We Americans are accused of making too much ado about our celebrities,
of being demonstratively conscious of each step that we take in the path
of progress; and the accusation has its ground doubtless in this
sense, that it is possible among us to-day to become a celebrity on
unprecedentedly easy terms. This, however, at the present hour is the
case all the world over, and it is difficult to see where the standard
of just renown remains so high that the first stone may be cast. It is
more and more striking that the machinery of publicity is so enormous,
so constantly growing and so obviously destined to make the globe small,
in relation of the objects, famous or obscure, which cover it, that
it procures for the smallest facts and the most casual figures a
reverberation to be expected only in the case of a world-conqueror. The
newspaper and the telegram constitute a huge sounding-board, which has,
every day and every hour, to be made to vibrate, to be fed with items,
and the diffusion of the items takes place on a scale out of any sort of
proportion to their intrinsic importance. The crackle of common things
is transmuted into thunder--a thunder perhaps more resounding in America
than elsewhere for the reason that the sheet of tin shaken by the
Jupiter of the Press has been cut larger. But the difference is only of
degree, not of kind; and if the system we in particular have brought
to perfection would seem to be properly applied only to Alexanders
and Napoleons, it is not striking that these adequate subjects present
themselves even in other countries. The end of it all surely no man can
see, unless it be that collective humanity is destined to perish from a
rupture of its tympanum. That is a theme for a later hour, and meanwhile
perhaps it is well not to be too frightened. Some of the items I just
spoke of are, after all, larger than others; and if, as a general thing,
it is a mistake to pull up our reputations to see how they are growing,
there are some so well grown that they will bear it, and others of
a hardy stock even while they are tender. We may feel, for instance,
comparatively little hesitation in extending an importunate hand towards
the fine young sapling of which Mr. Reinhart is one of the branches.
It is a plant of promise, which has already flowered profusely and the
fragrance of which it would be affectation not to to notice. Let us
notice it, then, with candor, for it has all the air of being destined
to make the future sweeter. The plant in question is of course simply
the art of illustration in black and white, to which American periodical
literature has, lately given such an impetus and which has returned
the good office by conferring a great distinction on our magazines. In
its new phase the undertaking has succeeded; and it is not always that
fortune descends upon so deserving a head. Two or three fine talents in
particular have helped it to succeed, and Mr. Reinhart is not the least
conspicuous of these. It would be idle for a writer in Harper to
pretend to any diffidence of appreciation of his work: for the pages
are studded, from many years back, with the record of his ability. Mr.
Rein-hart took his first steps and made his first hits in Harper, which
owes him properly a portrait in return for so much portraiture. I may
exaggerate the charm and the importance of the modern illustrative form,
may see in it a capacity of which it is not yet itself wholly conscious,
but if I do so Mr. Reinhart is partly responsible for the aberration.
Abundant, intelligent, interpretative work in black and white is, to the
sense of the writer of these lines, one of the pleasantest things of the
time, having only to rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future.
This idea, I confess, is such as to lead one to write not only
sympathetically but pleadingly about the artists to whom one looks for
confirmation of it. If at the same time as we commemorate what they have
done we succeed in enlarging a little the conception of what they
may yet do, we shall be repaid even for having exposed ourselves as
fanatics--fanatics of the general manner, I mean, not of particular
representatives of it.
May not this fanaticism, in a particular case, rest upon a sense of
the resemblance between the general chance, as it may be called, of the
draughtsman in black and white, with contemporary life for his theme,
and the opportunity upon which the literary artist brings another form
to bear? The forms are different, though with analogies; but the field
is the same--the immense field of contemporary life observed for an
artistic purpose. There is nothing so interesting as that, because it is
ourselves; and no artistic problem is so charming as to arrive, either
in a literary or a plastic form, at a close and direct notation of what
we observe. If one has attempted some such exploit in a literary form,
one cannot help having a sense of union and comradeship with those who
have approached the question with the other instrument. This will be
especially the case if we happen to have appreciated that instrument
even to envy. We may as well say it outright, we envy it quite
unspeakably in the hands of Mr. Reinhart and in those of Mr. Abbey.
There is almost no limit to the service to which we can imagine it to be
applied, and we find ourselves wishing that these gentlemen may be made
adequately conscious of all the advantages it represents. We wonder
whether they really _are_ so; we are disposed even to assume that they
are not, in order to join the moral, to insist on the lesson. The master
whom we have mentally in view Mr. Reinhart is a near approach to him
may be, if he will only completely know it, so prompt, so copious,
so universal--so “all there,” as we say nowadays, and indeed so all
everywhere. There is only too much to see, too much to do, and his
process is the one that comes nearest to minimizing the quantity. He can
touch so many things, he can go from one scene to another, he can sound
a whole concert of notes while the painter is setting up his easel. The
painter is majestic, dignified, academic, important, superior, anything
you will; but he is, in the very nature of the case, only occasional.
He is “serious,” but he is comparatively clumsy: he is a terrible time
getting under way, and he has to sacrifice so many subjects while he is
doing one. The illustrator makes one immense sacrifice, of course--that
of color; but with it he purchases a freedom which enables him to attack
ever so many ideas. It is by variety and numerosity that he commends
himself to his age, and it is for these qualities that his age commends
him to the next. The twentieth century, the latter half of it, will, no
doubt, have its troubles, but it will have a great compensatory luxury,
that of seeing the life of a hundred years before much more vividly than
we--even happy we--see the life of a hundred years ago. But for this
our illustrators must do their best, appreciate the endless capacity
of their form. It is to the big picture what the short story is to the
novel.
It is doubtless too much, I hasten to add, to ask Mr. Reinhart, for
instance, to work to please the twentieth century. The end will not
matter if he pursues his present very prosperous course of activity,
for it is assuredly the fruitful vein, the one I express the hope to
see predominant, the portrayal of the manners, types and aspects that
surround us. Mr. Reinhart has reached that happy period of life when
a worker is in full possession of his means, when he has done for his
chosen instrument everything he can do in the way of forming it and
rendering it complete and flexible, and has the fore only to apply
it with freedom, confidence and success. These, to our sense, are the
golden hours of an artist’s life; happier even than the younger time
when the future seemed infinite in the light of the first rays of
glory, the first palpable hits. The very sense that the future is
_not_ unlimited and that opportunity is at its high-water-mark gives
an intensity to the enjoyment of maturity. Then the acquired habit
of “knowing how” must simplify the problem of execution and leave the
artist free to think only of his purpose, as befits a real creator. Mr.
Reinhart is at the enviable stage of knowing in perfection how; he has
arrived at absolute facility and felicity. The machine goes of itself;
it is no longer necessary to keep lifting the cover and pouring in the
oil of fond encouragement: all the attention may go to the idea and the
subject. It may, however, remain very interesting to others to know how
the faculty was trained, the pipe was tuned. The early phases of such
a process have a relative importance even when, at the lime (so gradual
are many beginnings and so obscure man a morrow) they may have appeared
neither delightful nor profitable. They are almost always to be summed
up in the single precious word practice. This word represents, at any
rate, Mr. Reinhart’s youthful history, and the profusion in which,
though no doubt occasionally disguised, the boon was supplied to him in
the offices of Harper’s Magazine. There is nothing so innate that it
has not also to be learned, for the best part of any aptitude is the
capacity to increase it.
Mr. Reinhart’s experience began to accumulate very early, for at
Pittsburgh, where he was born, he was free to draw to his heart’s
content. There was no romantic attempt, as I gather, to nip him in the
bud. On the contrary, he was despatched with almost prosaic punctuality
to Europe, and was even encouraged to make himself at home in Munich.
Munich, in his case, was a _pis-aller_ for Paris, where it would have
been his preference to study when he definitely surrendered, as it
were, to his symptoms. He went to Paris, but Paris seemed blocked and
complicated, and Munich presented advantages which, if not greater, were
at least easier to approach. Mr. Reinhart passe through the mill of the
Bavarian school, and when it had turned him out with its characteristic
polish he came back to America with a very substantial stock to dispose
of. It would take a chapter by itself if we were writing a biography,
this now very usual episode of the return of the young American from the
foreign conditions in which he has learned his professional language,
and his position in face of the community that he addresses in a strange
idiom. There has to be a prompt adjustment between ear and voice, if the
interlocutor is not to seem to himself to be intoning in the void. There
is always an inner history in all this, as well as an outer one--such,
however, as it would take much space to relate. Mr. Reinhart’s more
or less alienated accent fell, by good-fortune, on a comprehending
listener. He had made a satirical drawing, in the nature of the
“cartoon” of a comic journal, on a subject of the hour, and addressed it
to the editor of _Harper’s Weekly_. The drawing was not published--the
satire was perhaps not exactly on the right note--but the draughtsman
was introduced. Thus began, by return of post, as it were, and with
preliminaries so few that they could not well have been less, a
connection of many years. If I were writing a biography another chapter
would come in here--a curious, almost a pathetic one; for the course
of things is so rapid in this country that the years of Mr. Reinhart’s
apprenticeship to pictorial journalism, positively recent as they are,
already are almost prehistoric. To-morrow, at least, the complexion of
that time, its processes, ideas and standards, together with some of
the unsophisticated who carried them out, will belong to old New York.
A certain mollifying dimness rests upon them now, and their superseded
brilliancy gleams through it but faintly. It is a lively span for Mr.
Reinhart to have been at once one of the unsophisticated and one of the
actually modern.
That portion of his very copious work to which, more particularly. I
apply the latter term, has been done for Harper’s Magazine. During these
latter years it has come, like so much of American work to-day, from
beyond the seas. Whether or not that foreign language of which I just
spoke never became, in New York, for this especial possessor of it, a
completely convenient medium of conversation, is more than I can say;
at any rate Mr. Reinhart eventually reverted to Europe and settled in
Paris. Paris had seemed rather inhospitable to him in his youth, but he
has now fitted his key to the lock. It would be satisfactory to be
able to express scientifically the reasons why, as a general thing, the
American artist, as well as his congener of many another land, carries
on his function with less sense of resistance in that city than
elsewhere. He likes Paris best, but that is not scientific. The
difference is that though theoretically the production of pictures is
recognized in America and in England, in Paris it is recognized both
theoretically and practically. And I do not mean by this simply that
pictures are bought--for they are not, predominantly, as it happens--but
that they are more presupposed. The plastic is implied in the French
conception of things, and the studio is as natural a consequence of it
as the post-office is of letter-writing. Vivid representation is the
genius of the French language and the need of the French mind. The
people have invented more aids to it than any other, and as these aids
make up a large part of the artist’s life, he feels his best home to be
in the place where he finds them most. He may begin to quarrel with that
home on the day a complication is introduced by the question of _what_
he shall represent--a totally different consideration from that of
the method; but for Mr. Reinhart this question has not yet offered
insoluble difficulties. He represents everything--he has accepted so
general an order. So long as his countrymen flock to Paris and pass in
a homogeneous procession before his eyes, there is not the smallest
difficulty in representing _them_. When the case requires that they
shall be taken in connection with their native circumstances and seen in
their ambient air, he is prepared to come home and give several months
to the task, as on the occasion of Mr. Dudley Warner’s history of a tour
among the watering-places, to which he furnished so rich and so curious
a pictorial accompaniment. Sketch-book in hand, he betakes himself,
according to need, to Germany, to England, to Italy, to Spain. The
readers of Harper will have forgotten his admirable pictorial notes on
the political world at Berlin, so rich and close in characterization.
To the _Spanish Vistas_ of Mr. G. P. Lathrop he contributed innumerable
designs, delightful notes of an artist’s quest of the sketchable, many
of which are singularly full pictures. The “Soldiers Playing Dominoes”
at a café is a powerful page of life. Mr. Reinhart has, of course,
interpreted many a fictive scene--he has been repeatedly called upon
to make the novel and the story visible. This he energetically and
patiently does; though of course we are unable to say whether the men
and women he makes us see are the very people whom the authors have
seen. That is a thing that, in any case, one will never know; besides,
the authors who don’t see vaguely are apt to see perversely. The
story-teller has, at any rate, the comfort with Mr. Reinhart that his
drawings are constructive and have the air of the actual. He likes to
represent character--he rejoices in the specifying touch.
The evidence of this is to be found also in his pictures, for I ought
already to have mentioned that, for these many years (they are beginning
to be many), he has indulged in the luxury of color. It is not probable
that he regards himself in the first place as an illustrator, in the
sense to which the term is usually restricted. He is a very vigorous and
various painter, and at the Salon a constant and conspicuous exhibitor.
He is fond of experiments, difficulties and dangers, and I divine that
it would be his preference to be known best by his painting, in which he
handles landscape with equal veracity. It is a pity that the critic
is unable to contend with him on such a point without appearing to
underestimate that work. Mr. Reinhart has so much to show for his
preference that I am conscious of its taking some assurance to say that
I am not sure he is right. This would be the case even if he had nothing
else to show than the admirable picture entitled “Washed Ashore”
(“Un Epave “) which made such an impression in the Salon of 1887. It
represents the dead body of an unknown man whom the tide has cast up,
lying on his back, feet forward, disfigured, dishonored by the sea. A
small group of villagers are collected near it, divided by the desire
to look and the fear to see. A gendarme, official and responsible, his
uniform contrasting with the mortal disrepair of the victim, takes down
in his note-book the _procès-verbal_ of the incident, and an old sailor,
pointing away with a stiffened arm, gives him the benefit of what _he_
knows about the matter. Plain, pitying, fish-wives, hushed, with
their shawls in their mouths, hang back, as if from a combination too
solemn--the mixture of death and the law. Three or four men seem to be
glad it isn’t they. The thing is a masterpiece of direct representation,
and has wonderfully the air of something seen, found without being
looked for. Excellently composed but not artificial, deeply touching but
not sentimental, large, close and sober, this important work gives the
full measure of Mr. Reinhart’s great talent and constitutes a kind of
pledge. It may be perverse on my part to see in it the big banknote,
as it were, which may be changed into a multitude of gold and silver
pieces. I cannot, however, help doing so. “Washed Ashore” is painted
as only a painter paints, but I irreverently translate it into its
equivalent in “illustrations”--half a hundred little examples, in
black and white, of the same sort of observation. For this observation,
immediate, familiar, sympathetic, human, and not involving a quest of
style for which color is really indispensable, is a mistress at whose
service there is no derogation in placing one’s self. To do little
things instead of big _may_ be a derogation; a great deal will depend
upon the way the little things are done. Besides, no work of art is
absolutely little. I grow bold and even impertinent as I think of the
way Mr. Rein-hart might scatter the smaller coin. At any rate, whatever
proportion his work in this line may bear to the rest, it is to be hoped
that nothing will prevent him from turning out more and more to play
the rare faculty that produces it. His studies of American _moeurs_ in
association with Mr. Warner went so far on the right road that we
would fain see him make all the rest of the journey. They made us ask
straightway for more, and were full of intimations of what was behind.
They showed what there is to see--what there is to guess. Let him carry
the same inquiry further, let him carry it all the way. It would be
serious work and would abound in reality; it would help us, as it were,
to know what we are talking about. In saying this I feel how much I
confirm the great claims I just made for the revival of illustration.