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 muc