cannot affect a judicial tone about it. Criticism is appreciation or
it is nothing, and an intelligence of the matter in hand is recorded
more substantially in a single positive sign of such appreciation than
in a volume of sapient objections for objection's sake--the cheapest of
all literary commodities. Silence is the perfection of disapproval, and
it has the great merit of leaving the value of speech, when the moment
comes for it, unimpaired.

Accordingly it is important to translate as adequately as possible the
positive side of Mr. Abbey's activity. None to-day is more charming, and
none helps us more to take the large, joyous, observant, various view
of the business of art. He has enlarged the idea of illustration, and
he plays with it in a hundred spontaneous, ingenious ways. "Truth and
poetry" is the motto legibly stamped upon his pencil-case, for if he has
on the one side a singular sense of the familiar, salient, importunate
facts of life, on the other they reproduce themselves in his mind in a
delightfully qualifying medium. It is this medium that the fond observer
must especially envy Mr. Abbey, and that a literary observer will envy
him most of all.

Such a hapless personage, who may have spent hours in trying to produce
something of the same result by sadly different means, will measure
the difference between the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of
respectable prose and the immediate projection of the figure by the
pencil. A charming story-teller indeed he would be who should write as
Mr. Abbey draws. However, what is style for one art is style for other,
so blessed is the fraternity that binds them together, and the worker
in words may take a lesson from the picture-maker of "She Stoops to
Conquer." It is true that what the verbal artist would like to do
would be to find out the secret of the pictorial, to drink at the same
fountain. Mr. Abbey is essentially one of those who would tell us if he
could, and conduct us to the magic spring; but here he is in the nature
of the case helpless, for the happy _ambiente_ as the Italians call it,
in which his creations move is exactly the thing, as I take it, that
he can least give an account of. It is a matter of genius and
imagination--one of those things that a man determines for himself as
little as he determines the color of his eyes. How, for instance, can
Mr. Abbey explain the manner in which he directly _observes_ figures,
scenes, places, that exist on