I have left Mr. Reinhart to the last because of his importance, and now
this very importance operates as a restriction and even as a sort of
reproach to me. To go well round him at a deliberate pace would take
a whole book. With Mr. Abbey, Mr. Reinhart is the artist who has
contributed 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 he
asks us to accept are less expensive to the imagination than those of
his colleague. He is, in short, the vigorous, racy _prosateur_ of that
human comedy of which Mr. Abbey is the poet. He illustrates the
modern sketch of travel, the modern tale--the poor little “quiet,”
psychological, conversational modern tale, which I often think the
artist invited to represent it to the eye must hate, unless he be a very
intelligent master, little, on a superficial view, would there appear to
be in it to represent. The superficial view is, after all, the natural
one for the picture-maker. A talent of the first order, however, only
wants 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 the
little tale itself, there is unmistakable life in his version of it.
Mr. Reinhart deals in that element purely with admirable frankness
and vigor. He is not so much suggestive as positively and sharply
representative. His facility, his agility, his universality are a truly
stimulating sight. He asks not too many questions of his subject, but to
those he does ask he insists upon a thoroughly intelligible answer. By
his universality I mean perhaps as much as anything else his admirable
drawing; not precious, as the æsthetic say, nor pottering, as the
vulgar, but free, strong and secure, which enables him to do with the
human 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 is
not easy) my sense of a certain capable indifference that is in him
otherwise than by saying that he would quite as soon do one thing as
another.
For it is true that the admirer of his work rather misses in him that
intimation of a secret preference which many strong draughtsmen show,
and which is not absent, for instance (I don’t mean the secret, but the
intimation), from the beautiful doings of Mr. Abbey. It is extremely
present in Mr. Du Maurier’s work, just as it was visible, less
elusively, in that of John Leech, his predecessor in _Punch_. Mr. Abbey
has a haunting type; Du Maurier has a haunting type. There was little
perhaps of the haunted about Leech, but we know very well how he wanted
his pretty girls, his British swell, and his “hunting men” to look. He
betrayed a predilection; he had his little ideal. That an artist may be
a great force and not have a little ideal, the scarcely too much to be
praised 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 yet
discovered how he would have liked his pretty girls to look. He has kept
the soft conception too much to himself--he has not trifled with the
common truth by letting it appear. This common truth, in its innumerable
combinations, is what Mr. Rein-hart also shows us (with of course
infinitely less of a _parti pris_ of laughing at it), though, as I must
hasten to add, the female face and form in his hands always happen to
take 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. Reinhart
is solidly an artist, but I doubt whether as yet he dreams, and the
absence of private predilections makes him seem a little hard. He is
sometimes rough with our average humanity, and especially rough with the
feminine portion of it. He usually represents American life, in which
that portion is often spoken of as showing to peculiar advantage. But
Mr. Reinhart sees it generally, as very _bourgeois_. His good ladies are
apt to be rather thick and short, rather huddled and plain. I
shouldn’t mind it so much if they didn’t look so much alive. They are
incontestably possible. The long, brilliant series of drawings he
made to accompany Mr. Charles Dudley Warner’s papers on the American
watering-places form a rich _bourgeois_ epic, which imaginations haunted
by a type must accept with philosophy, for the sketches in question will
have 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 a
charming picture of youthful juxtaposition, they give us a sense, to
which nothing need be added, of the energy of Mr. Reinhart’s pencil.
They are a final collection of pictorial notes on the manners and
customs, the aspects and habitats, in July and August, of the great
American democracy; of which, certainly, taking one thing with another,
they give a very comfortable, cheerful account. But they confirm that
analytic 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 very
gracefully, in the other by the operation of a sort of constructive
humor, remarkably strong, in his illustrations of Spanish life and his
sketches 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 critical
life in him, will be prone to wonder _why_ he doesn’t care, and whether
matters may not be turned about in such a way as that he should, with
the consequence that his large capacity would become more fruitful
still. Mr. Reinhart is open to the large appeal of Paris, where he
lives--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 the
mystic sentiment--about which I am perhaps writing nonsense. Is it
nonsense to say that, being very much an incarnation of the modern
international spirit (he might be a Frenchman in New York were he not
an American in Paris), the moral of his work is possibly the inevitable
want of finality, of intrinsic character, in that sweet freedom?
Does the cosmopolite necessarily pay for his freedom by a want of
function--the impersonality of not being representative? Must one be a
little narrow to have a sentiment, and very local to have a quality, or
at least a style; and would the missing type, if I may mention it
yet again, haunt our artist--who is somehow, in his rare instrumental
facility, outside of quality and style--a good deal more if he were not,
amid the mixture of associations and the confusion of races, liable to
fall 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.