he has done for hischosen instrument everything he can do in the way of forming it andrendering it complete and flexible, and has the fore only to applyit with freedom, confidence and success. These, to our sense, are thegolden hours of an artist's life; happier even than the younger timewhen the future seemed infinite in the light of the first rays ofglory, the first palpable hits. The very sense that the future is_not_ unlimited and that opportunity is at its high-water-mark givesan intensity to the enjoyment of maturity. Then the acquired habitof "knowing how" must simplify the problem of execution and leave theartist free to think only of his purpose, as befits a real creator. Mr. Reinhart is at the enviable stage of knowing in perfection how; he hasarrived at absolute facility and felicity. The machine goes of itself;it is no longer necessary to keep lifting the cover and pouring in theoil of fond encouragement: all the attention may go to the idea and thesubject. It may, however, remain very interesting to others to know howthe faculty was trained, the pipe was tuned. The early phases of sucha process have a relative importance even when, at the lime (so gradualare many beginnings and so obscure man a morrow) they may have appearedneither delightful nor profitable. They are almost always to be summedup in the single precious word practice. This word represents, at anyrate, Mr. Reinhart's youthful history, and the profusion in which, though no doubt occasionally disguised, the boon was supplied to him inthe offices of Harper's Magazine. There is nothing so innate that ithas not also to be learned, for the best part of any aptitude is thecapacity to increase it. 

Mr. Reinhart's experience began to accumulate very early, for atPittsburgh, where he was born, he was free to draw to his heart'scontent. There was no romantic attempt, as I gather, to nip him in thebud. On the contrary, he was despatched with almost prosaic punctualityto Europe, and was even encouraged to make himself at home in Munich. Munich, in his case, was a _pis-aller_ for Paris, where it would havebeen his preference to study when he definitely surrendered, as itwere, to his symptoms. He went to Paris, but Paris seemed blocked andcomplicated, and Munich presented advantages which, if not greater, wereat least easier to approach. Mr. Reinhart passe through the mill of theBavarian school, and when it had turned him out with its characteristicpolish he came back to America with a very substantial stock to disposeof. It would take a chapter by itself if we were writing a biography, this now very usual episode of the return of the young American from theforeign conditions in which he has learned his professional language, and his position in face of the community that he addresses in a strangeidiom. There has to be a prompt adjustment between ear and voice, if theinterlocutor is not to seem to himself to be intoning in the void. Thereis always an inner history in all this, as well as an outer one--such, however, as it would take much space to relate. Mr. Reinhart's moreor less alienated accent fell, by good-fortune, on a comprehendinglistener. He had made a satirical drawing, in the nature of the"cartoon" of a comic journal, on a subject of the hour, and addressed itto the editor of _Harper's Weekly_. The drawing was not published--thesatire was perhaps not exactly on the right note--but the draughtsmanwas introduced. Thus began, by return of post, as it were, and withpreliminaries so few that they could not well have been less, aconnection of many years. If I were writing a biography another chapterwould come in here--a curious, almost a pathetic one; for the courseof things is so rapid in this country that the years of Mr. Reinhart'sapprenticeship to pictorial journalism, positively recent as they are, already are almost prehistoric. To-morrow, at least, the complexion ofthat time, its processes, ideas and standards, together with some ofthe unsophisticated who carried them out, will belong to old New York. A certain mollifying dimness rests upon them now, and their supersededbrilliancy gleams through it but faintly. It is a lively span for Mr. Reinhart to have been at once one of the unsophisticated and one of theactually modern. 

That portion of his very copious work to which, more particularly. Iapply the latter term, has been done for Harper's Magazine. During theselatter years it has come, like so much of American work to-day, frombeyond the seas. Whether or not that foreign language of which I justspoke never became, in New York, for this especial possessor of it, acompletely convenient medium of conversation, is more than I can say;at any rate Mr. Reinhart eventually reverted to Europe and settled inParis. Paris had seemed rather inhospitable to him in his youth, but hehas now fitted his key to the lock. It would be satisfactory to beable to express scientifically the reasons why, as a general thing, theAmerican artist, as well as his congener of many another land, carrieson his function with less sense of resistance in that city thanelsewhere. He likes Paris best, but that is not scientific. Thedifference is that though theoretically the production of pictures isrecognized in America and in England, in Paris it is recognized boththeoretically and practically. And I do not mean by this simply thatpictures are bought--for they are not, predominantly, as it happens--butthat they are more presupposed. The plastic is implied in the Frenchconception of things, and the studio is as natural a consequence of itas the post-office is of letter-writing. Vivid representation is thegenius of the French language and the need of the French mind. Thepeople have invented more aids to it than any other, and as these aidsmake up a large part of the artist's life, he feels his best home to bein the place where he finds them most. He may begin to quarrel with thathome on the day a complication is introduced by the question of _what_he shall represent--a totally different consideration from that ofthe method; but for Mr. Reinhart this question has not yet offeredinsoluble difficulties. He represents everything--he has accepted sogeneral an order. So long as his countrymen flock to Paris and pass ina homogeneous procession before his eyes, there is not the smallestdifficulty in representing _them_. When the case requires that theyshall be taken in connection with their native circumstances and seen intheir ambient air, he is prepared to come home and give several monthsto the task, as on the occasion of Mr. Dudley Warner's history of a touramong the watering-places, to which he furnished so rich and so curiousa pictorial accompaniment. Sketch-book in hand, he betakes himself, according to need, to Germany, to England, to Italy, to Spain. Thereaders of Harper will have forgotten his admirable pictorial notes onthe political world at Berlin, so rich and close in characterization. To the _Spanish Vistas_ of Mr. G. P. Lathrop he contributed innumerabledesigns, delightful notes of an artist's quest of the sketchable, manyof which are singularly full pictures. The "Soldiers Playing Dominoes"at a café is a powerful page of life. Mr. Reinhart has, of course, interpreted many a fictive scene--he has been repeatedly called uponto make the novel and the story visible. This he energetically andpatiently does; though of course we are unable to say whether the menand women he makes us see are the very people whom the authors haveseen. That is a thing that, in any case, one will never know; besides, the authors who don't see vaguely are apt to see perversely. Thestory-teller has, at any rate, the comfort with Mr. Reinhart that hisdrawings are constructive and have the air of the actual. He likes torepresent character--he rejoices in the specifying touch. 

The evidence of this is to be found also in his pictures, for I oughtalready to have mentioned that, for these many years (they are beginningto be many), he has indulged in the luxury of color. It is not probablethat he regards himself in the first place as an illustrator, in thesense to which the term is usually restricted. He is a very vigorous andvarious painter, and at the Salon a constant and conspicuous exhibitor. He is fond of experiments, difficulties and dangers, and I divine thatit would be his preference to be known best by his painting, in which hehandles landscape with equal veracity. It is a pity that the criticis unable to contend with him on such a point without appearing tounderestimate that work. Mr. Reinhart has so much to show for hispreference that I am conscious of its taking some assurance to say thatI am not sure he is right. This would be the case even if he had nothingelse to show than the admirable picture entitled "Washed Ashore"("Un Epave ") which made such an impression in the Salon of 1887. Itrepresents the dead body of an unknown man whom the tide has cast up, lying on his back, feet forward, disfigured, dishonored by the sea. Asmall group of villagers are collected near it, divided by the desireto look and the fear to see. A gendarme, official and responsible, hisuniform contrasting with the mortal disrepair of the victim, takes downin his note-book the _procès-verbal_ of the incident, and an old sailor, pointing away with a stiffened arm, gives him the benefit of what _he_knows about the matter. Plain, pitying, fish-wives, hushed, withtheir shawls in their mouths, hang back, as if from a combination toosolemn--the mixture of death and the law. Three or four men seem to beglad it isn't they. The thing is a masterpiece of direct representation, and has wonderfully the air of something seen, found without beinglooked for. Excellently composed but not artificial, deeply touching butnot sentimental, large, close and sober, this important work gives thefull measure of Mr. Reinhart's great talent and constitutes a kind ofpledge. It may be perverse on my part to see in it the big banknote, as it were, which may be changed into a multitude of gold and silverpieces. I cannot, however, help doing so. "Washed Ashore" is paintedas only a painter paints, but I irreverently translate it into itsequivalent in "illustrations"--half a hundred little examples, inblack and white, of the same sort of observation. For this observation, immediate, familiar, sympathetic, human, and not involving a quest ofstyle for which color is really indispensable, is a mistress at whoseservice there is no derogation in placing one's self. To do littlethings instead of big _may_ be a derogation; a great deal will dependupon the way the little things are done. Besides, no work of art isabsolutely little. I grow bold and even impertinent as I think of theway Mr. Rein-hart might scatter the smaller coin. At any rate, whateverproportion his work in this line may bear to the rest, it is to be hopedthat nothing will prevent him from turning out more and more to playthe rare faculty that produces it. His studies of American _moeurs_ inassociation with Mr. Warner went so far on the right road that wewould fain see him make all the rest of the journey. They made us askstraightway for more, and were full of intimations of what was behind. They showed what there is to see--what there is to guess. Let him carrythe same inquiry further, let him carry it all the way. It would beserious work and would abound in reality; it would help us, as it were, to know what we are talking about. In saying this I feel how much Iconfirm the great claims I just made for the revival of illustration. 

ALFRED PARSONS

It would perhaps be extravagant to pretend, in this embarrassed age, that Merry England is still intact; but it would be strange if thewords "happy England" should not rise to the lips of the observer of Mr. Alfred Parsons' numerous and delightful studies of the gardens, greatand small, of his country. They surely have a representative value inmore than the literal sense, and might easily minister to the quietestcomplacency of patriotism. People whose criticism is imaginative willsee in them a kind of compendium of what, in home things, is at oncemost typical and most enviable; and, going further, they will almostwish that such a collection might be carried by slow stages round theglobe, to kindle pangs in the absent and passions in the alien. Asit happens to be a globe the English race has largely peopled, we canmeasure the amount of homesickness that would be engendered on theway. In fact, one doubts whether the sufferer would even need to be ofEnglish strain to attach the vision of home to the essentially lovableplaces that Mr. Parsons depicts. They seem to generalize and typifythe idea, so that every one may feel, in every case, that he has asentimental property in the scene. The very sweetness of its realityonly helps to give it that story-book quality which persuades us we haveknown it in youth. 

And yet such scenes may well have been constructed for the despair ofthe Colonial; for they remind us, at every glance, of that perfection towhich there is no short cut--not even "unexampled prosperity "--andto which time is the only guide. Mr. Parsons' pictures speak of manycomplicated things, but (in what they tell us of his subjects) theyspeak most of duration. Such happy nooks have grown slowly, suchfortunate corners have had a history; and their fortune has beenprecisely that they have had time to have it comfortably, have not beenobliged to try for character without it. 

Character is their strong point and the most expensive of allingredients. Mr. Parsons' portraiture seizes every shade of it, seizesit with unfailing sympathy. He is doubtless clever enough to paintrawness when he must, but he has an irrepressible sense of ripeness. Half the ripeness of England--half the religion, one might almostsay--is in its gardens; they are truly pious foundations. It isdoubtless because there are so many of them that the country seems sofinished, and the sort of care they demand is an intenser deliberation, which passes into the national temper. One must have lived in otherlands to observe fully how large a proportion of this one is walled infor growing flowers. The English love of flowers is inveterate; itis the most, unanimous protest against the grayness of some of theconditions, and it should receive justice from those who accuse the raceof taking its pleasure too sadly. A good garden is an organized revel, and there is no country in which there are so many. 

Mr. Parsons had therefore only to choose, at his leisure, and one mightheartily have envied him the process, scarcely knowing which to preferof all the pleasant pilgrimages that would make up such a quest. He had. Fortunately, the knowledge which could easily lead to more, and a careerof discovery behind him. He knew the right times for the right things, and the right things for the right places. He had innumerable memoriesand associations; he had painted up and down the land and looked overmany walls. He had followed the bounty of the year from month to monthand from one profusion to another. To follow it with him, in thisadmirable series, is to see that he is master of the subject. Therewill be no lack of confidence on the part of those who have alreadyperceived, in much of Mr. Parsons' work, a supreme illustration of allthat is widely nature-loving in the English interest in the flower. No sweeter submission to mastery can be imagined than the way thedaffodils, under his brush (to begin at the beginning), break outinto early April in the lovely drawings of Stourhead. One of the mostcharming of these--a corner of an old tumbled-up place in Wiltshire, where many things have come and gone--represents that moment oftransition in which contrast is so vivid as to make it more dramaticthan many plays--the very youngest throb of spring, with the brown slopeof the foreground coming back to consciousness in pale lemon-coloredpatches and, on the top of the hill, against the still cold sky, theequally delicate forms of the wintry trees. By the time these formshave thickened, the expanses of daffodil will have become a massof bluebells. All the daffodil pictures have a rare loveliness, butespecially those that deal also with the earlier fruit-blossom, theyoung plum-trees in Berkshire orchards. Here the air is faintly pink, and the painter makes us feel the little _blow_ in the thin blue sky. The spring, fortunately, is everybody's property and, in the language ofall the arts, the easiest word to conjure with. It is therefore partlyMr. Parsons' good-luck that we enjoy so his rendering of these phases;but on the other hand we look twice when it's a case of meddling withthe exquisite, and if he inspires us with respect it is because we feelthat he has been deeply initiated. No one knows better the friendlyreasons for our stopping, when chatting natives pronounce the weather"foine, " at charming casual corners of old villages, where grassy wayscross each other and timbered houses bulge irregularly and there arefresh things behind crooked palings; witness the little vision ofBlewbury, in Berkshire, reputedly of ancient British origin, with aroad all round it and only footways within. No one, in the Herefordshireorchards, masses the white cow-parsley in such profusion under theapple blossoms; or makes the whitewashed little damson-trees look soinnocently responsible and charming on the edge of the brook over whichthe planks are laid for the hens. Delightful, in this picture, is thesense of the clean spring day, after rain, with the blue of the skywashed faint. Delightful is the biggish view (one of the less numerousoil-pictures) of the Somersetshire garden, where that peculiarly Englishlook of the open-air room is produced by the stretched carpet of theturf and the firm cushions of the hedges, and a pair of proprietors, perhaps happier than they know, are putting in an afternoon among theirtulips, under the flushed apple-trees whose stems are so thin and whosebrims so heavy. Are the absorbed couple, at any rate, aware of thesurprising degree to which the clustered ruddy roofs of the next smalltown, over the hedge, off at the left, may remind the fancifulspectator of the way he has seen little dim Italian cities look on theirhill-tops? The whole thing, in this subject, has the particular Englishnote to which Mr. Parsons repeatedly testifies, the nook quality, theair of a land and a life so infinitely subdivided that they producea thousand pleasant privacies. The painter moves with the months andfinds, after the earliest things, the great bed of pansies in the angleof the old garden at Sutton, in which, for felicity of position andperfect pictorial service rendered--to say nothing of its polygonal, pyramidal roof--the ancient tool-house, or tea-house, is especially tobe commended. Very far descended is such a corner as this, very full ofreference to vanished combinations and uses; and the artist communicatesto us a feeling for it that makes us wish disinterstedly it may be stillas long preserved. 

He finds in June, at Blackdown, the blaze of the yellow azalea-bush, orin another spot the strong pink of the rhododendron, beneath the silverfirs that deepen the blue of the sky. He finds the Vicarage Walk, atKing's Langley, a smother of old-fashioned flowers--a midsummer vistafor the figures of a happy lady and a lucky dog. He finds the delicioushuddle of the gabled, pigeon-haunted roof of a certain brown oldbuilding at Frame, with poppies and gladiolus and hollyhock crowding thebeautiful foreground. He finds--apparently in the same place--the tangleof the hardy flowers that come while the roses are still in bloom, withthe tall blue larkspurs standing high among them. He finds the lilies, white and red, at Broadway, and the poppies, which have dropped most oftheir petals--apparently to let the roses, which are just coming out, give _their_ grand party. Their humility is rewarded by the artist'sadmirable touch in the little bare poppy-heads that nod on theirflexible pins. 

But I cannot go on to say everything that such a seeker, such adiscoverer, as Mr. Parsons finds--the less that the purpose of theselimited remarks is to hint at our own _trouvailles_. A view of thefield, at any rate, would be incomplete without such specimens as thethree charming oil-pictures which commemorate Holme Lacey. There aregardens and gardens, and these represent the sort that are always spokenof in the plural and most arrogate the title. They form, in England, amagnificent collection, and if they abound in a quiet assumption of thegrand style it must be owned that they frequently achieve it. There arepeople to be found who enjoy them, and it is not, at any rate, when Mr. Parsons deals with them that we have an opening for strictures. Aswe look at the blaze of full summer in the brilliantly conventionalparterres we easily credit the tale of the 40, 000 plants it takes tofill the beds. More than this, we like the long paths of turf thatstretch between splendid borders, recalling the frescoed galleries of apalace; we like the immense hedges, whose tops are high against the sky. While we are liking, we like perhaps still better, since they deal witha very different order, the two water-colors from the dear little gardenat Winchelsea--especially the one in which the lady takes he ease in herhammock (on a sociable, shady terrace, from which the ground drops), and looks at red Rye, across the marshes. Another garden where acontemplative hammock would be in order is the lovely canonical plotat Salisbury, with the everlasting spire above it tinted in the summersky--unless, in the same place, you should choose to hook yourself up bythe grassy bank of the Avon, at the end of the lawn, with the meadows, the cattle, the distant willows across the river, to look at. 

Three admirable water-colors are devoted by Mr. Parsons to theperceptible dignity of Gravetye, in Sussex, the dignity of very seriousgardens, entitled to ceremonious consideration, Few things in Englandcan show a greater wealth of bloom than the wide flowery terraceimmediately beneath the gray, gabled house, where tens of thousands oftea-roses, in predominant possession, have, in one direction, a massof high yews for a background. They divide their province with thecarnations and pansies: a wilder ness of tender petals ignorant ofanything rougher than the neighborhood of the big unchanged medley oftall yuccas and saxifrage, with miscellaneous filling-in, in the picturewhich presents the charming house in profile. The artist shows us later, in September, at Gravetye, the pale violet multitude of the Michaelmasdaisies; another I great bunch, or bank, of which half masks and greatlybeautifies the rather bare yellow cottage at Broadway. This brings us onto the autumn, if I count as autumnal the admirable large water-color ofa part of a garden at Shiplake, with the second bloom of the roses anda glimpse of a turn of the Thames. This exquisite picture expresses toperfection the beginning of the languor of the completed season--withits look of warm rest, of doing nothing, in the cloudless sky. To thesame or a later moment belongs the straight walk at Fladbury--the oldrectory garden by the Avon, with its Irish yews and the red lady in herchair; also the charming water-color of young, slim apple-trees, full offruit (this must be October), beneath an admirable blue and white sky. Still later comes the big pear-tree that has turned, among barer boughs, to flame-color, and, in another picture, the very pale russet ofthe thinned cherry-trees, standing, beneath a grayish sky, above aforeshortened slope. Last of all we have, in oils, December and a hardfrost in a bare apple-orchard, indented with a deep gully which makesthe place somehow a subject and which, in fact, three or four yearsago, made it one for a larger picture by Mr. Parsons, full of truth andstyle. 

This completes his charming story of the life of the English year, toldin a way that convinces us of his intimate acquaintance with it. Halfthe interest of Mr. Parsons' work is in the fact that he paints from afull mind and from a store of assimilated knowledge. In every touch ofnature that he communicates to us we feel something of the thrill of thewhole--we feel the innumerable relations, the possible variations of theparticular objects. This makes his manner serious and masculine--rescuesit from the thinness of tricks and the coquetries of _chic_. We walkwith him on a firm earth, we taste the tone of the air and seem to takenature and the climate and all the complicated conditions by their biggeneral hand. The painter's manner, in short, is one with the study ofthings--his talent is a part of their truth. In this happy serieswe seem to see still more how that talent was formed, how his richmotherland has been, from the earliest observation, its nurse andinspirer. He gives back to her all the good she has done him. 

JOHN S. SARGENT

I was on the point of beginning this sketch of the work of an artist towhom distinction has come very early in life by saying, in regard to thedegree to which the subject of it enjoys the attention of the public, that no American painter has hitherto won himself such recognition fromthe expert; but I find myself pausing at the start as on the edge of apossible solecism. Is Mr. Sargent in very fact an American painter?The proper answer to such a question is doubtless that we shall be welladvised to pretend it, and the reason of this is simply that we havean excellent opportunity. Born in Europe, he has also spent his life inEurope, but none the less the burden of proof would rest with those whoshould undertake to show that he is a European. Moreover he has evenon the face of it this great symptom of an American origin, that in theline of his art he might easily be mistaken for a Frenchman. It soundslike a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we lookfor "American art" we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out ofParis, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it. Mr. Sargent came upto the irresistible city in his twentieth year, from Florence, where in1856 he had been born of American parents and where his fortunate youthhad been spent. He entered immediately the studio of Caro-lus Duran, andrevealed himself in 1877, at the age of twenty-two, in the portrait ofthat master---a fine model in more than one sense of the word. He wasalready in possession of a style; and if this style has gained bothin finish and in assurance, it has not otherwise varied. As he saw and"rendered" ten years ago, so he sees and renders to-day; and I may addthat there is no present symptom of his passing into another manner. 

Those who have appreciated his work most up to the present timearticulate no wish for a change, so completely does that work seem tothem, in its kind, the exact translation of his thought, the exact "fit"of his artistic temperament. It is difficult to imagine a young painterless in the dark about his own ideal, more lucid and more responsiblefrom the first about what he desires. In an altogether exceptionaldegree does he give us the sense that the intention and the art ofcarrying it out are for him one and the same thing. In the brilliantportrait of Carolus Duran, which he was speedily and strikingly tosurpass, he gave almost the full measure of this admirable peculiarity, that perception with him is already by itself a kind of execution. Itis likewise so, of course, with many another genuine painter; but inSargent's case the process by which the object seen resolves itself intothe object pictured is extraordinarily immediate. It is as if paintingwere pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling. 

From the time of his first successes at the Salon he was hailed, Ibelieve, as a recruit of high value to the camp of the Impressionists, and to-day he is for many people most conveniently pigeon-holed underthat head. It is not necessary to protest against the classificationif this addition always be made to it, that Mr. Sargent's impressionshappen to be worthy of record. This is by no means inveterately the casewith those of the ingenuous artists who most rejoice in the title inquestion. To render the impression of an object may be a very fruitfuleffort, but it is not necessarily so; that will depend upon what, Iwon't say the object, but the impression, may have been. The talentsengaged in this school lie, not unjustly, as it seems to me underthe suspicion of seeking the solution of their problem exclusively insimplification. If a painter works for other eyes as well as his own hecourts a certain danger in this direction--that of being arrested by thecry of the spectator: "Ah! but excuse me; I myself take more impressionsthan that" We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice only when it isrich. Mr. Sargent simplifies, I think, but he simplifies with style, andhis impression is the finest form of his energy. 

His work has been almost exclusively in portraiture, and it has been hisfortune to paint more women than men; therefore he has had but a limitedopportunity to reproduce that generalized grand air with which his viewof certain figures of gentlemen invests the model, which is conspicuousin the portrait of Carolus Duran and of which his splendid "DocteurPozzi, " the distinguished Paris surgeon (a work not sent to the Salon), is an admirable example. In each of these cases the model has been ofa gallant pictorial type, one of the types which strike us as madefor portraiture (which is by no means the way of all), as especiallyappears, for instance, in the handsome hands and frilled wrists of M. Carolus, whose cane rests in his fine fingers as if it were the hiltof a rapier. The most brilliant of all Mr. Sargent's productions is theportrait of a young lady, the magnificent picture which he exhibitedin 1881; and if it has mainly been his fortune since to commemorate thefair faces of women, there is no ground for surprise at this sort ofsuccess on the part of one who had given so signal a proof of possessingthe secret of the particular aspect that the contemporary lady (of anyperiod) likes to wear in the eyes of posterity. Painted when he wasbut four-and-twenty years of age, the picture by which Mr. Sargent wasrepresented at the Salon of 1881 is a performance which may well havemade any critic of imagination rather anxious about his future. Incommon with the superb group of the children of Mr. Edward Boit, exhibited two years later, it offers the slightly "uncanny" spectacle ofa talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more tolearn. It is not simply precocity in the guise of maturity--a phenomenonwe very often meet, which deceives us only for an hour; it is thefreshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, reallyfelt and assimilated, of generations. My admiration for this deeplydistinguished work is such that I am perhaps in danger of overstatingits merits; but it is worth taking into account that to-day, afterseveral years' acquaintance with them, these merits seem to me more andmore to justify enthusiasm. The picture has this sign of productions ofthe first order, that its style clearly would save it if everything elseshould change--our measure of its value of resemblance, its expressionof character, the fashion of dress, the particular associations itevokes. It is not only a portrait, but a picture, and it arouses evenin the profane spectator something of the painter's sense, the joy ofengaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem. There are works of which it is sometimes said that they are painters'pictures (this description is apt to be intended invidiously), and theproduction of which I speak has the good-fortune at once to belong tothis class and to give the "plain man" the kind of pleasure that theplain man looks for. 

The young lady, dressed in black satin, stands upright, with her righthand bent back, resting on her waist, while the other, with the armsomewhat extended, offers to view a single white flower. The dress. Stretched at the hips over a sort of hoop, and ornamented in front, where it opens on a velvet petticoat with large satin bows, has anold-fashioned air, as if it had been worn by some demure princess whomight have sat for Velasquez. The hair, of which the arrangement is oddand charming, is disposed in two or three large curls fastened at oneside over the temple with a comb. Behind the figure is the vague fadedsheen, exquisite in tone, of a silk curtain, light, undefined, andlosing itself at the bottom. The face is young, candid and peculiar. Outof these few elements the artist has constructed a picture which it isimpossible to forget, of which the most striking characteristic isits simplicity, and yet which overflows with perfection. Painted withextraordinary breadth and freedom, so that surface and texture areinterpreted by the lightest hand, it glows with life, character anddistinction, and strikes us as the most complete--with one exceptionperhaps--of the author's productions. I know not why this representationof a young girl in black, engaged in the casual gesture of holding upa flower, should make so ineffaceable an impression and tempt one tobecome almost lyrical in its praise; but I remember that, encounteringthe picture unexpectedly in New York a year or two after it had beenexhibited in Paris, it seemed to me to have acquired an extraordinarygeneral value, to stand for more artistic truth than it would be easy toformulate. The language of painting, the tongue in which, exclusively, Mr. Sargent expresses himself, is a medium into which a considerablepart of the public, for the simple an excellent reason that they don'tunderstand it, will doubtless always be reluctant and unable to followhim. 

Two years before he exhibited the young lady in black, in 1879, Mr. Sargent had spent several months in Spain, and here, even more than hehad already been, the great Velasquez became the god of his idolatry. No scenes are more delightful to the imagination than those in whichwe figure youth and genius confronted with great examples, and if suchmatters did not belong to the domain of private life we might entertainourselves with reconstructing the episode of the first visit to themuseum of Madrid, the shrine of the painter of Philip IV. , of ayoung Franco-American worshipper of the highest artistic sensibility, expecting a supreme revelation and prepared to fall on his knees. It isevident that Mr. Sargent fell on his knees and that in this attitude hepassed a considerable part of his sojourn in Spain. He is various andexperimental; if I am not mistaken, he sees each work that he producesin a light of its own, not turning off successive portraits accordingto some well-tried receipt which has proved useful in the case of theirpredecessors; nevertheless there is one idea that pervades them all, ina different degree, and gives them a family resemblance--the idea thatit would be inspiring to know just how Velasquez would have treatedthe theme. We can fancy that on each occasion Mr. Sargent, as asolemn preliminary, invokes him as a patron saint. This is not, in myintention, tantamount to saying that the large canvas representing thecontortions of a dancer in the lamp-lit room of a _posada_, which heexhibited on his return from Spain, strikes me as having come into theworld under the same star as those compositions of the great Spaniardwhich at Madrid alternate with his royal portraits. This singular work, which has found an appreciative home in Boston, has the stamp ofan extraordinary energy and facility--of an actual scene, with itsaccidents and peculiarities caught, as distinguished from a compositionwhere arrangement and invention have played their part. It looks likelife, but it looks also, to my view, rather like a perversion of life, and has the quality of an enormous "note" or memorandum, rather than ofa representation. A woman in a voluminous white silk dress and a blackmantilla pirouettes in the middle of a dusky room, to the accompanimentof her own castanets and that of a row of men and women who sit in strawchairs against the whitewashed wall and thrum upon guitar and tambourineor lift other castanets into the air. She appears almost colossal, andthe twisted and inflated folds of her long dress increase her volume. She simpers, in profile, with a long chin, while she slants back at adangerous angle, and the lamplight (it proceeds from below, as if shewere on a big platform) makes a strange play in her large face. In thebackground the straight line of black-clad, black-hatted, white-shirtedmusicians projects shadows against the wall, on which placards, guitars, and dirty finger-marks display themselves. The merit of this productionis that the air of reality is given in it with remarkable breadth andboldness; its defect it is difficult to express save by saying that itmakes the spectator vaguely uneasy and even unhappy--an accident themore to be regretted as a lithe, inspired female figure, given up tothe emotion of the dance, is not intrinsically a displeasing object. "El Jaleo" sins, in my opinion, in the direction of ugliness, and, independently of the fact that the heroine is circling round incommodedby her petticoats, has a want of serenity. 

This is not the defect of the charming, dusky, white-robed person who, in the Tangerine subject exhibited at the Salon of 1880 (the fruit ofan excursion to the African coast at the time of the artist's visit toSpain), stands on a rug, under a great white Moorish arch, and from outof the shadows of the large drapery, raised pentwise by her hands, whichcovers her head, looks down, with painted eyes and brows showing abovea bandaged mouth, at the fumes of a beautiful censer or chafing-dishplaced on the carpet. I know not who this stately Mahometan may be, norin what mysterious domestic or religious rite she may be engaged; butin her muffled contemplation and her pearl-colored robes, under herplastered arcade which shines in the Eastern light, she transports andtorments us. The picture is exquisite, a radiant effect of white uponwhite, of similar but discriminated tones. In dividing the honor thatMr. Sargent has won by his finest work between the portrait of the younglady of 1881 and the group of four little girls which was painted in1882 and exhibited with the success it deserved the following year, Imust be careful to give the latter picture not too small a share. Theartist has done nothing more felicitous and interesting than this viewof a rich dim, rather generalized French interior (the perspective of ahall with a shining floor, where screens and tall Japanese vasesshimmer and loom), which encloses the life and seems to form the happyplay-world of a family of charming children. The treatment is eminentlyunconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing ofthe figures in the foreground. The place is regarded as a whole; it isa scene, a comprehensive impression; yet none the less do the littlefigures in their white pinafores (when was the pinafore ever paintedwith that power and made so poetic?) detach themselves and live with apersonal life. Two of the sisters stand hand in hand at the back, inthe delightful, the almost equal, company of a pair of immensely tallemblazoned jars, which overtop them and seem also to partake of the lifeof the picture; the splendid porcelain and the aprons of the childrenshine together, while a mirror in the brown depth behind them catchesthe light. Another little girl presents herself, with abundant tressesand slim legs, her hands behind her, quite to the left; and theyoungest, nearest to the spectator, sits on the floor and plays with herdoll. The naturalness of the composition, the loveliness of the completeeffect, the light, free' security of the execution, the sense it givesus as of assimilated secrets and of instinct and knowledge playingtogether--all this makes the picture as astonishing a work on the partof a young man of twenty-six as the portrait of 1881 was astonishing onthe part of a young man of twenty-four. 

It is these remarkable encounters that justify us in writing almostprematurely of a career which is not yet half unfolded. Mr. Sargent issometimes accused of a want of "finish, " but if finish means the lastword of expressiveness of touch, "The Hall with the Four Children, " aswe may call it, may-stand as a permanent reference on this point. If thepicture of the Spanish dancer illustrates, as it seems to me to do, thelatent dangers of the Impressionist practice, so this finer performanceshows what victories it may achieve. And in relation to the latter Imust repeat what I said about the young lady with the flower, that thisis the sort of work which, when produced in youth, leads the attentivespectator to ask unanswerable questions. He finds himself murmuring, "Yes, but what is left?" and even wondering whether it be an advantageto an artist to obtain early in life such possession of his means thatthe struggle with them, discipline, _tâtonnement_, cease to exist forhim. May not this breed an irresponsibility of cleverness, a wantonness, an irreverence--what is vulgarly termed a "larkiness"--on the part ofthe youthful genius who has, as it were, all his fortune in his pocket?Such are the possibly superfluous broodings of those who are criticaleven in their warmest admirations and who sometimes suspect that it maybe better for an artist to have a certain part of his property investedin unsolved difficulties. When this is not the case, the question withregard to his future simplifies itself somewhat portentously. "What willhe do with it?" we ask, meaning by the pronoun the sharp, completelyforged weapon. It becomes more purely a question of responsibility, andwe hold him altogether to a higher account. This is the case with Mr. Sargent; he knows so much about the art of painting that he perhaps doesnot fear emergencies quite enough, and that having knowledge to sparehe may be tempted to play with it and waste it. Various, curious, as wehave called him, he occasionally tries experiments which seem to arisefrom the mere high spirits of his brush, and runs risks little courtedby the votaries of the literal, who never expose their necks to escapefrom the common. For the literal and the common he has the smallesttaste; when he renders an object into the language of painting histranslation is a generous paraphrase. 

As I have intimated, he has painted little but portraits; but he haspainted very many of these, and I shall not attempt in so few pages togive a catalogue of his works. Every canvas that has come from his handshas not figured at the Salon; some of them have seen the light at otherexhibitions in Paris; some of them in London (of which city Mr. Sargentis now an inhabitant), at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery. If he has been mainly represented by portraits there are two or threelittle subject-pictures of which I retain a grateful memory. Therestands out in particular, as a pure gem, a small picture exhibited atthe Grosvenor, representing a small group of Venetian girls of the lowerclass, sitting in gossip together one summer's day in the big, dimhall of a shabby old palazzo. The shutters let in a clink of light; thescagliola pavement gleams faintly in it; the whole place is bathed ina kind of transparent shade. The girls are vaguely engaged in some veryhumble household work; they are counting turnips or stringing onions, and these small vegetables, enchantingly painted, look as valuable asmagnified pearls. The figures are extraordinarily natural and vivid;wonderfully light and fine is the touch by which the painter evokesthe small familiar Venetian realities (he has handled them with a vigoraltogether peculiar in various other studies which I have not space toenumerate), and keeps the whole thing free from that element of humbugwhich has ever attended most attempts to reproduce the idiosyncrasiesof Italy. I am, however, drawing to the end of my remarks withouthaving mentioned a dozen of those brilliant triumphs in the field ofportraiture with which Mr. Sargent's name is preponderantly associated. I jumped from his "Carolus Duran" to the masterpiece of 1881 withoutspeaking of the charming "Madame Pailleron" of 1879, or the picture ofthis lady's children the following year. Many, or rather most, of Mr. Sargent's sitters have been French, and he has studied the physiognomyof this nation so attentively that a little of it perhaps remains inthe brush with which to-day, more than in his first years, he representsother types. I have alluded to his superb "Docteur Pozzi, " to whose veryhandsome, still youthful head and slightly artificial posture he hasgiven so fine a French cast that he might be excused if he should, evenon remoter pretexts, find himself reverting to it. This gentleman standsup in his brilliant red dressing-gown with the _prestance_ of a princelyVandyck. I should like to commemorate the portrait of a lady of acertain age and of an equally certain interest of appearance--a ladyin black, with black hair, a black hat and a vast feather, whichwas displayed at that entertaining little annual exhibition of the"Mirlitons, " in the Place Vendôme. With the exquisite modelling of itsface (no one better than Mr. Sargent understands the beauty that residesin exceeding fineness), this head remains in my mind as a masterlyrendering of the look of experience--such experience as may beattributed to a woman slightly faded and eminently distinguished. Subject and treatment in this valuable piece are of an equal interest, and in the latter there is an element of positive sympathy which is notalways in a high degree the sign of Mr. Sargent's work. What shall I sayof the remarkable canvas which, on the occasion of the Salon of 1884, brought the critics about our artist's ears, the already celebratedportrait of "Madame G. ?" It is an experiment of a highly original kind, and the painter has had in the case, in regard to what Mr. Ruskin wouldcall the "rightness" of his attempt, the courage of his opinion. Acontestable beauty, according to Parisian fame, the lady stands uprightbeside a table on which her right arm rests, with her body almostfronting the spectator and her face in complete profile. She wears anentirely sleeveless dress of black satin, against which her admirableleft arm detaches itself; the line of her harmonious profile has asharpness which Mr. Sargent does not always seek, and the crescent ofDiana, an ornament in diamonds, rests on her singular head. This workhad not the good-fortune to please the public at large, and I believe iteven excited a kind of unreasoned scandal--an idea sufficiently amusingin the light of some of the manifestations of the plastic effort towhich, each year, the Salon stands sponsor. This superb picture, noblein conception and masterly in line, gives to the figure representedsomething of the high relief of the profiled images on great friezes. It is a work to take or to leave, as the phrase is, and one in regard towhich the question of liking or disliking comes promptly to be settled. The author has never gone further in being boldly and consistentlyhimself. 

Two of Mr. Sargent's recent productions have been portraits of Americanladies whom it must have been a delight to paint; I allude to those ofLady Playfair and Mrs. Henry White, both of which were seen in the RoyalAcademy of 1885, and the former subsequently in Boston, where it abides. These things possess, largely, the quality which makes Mr. Sargent sohappy as a painter of women--a quality which can best be expressed by areference to what it is not, to the curiously literal, prosaic, sexlesstreatment to which, in the commonplace work that looks down at us fromthe walls of almost all exhibitions, delicate feminine elements haveevidently so often been sacrificed. Mr. Sargent handles these elementswith a special feeling for them, and they borrow a kind of nobleintensity from his brush. This intensity is not absent from the twoportraits I just mentioned, that of Lady Playfair and that of Mrs. HenryWhite; it looks out at us from the erect head and frank animation ofthe one, and the silvery sheen and shimmer of white satin and white lacewhich form the setting of the slim tall-ness of the other. In the RoyalAcademy of 1886 Mr. Sargent was represented by three important canvases, all of which reminded the spectator of how much the brilliant effect heproduces in an English exhibition arises from a certain appearance thathe has of looking down from a height, a height of cleverness, a sensiblegiddiness of facility, at the artistic problems of the given case. Sometimes there is even a slight impertinence in it; that, doubtless, was the impression of many of the people who passed, staring, with anejaculation, before the triumphant group of the three Misses V. Theseyoung ladies, seated in a row, with a room much foreshortened for abackground, and treated with a certain familiarity of frankness, excitedin London a chorus of murmurs not dissimilar to that which it had beenthe fortune of the portrait exhibited in 1884 to elicit in Paris, andhad the further privilege of drawing forth some prodigies of purblindcriticism. Works of this character are a genuine service; after theshort-lived gibes of the profane have subsided, they are found to havecleared the air. They remind people that the faculty of taking a direct, independent, unborrowed impression is not altogether lost. 

In this very rapid review I have accompanied Mr. Sargent to a veryrecent date. If I have said that observers encumbered with a nervoustemperament may at any moment have been anxious about his future, I haveit on my conscience to add that the day has not yet come for a completeextinction of this anxiety. Mr. Sargent is so young, in spite of theplace allotted to him in these pages, so often a record of long careersand uncontested triumphs that, in spite also of the admirable works hehas already produced, his future is the most valuable thing he hasto show. We may still ask ourselves what he will do with it, while weindulge the hope that he will see fit to give successors to the twopictures which I have spoken of emphatically as his finest. There isno greater work of art than a great portrait--a truth to be constantlytaken to heart by a painter holding in his hands the weapon that Mr. Sargent wields. The gift that he possesses he possesses completely--theimmediate perception of the end and of the means. Putting aside thequestion of the subject (and to a great portrait a common sitter willdoubtless not always contribute), the highest result is achieved whento this element of quick perception a certain faculty of broodingreflection is added. I use this name for want of a better, and I meanthe quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were noton the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, inshort, enlarges and humanizes the technical problem. 

HONORÉ DAUMIER

AS we attempt, at the present day, to write the history of everything, it would be strange if we had happened to neglect the annals ofcaricature; for the very essence of the art of Cruikshank and Gavarni, of Daumier and Leech, is to be historical; and every one knows howaddicted is this great science to discoursing about itself. Manyindustrious seekers, in England and France, have ascended the streamof time to the source of the modern movement of pictorial satire. Thestream of time is in this case mainly the stream of journalism; forsocial and political caricature, as the present century has practisedit, is only journalism made doubly vivid. 

The subject indeed is a large one, if we reflect upon it, for manypeople would tell us that journalism is the greatest invention of ourage. If this rich affluent has shared the great fortune of the generaltorrent, so, on other sides, it touches the fine arts, touches manners, touches morals. All this helps to account for its inexhaustiblelife; journalism is the criticism of the moment _at_ the moment, andcaricature is that criticism at once simplified and intensified by aplastic form. We know the satiric image as periodical, and above all aspunctual--the characteristics of the printed sheet with which custom hasat last inveterately associated it. 

This, by-the-way, makes us wonder considerably at the failure ofcaricature to achieve, as yet, a high destiny in America--a failurewhich might supply an occasion for much explanatory discourse, muchsearching of the relations of things. The newspaper has been taughtto flourish among us as it flourishes nowhere else, and to flourishmoreover on a humorous and irreverent basis; yet it has never taken toitself this helpful concomitant of an unscrupulous spirit and a quickperiodicity. The explanation is probably that it needs an old society toproduce ripe caricature. The newspaper thrives in the United States, butjournalism languishes; for the lively propagation of news is one thingand the large interpretation of it is another. A society has to be oldbefore it becomes critical, and it has to become critical before it cantake pleasure in the reproduction of its incongruities by an instrumentas impertinent as the indefatigable crayon. Irony, scepticism, pessimismare, in any particular soil, plants of gradual growth, and it is in theart of caricature that they flower most aggressively. Furthermore theymust be watered by education--I mean by the education of the eye andhand--all of which things take time. The soil must be rich too, theincongruities must swarm. It is open to doubt whether a pure democracyis very liable to make this particular satiric return upon itself; forwhich it would seem tha' certain social complications are indispensable. These complications are supplied from the moment a democracy becomes, as we may say, impure from its own point of view; from the momentvariations and heresies, deviations or perhaps simple affirmationsof taste and temper begin to multiply within it. Such things afford a_point d'appui_; for it is evidently of the essence of caricature to bereactionary. We hasten to add that its satiric force varies immensely inkind and in degree according to the race, or to the individual talent, that takes advantage of it. 

I used just now the term pessimism; but that was doubtless in agreat measure because I have been turning over a collection of theextraordinarily vivid drawings of Honoré Daumier. The same impressionwould remain with me, no doubt, if I had been consulting an equalquantity of the work of Gavarni the wittiest, the most literary and mostacutely profane of all chartered mockers with the pencil. The feeling ofdisrespect abides in all these things, the expression of the spirit forwhich humanity is definable primarily by its weaknesses. For Daumierthese weaknesses are altogether ugly and grotesque, while for Gavarnithey are either basely graceful or touchingly miserable; but the visionof them in both cases is close and direct. If, on the other hand, welook through a dozen volumes of the collection of _Punch_ we get anequal impression of hilarity, but we by no means get an equal impressionof irony. Certainly the pages of _Punch_ do not reek with pessimism;their "criticism of life" is gentle and forbearing. Leech is positivelyoptimistic; there is at any rate nothing infinite in his irreverence;it touches bottom as soon as it approaches the pretty woman or the nicegirl. It is such an apparition as this that really, in Gavarni, awakesthe scoffer. Du Maurier is as graceful as Gavarni, but his sense ofbeauty conjures away almost everything save our minor vices. It isin the exploration of our major ones that Gavarni makes his principaldiscoveries of charm or of absurdity of attitude. None the less, ofcourse, the general inspiration of both artists is the same: the desireto try the innumerable different ways in which the human subject may_not_ be taken seriously. 

If this view of that subject, in its plastic manifestations, makeshistory of a sort, it will not in general be of a kind to convert thosepersons who find history sad reading. The writer of the present linesremained unconverted, lately, on an occasion on which many cheerfulinfluences were mingled with his impression. They were of a nature towhich he usually does full justice, even overestimating perhaps theircharm of suggestion; but, at the hour I speak of, the old Parisian quay, the belittered print-shop, the pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of thegreat Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in the interstices of thesallow _estampes_ suspended in window and doorway--all these elementsof a rich actuality availed only to mitigate, without transmuting, thatgeneral vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced itself together asI drew specimen after specimen from musty portfolios. I had been passingthe shop when I noticed in a small _vitrine_, let into the embrasure ofthe doorway, half a dozen soiled, striking lithographs, which it took nomore than a first glance to recognize as the work of Daumier. They wereonly old pages of the _Charivari_, torn away from the text and rescuedfrom the injury of time; and they were accompanied with an inscriptionto the effect that many similar examples of the artist were to be seenwithin. To become aware of this circumstance was to enter the shop andto find myself promptly surrounded with bulging; _cartons_ and tatteredrelics. These relics--crumpled leaves of the old comic journals of theperiod from 1830 to 1855--are neither rare nor expensive; but I happenedto have lighted on a particularly copious collection, and I made themost of my small good-fortune, in order to transmute it, if possible, into a sort of compensation for my having missed unavoidably, a fewmonths before, the curious exhibition "de la Caricature Moderne" heldfor several weeks just at hand, in the École des Beaux-Arts. 

Daumier was said to have appeared there in considerable force; and itwas a loss not to have had that particular opportunity of filling one'smind with him. 

There was perhaps a perversity in having wished to do so, strange, indigestible stuff of contemplation as he might appear to be; but theperversity had had an honorable growth. Daumier's great days were in thereign of Louis-Philippe; but in the early years of the Second Empirehe still plied his coarse and formidable pencil. I recalled, from ajuvenile consciousness, the last failing strokes of it. They used toimpress me in Paris, as a child, with their abnormal blackness as wellas with their grotesque, magnifying movement, and there was something inthem that rather scared a very immature admirer. This small personage, however, was able to perceive later, when he was unfortunately deprivedof the chance of studying them, that there were various things in thembesides the power to excite a vague alarm. Daumier was perhaps a greatartist; at all events unsatisfied curiosity increased in proportion tothat possibility. 

The first complete satisfaction of it was really in the long hours thatI spent in the little shop on the quay. There I filled my mind withhim, and there too, at no great cost, I could make a big parcel of thesecheap reproductions of his work. This work had been shown in the Ecoledes Beaux-Arts as it came from his hand; M. Champfleury, his biographer, his cataloguer and devotee, having poured forth the treasures of aprecious collection, as I suppose they would be called in the case of anartist of higher flights. It was only as he was seen by the readers ofthe comic journals of his day that I could now see him; but I tried tomake up for my want of privilege by prolonged immersion. I was not ableto take home all the portfolios from the shop on the quay, but I tookhome what I could, and I went again to turn over the superannuatedpiles. I liked looking at them on the spot; I seemed still surrounded bythe artist's vanished Paris and his extinct Parisians. Indeed no quarterof the delightful city probably shows, on the whole, fewer changes fromthe aspect it wore during the period of Louis-Philippe, the time whenit will ever appear to many of its friends to have been most delightful. The long line of the quay is unaltered, and the rare charm of the river. People came and went in the shop: it is a wonder how many, in the courseof an hour, may lift the latch even of an establishment that pretends tono great business. What was all this small, sociable, contentiouslife but the great Daumier's subject-matter? He was the painter of theParisian bourgeois, and the voice of the bourgeois was in the air. 

M. Champfleury has given a summary of Daumier's career in his smartlittle _Histoire e la Caricature Moderne_, a record not at all abundantin personal detail. The biographer has told his story better perhaps inhis careful catalogue of the artist's productions, the first sketch ofwhich is to be found in _L'Art_ for 1878. This copious list is Daumier'sreal history; his life cannot have been a very different business fromhis work. I read in the interesting publication of M. Grand-Carteret(_Les Moeurs et la Caricature en France_ 1888) that our artist producednearly 4000 lithographs and a thousand drawings on wood, up to the timewhen failure of eyesight compelled him to rest. This is not the sortof activity that leaves a man much time for independent adventures, andDaumier was essentially of the type, common in France, of the specialistso immersed in his specialty that he can be painted in only oneattitude--a general circumstance which perhaps helps to account forthe paucity, in that country, of biography, in our English sense of theword, in proportion to the superabundance of criticism. 

Honoré Daumier was born at Marseilles February 26th, 1808; he diedon the 11th of the same month, 1879. His main activity, however, was confined to the earlier portion of a career of almost exactlyseventy-one years, and I find it affirmed in Vapereau's _Dictionnairedes Contemporains_ that he became completely blind between 1850 and1860. He enjoyed a pension from the State of 2400 francs; but whatrelief from misery could mitigate a quarter of a century of darknessfor a man who had looked out at the world with such vivifying eyes? Hisfather had followed the trade of a glazier, but was otherwise vocalthan in the emission of the rich street-cry with which we used all to befamiliar, and which has vanished with so many other friendly pedestriannotes. The elder Daumier wrought verses as well as window-panes, and M. Champfleury has disinterred a small volume published by him in 1823. The merit of his poetry is not striking; but he was able to transmit theartistic nature to his son, who, becoming promptly conscious of it, madethe inevitable journey to Paris in search of fortune. 

The young draughtsman appeared to have missed at first the way to thisboon; inasmuch as in the year 1832 he found himself condemned to sixmonths' imprisonment for a lithograph disrespectful to Louis-Philippe. This drawing had appeared in the _Caricature_, an organ of pictorialsatire founded in those days by one Philipon, with the aid of a band ofyoung mockers to whom he gave ideas and a direction, and several others, of whom Gavarni, Henry Monnier, Decamps, Grandville, were destined tomake themselves a place. M. Eugène Montrosier, in a highly appreciativearticle on Daumier in _L'Art_ for 1878, says that this same Philiponwas _le journalisme fait homme_; which did not prevent him--ratherin fact fostered such a result--from being perpetually in delicaterelations with the government. He had had many horses killed underhim, and had led a life of attacks, penalties, suppressions andresurrections. He subsequently established the _Charivari_ and launcheda publication entitled _L'Association Lithographique Mensuelle_, whichbrought to light much of Daumier's early work. The artist passedrapidly from seeking his way to finding it, and from an ineffectual to avigorous form. 

In this limited compass and in the case of such a quantity of productionit is almost impossible to specify--difficult to pick dozens of examplesout of thousands. Daumier became more and more the political spirit ofthe _Charivari_, or at least the political pencil, for M. Philipon, thebreath of whose nostrils was opposition--one perceives from here thelittle bilious, bristling, ingenious, insistent man--is to be creditedwith a suggestive share in any enterprise in which he had a hand. Thispencil played over public life, over the sovereign, the ministers, the deputies, the peers, the judiciary, the men and the measures, the reputations and scandals of the moment, with a strange, ugly, extravagant, but none the less sane and manly vigor. Daumier's sign isstrength above all, and in turning over his pages to-day there is nointensity of force that the careful observer will not concede to him. Itis perhaps another matter to assent to the proposition, put forth byhis greatest admirers among his countrymen, that he is the first ofall caricaturists. To the writer of this imperfect sketch he remainsconsiderably less interesting than Gavarni; and/or a particular reason, which it is difficult to express otherwise than by saying that he is toosimple. Simplicity was not Gavarni's fault, and indeed to a largedegree it was Daumier's merit. The single grossly ridiculous or almosthauntingly characteristic thing which his figures represent is largelythe reason why they still represent life and an unlucky reality yearsafter the names attached to them have parted with a vivifying power. Such vagueness has overtaken them, for the most part, and to such a thinreverberation have they shrunk, the persons and the affairs whichwere then so intensely sketchable. Daumier handled them with a want ofceremony which would have been brutal were it not for the element ofscience in his work, making them immense and unmistakable in theirdrollery, or at least in their grotesqueness; for the term drollerysuggests gayety, and Daumier is anything but gay. _Un rude peintre demoeurs_, M. Champfleury calls him; and the phrase expresses his extremebreadth of treatment. 

Of the victims of his "rudeness" M. Thiers is almost the only one whomthe present generation may recognize without a good deal of reminding, and indeed his hand is relatively light in delineating this personageof few inches and many episodes. M. Thiers must have been dear to thecaricaturist, for he belonged to the type that was easy to "do;" itbeing well known that these gentlemen appreciate public characters indirect proportion to their saliency of feature. When faces are reducibleto a few telling strokes their wearers are overwhelmed with the honorsof publicity; with which, on the other hand, nothing is more likely tointerfere than the possession of a countenance neatly classical. Daumierhad only to give M. Thiers the face of a clever owl, and the trick wasplayed. Of course skill was needed to individualize the symbol, but thatis what caricaturists propose to themselves. Of how well hesucceeded the admirable plate of the lively little minister in a"new dress"--tricked out in the uniform of a general of the FirstRepublic--is a sufficient illustration. The bird of night is not anacute bird, but how the artist has presented the image of a selectedspecimen! And with what a life-giving pencil the whole figure is puton its feet, what intelligent drawing, what a rich, free stroke! Theallusions conveyed in it are to such forgotten things that it is strangeto think the personage was, only the other year, still contemporaneous;that he might have been met, on a fine day, taking a few firm steps ina quiet part of the Champs Élysées, with his footman carrying a secondovercoat and looking doubly tall behind him. In whatever attitudeDaumier depicts him, planted as a tiny boxing-master at the feet of thevirtuous colossus in a blouse (whose legs are apart, like those-of theRhodian), in whom the artist represents the People, to watch the matchthat is about to come off between Ratapoil and M. Berryer, or even inthe act of lifting the "parricidal" club of a new repressive law todeal a blow at the Press, an effulgent, diligent, sedentary muse (thispicture, by the way, is a perfect specimen of the simple and telling inpolitical caricature)--however, as I say, he takes M. Thiers, there isalways a rough indulgence in his crayon, as if he were grateful to himfor lending himself so well. He invented Ratapoil as he appropriatedRobert Macaire, and as a caricaturist he never fails to put intocirculation, when he can, a character to whom he may attribute as manyas possible of the affectations or the vices of the day. Robert Macaire, an imaginative, a romantic rascal, was the hero of a highly successfulmelodrama written for Frederick Lemaitre; but Daumier made him thetype of the swindler at large in an age of feverish speculation--theprojector of showy companies, the advertiser of worthless shares. Thereis a whole series of drawings descriptive of his exploits, a hundredmasterly plates which, according to M. Champfleury, consecratedDaumier's reputation. The subject, the legend, was in most cases, stillaccording to M. Champfleury, suggested by Philipon. Sometimes it wasvery witty; as for instance when Bertrand, the muddled acolyte orscraping second fiddle of the hero, objects, in relation to a brilliantscheme which he has just developed, with the part Bertrand is to play, that there are constables in the country, and he promptly replies, "Constables? So much the better--they'll take the shares!" Ratapoil wasan evocation of the same general character, but with a difference of_nuance_--the ragged political bully, or hand-to-mouth demagogue, withthe smashed tall hat, cocked to one side, the absence of linen, the clubhalf-way up his sleeve, the swagger and pose of being gallant for thepeople. Ratapoil abounds in the promiscuous drawings that I have lookedover, and is always very strong and living, with a considerable elementof the sinister, so often in Daumier an accompaniment of the comic. There is an admirable page--it brings the idea down to 1851--in whicha sordid but astute peasant, twirling his thumbs on his stomach andlooking askance, allows this political adviser to urge upon him ina whisper that there is not a minute to lose--to lose for action, ofcourse--if he wishes to keep his wife, his house, his field, his heiferand his calf. The canny scepticism in the ugly, half-averted face of thetypical rustic who considerably suspects his counsellor is indicated bya few masterly strokes. 

This is what the student of Daumier recognizes as his science, or, ifthe word has a better grace, his art. It is what has kept life in hiswork so long after so many of the occasions of it have been swept intodarkness. Indeed, there is no such commentary on renown as the "backnumbers" of a comic journal. They show us that at certain momentscertain people were eminent, only to make us unsuccessfully try toremember what they were eminent _for_. And the comparative obscurity(comparative, I mean, to the talent of the caricaturist) overtakes eventhe most justly honored names. M. Berryer was a splendid speaker and apublic servant of real distinction and the highest utility; yet the factthat to-day his name is on few men's lips seems to be emphasized by thisother fact that we continue to pore over Daumier, in whose plates wehappen to come across him. It reminds one afresh how Art is an embalmer, a magician, whom we can never speak too fair. People duly impressed withthis truth are sometimes laughed at for their superstitious tone, whichis pronounced, according to the fancy of the critic, mawkish, maudlin orhysterical. But it is really difficult to see how any reiteration ofthe importance of art can overstate the plain facts. It prolongs, itpreserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead. It conciliates, charms, bribes posterity; and it murmurs to mortals, as the old Frenchpoet sang to his mistress, "You will be fair only so far as I have saidso. " When it whispers even to the great, "You depend upon me, and I cando more for you, in the long-run, than any one else, " it is scarcely tooproud. It puts method and power and the strange, real, mingled airof things into Daumier's black sketchiness, so full of the technical_gras_, the "fat" which French critics commend and which we have noword to express. It puts power above all, and the effect which hebest achieves, that of a certain simplification of the attitude or thegesture to an almost symbolic generality. His persons represent only onething, but they insist tremendously on that, and their expression of itabides with us, unaccompanied with timid detail. It may really be saidthat they represent only one class--the old and ugly; so that there isproof enough of a special faculty in his having played such a concert, lugubrious though it be, on a single chord. It has been made a reproachto him, says M. Grand-Carteret, that "his work is lacking in two capitalelements--_la jeunesse et la femme_;" and the commentator resents hisbeing made to suffer for the deficiency--"as if an artist could be atthe same time deep, comic, graceful and pretty; as if all those who havea real value had not created for themselves a form to which they remainconfined and a type which they reproduce in all its variations, as soonas they have touched the æsthetic ideal that has been their dream. Assuredly humanity, as this great painter saw it, could not bebeautiful; one asks one's self what maiden in her teens, a pretty face, would have done in the midst of these good, plain folk, stunted andelderly, with faces like wrinkled apples. A simple accessory most ofthe time, woman is for him merely a termagant or a blue-stocking who hasturned the corner. "

When the eternal feminine, for Daumier appears in neither of theseforms he sees it in Madame Chaboulard or Madame Fribochon, the oldsnuff-taking, gossiping portress, in a nightcap and shuffling _savates_, relating or drinking in the wonderful and the intimate. One of hismasterpieces represents three of these dames, lighted by a gutteringcandle, holding their heads together to discuss the fearful earthquakeat Bordeaux, the consequence of the government's allowing the surfaceof the globe to be unduly dug out in California. The representation ofconfidential imbecility could not go further. When a man leaves out somuch of life as Daumier--youth and beauty and the charm of woman and theloveliness of childhood and the manners of those social groups ofwhom it may most be said that they _have_ manners--when he exhibits adeficiency on this scale it might seem that the question was not to beso easily disposed of as in the very non-apologetic words I have justquoted. All the same (and I confess it is singular), we may feel whatDaumier omitted and yet not be in the least shocked by the claim ofpredominance made for him. It is impossible to spend a couple of hoursover him without assenting to this claim, even though there may be aweariness in such a panorama of ugliness and an inevitable reactionfrom it. This anomaly, and the challenge to explain it which appears toproceed from him, render him, to my sense, remarkably interesting. Theartist whose idiosyncrasies, whose limitations, if you will, makeus question and wonder, in the light of his fame, has an elementof fascination not attaching to conciliatory talents. If M. EugeneMontrosier may say of him without scandalizing us that such and suchof his drawings belong to the very highest art, it is interesting (andDaumier profits by the interest) to put one's finger on the reason weare not scandalized. 

I think this reason is that, on the whole he is so peculiarly serious. This may seem an odd ground of praise for a jocose draughtsman, and ofcourse what I mean is that his comic force is serious--a very differentthin from the absence of comedy. This essential sign of the caricaturistmay surely be anything it will so long as it is there. Daumier's figuresare almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened, mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense ofthe nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almosttragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, iscarried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the seriesof "Le Public du Salon, " old classicists looking up, horrified andscandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces havean appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumierreproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it isthe very medium in which he moves. He has no wide horizon; the absolutebourgeois hems him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, without poeticironies, to whom a big cracked mirror has been given. His thick, strong, manly touch stands, in every way, for so much knowledge. He used to makelittle images, in clay and in wax (many of them still exist), ofthe persons he was in the habit of representing, so that they mightconstantly seem to be "sitting" for him. The caricaturist of that dayhad not the help of the ubiquitous photograph. Daumier painted actively, as well, in his habitation, all dedicated to work, on the narrow islandof St. Louis, where the Seine divides and where the monuments of oldParis stand thick, and the types that were to his purpose pressed closeupon him. He had not far to go to encounter the worthy man, in theseries of "Les Papas, " who is reading the evening paper at the caféwith so amiable and placid a credulity, while his unnatural little boy, opposite to him, finds sufficient entertainment in the much-satirized_Constitutionnel_. The bland absorption of the papa, the face of the manwho believes everything he sees in the newspaper, is as near as Daumieroften comes to positive gentleness of humor. Of the same family is thepoor gentleman, in "Actualités, " seen, in profile, under a doorway wherehe has taken refuge from a torrent of rain, who looks down at his neatlegs with a sort of speculative contrition and says. "To think ofmy having just ordered two pairs of white trousers. " The _tout petitbourgeois_ palpitates in both these sketches. 

I must repeat that it is absurd to pick half a dozen at hazard, out offive thousand; yet a few selections are the only way to call attentionto his strong drawing. This has a virtuosity of its own, for allits hit-or-miss appearance. Whatever he touches--the nude, in theswimming-baths on the Seine, the intimations of landscape, when his_petits rentiers_ go into the suburbs for a Sunday--acquires relief andcharacter, Docteur Véron, a celebrity of the reign of Louis-Philippe, a Mæcenas of the hour, a director of the opera, author of the _Mémoiresd'un Bourgeois de Paris_--this temporary "illustration, " who appears tohave been almost indecently ugly, would not be vivid to us to-day hadnot Daumier, who was often effective at his expense, happened to haverepresented him, in some crisis of his career, as a sort of nakedinconsolable Vitellius. He renders the human body with a cynicalsense of its possible flabbiness and an intimate acquaintance with itsstructure. "Une Promenade Conjugale, " in the series of "Tout ce qu'onvoudra, " portrays a hillside, on a summer afternoon, on which a man hasthrown himself on his back to rest, with his arms locked under his head. His fat, full-bosomed, middle-aged wife, under her parasol, with a bunchof field-flowers in her hand, looks down at him patiently and seems tosay, "Come, my dear, get up. " There is surely no great point in this;the only point is life, the glimpse of the little snatch of poetry inprose. It is a matter of a few broad strokes of the crayon; yet thepleasant laziness of the man, the idleness of the day, the fragment ofhomely, familiar dialogue, the stretch of the field with a couple oftrees merely suggested, have a communicative truth. 

I perhaps exaggerate all this, and in insisting upon the merit ofDaumier may appear to make light of the finer accomplishment of severalmore modern talents, in England and France, who have greater ingenuityand subtlety and have carried qualities of execution so, much further. In looking at this complicated younger work, which has profited so byexperience and comparison, it is inevitable that we should perceive itto be infinitely more cunning. On the other hand Daumier, moving in hiscontracted circle, has an impressive depth. It comes back to his strangeseriousness. He is a draughtsman by race, and if he has not extractedthe same brilliancy from training, or perhaps even from effort andexperiment, as some of his successors, does not his richer satiric andsympathetic feeling more than make up the difference?

However this question may be answered, some of his drawings belong tothe class of the unforgetable. It may be a perversity of prejudice, but even the little cut of the "Connoisseurs, " the group of gentlemencollected round a picture and criticising it in various attitudesof sapience and sufficiency, appears to me to have the strength thatabides. The criminal in the dock, the flat-headed murderer, bending overto speak to his advocate, who turns a whiskered, professional, anxioushead to caution and remind him. Tells a large, terrible story and awakesa recurrent shudder. We see the gray court-room, we feel the personalsuspense and the immensity of justice. The "Saltimbanques, " reproducedin _L'Art_ for 1878, is a page of tragedy, the finest of a cruelseries. M. Eugène Montrosier says of it that "The drawing is masterly, incomparably firm, the composition superb, the general impression quiteof the first order. " It exhibits a pair of lean, hungry mountebanks, aclown and a harlequin beating the drum and trying a comic attitudeto attract the crowd, at a fair, to a poor booth in front of which apainted canvas, offering to view a simpering fat woman, is suspended. But the crowd doesn't come, and the battered tumblers, with theirfurrowed cheeks, go through their pranks in the void. The whole thingis symbolic and full of grim-ness, imagination and pity. It is the sensethat we shall find in him, mixed with his homelier extravagances, anelement prolific in indications of this order that draws us back toDaumier. 

AFTER THE PLAY

The play was not over when the curtain fell, four months ago; itwas continued in a supplementary act or epilogue which took placeimmediately afterwards. "Come home to tea, " Florentia said to certainfriends who had stopped to speak to her in the lobby of the littletheatre in Soho--they had been present at a day performance by thecompany of the Theatre Libre, transferred for a week from Paris; andthree of these--Auberon and Dorriforth, accompanying Amicia--turned upso expeditiously that the change of scene had the effect of being neatlyexecuted. The short afterpiece--it was in truth very slight--began withAmicia's entrance and her declaration that she would never again go toan afternoon performance: it was such a horrid relapse into the real tofind it staring at you through the ugly daylight on coming out of theblessed fictive world. 

Dorriforth. Ah, you touch there on one of the minor sorrows of life. That's an illustration of the general change that comes to pass in usas we grow older, if we have ever loved the stage: the fading of theglamour and the mystery that surround it. 

Auberon. Do you call it a minor sorrow? It's one of the greatest. Andnothing can mitigate it. 

Amicia. Wouldn't it be mitigated a little if the stage were a triflebetter? You must remember how that has changed. 

Auberon. Never, never: it's the same old stage. The change is inourselves. 

Florentia. Well, I never would have given an evening to what we havejust seen. If one could have put it in between luncheon and tea, wellenough. But one's evenings are too precious. 

Dorriforth. Note that--it's very important. 

Florentia. I mean too precious for that sort of thing. 

Auberon. Then you didn't sit spellbound by the little history of the Dued'Enghien?

Florentia. I sat yawning. Heavens, what a piece!

Amicia. Upon my word I liked it. The last act made me cry. 

Dorriforth. Wasn't it a curious, interesting specimen of some of thethings that are worth trying: an attempt to sail closer to the real?

Auberon. How much closer? The fiftieth part of a point--it isn'tcalculable. 

Florentia. It was just like any other play--I saw no difference. Ithad neither a plot, nor a subject, nor dialogue, nor situations, norscenery, nor costumes, nor acting. 

Amicia. Then it was hardly, as you say, just like any other play. 

Auberon. Florentia should have said like any other _bad_'one. The onlyway it differed seemed to be that it was bad in theory as well as infact. 

Amicia. It's a _morceau de vie_, as the French say. 

Auberon. Oh, don't begin on the French!

Amicia. It's a French experiment--_que voulez-vous?_

Auberon. English experiments will do. 

Dorriforth. No doubt they would--if there _were_ any. But I don't seethem. 

Amicia. Fortunately: think what some of them might be! ThoughFlorentia saw nothing I saw many things in this poor little shabby "Dued'Enghien, " coming over to our roaring London, where the dots have tobe so big on the i's, with its barely audible note of originality. Itappealed to me, touched me, offered me a poignant suggestion of the waythings happen in life. 

Auberon. In life they happen clumsily, stupidly, meanly. One goes tothe theatre just for the refreshment of seeing them happen in anotherway--in symmetrical, satisfactory form, with unmistakable effect andjust at the right moment. 

Dorriforth. It shows how the same cause may produce the most diverseconsequences. In this truth lies the only hope of art. 

Auberon. Oh, art, art--don't talk about art!

Amicia. Mercy, we must talk about something!

Dorriforth. Auberon hates generalizations. Nevertheless I make boldto say that we go to the theatre in the same spirit in which we reada novel, some of us to find one thing and some to find another; andaccording as we look for the particular thing we find it. 

Auberon. That's a profound remark. 

Florentia. We go to find amusement: that, surely, is what we all go for. 

Amicia. There's such a diversity in our idea of amusement. 

Auberon. Don't you impute to people more ideas than they have?

Dorriforth. Ah, one must do that or one couldn't talk about them. Wego to be interested; to be absorbed, beguiled and to lose ourselves, togive ourselves up, in short, to a charm. 

Florentia. And the charm is the strange, the extraordinary. 

Amicia. Ah, speak for yourself! The charm is the recognition of what weknow, what we feel. 

Dorriforth. See already how you differ. 

"SO!"

What we surrender ourselves to is the touch of nature, the sense oflife. 

Amicia. The first thing is to believe. 

Florentia. The first thing, on the contrary, is to _dis_believe. 

Auberon. Lord, listen to them!

Dorriforth. The first thing is to folio--to care. 

Florentia. I read a novel, I go to the theatre, to forget. 

Amicia. To forget what?

Florentia. To forget life; to thro myself into something more beautifulmore exciting: into fable and romance. 

Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it's about _us_, about you and me--or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is thesame as ours. In other words, we _live_ their experience, for the time, and that's hardly escaping from life. 

Florentia. I'm not at all particular as to what you call it. Call it anescape from the common, the prosaic, the immediate. 

Dorriforth. You couldn't put it better. That's the life that art, withAuberon's permission, gives us; that's the distinction it confers. Thisis why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgarfellow--the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand. Then what becomes of our escape?

Florentia. It's precisely then that I complain of him. He leads us intofoul and dreary places--into flat and foolish deserts. 

Dorriforth. He leads us into his own mind, his own vision of things:that's the only place into which the poet _can_ lead us. It's there thathe finds "As You Like It, " it is there that he finds "Comus, " or "TheWay of the World, " or the Christmas pantomime. It is when he betrays us, after he has got us in and locked the door, when he can't keep from usthat we are in a bare little hole and that there are no pictures on thewalls, it is then that the immediate and the foolish overwhelm us. 

Amicia. That's what I liked in the piece we have been looking at. Therewas an artistic intention, and the little room wasn't bare: there wassociable company in it. The actors were very humble aspirants, they werecommon--

Auberon. Ah, when the French give their mind to that--!

Amicia. Nevertheless they struck me as recruits to an interesting cause, which as yet (the house was so empty) could confer neither money norglory. They had the air, poor things, of working for love. 

Auberon. For love of what?

Amicia. Of the whole little enterprise--the idea of the Théâtre Libre. 

Florentia. Gracious, what you see in things! Don't you suppose they werepaid?

Amicia. I know nothing about it. I liked their shabbiness--they hadonly what was indispensable in the way of dress and scenery. That oftenpleases me: the imagination, in certain cases, is more finely persuadedby the little than by the much. 

Dorriforth. I see what Amicia means. 

Florentia. I'll warrant you do, and a great deal more besides. 

Dorriforth. When the appointments are meagre and sketchy theresponsibility that rests upon the actors becomes a still more seriousthing, and the spectator's observation of the way they rise to it apleasure more intense. The face and the voice are more to the purposethan acres of painted canvas, and a touching intonation, a vivid gestureor two, than an army of supernumeraries. 

Auberon. Why not have everything--the face, the voice, the touchingintonations, the vivid gestures, the acres of painted canvas, _and_ thearmy of supernumeraries? Why not use bravely and intelligently everyresource of which the stage disposes? What else was Richard Wagner'sgreat theory, in producing his operas at Bayreuth?

Dorriforth. Why not, indeed? That would be the ideal. To have thepicture complete at the same time the figures do their part in producingthe particular illusion required--what a perfection and what a joy! Iknow no answer to that save the aggressive, objectionable fact. Simplylook at the stage of to-day and observe that these two branches of thematter never do happen to go together. There is evidently a corrosiveprinciple in the large command of machinery and decorations--a germof perversion and corruption. It gets the upperhand--it becomes themaster. It is so much less easy to get good actors than good sceneryand to represent a situation by the delicacy of personal art than by"building it in" and having everything real. Surely there is no realityworth a farthing, on the stage, but what the actor gives, and only whenhe has learned his business up to the hilt need he concern himself withhis material accessories. He hasn't a decent respect for his art unlesshe be ready to render his part as if the whole illusion depended on thatalone and the accessories didn't exist. The acting is everything or it'snothing. It ceases to be everything as soon as something else becomesvery important. This is the case, to-day, on the London stage: somethingelse is very important. The public have been taught to consider it so:the clever machinery has ended by operating as a bribe and a blind. Their sense of the rest of the matter has gone to the dogs, as you mayperceive when you hear a couple of occupants of the stalls talking, in atone that excites your curiosity, about a performance that's "splendid. "

Amicia. Do you ever hear the occupants of the stalls talking? Never, in the _entr'actes_, have I detected, on their lips, a criticism or acomment. 

Dorriforth. Oh, they say "splendid"--distinctly! But a question ortwo reveals that their reference is vague: they don't themselves knowwhether they mean the art of the actor or that of the stage-carpenter. 

Auberon. Isn't that confusion a high result of taste? Isn't it what'scalled a feeling for the _ensemble?_ The artistic effect, as a whole, isso welded together that you can't pick out the parts. 

Dorriforth. Precisely; that's what it is in the best cases, and someexamples are wonderfully clever. 

Florentia. Then what fault do you find? Dorriforth. Simply this--thatthe whole is a pictorial whole, not a dramatic one. There is somethingindeed that you can't pick out, for the very good reason that--in anyserious sense of the word--it isn't there. 

Florentia. The public has taste, then, if it recognizes and delights ina fine picture. 

Dorriforth. I never said it hadn't, so far as that goes. The publiclikes to be amused, and small blame to it. It isn't very particularabout the means, but it has rather a preference for amusements that Ibelieves to be "improving, " other things being equal. I don't think it'seither very intelligent or at all opinionated, the dear old public ittakes humbly enough what is given it and it doesn't cry for the moon. Ithas an idea that fine scenery is an appeal to its nobler part, and thatit shows a nice critical sense in preferring it to poor. That's a realintellectual flight, for the public. 

Auberon. Very well, its preference is right, and why isn't that aperfectly legitimate state of things?

Dorriforth. Why isn't it? It distinctly _is!_ Good scenery and pooracting are better than poor scenery with the same sauce. Only it becomesthen another matter: we are no longer talking about the drama. 

Auberon. Very likely that's the future of the drama, in London--animmense elaboration of the picture. 

Dorriforth. My dear fellow, you take the words out of my mouth. An immense elaboration of the picture and an immense sacrifice ofeverything else: it would take very little more to persuade me that thatwill be the only formula for our children. It's all right, when once wehave buried our dead. I have no doubt that the scenic part of the art, remarkable as some of its achievements already appear to us, is only inits infancy, and that we are destined to see wonders done that we nowbut faintly conceive. The probable extension of the mechanical artsis infinite. "Built in, " forsooth! We shall see castles and cities andmountains and rivers built in. Everything points that way; especiallythe constitution of the contemporary multitude. It is huge andgood-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects;it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It's ina tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape, and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine. You can't portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of humanfigure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the theatre, inevitably accommodating itself, will be at last a landscape withoutfigures. I mean, of course, without figures that count. There willbe little illustrations of costume stuck about--dressed manikins; butthey'll have nothing to say: they won't even go through the form ofspeech. 

Amicia. What a hideous prospect!

Dorriforth. Not necessarily, for we shall have grown used to it: weshall, as I say, have buried our dead. To-day it's cruel, because ourold ideals are only dying, they are _in extremis_, they are virtuallydefunct, but they are above-ground--we trip and stumble on them. Weshall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, becauseit's a moment of transition, and we still _miss_ the old superstition, the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretationof character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as theostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, forinstance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. Then we are consciousof a certain divine dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which isn't. But we shall have got over this discomfort on the day when we haveaccepted the ostensible occasion as merely and frankly ostensible, andthe real one as having nothing to do with it. 

Florentia. I don't follow you. As I'm one of the squeezed, gapingpublic, I must be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way, immenseinjustice to that body. They do care for character--care much for it. Aren't they perpetually talking about the actor's conception of it?

Dorriforth. Dear lady, what better proof can there be of theirineptitude, and that painted canvas and real water are the only thingsthey understand? The vanity of wasting time over that! Auberon. Overwhat? Dorriforth. The actor's conception of a part. It's the refuge ofobservers who are no observers and critics who are no critics. With whaton earth have we to do save his execution?

Florentia. I don't in the least agree with you. 

Amicia. Are you very sure, my poor Dorriforth?

Auberon. Give him rope and he'll hang himself. 

Dorriforth. It doesn't need any great license to ask who in the worldholds in his bosom the sacred secret of the right conception. All theactor can do is to give us his. We must take that one for granted, wemake him a present of it. He must impose his conception upon us--

Auberon (interrupting). I thought you said we accepted it. 

Dorriforth. Impose it upon our _attention_. Clever Auberon. It isbecause we accept his idea that he must repay us by making it vivid, byshowing us how valuable it is. We give him a watch: he must show us whattime it keeps. He winds it up, that is he executes the conception, andhis execution is what we criticise, if we be so moved. Can anything bemore absurd than to hear people discussing the conception of a part ofwhich the execution doesn't exist--the idea of a character which neverarrives at form? Think what it is, that form, as an accomplished actormay give it to us, and admit that we have enough to do to hold him tothis particular honor. 

Auberon. Do you mean to say you don't think some conceptions are betterthan some others?

Dorriforth. Most assuredly, some are better: the proof of the puddingis in the eating. The best are those which yield the most points, which have the largest face; those, in other words, that are the mostdemonstrable, or, in other words still, the most actable. The mostintelligent performer is he who recognizes most surely this "actable"and distinguishes in it the more from the less. But we are so far frombeing in possession of a subjective pattern to which we have a right tohold him that he is entitled directly to contradict any such absolute bypresenting us with different versions of the same text, each completelycolored, completely consistent with itself. Every actor in whom theartistic life is strong must often feel the challenge to do that. Ishould never think, for instance, of contesting an actress's right torepresent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she reallysees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but sofar from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extensionof knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to me. 

Auberon. A reading, as they say, either commends itself to one's senseof truth or it doesn't. In the one case--

Dorriforth. In the one case I recognize--even--or especially--when thepresumption may have been against the particular attempt, a consummateillustration of what art can do. In the other I moralize indulgentlyupon human rashness. 

Florentia. You have an assurance _à taute épreuve_; but you aredeplorably superficial. There is a whole group of plays and a wholecategory of acting to which your generalizations quite fail to apply. Help me, Auberon. 

Auberon. You're easily exhausted. I suppose she means that it's far fromtrue everywhere that the scenery is everything. It may be true--I don'tsay it is!--of two or three good-natured playhouses in London. It isn'ttrue--how can it be?--of the provincial theatres or of the others in thecapital. Put it even that they would be all scenery if they could; theycan't, poor things--so they have to provide acting. 

Dorriforth. They have to, fortunately; but what do we hear of it?

Florentia. How do you mean, what do we hear of it?

Dorriforth. In what trumpet of fame does it reach us? They do what theycan, the performers Auberon alludes to, and they are brave souls. But Iam speaking of the conspicuous cases, of the exhibitions that draw. 

Florentia. There is good acting that draws; one could give you names andplaces. 

Dorriforth. I have already guessed those you mean. But when it isn'ttoo much a matter of the paraphernalia it is too little a matter ofthe play. A play nowadays is a rare bird. I should like to see ¦ one. Florentia. There are lots of them, all the while--the newspapers talkabout them. People talk about them at dinners. 

Dorriforth. What do they say about them?

Florentia. The newspapers?

Dorriforth. No, I don't care for _them_. The people at dinners. 

Florentia. Oh. They don't say anything in particular. 

Dorriforth. Doesn't that seem to show the effort isn't very suggestive?

Amicia. The conversation at dinners certainly isn't. 

Dorriforth. I mean our contemporary drama. To begin with, you can't findit there's no text. 

Florentia. No text?

Auberon. So much the better!

Dorriforth. So much the better if there is to be no criticism. Thereis only a dirt prompter's book. One can't put one's hand upon it; onedoesn't know what one is discussing. There is no "authority"--nothing isever published. 

Amicia. The pieces wouldn't bear that. 

Dorriforth. It would be a small ordeal to resist--if there were anythingin them. Look at the novels!

Amicia. The text is the French _brochure_. The "adaptation" isunprintable. 

Dorriforth. That's where it's so wrong, It ought at least to be as goodas the original. 

Auberon. Aren't there some "rights" to protect--some risk of the playbeing stolen if it's published?

Dorriforth. There may be--I don't know. Doesn't that only prove howlittle important we regard the drama as being, and how little seriouslywe take it, if we won't even trouble ourselves to bring about decentcivil conditions for its existence? What have we to do with the French_brochure?_ how does that help us to represent our own life, ourmanners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world?Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire, as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of Londonalone--what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist--the mostmagnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the manLondon would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn't. 

Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire--!

Dorriforth. I'm too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show youthat I'm not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that--I am onlyreading the signs. 

Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they arealtered, they are fitted. 

Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants. They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They areneither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that's left out and allthe naïveté that's put in, they cease to place before us any coherentappeal or any recognizable society. 

Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same. 

Dorriforth. They may; but they don't make good plays to see or to hear. The theatre consists of two things, _que diable_--of the stage and thedrama, and I don't see how you can have it unless you have both, or howyou can have either unless you have the other. They are the two bladesof a pair of scissors. 

Auberon. You are very unfair to native talent. There are lots of_strictly original_ plays--

Amicia. Yes, they put that expression on the posters. 

Auberon. I don't know what they put on the posters; but the plays arewritten and acted--produced with great success. 

Dorriforth. Produced--partly. A play isn't fully produced until it is ina form in which you can refer to it. We have to talk in the air. I canrefer to my Congreve, but I can't to my Pinero. {*}

 * Since the above was written several of Mr. Pinero's plays have been published. 

Florentia. The authors are not bound to publish them if they don't wish. 

Dorriforth. Certainly not, nor are they in that case bound to insist onone's not being a little vague about them. They are perfectly free towithhold them; they may have very good reasons for it, and I can imaginesome that would be excellent and worthy of all respect. But theirwithholding them is one of the signs. 

Auberon. What signs?

Dorriforth. Those I just spoke of--those we are trying to read together. The signs that ambition and desire are folly, that the sun of the dramahas set, that the matter isn't worth talking about, that it has ceasedto be an interest for serious folk, and that everything--everything, Imean, that's anything--is over. The sooner we recognize it the sooner tosleep, the sooner we get clear of misleading illusions and are purgedof the bad blood that disappointment makes. It's a pity, because thetheatre--after every allowance is made--_might_ have been a fine thing. At all events it was a pleasant--it was really almost a noble--dream. _Requiescat!_

Florentia. I see nothing to confirm your absurd theory. I delight in theplay; more people than ever delight in it with me; more people than evergo to it, and there are ten theatres in London where there were two ofold. 

Dorriforth. Which is what was to demonstrated. Whence do they derivetheir nutriment?

Auberon. Why, from the enormous public. 

Dorriforth. My dear fellow, I'm not talking of the box-office. Whatwealth of dramatic, of histrionic production have we to meet thatenormous demand? There will be twenty theatres ten years hence wherethere are ten to-day, and there will be, no doubt, ten times as manypeople "delighting in them, " like Florentla. But it won't alter the factthat our dream will have been dreamed. Florentia said a word when wecame in which alone speaks volumes. 

Florentia. What was my word?

Auberon. You are sovereignly unjust to native talent among the actors--Ileave the dramatists alone. There are many who do excellent, independentwork; strive for perfection, completeness--in short, the things we want. 

Dorriforth. I am not in the least unjust to them--I only pity them: theyhave so little to put _sous la dent_. It must seem to them at timesthat no one will work for them, that they are likely to starve forparts--forsaken of gods and men. 

Florentia. If they work, then, in solitude and sadness, they have themore honor, and one should recognize more explicitly their great merit. 

Dorriforth. Admirably said. Their laudable effort is precisely the onelittle loop-hole that I see of escape from the general doom. Certainlywe must try to enlarge it--that small aperture into the blue. We mustfix our eyes on it and make much of it, exaggerate it, do anything withit tha may contribute to restore a working faith. Precious that must beto the sincere spirits on the stage who are conscious of all the otherthings--formidable things--that rise against them. 

Amicia. What other things do you mean?

Dorriforth. Why, for one thing, the grossness and brutality ofLondon, with its scramble, its pressure, its hustle of engagements, ofpreoccupations, its long distances, its late hours, its nightly dinners, its innumerable demands on the attention, its general congregation ofinfluences fatal to the isolation, to the punctuality, to the security, of the dear old playhouse spell. When Florentia said in her charmingway--

Florentia. Here's my dreadful speech at last. 

Dorriforth. When you said that you went to the Théâtre Libre in theafternoon because you couldn't spare an evening, I recognized thedeath-knell of the drama. _Time_, the very breath of its nostrils, is lacking. Wagner was clever to go to leisurely Bayreuth among thehills--the Bayreuth of spacious days, a paradise of "development. "

Talk to a London audience of "development!" The long runs would, ifnecessary, put the whole question into a nutshell. Figure to yourself, for then the question is answered, how an intelligent actor must loathethem, and what a cruel negation he must find in them of the artisticlife, the life of which the very essence is variety of practice, freshness of experiment, and to feel that one must do many things inturn to do any one of them completely. 

Auberon. I don't in the least understand your _acharnement_, in view ofthe vagueness of your contention. 

Dorriforth. My _acharnement_ is your little joke, and my contention is alittle lesson in philosophy. 

Florentia. I prefer a lesson in taste. I had one the other night at the"Merry Wives. "

Dorriforth. If you come to that, so did I!

Amicia. So she does spare an evening sometimes. 

Florentia. It was all extremely quiet and comfortable, and I don'tin the least recognize Dorriforth's lurid picture of the dreadfulconditions. There was no scenery--at least not too much; there was justenough, and it was very pretty, and it was in its place. 

Dorriforth. And what else was there?

Florentia. There was very good acting. 

Amicia. I also went, and I thought it all, for a sportive, wanton thing, quite painfully ugly. 

Auberon. Uglier than that ridiculous black room, with the invisiblepeople groping about in it, of your precious "Duc d'Enghien?"

Dorriforth. The black room is doubtless not the last word of art, but itstruck me as a successful application of a happy idea. The contrivancewas perfectly simple--a closer night effect than is usually attempted, with a few guttering candles, which threw high shadows over the barewalls, on the table of the court-martial. Out of the gloom came thevoices and tones of the distinguishable figures, and it is perhaps afancy of mine that it made them--given the situation, of course--moreimpressive and dramatic. 

Auberon. You rail against scenery, but what could belong more to theorder of things extraneous to what you perhaps a little priggishly callthe delicacy of personal art than the arrangement you are speaking of?

Dorriforth. I was talking of the abuse of scenery. I never said anythingso idiotic as that the effect isn't helped by an appeal to the eye andan adumbration of the whereabouts. 

Auberon. But where do you draw the line and fix the limit? What is theexact dose?

Dorriforth. It's a question of taste and tact. 

Florentia. And did you find taste and tact in that coal-hole of theThéâtre Libre?

Dorriforth. Coal-hole is again your joke. I found a strong impressionin it--an impression of the hurried, extemporized cross-examination, bynight, of an impatient and mystified prisoner, whose dreadful fate hadbeen determined in advance, who was to be shot, high-handedly, inthe dismal dawn. The arrangement didn't worry and distract me: it wassimplifying, intensifying. It gave, what a judicious _mise-en-scène_should always do, the essence of the matter, and left the embroidery tothe actors. 

Florentia. At the "Merry Wives, " where you could see your hand beforeyour face, I could make out the embroidery. 

Dorriforth. Could you, under Falstaff's pasteboard cheeks and the saddisfigurement of his mates? There was no excess of scenery, Auberonsays. Why, Falstaff's very person was nothing _but_ scenery. A falseface, a false figure, false hands, false legs--scarcely a square inch onwhich the irrepressible humor of the rogue could break into illustrativetouches. And he is so human, so expressive, of so rich a physiognomy. One would rather Mr. Beerbohm Tree should have played the part in hisown clever, elegant slimness---that would at least have representedlife. A Falstaff all "make-up" is an opaque substance. This seems to mean example of what the rest still more suggested, that in dealing with aproduction like the "Merry Wives" really the main quality to putforward is discretion. You must resolve such a production, as a thingrepresented, into a tone that the imagination can take an aestheticpleasure in. Its grossness must be transposed, as it were, to a fictivescale, a scale of fainter tints and generalized signs. A filthy, eruptive, realistic Bardolph and Pistol overlay the romantic with theliteral. Relegate them and blur them, to the eye; let their blotches beconstructive and their raggedness relative. 

Amicia. Ah, it was _so_ ugly!

Dorriforth. What a pity then, after all, there wasn't more paintedcanvas to divert you! Ah, decidedly, the theatre of the future must bethat. 

Florentia. Please remember your theory that our life's a scramble, andsuffer me to go and dress for dinner. 

1889.