IT was but yesterday, though in this country that is a long time ago, that American painters with the zeal of the neophyte were declaiming against the story-telling picture. Of course, we know that the objection was well taken in regard to a large class of pictures, wherein the story was the “thing,” the way of telling it merely incidental and generally banal. But, like many other good principles pushed to excess, it resulted in a bathos as complete as that from which it would have saved us. Countless canvases have been painted, which possess no human interest and very little artistic justification; the barren issue of a mere negation. Slowly there is coming a reaction, and we are beginning to realize that a painter is none the less an artist for having something to say, may even ultimately depend for his ranking as an artist upon the quality of what he has to say, provided always that he says it in true painter fashion, with reliance, in fact, upon the vocabulary of his own particular art.

Among those who have never allowed themselves to be troubled by the art-for-art’s-sake grain of truth in a bushel of chaff is Edwin A. Abbey. As an artist he must largely stand or fall upon his merit as a teller of stories. Have his stories been intrinsically interesting? Is his way of telling them artistic? That he has won his way from a stool at the drawing table of Harper and Brothers to a seat in the Royal Academy will not of itself convince a great many people, who are of the opinion that the story-telling picture is just what attracts the English and is the bane of their Academy. So, to reach an acceptable estimate of Abbey’s rank as an artist, we must confine ourselves strictly to the character of his work, both in pen and ink and in paint.

It was in 1871, when he was nineteen years old, that he passed from his student days at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts into the employment of the Harpers, becoming one of the firm’s band of illustrators, including, among others, Charles S. Reinhart, Howard Pyle, Joseph Pennel, and Alfred Parsons, who helped to draw attention in Europe to the superiority of the chief American illustrated monthlies. In 1878 came his first great opportunity, when he was commissioned to illustrate some of the poems of Herrick, and, in search of material, visited England, where, except for a few short visits to this country, he has remained ever since. He betook himself to Stratford-on-Avon and Bidford, and later to Broadway, in Worcestershire.

Probably every true artist has within him a little world of his own, an island in the ocean of the world around him, a little spot of fact, on which flourish the trees and flowers and personages of his imagination. He is happy if circumstances permit him to work in it, and still more happy if his world of fancy has some correspondence to the actual world about him. Such was Abbey’s happiness in having his footsteps directed through rural England. On the other hand, it could have been no accident that put it in his way to illustrate an old-time poem. The whole tenor of his subsequent work, since he has been at liberty to choose his own subjects, proves that the bias of his temperament is toward the past: to the days of picturesque costume, to a period remote enough to justify his fancy in selecting what it would, and ignoring what it would not. Nor do I overlook the fact that Abbey from the first has shown an ability to create from within himself an environment for his conceptions. Yet, even so, he could not have lighted on a place more fertilizing to such a temperament than the English scenes among which he has moved, with their old-time associations and simple rural loveliness.

Broadway, for instance, is on the old post road that runs from London, through Oxford, on to Worcester and the west; within easy reach of Stratford and Kenilworth; its nearest station, Evesham, an old market town where Simon de Montfort, who first stood up for Englishmen against the Norman conquerors and for the rights of the common people, was slain in battle. As you near the village the pleasant vale of Evesham narrows into a horseshoe of hills, gentle slopes of verdure intersected with hedges, and rimmed with coppices and woods. Millet’s house is at the entrance; a little farther on, the village green; and a little farther still a fine old gabled inn, where Cromwell, says the story, slept after his victory at Worcester. The broad street, continually mounting, passes between gabled farmhouses, buried in ivy, and cottages whose windows are bright with pot geraniums and little gardens filled with the flowers and herbs that Ophelia crooned of; past doorways that bear the date of that first James, “the most learned fool in Christendom”; past the remantled farmstead where Mary Anderson in her present rÔle of wife and mother would fain forget that she has been a star; till it winds up in a thin line of white between the green and

brown, and vanishes at the top of the hill, where beyond the mounds and hollows of a Roman encampment there is only the knowledge of a modern world. But you have scarce seen Broadway until you have penetrated into some of the cottage and kitchen interiors, with their wide-open hearths, smoke-stained timbered ceilings, from which hang hams and flitches of bacon and strings of onions; or passed to the backs of some of the houses and explored the dairies and quaint inglenooks of architecture, the trim vegetable gardens, the apple orchards and the barnyards, in close companionship with which is always the vivid green of the pleasant hills.

And it was in such places that Abbey gathered material for his illustrations to “Selections from the Hesperides” and “Noble Numbers” of Robert Herrick; to the “Old Songs” and “She Stoops to Conquer”; a spot wherein there must have been so much akin to his own moods of imagination. What wonder that his drawings have the fragrance of apple blossom and new-mown hay, the sweet musicalness of rippling brooks, the delicate atmosphere of the quiet life, and the savour of the old-time spirit! Within the limits of their particular intention, I doubt if any drawings are more perfect. Nor do I forget those drawings of the country by Alfred Parsons, made about the same time and around the same spots; drawings which show such apprehension of the subtle qualities of rural beauty, such an eye for lovely fragments, such a sensitive artistry in picturing them. But the difference in the work of these two close friends throws a clear light on the special quality of Abbey’s mind. Parsons pictured what he saw, interpreting the bit of nature in daintiest terms of art; while Abbey has the power of calling up a picture in his imagination. Yet in these drawings, at least, there is not an act of pure imagination; for the text of the poem or play supplies the idea. His skill is shown in the vivid recreation of the borrowed theme; in a delicate tact of choice, in his way of representing it and of illuminating it with a few choice details, and in his manner of setting the figures and objects in an atmosphere of their own. And I am not thinking now of that technical accomplishment which surrounds the figures with an envelope of lighted air, but of that more poetical gift which enables him to recreate the impression of the old-time feeling. As he says himself, a picture of bygone manners should be treated as an artist of its own period might have treated it. It is undoubtedly Abbey’s faculty of borrowing the habit of mind as well as of manners of the past that gives a special distinction to these drawings.

But the recognition of this should not obscure the larger faculty of which this is only a phase, of being able to illuminate the text; to illustrate it in the true sense, for the term has fallen into discredit. This is partly the fault of publishers who are apt to insist on the most literal interpretation of the text, instead of allowing the artist to reinform the essence of the text with the spirit of his independent art; and partly, no doubt, to the inability of many draughtsmen to do more than baldly literalize. Thus we have a perpetual crop of so-called illustrations, either crowded with detail or almost flippantly negligent of anything but a certain loose bravura of line and spacing, clever, if you like, but tediously similar in general character. “She rose to greet him”—can you not predicate with tolerable accuracy how such and such a one among many illustrators would represent the incident? In Abbey’s case you could not. The phrase would formulate in his mind a picture; complete, daintily suggestive, full of the charming quality of unexpectedness. But it is when an illustration tries to enforce the text by picturing some incident of prime importance in the story, with its play of passion, perhaps, and diverse possibility of appeal to different minds, that the effort of the ordinary illustrator is so hopelessly jejune. Such subjects are only partially acceptable when one like Abbey essays them. Indeed, many of us may have felt that where, as in Shakespeare, the scene is one of very full significance, affecting the sensibility of different thoughtful readers as diversely as the same passage of music will affect its auditors differently, one’s intelligence and power of appreciation can hardly be satisfied with any one man’s crystallizing of such fluidity and diversity of appeal into a fixed presentment.

Abbey’s illustrations to Shakespeare, though I know they are considered one of his greatest triumphs, have seemed to me to mark the beginning of less perfection. Again, I am not speaking of the craftsmanship, but of the spirit that animates the artist. So long as he confines himself to fragments from the scenes and to subordinate persons, or to those whose character is very simple and direct, his old charm remains; but when he attempts a complex character, as that of Portia, he necessarily cannot please all comers; and when he essays to build up scenes, the old spontaneity of imagination seems to dwindle. It is as if the foliage of a tree were beginning to lose its freshness and twinkle of artless movement; as if by degrees the leaves were losing sap and falling; and the naked boughs, the bare construction of the tree, were gradually being revealed. And in Abbey’s case it seems to be a process that has been going on more and more as he passed to the use of paint and to the building up of important mise en scÈnes, such as “Hamlet,” “Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and the Lady Anne,” or “The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester.”

His passage to paint was but a question of time; not only because to all artists it seems to offer the largest scope, but because, as a draughtsman, he has always had the feeling of a colourist. He has avoided hardness of contours, softening them with light and atmosphere, and merging the figures in the ensemble. The latter are not merely set against a background, they are always in and part of the picture. Further, he sees them as masses. You will scarcely find in his drawings authority of line, or fascination in the direction and quality of the line as line; instead, an infinity of little lines, not without feeling, doubtless, but without a separateness of Æsthetic value. It is in the mass that they count; so that a woman’s gown will not afford a sweep of movement, but a delightful tissue of lights and shadows. And when he proceeds to colour it is again the mass that captivates him—masses, especially of black, of crimson and white. But with this very marked love for colour, he is not a colourist in the sense of weaving harmonies of colour. His pictures are still a balancing of masses rather than an effect of orchestration; and in the voluminous draperies that he introduces, while there is much influence of the amplitude of Venetian painting, there is little of its love of light or bigness of architectonic use of colour. In his treatment of coloured masses he is nearer to the manner of Holbein or Van Eyck. He does not seem to have an antecedent realization of the structure of his colour scheme, but builds it bit by bit, and the units more or less retain their separateness. Yet, while there is a lack of breadth in the picture as a whole, the parts are broadly treated, and often with a fine freedom of stroke. In his earlier paintings, such as the “Pavane,” belonging to Mr. Whitelaw Reid, he was still drawing with his brush, but in his later ones the manner has become a painter’s.

But no less natural than this progress of his technical evolution has been that of his mental one. In the course of this how could he well escape the Shakespeare cycle; not only because he had begun by interpreting old English poems and plays, and it was only a question of time as to when he would feel the influence of the poet-dramatist, but also because his imagination is of the dramatic kind. He would have made an ideal stage manager of the highest type. As I have said, it is less by any originality of conception that his imagination is distinguished than by an aptitude for grasping the thought of another, reclothing it with actuality, setting it in its appropriate environment, and making it breathe again with the spirit of its time. But such a gift, on the stage at least, is rarely, if ever, accompanied by personal histrionic ability. It is a gift, of selecting, assembling, and combining, rather than of absorption of self in a given line of motive. The stage manager gives the appearance of life to a scene, the actor makes it live, and I wonder whether it be not true that in these Shakespearian canvases of Abbey’s and in his mural decorations of the Holy Grail in the Boston Public Library there is a marshalling of the scene without the dramatic force. Do they carry us away and fill us with the emotion that we should receive in presence of the play well acted on the stage or in the reading of the legend intelligently? We find ourselves, I believe, rather studying the parts of those elaborate productions, the accuracy and beauty of detail, admiring the manipulative ability that has collected and coÖrdinated, and waiting, meanwhile, for the drama to begin.

And if this is true, may it not be the result of choosing for pictorial representation a subject of such complex emotions as the player’s scene in “Hamlet,” or one of such almost inexplicable subtlety as Richard’s love advances to Anne as she follows in the funeral procession of her dead husband, or even one of comparatively directer significance as that of “The Penance of Eleanor”? In his last picture, the “Trial of Queen Katherine,” he has not attempted to portray the climax of the scene, but the first pathetic pleading of the “most poor woman.” Surely he did well to seize for representation this intermediate movement in the scene. He has gained thereby our human sympathy for a subject which might easily have been too complicated with highly strung emotions to be immediately intelligible. And it is one of the merits of this picture that its appeal is not only impressive but immediate. He has exhibited a tactful modesty, and I use the word with a thought of its real meaning, which is something choicer than moderation. He might have attempted a more heroic note, pitched it to the extreme possibility of the scene. But he avoids a tour de force; and draws us as much by persuasion as by strength; by the strength, in fact, of what he holds in reserve.

For the peculiar qualities of his strength are quietness and depth. One may find it in “The Jongleur,” where coming from the castle gate, flanked on each side by a sheltering range of roof, cheerless outside, but suggesting cheer within, across the waste of snow the man in motley’s solitary figure is seen, wincing as he faces the cold and touching a strain on his mandolin to keep up his spirits. It is a beautiful picture, full of significant suggestion, not only of the immediate incident, but of the pathos of the life which lives to amuse others and of the emptiness of the world for one whose spirit is apart from it. It is a picture that compares in spontaneousness of expression with the earlier drawings, and has the fuller import of a maturer mind. Surely it is along lines such as this of purer imagination that Abbey will find his truest self.

To his decorations at the Boston Public Library much of what one has said of the Shakespeare paintings is applicable. They are not dramatic; their impressiveness is of a quiet and tempered sort. As one becomes familiar with these pictures, their power to make one feel the reasonableness and the beauty of the old thought; to feel it, too, not as something entirely strange, but as of present interest, grows and grows upon one. The intellect that has conceived them is not of the kind that leaps to an inspired result. Its quality is choiceness and delicacy of imaginativeness that wins us by persuasion.

In these pictures, as generally in his others, it is the women that he introduces who are the most captivating features of the conception. How beautiful they are! The alluring purity of expression, for example, in the faces of the Virtues is irresistible. Their heads, fragrantly pure, sway like a row of lilies in a gentle wind. Their motionless bodies are arrayed in costumes of delicate richness, each one of which is differently exquisite; the expression is mostly signified by movement of the hands and head; along the line there is a simultaneous act of unveiling, diversified by separate traits of modesty. Perhaps the most captivating of all the figures is that of the one who holds the young knight’s left hand. She draws back and yields at the same moment, with a gesture in which there is a most subtle mingling of confidence and hesitation. The touch of man is so new to her, yet who may doubt this youth?

One of the gems of the whole series is the representation of Blanchefleur, sitting in her dove-gray wedding gown; rose-wreathed and holding roses in her lap; gazing before her with a look of surrender, so infinitely spiritual. In her as in the Virtues the painter has made purity adorable; neither ascetic nor ecstatic, not at variance with the humanity of womanhood, but represented as its choicest flowering. Again, in his rendering of the angels he helps us to realize that they are creatures of the imagination; especially in the last picture, where their form is vague and they are felt rather as presences. And to this detachment from mere humanity spiritualized corresponds the expression of their faces; the rapt adoration of beings raised above the stir of human passion, in an atmosphere of calm where passivity is action.

However, judged as a series of decorations, following around the frieze of a room, these pictures are less satisfactory. They count as units, rather than in progression. One fails to find a rhythmic continuity or periodic emphasis of movement and colour, they vary conspicuously in size and colour and in character of composition and motive, and make their impression separately, instead of being in consecutive accord.

But if from a decorative standpoint these canvases are open to adverse criticism, let it not divert attention from their essential merit. Such big and serious effort is none too usual in painting—the opportunity for it, one must add in fairness, too infrequently occurs—so that, when one meets it, one’s heart goes out in appreciative acknowledgment. Within the scope of Abbey’s primary intention of commemorating a great theme in a series of noble pictures and of reinvesting old truth with present force, he has achieved a triumph that will win the admiration of all to whom seriously imaginative work appeals.