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 promp