imation 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 o