There is no paucity about Mr. Abbey as a virtuoso in black and white,
and if one thing more than another sets the seal upon the quality of
his work, it is the rare abundance in which it is produced. It is not a
frequent thing to find combinations infinite as well as exquisite. Mr.
Abbey has so many ideas, and the gates of composition have been
opened so wide to him, that we cultivate his company with a mixture of
confidence and excitement. The readers of Harper have had for years a
great deal of it, and they will easily recognize the feeling I allude
to--the expectation of familiarity in variety. The beautiful art and
taste, the admirable execution, strike the hour with the same note; but
the figure, the scene, is ever a fresh conception. Never was ripe skill
less mechanical, and never was the faculty of perpetual evocation less
addicted to prudent economies. Mr. Abbey never saves for the next
picture, yet the next picture will be as expensive as the last. His
whole career has been open to the readers of Harper, so that what they
may enjoy on any particular occasion is not only the talent, but a kind
of affectionate sense of the history of the talent, That history is,
from the beginning, in these pages, and it is one of the most
interesting and instructive, just as the talent is one of the richest
and the most sympathetic in the art-annals of our generation. I may as
well frankly declare that I have such a taste for Mr. Abbey’s work that
I cannot affect a judicial tone about it. Criticism is appreciation or
it is nothing, and an intelligence of the matter in hand is recorded
more substantially in a single positive sign of such appreciation than
in a volume of sapient objections for objection’s sake--the cheapest of
all literary commodities. Silence is the perfection of disapproval, and
it has the great merit of leaving the value of speech, when the moment
comes for it, unimpaired.
Accordingly it is important to translate as adequately as possible the
positive side of Mr. Abbey’s activity. None to-day is more charming, and
none helps us more to take the large, joyous, observant, various view
of the business of art. He has enlarged the idea of illustration, and
he plays with it in a hundred spontaneous, ingenious ways. “Truth and
poetry” is the motto legibly stamped upon his pencil-case, for if he has
on the one side a singular sense of the familiar, salient, importunate
facts of life, on the other they reproduce themselves in his mind in a
delightfully qualifying medium. It is this medium that the fond observer
must especially envy Mr. Abbey, and that a literary observer will envy
him most of all.
Such a hapless personage, who may have spent hours in trying to produce
something of the same result by sadly different means, will measure
the difference between the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of
respectable prose and the immediate projection of the figure by the
pencil. A charming story-teller indeed he would be who should write as
Mr. Abbey draws. However, what is style for one art is style for other,
so blessed is the fraternity that binds them together, and the worker
in words may take a lesson from the picture-maker of “She Stoops to
Conquer.” It is true that what the verbal artist would like to do
would be to find out the secret of the pictorial, to drink at the same
fountain. Mr. Abbey is essentially one of those who would tell us if he
could, and conduct us to the magic spring; but here he is in the nature
of the case helpless, for the happy _ambiente_ as the Italians call it,
in which his creations move is exactly the thing, as I take it, that
he can least give an account of. It is a matter of genius and
imagination--one of those things that a man determines for himself as
little as he determines the color of his eyes. How, for instance, can
Mr. Abbey explain the manner in which he directly _observes_ figures,
scenes, places, that exist only in the fairy-land of his fancy? For the
peculiar sign of his talent is surely this observation in the remote. It
brings the remote near to us, but such a complicated journey as it must
first have had to make! Remote in time (in differing degrees), remote
in place, remote in feeling, in habit, and in their ambient air, are the
images that spring from his pencil, and yet all so vividly, so minutely,
so consistently seen! Where does he see them, where does he find them,
how does he catch them, and in what language does he delightfully
converse with them? In what mystic recesses of space does the revelation
descend upon him?
The questions flow from the beguiled but puzzled admirer, and their
tenor sufficiently expresses the claim I make for the admirable artist
when I say that his truth is interfused with poetry. He spurns the
literal and yet superabounds in the characteristic, and if he makes
the strange familiar he makes the familiar just strange enough to be
distinguished. Everything is so human, so humorous and so caught in the
act, so buttoned and petticoated and gartered, that it might be round
the corner; and so it is--but the corner is the corner of another world.
In that other world Mr. Abbey went forth to dwell in extreme youth, as I
need scarcely be at pains to remind those who have followed him in
Harper. It is not important here to give a catalogue of his
contributions to that journal: turn to the back volumes and you will
meet him at every step. Every one remembers his young, tentative,
prelusive illustrations to Herrick, in which there are the prettiest
glimpses, guesses and foreknowledge of the effects he was to make
completely his own. The Herrick was done mainly, if I mistake not,
before he had been to England, and it remains, in the light of this
fact, a singularly touching as well as a singularly promising
performance. The eye of sense in such a case had to be to a rare extent
the mind’s eye, and this convertibility of the two organs has persisted.
From the first and always that other world and that qualifying medium
in which I have said that the human spectacle goes on for Mr. Abbey have
been a county of old England which is not to be found in any geography,
though it borders, as I have hinted, on the Worcestershire Broadway. Few
artistic phenomena are more curious than the congenital acquaintance of
this perverse young Philadelphian with that mysterious locality. It is
there that he finds them all--the nooks, the corners, the people, the
clothes, the arbors and gardens and teahouses, the queer courts of old
inns, the sun-warmed angles of old parapets. I ought to have mentioned
for completeness, in addition to his pictures to Goldsmith and to the
scraps of homely British song (this latter class has contained some of
his most exquisite work), his delicate drawing’s for Mr. William Black’s
_Judith Shakespeare_. And in relation to that distinguished name--I
don’t mean Mr. Black’s--it is a comfort, if I may be allowed the
expression, to know that (as, to the best of my belief, I violate
no confidence in saying) he is even now engaged in the great work of
illustrating the comedies. He is busy with “The Merchant of Venice;”
he is up to his neck in studies, in rehearsals. Here again, while in
prevision I admire the result, what I can least refrain from expressing
is a sort of envy of the process, knowing what it is with Mr. Abbey and
what explorations of the delightful it entails--arduous, indefatigable,
till the end seems almost smothered in the means (such material
complications they engender), but making one’s daily task a thing of
beauty and honor and beneficence.