IV

[Illustration: Alfred Parsons]

Even if Mr. Alfred Parsons were not a masterly contributor to the pages

of Harper, it would still be almost inevitable to speak of him after

speaking of Mr. Abbey, for the definite reason (I hope that in giving it

I may not appear to invade too grossly the domain of private life)

that these gentlemen are united in domestic circumstance as well as

associated in the nature of their work. In London, in the relatively

lucid air of Campden Hill, they dwell together, and their beautiful

studios are side by side. However, there is a reason for commemorating

Mr. Parsons’ work which has nothing to do with the accidental--the

simple fact that that work forms the richest illustration of the English

landscape that is offered us to-day. Harper has for a long time past

been full of Mr. Alfred Parsons, who has made the dense, fine detail

of his native land familiar in far countries, amid scenery of a very

different type. This is what the modern illustration can do when the

ripeness of the modern sense is brought to it and the wood-cutter plays

with difficulties as the brilliant Americans do to-day, following his

original at a breakneck pace. An illusion is produced which, in its very

completeness, makes one cast an uneasy eye over the dwindling fields

that are still left to conquer. Such art as Alfred Parsons’--such an

accomplished translation of local aspects, translated in its turn by

cunning hands and diffused by a wonderful system of periodicity through

vast and remote communities, has, I confess, in a peculiar degree, the

effect that so many things have in this age of multiplication--that

of suppressing intervals and differences and making the globe seem

alarmingly small. Vivid and repeated evocations of English rural

things--the meadows and lanes, the sedgy streams, the old orchards and

timbered houses, the stout, individual, insular trees, the flowers under

the hedge and in it and over it, the sweet rich country seen from the

slope, the bend of the unformidable river, the actual romance of the

castle against the sky, the place on the hill-side where the gray church

begins to peep (a peaceful little grassy path leads up to it over

a stile)--all this brings about a terrible displacement of the very

objects that make pilgrimage a passion, and hurries forward that

ambiguous advantage which I don’t envy our grandchildren, that of

knowing all about everything in advance, having trotted round the globe

annually in the magazines and lost the bloom of personal experience. It

is a part of the general abolition of mystery with which we are all so

complacently busy today. One would like to retire to another planet with

a box of Mr. Parsons’ drawings, and be homesick there for the pleasant

places they commemorate.

There are many things to be said about his talent, some of which are

not the easiest in the world to express. I shall not, however, make them

more difficult by attempting to catalogue his contributions in these

pages. A turning of the leaves of Harper brings one constantly face to

face with him, and a systematic search speedily makes one intimate.

The reader will remember the beautiful Illustrations to Mr. Blackmore’s

novel of _Springhaven_, which were interspersed with striking

figure-pieces from the pencil of that very peculiar pictorial humorist

Mr. Frederick Barnard, who, allowing for the fact that he always seems

a little too much to be drawing for Dickens and that the footlights

are the illumination of his scenic world, has so remarkable a sense of

English types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may be

called the great-coat-and-gaiters period--the period when people

were stiff with riding and wicked conspiracies went forward in sanded

provincial inn-parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons, who is still conveniently

young, waked to his first vision of pleasant material in the

comprehensive county of Somerset--a capital centre of impression for a

painter of the bucolic. He has been to America; he has even reproduced

with remarkable discrimination and truth some of the way-side objects

of that country, not making them look in the least like their English

equivalents, if equivalents they may be said to have. Was it there that

Mr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear?

I ask this idle question simply because the England of his pencil, and

not less of his brush (of his eminent brush there would be much to say),

is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted

to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the

delightful testimony it inherits. It was scarcely to have been supposed

possible that the native point of view would embrace and observe so

many of the things that the more or less famished outsider is, in vulgar

parlance, “after.” In other words (though I appear to utter a foolish

paradox), the danger might have been that Mr. Parsons knew his subject

too well to feel it--to feel it, I mean, _à l’Américaine_. He is as

tender of it as if he were vague about it, and as certain of it as if he

were _blasé_.

But after having wished that his country should be just so, we proceed

to discover that it is in fact not a bit different. Between these phases

of our consciousness he is an unfailing messenger. The reader will

remember how often he has accompanied with pictures the text of some

amiable paper describing a pastoral region--Warwickshire or Surrey.

Devonshire or the Thames. He will remember his exquisite designs for

certain of Wordsworth’s sonnets. A sonnet of Wordsworth is a difficult

thing to illustrate, but Mr. Parsons’ ripe taste has shown him the way.

Then there are lovely morsels from his hand associated with the drawings

of his friend Mr. Abbey--head-pieces, tailpieces, vignettes, charming

combinations of flower and foliage, decorative clusters of all sorts

of pleasant rural emblems. If he has an inexhaustible feeling for the

country in general, his love of the myriad English flowers is perhaps

the fondest part of it. He draws them with a rare perfection, and

always--little definite, delicate, tremulous things as they are--with

a certain nobleness. This latter quality, indeed. I am prone to find in

all his work, and I should insist on it still more if I might refer

to his important paintings. So composite are the parts of which any

distinguished talent is made up that we have to feel our way as we

enumerate them; and yet that very ambiguity is a challenge to analysis

and to characterization. This “nobleness” on Mr. Parsons’ part is the

element of style--something large and manly, expressive of the total

character of his facts. His landscape is the landscape of the male

vision, and yet his touch is full of sentiment, of curiosity and

endearment. These things, and others besides, make him the most

interesting, the most living, of the new workers in his line. And what

shall I say of the other things besides? How can I take precautions

enough to say that among the new workers, deeply English as he is, there

is comparatively something French in his manner? Many people will like

him because they see in him--or they think they do--a certain happy

mean. Will they not fancy they catch him taking the middle way between

the unsociable French _étude_ and the old-fashioned English “picture”?

If one of these extremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is an oasis

still more vain. I have a recollection of productions of Mr. Alfred

Parsons’ which might have come from a Frenchman who was in love with

English river-sides. I call to mind no studies--if he has made any--of

French scenery; but if I did they would doubtless appear English enough.

It is the fashion among sundry to maintain that the English landscape

is of no use for _la peinture sérieuse_, that it is wanting in technical

accent and is in general too storytelling, too self-conscious

and dramatic also too lumpish and stodgy, of a green--_d’un vert

bête_--which, when reproduced, looks like that of the chromo. Certain

it is that there are many hands which are not to be trusted with it,

and taste and integrity have been known to go down before it. But Alfred

Parsons may be pointed to as one who has made the luxuriant and

lovable things of his own country almost as “serious” as those familiar

objects--the pasture and the poplar--which, even when infinitely

repeated by the great school across the Channel, strike us as but meagre

morsels of France.

V

[Illustration: Mr. George H. Boughton]

In speaking of Mr. George H. Boughton, A.R.A., I encounter the same

difficulty as with Mr. Millet: I find the window closed through which

alone almost it is just to take a view of his talent. Mr. Boughton is

a painter about whom there is little that is new to tell to-day, so

conspicuous and incontestable is his achievement, the fruit of a career

of which the beginning was not yesterday. He is a draughtsman and an

illustrator only on occasion and by accident. These accidents have

mostly occurred, however, in the pages of Harper, and the happiest of

them will still be fresh in the memory of its readers. In the _Sketching

Rambles in Holland_ Mr. Abbey was a participant (as witness, among many

things, the admirable drawing of the old Frisian woman bent over her

Bible in church, with the heads of the burghers just visible above the

rough archaic pew-tops--a drawing opposite to page 112 in the handsome

volume into which these contributions were eventually gathered

together); but most of the sketches were Mr. Boughton’s, and the

charming, amusing text is altogether his, save in the sense that

it commemorates his companion’s impressions as well as his own--the

delightful, irresponsible, visual, sensual, pictorial, capricious

impressions of a painter in a strange land, the person surely whom

at particular moments one would give most to be. If there be anything

happier than the impressions of a painter, it is the impressions of two,

and the combination is set forth with uncommon spirit and humor in this

frank record of the innocent lust of the eyes. Mr. Boughton scruples

little, in general, to write as well as to draw, when the fancy takes

him; to write in the manner of painters, with the bold, irreverent,

unconventional, successful brush. If I were not afraid of the

patronizing tone I would say that there is little doubt that if as a

painter he had not had to try to write in character, he would certainly

have made a characteristic writer. He has the most enviable “finds,” not

dreamed of in timid literature, yet making capital descriptive prose.

Other specimens of them may be encountered in two or three Christmas

tales, signed with the name whose usual place is the corner of a

valuable canvas.

If Mr. Boughton is in this manner not a simple talent, further

complications and reversions may be observed in him, as, for instance,

that having reverted from America, where he spent his early years, back

to England, the land of his origin, he has now in a sense oscillated

again from the latter to the former country. He came to London one day

years ago (from Paris, where he had been eating nutritively of the tree

of artistic knowledge), in order to re-embark on the morrow for the

United States; but that morrow never came--it has never come yet.

Certainly now it never _can_ come, for the country that Mr. Boughton

left behind him in his youth is no longer there; the “old New York” is

no longer a port to sail to, unless for phantom ships. In imagination,

however, the author of “The Return of the _Mayflower_” has several times

taken his way back; he has painted with conspicuous charm and success

various episodes of the early Puritan story. He was able on occasion

to remember vividly enough the low New England coast and the thin New

England air. He has been perceptibly an inventor, calling into being

certain types of face and dress, certain tones and associations of color

(all in the line of what I should call subdued harmonies if I were not

afraid of appearing to talk a jargon), which people are hungry for when

they acquire “a Boughton,” and which they can obtain on no other terms.

This pictorial element in which he moves is made up of divers delicate

things, and there would be a roughness in attempting to unravel the

tapestry. There is old English, and old American, and old Dutch in

it, and a friendly, unexpected new Dutch too--an ingredient of New

Amsterdam--a strain of Knickerbocker and of Washington Irving. There is

an admirable infusion of landscape in it, from which some people regret

that Mr. Boughton should ever have allowed himself to be distracted by

his importunate love of sad-faced, pretty women in close-fitting coifs

and old silver-clasped cloaks. And indeed, though his figures are very

“tender,” his landscape is to my sense tenderer still. Moreover, Mr.

Boughton bristles, not aggressively, but in the degree of a certain

conciliatory pertinacity, with contradictious properties. He lives in

one of the prettiest and most hospitable houses in London, but the note

of his work is the melancholy of rural things, of lonely people and of

quaint, far-off legend and refrain. There is a delightful ambiguity of

period and even of clime in him, and he rejoices in that inability to

depict the modern which is the most convincing sign of the contemporary.

He has a genius for landscape, yet he abounds in knowledge of every sort

of ancient fashion of garment; the buckles and button-holes, the very

shoe-ties, of the past are dear to him. It is almost always autumn or

winter in his pictures. His horizons are cold, his trees are bare (he

does the bare tree beautifully), and his draperies lined with fur; but

when he exhibits himself directly, as in the fantastic “Rambles” before

mentioned, contagious high spirits are the clearest of his showing.

Here he appears as an irrepressible felicitous sketcher, and I know no

pleasanter record of the joys of sketching, or even of those of simply

looking. Théophile Gautier himself was not more inveterately addicted to

this latter wanton exercise. There ought to be a pocket edition of Mr.

Boughton’s book, which would serve for travellers in other countries

too, give them the point of view and put them in the mood. Such

a blessing, and such a distinction too, is it to have an eye. Mr.

Boughton’s, in his good-humored Dutch wanderings, holds from morning

till night a sociable, graceful revel. From the moment it opens till the

moment it closes, its day is a round of adventures. His jolly pictorial

narrative, reflecting every glint of October sunshine and patch of

russet shade, tends to confirm us afresh in the faith that the painter’s

life is the best life, the life that misses fewest impressions.