His passage to paint was but a question of time; not only because to all artists it seems to offer the largest scope, but because, as a draughtsman, he has always had the feeling of a colourist. He has avoided hardness of contours, softening them with light and atmosphere, and merging the figures in the ensemble. The latter are not merely set against a background, they are always in and part of the picture. Further, he sees them as masses. You will scarcely find in his drawings authority of line, or fascination in the direction and quality of the line as line; instead, an infinity of little lines, not without feeling, doubtless, but without a separateness of æsthetic value. It is in the mass that they count; so that a woman’s gown will not afford a sweep of movement, but a delightful tissue of lights and shadows. And when he proceeds to colour it is again the mass that captivates him--masses, especially of black, of crimson and white. But with this very marked love for colour, he is not a colourist in the sense of weaving harmonies of colour. His pictures are still a balancing of masses rather than an effect of orchestration; and in the voluminous draperies that he introduces, while there is much influence of the amplitude of Venetian painting, there is little of its love of light or bigness of architectonic use of colour. In his treatment of coloured masses he is nearer to the manner of Holbein or Van Eyck. He does not seem to have an antecedent realization of the structure of his colour scheme, but builds it bit by bit, and the units more or less retain their separateness. Yet, while there is a lack of breadth in the picture as a whole, the parts are broadly treated, and often with a fine freedom of stroke. In his earlier paintings, such as the “Pavane,” belonging to Mr. Whitelaw Reid, he was still drawing with his brush, but in his later ones the manner has become a painter’s.
But no less natural than this progress of his technical evolution has been that of his mental one. In the course of this how could he well escape the Shakespeare cycle; not only because he had begun by interpreting old English poems and plays, and it was only a question of time as to when he would feel the influence of the poet-dramatist, but also because his imagination is of the dramatic kind. He would have made an ideal stage manager of the highest type. As I have said, it is less by any originality of conception that his imagination is distinguished than by an aptitude for grasping the thought of another, reclothing it with actuality, setting it in its appropriate environment, and making it breathe again with the spirit of its time. But such a gift, on the stage at least, is rarely, if ever, accompanied by personal histrionic ability. It is a gift, of selecting, assembling, and combining, rather than of absorption of self in a given line of motive. The stage manager gives the appearance of life to a scene, the actor makes it live, and I wonder whether it be not true that in these Shakespearian canvases of Abbey’s and in his mural decorations of the Holy Grail in the Boston Public Library there is a marshalling of the scene without the dramatic force. Do they carry us away and fill us with the emotion that we should receive in presence of the play well acted on the stage or in the reading of the legend intelligently? We find ourselves, I believe, rather studying the parts of those elaborate productions, the accuracy and beauty of detail, admiring the manipulative ability that has collected and coördinated, and waiting, meanwhile, for the drama to begin.