[Illustration: Millet]
It is characteristic of Mr. Frank Millet’s checkered career, with
opposites so much mingled in it, that such work as he has done for
Harper should have had as little in common as possible with midland
English scenery. He has been less a producer in black and white than a
promoter and, as I may say, a protector of such production in others;
but none the less the back volumes of Harper testify to the activity of
his pencil as well as to the variety of his interests. There was a time
when he drew little else but Cossacks and Orientals, and drew them as
one who had good cause to be vivid. Of the young generation he was the
first to know the Russian plastically, especially the Russian soldier,
and he had paid heavily for his acquaintance. During the Russo-Turkish
war he was correspondent in the field (with the victors) of the New York
_Herald_ and the London _Daily News_--a capacity in which he made many
out-of-the-way, many precious, observations. He has seen strange
countries--the East and the South and the West and the North--and
practised many arts. To the London _Graphic_, in 1877 he sent striking
sketches from the East, as well as capital prose to the journals I have
mentioned. He has always been as capable of writing a text for his own
sketches as of making sketches for the text of others. He has made
pictures without words and words without pictures. He has written some
very clever ghost-stories, and drawn and painted some very immediate
realities. He has lately given himself up to these latter objects, and
discovered that they have mysteries more absorbing than any others. I
find in Harper, in 1885. “A Wild-goose Chase” through North Germany and
Denmark, in which both pencil and pen are Mr. Millet’s, and both show
the natural and the trained observer.
He knows the art-schools of the Continent, the studios of Paris, the
“dodges” of Antwerp, the subjects, the models of Venice, and has had
much æsthetic as well as much personal experience. He has draped and
distributed Greek plays at Harvard, as well as ridden over Balkans to
post pressing letters, and given publicity to English villages in which
susceptible Americans may get the strongest sensations with the least
trouble to themselves. If the trouble in each case will have been
largely his, this is but congruous with the fact that he has not only
found time to have a great deal of history himself, but has suffered
himself to be converted by others into an element--beneficent I should
call it if discretion did not forbid me--of _their_ history. Springing
from a very old New England stock, he has found the practice of art a
wonderful antidote, in his own language, “for belated Puritanism.” He is
very modern, in the sense of having tried many things and availed
himself of all of the facilities of his time; but especially on this
ground of having fought out for himself the battle of the Puritan habit
and the æsthetic experiment. His experiment was admirably successful
from the moment that the Puritan levity was forced to consent to its
becoming a serious one. In other words, if Mr. Millet is artistically
interesting to-day (and to the author of these remarks he is highly so),
it is because he is a striking example of what the typical American
quality can achieve.
He began by having an excellent pencil, because as a thoroughly
practical man he could not possibly have had a weak one. But nothing
is more remunerative to follow than the stages by which “faculty” in
general (which is what I mean by the characteristic American quality)
has become the particular faculty; so that if in the artist’s present
work one recognizes--recognizes even fondly--the national handiness, it
is as handiness regenerate and transfigured. The American adaptiveness
has become a Dutch finish. The only criticism I have to make is of the
preordained paucity of Mr. Millet’s drawings; for my mission is not to
speak of his work in oils, every year more important (as was indicated
by the brilliant interior with figures that greeted the spectator in so
friendly a fashion on the threshold of the Royal Academy exhibition
of 1888), nor to say that it is illustration too--illustration of
any old-fashioned song or story that hums in the brain or haunts the
memory--nor even to hint that the admirable rendering of the charming
old objects with which it deals (among which I include the human face
and figure in dresses unfolded from the lavender of the past), the old
surfaces and tones, the stuffs and textures, the old mahogany and silver
and brass--the old sentiment too, and the old picture-making vision--are
in the direct tradition of Terburg and De Hoogh and Metzu.